Harry Potter and the Paradigm Shift
Out-take: Voldemort flubs his lines...
By Kinsfire
Outtake: Voldemort Flubs His Lines.
… At eleven-forty-five exactly, the loud cracks of Apparation sounded in the clearing, and a large number of Death Eaters appeared, with a tall creature in the centre, trying to appear majestic. Harry waited a few moments for the cracks to end before whispering "Now!" into the PDA. He felt the wards snap into existence.
The Death Eaters looked around. "I’ll kill the fool for setting me up like this!" Voldemort hissed, loud enough for all to hear.
"You won’t live long enough for that, Tommie," Harry said, standing up from his hiding place. "Today’s the day you finally end your miserable half-life."
"No, the time has come for you to finally die, Potter," the high-pitched nasal voice exclaimed. "How stupid of you to come alone. But it will make things easier for me."
Harry laughed and flicked his wand in the direction that the slight wind was blowing from, and a tumbleweed appeared and rolled between them, with the faint strains of the theme from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" floating in the air.
"What are you on about, Potter?" Voldemort asked, destroying the tumbleweed easily.
"Come now, Tommie boy …"
"Stop calling me that, Potter," Voldemort interrupted.
"Tom, I’ll call you what I want to. You know the prophecy — I know that you have to. I figured out a while back who your spy is, and I know that your spy knows the prophecy. So you know that you can send every stinking catamite in your army at me and they won’t be able to kill me. It has to be at your hands. Just like I’m the only one who can kill you. So I got sick of it, and decided to set up your spy. He told you there was an Order meeting taking place here at noon. I’ve been here for a while, Tommie-boy. Wouldn’t you like to know what I’ve done with the place while waiting for you?"
As he spoke, he began to move the quarterstaff in a counter-clockwise rotation before suddenly snapping one of the shod ends to point at Voldemort.
"You think your Muggle weapon can scare me, Potter?" the sneering response returned. "You can’t even … can’t even … BURMA!" he exclaimed.
"’Burma’?" said Harry, dropping the end of the staff to the ground and leaning on it. "Why’d you say ‘Burma’?"
"I panicked," said Voldemort.
"Cut, cut, cut!" yelled Kinsfire, striding out into the garden. "Come on, Tom, that’s the fourth take you’ve ruined! Can’t you remember your lines?"
"You try remembering your lines when you’re about to be blown up," said the snake-faced man sullenly.
"For the umpteenth time, it’s called special effects. You remember that model of you we made last week? The one where you complained about having to breathe through straws in your nose so we could make a model of your face? We filled that with pink gelatine, and when we get to the right point in the script, I yell ‘cut’, you step out of the scene, we put the model in, I yell ‘action’ again, Harry blows up the model, and then we just delete the intervening paragraphs. Simple, right?"
"I think you’re just putting off the end of the fic," put in Draco Malfoy, casually tossing his wand from hand to hand. "I’m about to get shot in the head, but you don’t see me complaining, do you? When the shot’s done, I get to go back to my trailer and relax."
"Hmpf," said Voldemort. "Easy enough for you to relax at the end of the run. You get to go have a lucrative modelling career. And that one," he said, pointing at Harry, who was now buffing his nails on his shirt, "gets to play Bond when he grows up."
"Er, no, actually, I think you’ve got me confused with the actor again," said Harry. "I get to be Minister for Magic."
"Whatever. The point is, you’re both young and pretty and have promising careers ahead of you. What kind of career options are there for somebody with no nose and pasty white skin?"
"Stunt double for Michael Jackson?" suggested Kinsfire.
Voldemort hissed. "Even I won’t stoop that low," he said.
"Forget I mentioned it. Trust me, there will be plenty of other fics, so you’ll be employed for the foreseeable future. Not all of them are going to start with ‘Harry killed Voldemort last week, and …’ Heck, some of ‘em you even get to win."
"I know," said Voldemort, a dreamy look in his eyes. "I do like working for Amanuensis, I really do …"
"And the sooner you finish this shot, the sooner you can go back to Pornish Pixies and see what she’s working on now."
Harry made a gagging noise.
"Oh, all right," said Voldemort, fussily. "Where were we? Script girl!"
"I am not getting paid enough for this," Dorothy complained as she handed Voldemort his script and he reviewed his lines again.
"Nobody’s getting paid for this," said Kinsfire. "Okay, Tom, you good with your lines now? We got another tumbleweed ready? Harry, back in the shrubbery."
"What’s my motivation?" the young man grumbled good-naturedly, but he stepped back among the plants and hid behind the designated bush.
"Everybody on your marks? Death Eaters?"
"Yes."
"Yes."
"Whoops, wait a minute! Okay, I’m back on."
"Try to stay focused, Bella," said Kinsfire, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose in irritation. "I want to get this done before we lose the light. Order, we all set?"
Various noises of affirmation came from behind trees and bushes.
"Okay, then." Kinsfire stepped out of the shot.
Dorothy wielded her clap board with ruthless efficiency. "Unnamed Story, Chapter 14, Scene 6, Take 5! Action!"
At eleven-forty-five exactly, the loud cracks of Apparation sounded in the clearing, and a large number of Death Eaters appeared, with a tall creature in the centre, trying to appear majestic...
By the way - my wife Dorothy wrote this scene, and the Chapter and Scene listed at the end are, in fact, correct...