Chapter 1b: Uh-Oh, This Is Going To Be Some Day
After that there was a fair amount of Scourgifying for me to do, followed by a long period of recuperation for poor old Voldemort, or, at any rate, this odd person pretending to be him, who kept announcing that he was all right, then standing up and collapsing again; then a long, confusing discussion in which he burst into tears and kept bemoaning "the other two"; and about an hour later I finally discerned that there were three bombers based here and that the reason the other two weren't on the runway was because they'd already taken off.
"Fly up on a broom and cast Evanesco again," I said.
"Fly up on a broom?" he screeched. "Are you even aware that those planes fly at nine hundred miles per hour?"
"But they're not moving."
"How far d'you think they are from this base already, boy?"
"Fly after them," I suggested.
"And we find them, how?... by following the con trails," Voldemort concluded. "You know, Potter, you're not half as stupid as you look. But I can't ride a broom."
"You can't what?"
"Never suited me. I kept thinking about what would happen if I fell off."
How strange. "OK, I'll give you a backie."
"I'm still terrified of flying. I'll still fall off."
"I'll cast Incarcerous and strap you on, and will you stop whining?" I said, beginning to get irritated with all his excuses.
"WHINING! WHINING! Let me tell you, boy, there is NOTHING so difficult to understand as another person's phobias. I once knew a Estonian who was terrified of travelling by car. He went everywhere on horseback instead. The fact that the horse might get spooked by traffic and throw him under a car didn't seem to bother him. Logic doesn't come into it, boy! THAT'S why they're difficult to understand. Illogical, but powerful."
It was hard to dispute the truth of this. I nodded obediently.
"But," he concluded, glancing nervously up at the sky, "the fact remains that sometimes you have to defy them. I think this might be a good time for that." His hands were shaking again. "Where do we get a broom?"
"It's still in my dorm, back at Hogwarts."
Glare. "I don't want some schoolboy's broom, boy. How is that supposed to help us catch up with an Eagle?"
"It's a Firebolt," I said indignantly. "It's the fastest fucking broom in the world. The Irish use them!"
"Really?" he said incredulously, then sneered, "Flashboy."
"I didn't buy it, someone gave it to me!"
"You're still a poser. Good thing you've got it, though. Hogwarts?" he enquired, standing and reaching out for me with the dreaded arm.
"I suppose so," I said glumly, and let him crush me against his chest yet again.
000
Hogwarts was, of course, unchanged, and seemed blissfully serene. From the outside I could forget that the castle was filled with mannequins and nothingness and stale air; it was heavy and rugged and quite indifferent to human affairs. Voldemort and I stood on the grass and looked up at it with strange nostalgia.
"Will this get bombed?" I asked.
"D'you mean would it get bombed? Of course not, the Muggles don't know it's here. This is probably the safest place in the whole of Britain. Even the fallout might not affect it significantly, depending on the wind direction."
After a moment of further gazing I said "OK, I'll be back in a minute."
I walked hastily through the grounds and into the castle, passing all the frozen figures with a shiver of horror. It was especially nasty seeing the expressions on people's faces; worse, if anything, now that I knew the reason they'd been frozen. I couldn't abide being in here for any longer than necessary, but the only alternative was taking a job as Voldemort's gofer and preventing a nuclear war. Great. I walked past the broken hourglasses feeling very alone.
My dorm was, mercifully, devoid of humans. It looked so familiar and comforting that I stared at it fondly, feeling a mad urge to just stay there. I couldn't face walking back through the statue garden that was the rest of the school, so I put my Quidditch gear in a bag, strapped it to my back and flew out through the window.
Flying above Hogwarts remained as uplifting, in a very literal sense, as ever. I flew a few circles around the towers for pure pleasure, looking down at the Forbidden Forest and the Black Loch; far beyond them the horizon was clear and innocent.
I found Voldie staring at the place in the grounds where Dumbledore's grave would presumably have been: neat rows of chairs, all facing a marble table. I felt a sudden, ferocious desire to stab him to death, and knew I couldn't; after seeing him Vanish the bombs at Lakenheath, I was convinced. That didn't mean I couldn't hate him.
"What's this for?" he asked, indicating the table.
"Never you mind," I said, shaking with anger.
He stared into my eyes. "Dumbledore's grave was to be here? I didn't know the funeral was today." He turned to face the table again and said, "Good thing he's not still alive."
"You'd better not say another word about him," I managed to force out, "because I know I need you to stop the nuclear war, but if you say anything about him I'm going to be so angry I might try to kill you."
He glanced round, startled, and said in a much milder tone, "Harry, all I meant was that he would certainly have been powerful enough to resist the temporal stasis spell, and if he had still been here, moving and speaking, that would certainly have been a disaster, since we would have fought with each other and probably ruined everything."
My anger abated to a more or less safe level. I still felt full of intolerable thoughts, but couldn't speak. I stamped down to the loch and stared out at the water for some time, trying not to cry. At last I wandered back up to the castle and found Voldie lying peacefully on the grass, apparently sunbathing.
"Well, I can't spend all day crying," I informed him. "I'm ready to go now, if you are?"
He uncrossed his legs casually and sat up. "Anything else you need from the castle?" he said.
I thought about it. "Don't think so. It's not as if we need an Invisibility Cloak."
He stood up and stared up, for quite a long time, at the castle. I wondered if he was aware that he was looking right at the tower where Dumbledore had been killed.
He turned back to face me. "They'll have to change that bloody school motto, won't they?" he said glumly. "'Do Not Tickle the Dragon's Tail'. All right, let's get going."
000
Back at Lakenheath, he Apparated us at the extreme end of the runway and cast a few spells. These highlighted a faint, bizarrely stationary cloud of smoke, which apparently marked the point at which the second aeroplane had taken off. Voldie seemed to think this was good, as it showed that the plane had relatively recently departed; I put on my Quidditch gear, lent him Ron's gloves and goggles (Ron would have a few words to say about that, I suspected, but it couldn't be helped), and mounted my broom. Voldie marched round and round me, casting spells and muttering to himself.
"Shielding Charm, Warming Charm, pressure regulator, Bubble-Head Charm. Have I missed anything out? Scoping Charm, perhaps, to stop us crashing into the fucking thing... All right, Potter, we're ready to go," he concluded, giving one sharp tap to the top of my head that left it trapped in a bubble of air. "Where d'you want me to tie myself on?"
"Give us your wand and I'll do it," I shouted back, since our dialogue was oddly muffled by the bubbles, and I conjured magical bonds that tied him extremely securely to me. I had more or less resigned myself to hermetic Dark Lord attachment at this stage. "And don't scream in my ear, OK?"
Then I pushed off the ground at full speed and he screamed very loudly in my ear for about five minutes. Fuck's sake. Also, he lost control of his Occlumency; so for the first five minutes I flew in dubious curves with tears pouring from my eyes as my forehead split apart, and it's a good thing the planes were nowhere near the base or I'd have smacked straight into them.
"Oi – Voldie," I shouted when I'd managed to get control of my mind and the broomstick. "D'you think you could get a grip on your Occlumency? Or we'll both die."
"I'm trying!" he snapped, and sank into a sulky silence; but the pain slowly abated, so I supposed he'd managed to get his shutters down. This was a great relief, since with him out of the way I could appreciate the ride; I'd not flown this high since Ron and I stole the car in second year, and fuck me, it was gorgeous. I was awed by everything: the light, the rush of air past the shields, the strangely flattened clouds over France; the fact that the edge of the Earth really was curved, and it had taken me seventeen years to notice!
At length I settled into an easy glide at about 150mph, flying along the first set of con trails exactly as if they were a road. This was a lot more comfortable than the flying car; I did a couple of loop-the-loops for pleasure, but stopped when Voldie started screaming again. I made a mental note never to take him on holiday.
At length he said "There. Up ahead, bright green."
"Bright green?" I said, squinting and failing to see anything.
"Yes, it's the colour of the Scoping Charm."
I followed the con trails, which grew thicker very rapidly and then terminated in the bum of a second Eagle bomber, which was indeed lime green. I hovered and stared at it; it looked less gigantic up here in mid-air, but deeply sinister, even in the bright sunlight against a carpet of innocent clouds. Perhaps it was the shape, I decided; every part of an aeroplane that would normally be straight was curved, and every part that would normally be broad was a spike. It looked like a grasping, clawed hand. Like Voldemort's hand. The comparison sprang easily to mind, because at that moment he dug his talons into my shoulder, sticking them right through Ron's glove. Sorry, Ron.
"Get away from it," he hissed. "There's no earthly reason for us to be so close. Get AWAY!"
"I was trying to make it easier for you to cast the Vanishing Spell," I said, banking obligingly and relocating the broom about twenty feet away. This elicited further hissing and squawking, plus frenzied scrabbling at my chest.
"I wish you'd get a grip," I muttered.
"I – AM – TRYING!"
At length he managed to calm down slightly; his wand appeared beside my elbow and pointed in the general direction of the plane, shaking wildly once again as though he had cerebral palsy. I resigned myself to controlling the broom with one hand while I tucked his wand arm under my armpit. Once he was thus steadied he did manage to invisible-ise the side of the plane, but the Vanishing Spell once again appeared to be totally beyond him.
After about a minute had gone by I felt his head rest itself on my shoulder as he began to sob.
"We'll just turn round for a minute," I interrupted gently, not really wanting to get puked on again, "and you calm down and think about nothing and stuff, and then we'll have another go."
Strangely enough, that appeared to get his arse in gear; he suddenly sat up straight, wiped his nose glutinously on his sleeve, and cast the Vanishing Spell. The missiles disappeared.
"Dark Lord: 2, bombers: 0," I said in relief. "You're getting quite good at this."
"2?" he said, wiping his nose again and putting his wand away. "Two what? Planes? It's more than that, I did the Tornados before you arrived."
"The Tutshill Tornados?" I said blankly, turning towards the second con trail and jetting off eastwards. I felt the uneasy tingle down my spine that meant Voldie was glaring at me hatefully.
"No, you fool. The RAF's Tornado planes, the ones with nuclear capability. I dealt with them ALL ON MY OWN."
I decided not to mention that this thought made my hair stand on end. "Well done, mate. Good job. – Is that the second plane down there?"
"WHAT? WHERE?" shouted Voldie, digging his claws into my chest. Before I could even howl in agony he relaxed again and said contemptuously, "What would a bomber be doing at that altitude? It's a passenger plane."
"Bummer for the passengers," I said absently, peering down at the little green blob silhouetted against the clouds way below us. "'Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. A nuclear war has broken out and...'"
Voldemort terminated my impromptu comedy turn by punching me in the side of the head. This seemed fair enough to me, so we flew on in sober silence.
000
A couple of hundred miles later, we discovered The Little Problem. We didn't notice it straight away. The cloud cover had petered out by this stage, and we could see straight down to brown, snow-strewn mountains. Voldie found this even more frightening, and was gurgling quietly to himself with, I suspected, his eyes tight shut. This was confirmed when I saw the green blob ahead.
"Voldie," I called. "Hey! Voldie!"
Pause. "Hrm?"
"There's two green things."
"Two? High or low?"
"High. – Hey," I said, confused. "It looked as if it was moving."
"What? It can't be fucking moving. Your eyesight is dreadful, Potter. – DEAR GOD!"
Ah, so he'd opened his eyes.
"THAT'S NOT AN AEROPLANE! THAT'S A FUCKING DRAGON!"
Things got moving then. Deciding this counted as a crisis, I accelerated to 300mph. My internal organs did odd things. The green blobs came rapidly closer, and soon even I could see clearly that an indignant green dragon, apparently have mistaken the plane for a rival, was attacking it and trying to chew its wing off.
"Does it matter if just one bomb goes off?" I said, trying to cough the terror out of my chest. I was pretty sure that even one bomb would finish us both.
"ONE BOMB? ONE BOMB? POTTER, IT'S GOT THREE MISSILES ON BOARD, WITH TWENTY-FIVE WARHEADS EACH!"
That was a clincher if ever there was one. "D'you know the Conjunctivitis Charm?" I yelled; Voldemort's only reply was a singularly unhelpful scream, and odd flashes of pain as he struggled to keep his Occlumency under control. Beyond all reasonable expectation, he managed it, which is probably the only reason the world's still here. Leaning so far down my nose almost touched the broomstick, I flew for my life.
The dragon was a Ukrainian Ironbelly, which was good (no fire breath) and bad (fucking huge). I went into a very steep dive right at its face. It heard me at the last minute and swung its head round; I rolled out of the dive at the last possible moment and cast a Stinging Hex right in its eye.
There was a roar so loud that Voldemort, as I later discovered, shat himself, thinking that the bombs had gone off after all; then I had to turn back and swoop at the dragon again, shouting and waving my arm to try to get it to chase me instead of the plane. What spell did I have that made flashing lights, or a loud noise, I wondered frantically, silently reflecting on how fortunate it was the Gryffindor Quidditch players wore long, flowing red robes. "Relashio!" I shouted, creating an explosion of sparks that made the dragon snarl; but it still didn't move.
"Right. OK," I said to myself. "You've done this once already during the Triwizard Tournament. Get moving," and I propelled myself down towards the dragon and twisted off to one side in time to avoid a claw to the head. Only just in time, mind you; Voldie was making the broom a lot heavier than usual, plus he was screaming again, which was very distracting. I rose again, dove again, and old leatherywings grunted in fury but wouldn't move away from the plane.
"God almighty!" I said in frustration, and flew down to hover right in front of the dragon's mouth, reversing neatly in time to avoid being bitten in half; but it still wouldn't bloody move. There must be some spell I can use to annoy it, something that flashes and bangs and makes a loud noise...
Loud noise. "Sonorus! AAAAARGH!" I screamed, almost deafening myself and Voldie; and the dragon at last howled in agony and bashed the plane away from itself. I held my breath. Nothing happened.
Well. When I say "nothing happened", I mean the dragon launched itself at me and did its best to swallow me whole; and soon I was fluttering across the sky like a tiny hawk mobbed by a gigantic rook as I tried to lead the creature as far as possible from the Eagle. This wouldn't have been too difficult, but I couldn't see properly behind me, since Voldie's head was in the way; so I kept oscillating in bizarre curlicues to keep myself away from the claws, and soon felt distinctly seasick. I didn't dare to hope that Voldemort would keep a grip on the contents of his stomach. The back of my robes already felt pretty wet.
"How far are we from the plane?" I shouted, but got no reply; and that, in my opinion, wasn't good at all. What if we we'd only gone a few miles? That was nothing to a dragon. I carried on flying, but fortunately the dragon made up its own mind after a few minutes and flew unhurriedly down towards the mountains.
"It's gone," I observed with surprise. "Hey, Volla, you can open your eyes now. The dragon's buggered off."
"Of course it's buggered off," he said in a weak and understandably miserable voice. "You can't expect even a dragon to hang around forever at this altitude, can you?"
"D'you know which way the plane is now?" I enquired, squinting around the sky, and Voldemort's skinny finger appeared and pointed silently at the distant con trail. I set off towards it at a sedate 100mph. I didn't want to upset his stomach any more than was absolutely necessary.
"How come it was even moving?" I complained as we approached the wonky Eagle. "Everything's supposed to be stabatted!"
He gave a very un-Dark Lord-like snort. "Potter, dear... power."
"So there might be dragons everywhere attacking the planes?" I demanded.
"Won't that be fun," he said listlessly.
"Come on..."
"I hope it's reasonable to assume that most dragons won't be flying this high up. And by the way," he said with incredible indignation, "I thought I told you not to tickle the dragon's tail."
So we parked by the Eagle once again and I jammed Voldie's arm under my armpit and supported his shaky, snaky hand. I hoped he wouldn't drop his wand, but I reflected that if he'd managed to hang on to it while I was dodging the dragon, he wouldn't have much of a problem with this. That lasted until I remembered he was a lot more afraid of bombs than he was of dragons.
"You're doing a great job, Voldemort," I said gently. "Just this one to do, and we'll go down and get changed."
"Shut up," he said, and Vanished the third lot of bombs.
000
It took us a while to get back to Britain, mostly because Voldie was too agitated to Apparate; or rather, I wouldn't let him try, because I was convinced he would splinch us both. I flew as gently as possible across central Europe until Voldie calmed down and asked me to land.
We glided down to earth, well, a pile of broken rocks, by a tarn somewhere in the Carpathians; and I took a leak while Voldemort cleaned copious quantities of sick and crap off our robes. There was so much that I began to feel a bit worried in case he died of dehydration, and persuaded him to cast a Purifying Charm and drink from the tarn.
For my kindness and consideration I got a Dark Lord rant. He stood up with water dripping down the front of his robe, reminding me horribly of Quirrell drinking unicorn blood in the Forbidden Forest, and burst out "Why are you acting so normally, you thick-headed, gurning lunatic?"
That seemed such a non sequitur I just sort of looked at him and said, "What?"
"WHY AREN'T YOU FRIGHTENED?"
"What, what?" I spluttered. "We've done the bombs, and the dragon, what's there to be frightened of?"
"Aren't you scared, you bloody idiot?" he said incredulously. "You're not scared about the end of the world?"
I examined my emotions. "No," I said truthfully. "Or, you know. Not pathologically." Not like you, I thought privately, but I didn't say it out loud for fear of setting him off again.
"Depression," he said. "I hate people with depression. No emotions. No fear."
"I think that's just what we need at the moment," I said irritably, "with you screaming and fainting all over."
"Are you coming over all macho on me, boy? Harry the Hero and Voldemort the Fainting Fairy?"
That was quite funny for him. I snorted. "No," I admitted. "I'm not macho. I'm a nerd... I just thought, it's a good thing one of us isn't, er, y'know. Like, puking."
"But sadly, you're not enough of a nerd to know about nuclear physics or how to disarm a warhead."
"Well, no. But neither do you."
"True," he said, and paced about restlessly. At last he sat down on a rock, put his head in his hands and said "I can't believe this is happening."
"You cast a spell that would stop it forty years ago," I said impatiently.
"I know," he said bleakly. "That's the odd thing. The time's gone by far too fast." He stood up. "All right, let's go home."
"Home?" I said, startled. "What, Hogwarts?"
"Nice idea," he said contemplatively, "but it's full of frozen people at the moment, plus, I believe, dead headmasters. I suggest we go to the house I've been using in Wales."
Arm. Apparition.