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“Wait, I don’t understand, was this a dream?”
“Yeah, because no offense, but this sounds...kind of...wildly implausible.”
Lord Voldemort, Master of Death and Dark Lord of All, let a hissing sigh pass through the narrow slits of his nostrils and further constricted the narrow slits of his eyes.
“No, it was not a dream. It was me, forty feet high, surrounded by a brigade of flying Mary Poppins...Poppinses.”
“Poppinses? What is a Poppinses, preciousss?”
Dear Lord. The balloon-headed house-elf-like creature in the corner was actually trying to speak to him.
“Perhaps it would be easier to explain this way.” Lord Voldemort, the One Who Shall Not Be Named, conjured a Pensieve from beneath his cloak and used his wand to draw a strand of silvery flax from his temple, dropping it into the shallow bowl. “Look closely.”
The grotesque group gathered around the Pensieve as best they could--with some of them standing nearly three meters high, some standing more like three meters across, and some not really standing at all (being amorphous dark masses), this was no easy task. They all looked into the bowl and felt themselves falling...
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…falling, falling, falling, not as much downward but inward. To a place so far inward that he felt himself becoming not a person but an idea. Darkness. Nothingness. A vacuum eroding the borders of himself. A kind of death. Until...
BANG. Up, up, outward! Alive once again! But somehow uncomfortably changed, like he had been sucked out of his body and decanted into a new one that didn’t quite fit. Flying up, ever upwards, up to the earth and then even further. Suddenly he was much too tall. About forty feet tall, actually, and with long, spindly fingers each as tall as a man. Fingers that were clutching...his wand! Thank goodness. Er, evilness. And what was this deafening noise all around him?
Muggles. Muggles everywhere he looked, stacked on top of each other in some kind of massive arena. Thousands upon thousands of them! And more than that...he could feel millions more watching, eyes locked on him from afar. What incredible perfection! The entire world had come to bear witness to his resurrection and bow before his undeniable power! The muggles had even laid out their schoolchildren in beds before him, for some unfathomable reason...but no matter, his new minions were already among them, spreading utter terror as they crawled among the children and their ranks of nurses.
This would be the night of his greatest triumph. Even now he could see his Death Eaters flying to him, gently floating down on the summer breeze. Hang on, though...Death Eaters don’t “gently float” anywhere. And there definitely shouldn’t be any summer breezes under the Most Dark Reign of Death’s King. As the cloaked figures drew closer, he could see that they were traveling via some sort of enchanted umbrellas. How very...whimsical. A shudder ran through his body, and he realized that even as powerful dark magic coursed through his very being, bolstered by the countless unspeakable atrocities he had committed, he could still feel the creeping Hand of the Narrative bending events to its will. He would not--and could never--triumph.
For the umbrella-bearing enchantresses had landed and taken up defensive positions in front of the children. A name came to him--Mary Poppins--and it occurred to him that the enchantress-nannies were not an army, but one massively powerful being who had somehow managed to split herself into thirty parts. He had had enough trouble keeping track of seven soul fragments, and she had thirty?? Damn you, Poppinses!
Well, if it was a fight she wanted, a fight she would get. Though he could sense the inevitability of his defeat, he was resolved to deal a few devastating blows before he was unceremoniously forced back into the void. He braced himself as the Poppinses swirled around, manipulating the umbrellas in what looked like the preparation for an enchantment--no, some sort of horrific curse...
Oh, no, they were just dancing.
And he was melting.
Wait, that was IT? They were DANCING HIM TO DEATH? Are you BLOODY JOKING?!?!
How completely, utterly humiliating. What total emasculation and embarrassment. What sick minds had designed the cruel and unusual punishment of dancing the Dark Lord away?? Even as he grasped the sheer absurdity of it, he continued to wither away, rapidly deflating, with each dance step kick-ball-changing a dagger into his heart. Not back into the void! Please, anything but that! He was falling again....
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...the group jerked up out of the Pensieve, gasping for air. Stunned silence hung over the room.
“Well, anyway, that’s why I’m here.” Lord Voldemort, the Conqueror of Death, Feared by All, glanced down at his slender, ghostly white fingers and picked some dirt out from underneath his nails.
“That was...uhh....” started the Grinch.
“...a powerful witch, that much is clear,” Jadis, Queen of Narnia said solemnly, as a rather burnt-looking candy-covered hag to her left nodded in agreement.
“I didn’t like the melting part,” a hook-nosed green woman chimed in.
“Group, I think there’s a lot of things in that story that all of us can relate to.” This came from an entity that sometimes appeared as an enormous, hulking wolf with razor-sharp, foot-long teeth; sometimes as a physical embodiment of Darkness, Fear, and the Other; but mostly as a scrawny, chilled-out dude wearing a hemp necklace who had asked them all to call him Brian. He was, in actuality, the Big Bad Wolf, and he was the leader of the support group for Villains Who’ve Just Realized They’re In Children’s Stories (And Just Realized They Were Villains, For That Matter). “You’ve come to the right place, Tom. May I call you Tom?”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
“Right then, Lord Voldemort, can you share with us why this incident bothered you so much?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Everyone else seemed to know that my defeat was inevitable! And not only that, they found it amusing! I, the Dark Lord, the Most Powerful Wizard in the World, am entertainment to them!”
“Yes, exactly!” cried Captain Hook. “They turned me into an animation and laughed at me. Suddenly using a giant hook in place of one’s hand is so hilarious?”
“Indeed,” agreed a tall, dark woman, who seemed to flicker between haughty, porcelain beauty and a breathtakingly putrid state of rot depending on how the light hit her. “I was quite shocked to learn that the name of Grand High Witch of All the World is associated with a children’s tale. My explicit purpose in life is to murder children, in the most exquisitely gruesome ways. And somehow that belongs in a bedtime story?”
“And what I also want to know is,” interjected Voldemort, getting more incensed by the minute, “why did that sadistic woman Rowling create me to feel such ultimate power, such utter dominance, when the true dominance and real power is ever fixed against me?”
“I feel you, bro,” began Brian. Lord Voldemort, Destroyer of Dreams and Maker of Orphans, had never been called “bro” in his life. Accordingly, he fixed Brian with a glare that could turn a basilisk to stone. “No, but listen,” Brian continued, unfazed. “Power, dominance...that’s what you do. It’s not who you are.”
“Whoa,” said the Child Catcher.
“But I--that's what--I mean, I’m...hmm.” Voldemort had never really thought about this before.
“It sounds like you have a lot of thinking to do, Lord V. We all do.” Brian gently suggested.
“RU-MI-NATE!” intoned Dalek Sec.
“Indeed, my plunger-armed brother, indeed. Why don’t we all take some time this week and think about who we are. See you all back here, same time next Wednesday.”
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It was not a good week for Lord Voldemort. Everywhere he went, pictures of his puppet likeness were plastered next to stories of his humiliating defeat at the hands of the dastardly Poppinses. He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, Terror of Britain, thrice voted Sexiest Prefect at Hogwarts*, reduced to a boggle-eyed puppet and trounced by a horde of domestic employees. Unbelievable.
Eventually, he gave up on leaving the house. “What’s the use, Nagini?” he moaned to the giant snake, who currently seemed more engrossed with luring the neighbor’s cat in from the yard than with comforting her soul-sick master. “At this point I probably couldn’t even order a pint at the pub without being foiled by a group of teenagers who’ve been practicing magic for several decades less than I have.” Lord Voldemort, Bringer of Tears and High Priest of the Dark Arts, settled down into the couch to drown his sorrows in swimming pools of tea and multitudes of reality television such as the world had never seen.
A few days and several Strictly marathons later, Nagini grew concerned enough to intervene. “Nash’hat lras hassthet, tshhhlaks’lah,” she said.
“No shit, Nagini,” he replied. “I haven’t showered in days and I’m sure my hair is a total wreck.”
“Sssha--”
“My METAPHORICAL hair, Nagini, ugh! But you’re right, I do need to pull myself together. It’s just, I can’t stop thinking about what that nitwit Brian said. About how commanding the powers of darkness is what I do, but it’s not who I am. Who am I...really?”
Nagini rolled her luminous reptilian eyes so hard Voldemort swore they were going to shoot right out of her head. “F’thassha? Hafthssna l’anshi, nrethsh valassh, s halsthhhass nashhath shemleth vrass.”
“Wow. You know what, you’re right. Crushing people’s hopes, dreams, and lives does make me happy, and if untrained teenagers and dance-fighting nannies are destined to defeat me every time, I guess that just means I get to do it again, and again, and again.”
“Hash’ni. S vleth hafssnash asth haghlah.”
“Absolutely. Give me fifteen minutes to put on my best, darkest robes, and I’ll be right behind you.”
And with that, the Dark Lord and his colossal snake were walking (and slithering) out the door, ready to wreak havoc until such time as any children, children’s authors, nannies, or fairy godmothers saw fit to get in their way. It’s just who they were.
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* When, in his seventh year, Voldemort didn’t win (perhaps owing to the deteriorating state of his nose cartilage), the champion, Virgil Higginsbottom, was found mysteriously disfigured in what he would only ever refer to afterwards as “a freak Potions accident.”