Queer Fish: Chapter 5c

(Note: Gabzies kindly drew a picture of Harry and Voldie getting pissed and dressing in women's underwear, which can be found at http://i16 dot tinypic dot com/623av0n.jpg. Thank you, Gabzies.)

At some unidentifiable time that "night", which wasn't a night, I lay flat on my back on the floor of the kitchen in Wales. The flagstones were blessedly cool, just right for soothing my hot and bothered body and brain. I'd tried opening the back door, but soon discovered there was no point; it only admitted sunlight, and there could be no breeze.

Crack. Voldie Apparated outside and walked into the kitchen, stepping over me casually. "Is he dead?" he asked the world at large. "Must have been suicide. There's not a mark on him. All right, we've finished now, Harry. All done."

"Excellent," I said, getting up with alacrity and making a bee-line for the fire. One thing to be said for temporal stasis spells, they made it unbelievably easy to keep someone's tea waiting for them. Just step far enough away and the food stayed perfect for hours. Wished I'd had it all those years when Uncle Vernon kept being late. "Any more disasters and fights?"

"No, and don't sound so cheerful about it... Look, you were allowed to eat yours before I arrived," he said, surveying my frenzied attack on the pot of soup. "You don't have to eat with me at all."

"You Dark Lords don't understand good manners," I informed him, doling out the soup into beautiful Welsh stoneware.

"Clearly not. Or perhaps we just don't want to watch teenage boys eating like deranged German Shepherds. I would do a straw poll of other Dark Lords, but I killed them all. Let's eat."

We downed the meal in an amicable silence, which was broken only by Voldie's singing "La, la, la" while he ground pepper into his soup. Evidently he had temporarily cheered up. I prayed devoutly that this state would persist.

Then I started thinking about other things. "Voldie," I said at last, "seeing as it's the end of the world and everything, shouldn't we be getting pissed and dressing in women's underwear and so on?"

He laughed for an incredibly long time, then said "I've heard of the drink scenario, but women's underwear is a new one on me."

"Oh, I saw it in some film."

"Ah, different generations," he said. "The chaps in the films when I was young just bonked the sex symbols, they didn't bother trying their knickers on first. Which film was it, by the way?" he asked, visibly booting up Voldie's Big Nuclear War Database, and I had to describe every detail I could remember until we finally decided it wasn't about nuclear war after all.

"Well, we can get drunk, anyway."

"Oh yes, definitely," he said; and then, as I yawned hugely, "but not now, I think."

"I'm glad all those people have gone," I confided. "It got really fucking knackering."

Voldie found this a strangely amusing concept, and laughed at me. "Am I not a person?" he enquired. "Or are you pleased to be left to your happy home life with Lord Voldemort?"

"It means I'm knackered," I said firmly, downing the last drops of my soup. "And don't talk about yourself in the third person, you sound like Bob Dole."

That set him off all over again, and while I was on the toilet I could hear him cackling away at the other end of the house. It didn't last, though. When I returned to the kitchen I found he'd gone. I finally located him in one of the many bedrooms, opening the windows and peering worriedly out at the garden. When I made a slight noise he jumped and looked round wildly.

"Are you all right?" I said as gently as possible, in the manner of one talking to a little lost bear cub.

Voldie hunched his back and played uneasily with his claws. "I keep listening for missiles," he confessed.

"There aren't any missiles coming," I assured him, "because all the Muggles are frozen. You can see that, can't you? The trees aren't waving around in the wind or anything."

He raised an eyebrow and gave me the ghost of a pitying look, which was a great relief. "Can't you just laugh at me as usual and call me a moron?" he said. "It's so much more frightening when you talk in that very soft voice as if I'm totally loony."

"Well, you are," I said, placing a hand in the middle of his back and steering him firmly back towards the kitchen. "And I don't want you to feel bad. It makes me feel sorry for you. Read one of your horrible books."

"Oh, I don't think I could face one of the horrible ones," he said with a shiver.

"They all are," I complained. "They're all about a foot thick with twenty numbers at the bottom of every page."

Voldie laughed until he cried while I did the washing-up. Then he read Nuke Box Jury: Could A World Court End Nuclear War? This presumably made him feel better, because by the time I finished cleaning the bath I could hear him whistling again; when I walked into the kitchen he slapped the book down on his little table, put his feet up on a pouffe and said matter-of-factly, "Turns out a prophecy was made about the war."

Before I could say "Oh no, not those stupid prophecies again," he continued, "Guess where it was kept?"

"Er. Somewhere we can't get to," I said.

"Quite the contrary, we could get there very easily."

"Oh. British Ministry? You could go there on your own," I suggested, "or I suppose I could go with you if it was very important – what?" I said, because he was chuckling at me and shaking his head pityingly; and I finally realised, "Oh. You said, guess where it was kept?"

"Now you're getting there, Potter."

I envisaged the fight in the Department of Ministries. "Smash shelves," my past self muttered to Hermione, and then there was a great crash as dozens of prophecies shattered; so I said, "Oops."

"Yep."

"Look, WHY are the bloody things made of GLASS?! They always get broken..."

"Doesn't matter," Voldie assured me. "I was getting too obsessed with prophecies anyway. However. Yevfimy and Svetlana, as you can imagine, had a good gloat at my expense, and I told them to get on with defusing bombs and stop being so childish..."

"Well done," I said, amazed.

"Oh, thank you! Well, anyway, the concept sprang to mind quite easily, because the Americans and Russians, in squabbling with each other over dogma and power and 'manhood' and so forth, have accidentally destroyed the world; and we two, in silly and childish attempts to kill each other, have accidentally destroyed anything that could actually be of any use."

We had? "What?"

"Anything that could help us with the present situation. Your side destroyed the prophecy – one point to me," he said, counting on his fingers. "I killed Amelia Bones – one point to you. Dumbledore destroyed the Philosopher's Stone – one point to me... and then there's the fact nobody trusts me because I'm a genocidal maniac, but I'm not sure whether that's hurting or helping. I think our amassed stooges seem much more inclined to listen to a maniac than a nonentity; look at the way they treat Albert."

I tried to think this over. It didn't seem to have occurred to him that the maniac/nonentity situation might not actually be either/or. Also, I vaguely resented being cast as America or Russia; I was more inclined to see him as Germany and me as Poland. One thing above all was bothering me, though: "What's the Philosopher's Stone got to do with it?" I said in tangled perplexity; someone appeared to have knitted my brain. "You mentioned it yesterday, to Albert – "

"I could have used it to get rid of the plutonium," Voldemort said tersely. "Possibly, anyway, although in practice it would have taken years of research."

"What?" I said. "It makes you live forever and it turned lead to gold. Nobody mentioned anything about it getting rid of plutonium!"

Voldemort gave me a horrible crimson stare. "Hello, Potter, if it can turn lead to gold it can turn plutonium into protactinium."

"...," I said.

"Oh, god!" he said. "It can reduce the number of protons in the – you do know what the Periodic Table is, don't you?"

"Yes! Well... sort of..."

Words, it appeared, were not enough for this situation. Voldemort sat temporarily speechless, then launched himself up from the table, knocking over the chair in the process, and performed a violent war-dance in which he leapt about like a scarecrow and hooted and screeched with rage. It was a remarkable sight. I wondered if he was going to kill and eat me.

"Right," he seethed when he'd finished. "Here is the Periodic Table," and he lifted his wand and drew a U-shaped thing in mid-air, with a blob hanging above it. "There's hydrogen – " he jabbed his wand at the blob – "and there's the noble gases, there's the transition metals, blah, blah, blah. Does this look vaguely familiar?"

"Yes," I said doubtfully.

He rolled his eyes to the heavens and made horrid jerking motions with his claws in mid-air, since he couldn't tear his hair out. "Quite. But you are familiar with the existence of lead, gold, nitrogen, oxygen, copper?"

Watching each little square light up in a different colour as he mentioned its name, I said, "Yes. They're elements."

"Well done," he said with the utmost sarcasm. "Now, here is lead, element number 91. Here is gold, 88." They lit up obligingly. "The Philosopher's Stone has the power to strip protons from the nucleus of an element, to move a substance up the Periodic Table, and possibly down it as well, although I never had the chance to find out. Now, here are uranium and plutonium, down here in the actinides at the bottom." The actinides duly glowed. "Getting the idea yet, Potter?"

"You could use the Philosopher's Stone to turn plutonium into lead," I concluded.

He calmed down, and sat down, too. "Well. I don't know about lead. Maybe we ought to aim a little lower. But yes, it can basically transmute the elements; it works like a particle accelerator, except it's not five miles long and doesn't cost a billion quid."

I unravelled my brain a bit more and said, "I thought you said Ageing Spells would work."

He closed his eyes, lay back in his chair and said, "I take back everything I just thought to myself about your intelligence. OF COURSE THEY WOULDN'T WORK."

"They wouldn't? Why not?"

He gnashed his fangs and said, "Possibly because the isotopes used for nuclear weapons have half-lives of," he took a breath, "twenty-four thousand years, a hundred and sixty thousand years, and seven million years."

"And that's too long."

A squeal of appalled laughter. "Of course it's too long!"

"Well, you said a Flame-Freezing Charm could protect you against thirty thousand degrees," I explained, "and to me it's all just numbers."

"It is, isn't it?" he agreed wearily. "An Ageing Spell is normally cast in terms of years, perhaps decades. Extraordinarily, centuries. And even if I could make a dent in the plutonium, what would it decay into, Potter?"

"Something even worse," I said immediately.

"No. Uranium-235. But you were nearly right."

"Cool," I said, pleased by the resurgence of my intellect. "But the Philosopher's Stone would have worked. OK. Great."

"Yes," he agreed, then looked shifty and mumbled, "well. Sort of."

"What?" I said suspiciously.

He ducked his head and mumbled apologetically, "Itcouldtheoretically turnleadintoplutonium aswell."

"What?"

He cleared his throat. "It could also be used to add protons. To turn lead into plutonium. Theoretically."

"Ah," I said.

"Mm-hm."

"And Nicolas Flamel didn't, like, mention this at any point?" I said, dazed.

"Ah, now, that's the point," Voldemort said with enthusiasm. "In eight hundred years of using the Stone, he never once mentioned radioactivity. So, we have Hypothesis 1, which that he was the stupidest man in the world..."

"Oi," I said, glaring at him.

"What? Did you know him? I didn't know you knew him."

"I didn't. He made the Stone and you never have, so you shouldn't slag him off, that's all."

He stared at me with awful pertinacity and said "You like him because he was Dumbledore's friend."

"Why not?!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Potter," he howled, "here we go again. You don't have to be the knight in shining armour for every one of his bloody friends! We'd be here forever! You never even met him!"

"Well, if you didn't insult him IN THE FIRST PLACE!"

"Well, that's what I was SAYING!" he shouted with great triumph. "The first argument is that he was the thickest man in the world and never once thought 'I wonder what happens if you add protons to a nucleus?' or whatever people who use Philosopher's Stone think, I mean, we don't know precisely how it works. Now, the second argument is that he was the brainiest man in the world," he said, suddenly deflating with a sigh, "and he saw all this coming."

"So he kept it quiet."

"May have done."

"And didn't make any plutonium."

"I don't know about that. As far as I know, Dumbledore" (did he have to spit the name as if he was a lump of used chewing gum?) "never knew anything about nuclear physics beyond the most superficial practical applications. He had a vague idea the Muggles had big bombs and power stations. Flamel, obviously, he lived in total secrecy, so I've no idea."

"Or you'd have nicked his Stone."

"Yep."

"And got rid of plutonium with it?"

That elicited an unusual silence. Voldemort's eyes focussed on invisible spectres. His brow furrowed and he abstractedly bit on his knuckles, looking suddenly and confusingly feminine.

I grew impatient, and demanded suspiciously, "Are you being neurotic again?"

That startled a giggle out of him. He eventually admitted, "I would have had to destroy the Stone."

"Why?!"

He rolled his eyes in supreme impatience. "To stop it falling into the hands of people who might use it to make actinides!"

"What are actinides?" I said absently, then, without waiting for a reply, "But you wanted it, to live forever!"

He contorted his face with the utmost hatred and said "You can't have everything you want in life, Potter. You can get rid of the bloody thing, or you can leave it knocking about in a world where people want to make weapons with it! It's a pretty fucking simple decision!" he shouted in frustration.

"But you want to live forever. More than anything else," I said in disbelief. "Although I suppose you've got Horcruxes..."

"You don't know as much about Horcruxes as you think you do. And for god's sake, Potter, listen to yourself! Would I live forever if there was a war? – I couldn't make the Elixir of Life if the Earth was a giant cinder. Would I want to live forever? No! It's simple! Simple!" he shouted, huffing furiously through his non-nose.

"You might have just locked it up somewhere so no-one could ever get at it."

"Yes, that really worked when Dumbledore was after my Horcruxes," he snarled; and then, improbably, sniggered. "I might have temporised," he admitted. "I might have convinced myself that nobody would find it for a few years, and put off making a decision... no, no, I would just never have tried taking the Elixir in the first place. What if it was addictive? Or simply highly enjoyable? It wouldn't be worth the temptation."

"True," I admitted.

"Besides," he said, shooting me a hostile glance, "what are you talking about – not believing me? You're still here, aren't you?"

"What?" I said, lost.

"You're still alive. I haven't killed you! You're the one who's prophesised to kill me, if you remember, but you're still here! I could have finished you off when I first met you," he said, staring, upset, into the middle distance, "but this was more important..."

Then, before I knew it, he'd jumped off his chair, run across the room and started banging his head violently against the top of a six-foot bookcase. I leapt to my feet and ran over to him; put my arms around him and tried to drag him away. He pushed me away violently and carried on. Briefly I felt a great desire to leave him to it, or just to whack him over the head with a brick and hasten the process, but I tried again and managed to squeeze myself between him and the bookcase. At this he became still and I stood there silently hugging his body and observing the extreme scrawniness of his waist; I would like to say that I was silence out of sensitivity and good judgement, but in fact it was because I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't have much to offer except Quidditch-Toned Muscles (TM) and body heat, so I gave them generously while meditating on my lack of sympathy and understanding. I ought to be able to soothe Voldemort, but I couldn't; I only knew how to bash him to bits. I supposed this was the same problem as smashing the prophecy and destroying the Stone and so on, and that it applied to nuclear wars as well, in that the various governments had invested a lot more in weaponry than they had in education and diplomacy and stuff; and now we would all have to learn how to be nice to each other, or else die horribly. At least, I thought, cheering up, I was doing better at it than poor old Voldemort.

"Anyway," he said at last in quite a normal voice, shrugging me off like a random encumbrance, "you're here, and the Philosopher's Stone isn't, and we're doing quite well, really. What's for dessert?"