A/N: This is a oneshot crack-humor fic that was inspired by the movie Fido and a thread about inferi at DLP.  Much of the seventh book is ignored, but there are horcruxes and hallows ahead.  Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don’t own Harry Potter and I’m not making a dime off this.  It’s purely for my own amusement.  Hopefully yours too.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Voldemort, My Pet Inferius

“Voldemort.”

There is no response.

“Voldemort!”  I yell, raising my voice to get the creature’s attention.

“Durrrggghhhh,” comes the gurgled reply, and the shambling wreck of a man turns to glare at me.

“When you’re finished trimming the hedges, make sure that the garden is free of weeds.”

The red-eyed Dark Lord Emeritus stares at me for a moment longer, then nods miserably in acquiescence.

I return to the house, wondering what my deliciously loony wife has dreamed up for dinner tonight.

That’s right.  I, Harry Potter, The-Boy-Who-Lived-Through-Dumbledore’s-Impossibly-Stupid-Plan, am married to the lovely Luna Lovegood.  Have been for two years now.

How my nuptial bliss came about is a long story.  I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that it involved lots of talking, nurturing, and KY Jelly.

It’s not what you think.  Really.  Turns out that KY is very useful in certain necromantic rituals.

As I make my way to my loving wife’s workshop, the pungent smell of thestral dung assaults my nostrils.  That’s a bad sign.  If Luna is experimenting again, she probably hasn’t made any plans for dinner.  It’s Dobby’s night off, and Luna usually cooks on these nights.  Just one of those little gestures she likes to make toward domestic tranquility.

“Luna, luv, have you given any thought to what’s for dinner tonight?”

She looks up at me from behind a long wooden table, up to her elbows in a brown, slimy goop and sporting a little dollop of thestral turd on the end of her nose.  Charming.

As the one and only official Master of Death ™, I suppose I should feel more affection for the skeletal-looking horses of death.  Honestly, though, they creep me out.  Luna is the one with the real affinity for them.  Ever since she discovered what sorts of strange plants one could grow with thestral fertilizer, she’s been following our small herd around with a magical pooper-scooper.

Given that Luna has attempted to breed the poor horses with fire crabs in the past, they are justifiably alarmed by her obsession with their digestive processes.

“Oh, hi Harry,” she smiles, blissfully unaware of the rancid smell in the room.  “Is it Dobby’s night off again?  I suppose I could have Tom whip something up for us if you’re feeling peckish.”

“Er, that’s alright, luv.  I’ve been wanting to get owl-delivery from that new curry place.  You can go ahead and finish your, er, whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Are you sure, Harry?” she frowns.  “The moon calf mix only has to be kneaded for another 10 minutes, and then I’m free.”

“No, honestly, Luna; it’s fine,” I smile.  “I’ll order us some curry.  Just let me find Azrael.”

I leave the room hurriedly, grateful that I won’t be subjected to Luna’s idea of a culinary quick fix again.

Luna has some charming eccentricities, but really, who wants to eat a meal prepared by an inferius?

Ah, yes.  Did I forget to mention that our little cottage also houses two inferi?

Funny story, that.

It all started with Dumbledore’s brilliant plan to send Ron, Hermione, and I on a merry scavenger hunt across England.  He gave each of us an item that had no discernible value and turned us loose, having made plans for Snape to give us inscrutable hints along the way.  Like I said, brilliant.  

Thank Merlin for Luna’s insane father.  Were it not for his total lack of fashion sense, Viktor Krum might never have insulted him at Bill and Fleur’s wedding.  Luna took offense, and we were all treated to a whispered recounting of the legend of the Deathly Hallows and why her father sported its symbol.

It all sounded like rubbish, of course, but two days later Hermione ran across an obscure reference to the Elder Wand in one of the books she stole from Dumbledore’s office.  Coupled with the fact that Dumbledore had left her “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” in his will, she began to suspect that the legends weren’t rubbish after all.  It wasn’t long before our Hermione put two and two together.

A fabled invisibility cloak?  Check.  We already had one, and it hadn’t shown any wear and tear despite being an ancient family heirloom.  A super wand?  We weren’t sure, but all the clues pointed to Dumbledore being the likely master.  A resurrection stone?  Dumbledore had been mortally injured by a cursed ring with a big stone in it, and it just so happened that it would fit inside the snitch he left me in his will.

No one really knew what would happen if we combined all three Hallows, only that the bearer would become the so-called Master of Death.  Having no better plans, we figured it was worth a shot.

So Ron and I raided Dumbledore’s tomb to retrieve his wand.  Hermione went to work on opening the snitch, and she eventually discovered that basilisk venom will destroy virtually anything, including powerful enchantments.

One quick trip to Knockturn Alley for the venom, and, presto, we possessed all three of the Deathly Hallows.

Well, I did, at least.  It was quite an awakening, let me tell you.  I could suddenly see souls.  Everywhere.  It was as if they were trapped inside our bodies, and they had faces of their own.  Ron’s soul kept leering at Hermione in suggestive ways; it was quite disconcerting.

But not as disconcerting as when I next looked in a mirror.  Bloody hell.  There was a miniature Voldemort latched onto my forehead and giving me the two-fingered salute.  The foul thing looked like a cross between a flobberworm and a vampire.

After I finally stopped vomiting, we realized that good old Tom had somehow turned me into a horcrux.  Suddenly, tracking down Dolores Umbridge and the Slytherin locket didn’t seem like such a priority.

Well, long story short, Luna saved my arse again.  I wanted to figure out what sort of cool new superpowers I got as Master of Death (there had to be something cool), so we took Luna into our confidence.  She was the resident expert on the Hallows, after all.  She took us on a scavenger hunt all over Europe, looking not for horcruxes but for the darkest necromantic tomes we could lay our hands on.  She decided I had found my calling as the world’s ultimate necromancer.

You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things we found in those books.  I had Hermione obliviate me after I casually perused “Pick a Hole, Any Hole: Advanced Techniques for the Necrophile.”  We burned that one.

In the end, though, we found what we needed.

As possessor of all three Hallows, I had the power to summon departed souls, bind souls to bodies, and even send ghosts on to the great beyond.  You better believe I removed that piece of soul from my forehead posthaste.  The ugly little parasite went screaming off into the ether, and my life was suddenly filled with significantly less angst.

But it was my ability to create and command inferi that decided the outcome of the war.

It’s not what you’re thinking.  We didn’t send columns of inferi infantry at Death Eater hideouts.  We didn’t need an army; what we needed was time.  Time to locate and destroy the horcruxes before Tommy Boy conquered the world.

It was my luscious little Luna who came up with the plan to defeat Voldemort: we would kill him, trap his soul in his body, and then turn him into an inferius.  Hermione nearly had a stroke at her reasoning, but it made perfect sense to me.  It would stop his soul from seeking out another body, and I could control the monster with my new Mastery of Death.  It would give us time to seek out the horcruxes at our leisure while the Death Eaters floundered without their Master.

The problem was how to take out Voldemort in the first place, but it turned out to be a lot easier than one might think.  The arrogant arsewipe set himself up for disaster by putting that taboo on his name.  Really, what kind of sense does it make to show up blind and unprepared to any location where someone says your name out loud?

So one winter afternoon we laid our trap near the Burrow.  Hermione created an illusion of me standing in the center of a small hollow, while I hid under my cloak and levitated a two-hundred-ton boulder over the entire area.  One “Voldemort” and several apparitions later, there was a large grease spot on the previously untainted ground.

That first time we only managed to crush a few criminals that called themselves ‘snatchers.’  So we did it again.  And again.  And again.  Eventually we started getting high-level Death Eaters, called into service by the sudden disappearance of Voldemort’s more incompetent lackeys.

Finally, after more than two dozen splatter-fests in various locations, we hit the jackpot.  Lucius Malfoy.  Rather than turn Malfoy into another grease spot, we captured him and struck a deal.  Turns out the old boy was dissatisfied in his Lord’s service, and was willing to summon his Master in exchange for a promise to help him escape justice later.

So Malfoy sent a brief summons to Voldemort, telling him that he knew my location, and three minutes later the snake-faced wanker was standing underneath a massive boulder.  He never saw it coming.

I did my little hocus-pocus, and the Dark Lord’s soul found itself trapped within his dead body.  This wouldn’t last very long, so I muttered some complicated gibberish in Latin and waved the Elder Wand around like a maniac.  Next thing he knew, the Dark Lord was an inferius.  

He could no longer use magic or communicate with language—well, he does seem to distinguish between “durrrrggghhhh” and “arrggghhhh”—but he was bound to obey my commands as the Master of Death.  Problem solved.  I even straightened out his mangled body somewhat; it’s a bit unnerving to look at an inferius who’s shaped like a pancake.

Flush with victory, we retreated back to Luna’s childhood home to celebrate.  Once everyone realized Voldemort was gone, the Death Eaters folded.  True, we had massacred our fair share with the taboo, but suddenly the country seemed to be crawling with Aurors.  I wanted to ask the bastards where they had been hiding all this time.

So Kingsley Shacklebolt took over at the Ministry while we hunkered down in Luna’s tower and sussed out how to find the remaining horcruxes.

It was pretty easy to recover Slytherin’s locket from Umbridge, and eventually I remembered that I had seen Ravenclaw’s diadem in the Room of Requirement.  Nagini was the easiest, as we didn’t have to lift a finger.  Pettigrew had executed the beast after he heard his master was dead.  I guess he was sick of milking the snake’s venom and feeding it live babies.

The real trouble was that we had no idea where to look for the last one.  Minister Shacklebolt told us that Snape had information for us, and wanted to use it to bargain for his freedom.  Well, we heard the greasy tosser out, but he didn’t make much sense—something about the Sword of Gryffindor, his patronus, and the Lestrange vault.

We bribed the goblins for a look at the Lestrange vault, but there was no sign of Hufflepuff’s cup.  If it was once there, Voldemort must have moved it before his timely demise.  We couldn’t ask Bellatrix because she had gotten herself run over by a muggle lorry.  The idiot tried to hide in the muggle world and lasted until the first time she tried to cross the street.  We told Snape about his faulty information, and he was understandably distressed.  He wouldn’t be getting his freedom after all.

When we last saw him he was ranting and raving about Dumbledore planning his own death, my mother’s doe eyes, and my curse scar.  The creepy bugger kept asking me to look at him.

I think he finally went round the bend after he murdered Dumbledore, but Luna suggested that he was suffering from acute Severitis: a condition caused by “inflammation of the Severus” and characterized by greasy hair, yellow teeth, and generally bad hygiene.  I’m still not sure whether she was trying to make a joke.

So there you have it.  Until we can find the location of the final horcrux, Lord Voldemort is my pet inferius.

We’ve been searching for two years now, but Hufflepuff’s damned cup seems to have disappeared.  I’m worried that we’ll soon run out of places to look.  I just can’t wait until we find it and finally send the smelly wanker off to the next great adventure.

Why don’t we have him locked up in a magical cage somewhere, you ask?  Several reasons, really.  First, he can’t hurt anyone.  Well, he can’t hurt any humans at least.  He seems to find my orders optional when it comes to small animals and fellow inferi.  Second, Luna feels sorry for him.  For some reason she’s grown fond of “dear Tom,” and she gives him tasks around the house so he’ll feel like a useful member of the household.  Yes, my Luna is hopelessly and gloriously insane.

She sometimes dresses him in an old seersucker suit and forces him to dance jigs to jaunty tunes on the wireless.  Lately she’s become enamored with spello-taping an old muggle toupee to his bald head.  She thinks it will help his self-esteem if he has hair again.

I have to admit, though, it amuses me to make the filthy bugger obey my orders.  I get a kick out of treating him just like the Dursleys treated me all those years.  If the rotter needed nourishment of any kind I swear I’d feed him through a cat flap.  Poetic justice and all that.

The only real trouble we’ve ever had with him running loose came from his encounters with the local muggles.  Luna didn’t want muggle-repelling wards around our home because she likes to take the occasional delivery from a muggle store.  Well, that was a bad idea.

A Jehovah’s Witness once caught a glimpse of Tommy Boy doing his gardening and had a heart attack right there on our lawn.  Soon after, a priest showed up and tried to exorcize Tom’s demons by dousing him with holy water and beating him about the face and neck with a bible.  I got to polish my obliviation skills that day.

I finally had to put my foot down with Luna and set up the muggle-repelling wards.  The neighbors were starting to talk.

All of this narrating is making me hungry.  Why did I come down to the kitchen again?  Ah yes, Azrael and curry.

I give my faithful owl a shrill whistle and he flies obediently in through the kitchen window.  He’s a majestic black-and-gray eagle owl that I acquired after losing Hedwig.  I once considered resurrecting the old girl, but somehow I didn’t think she’d appreciate being turned into a zombie.  Plus it probably would have creeped people out when she made deliveries.

Writing out an order for spicy chicken curry, I tie it to Azrael’s leg and send him on his way.  With any luck we’ll be enjoying some hot Indian cuisine in less than 30 minutes.

A sudden shout from the yard captures my attention.

“Bad Morty!  Bad Morty!  Morty is to be giving back gnome right now!”

I look outside and see a pale white blur go by the window.  Dobby is chasing Voldemort with a stick while His Rottenness shuffles away hurriedly with a garden gnome in his grasp.  I’m not worried.  Dobby can control him well enough.

It turns out Voldemort has a fetish for garden gnomes.  All small animals, really.  However much I control him, his contempt for weaker beings seems to be ineradicable.  Luna once caught him trying to bite the head off one of the poor little blighters, and gave him the scolding of a lifetime.

He even went after Crookshanks once when Ron and Hermione came to visit.  Poor Crooks has never been the same.  Neither has Hermione, if I’m being honest.  I don’t think she’s very fond of our solution to the Voldemort problem.  Her visits to our humble cottage have grown rare of late.

Or perhaps she just has her hands full with Ron.  He’s my best mate and all, but even I can admit that he’s the laziest person I’ve ever met.  I think Hermione views him as a personal project, like emancipating house elves.  I don’t think she’s realized yet that she’s more likely to campaign successfully for inferi rights than she is to civilize Ron.  That ship sailed long ago.

But here I am digressing again.  Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Garden gnomes.  And Crookshanks.  Which leads to kittens.  Or rather one very unfortunate kitten.  After Voldemort’s attempt to ingest Crookshanks, Luna decided that he needed some company.  Company of the undead kind.  Poor Mr. Dribbles never stood a chance.  Luna humanely put a kitten to sleep and made me use my necromantic superpowers to reanimate it.

Mr. Dribbles the zombie kitten was born.  Luna was sorely disappointed with the results.

I think Mr. Dribbles lasted all of a day.  We found Voldemort chewing lazily on one of his rear legs and using one of his tiny ribs as a toothpick.  It was not a happy day in the Potter household.  Don’t ask me what ultimately happened to Mr. Dribbles.  He wasn’t dead, exactly, but what happens to an undead kitten when he is ingested by another inferius?  Yeah, I don’t know either.

Alas, the unfortunate incident of the undead kitten did not dissuade Luna from her notion that Voldemort would behave if he had some company.

That’s when she used her unparalleled powers of persuasion (she withheld sex for a week) to convince me to raise Bellatrix Lestrange from the dead.  Remember that I said we have two inferi guests in our lovely home?  Well, the crazy bitch is the other one.  She’s currently locked in her bedroom in timeout because she stepped in one of Luna’s experiments and spread acromantula entrails all over the house.

I didn’t return Bella’s soul to her; there was no real reason to trap her soul in a decaying body.  I just reanimated her body.  Let me tell you, inventing those new anti-decomposition and freshening charms gave my magic a workout.  Luna, nutty little Ravenclaw that she is, took to the Arithmancy like a snorkack in heat, and we eventually discovered a way to keep that ‘not-so-fresh’ smell out of our nostrils.

The real trouble was with decomposition.  We haven’t fully solved that one yet.  We can make their tissues stronger, and slow the rate of decay, but dead body parts still have a nasty habit of falling off at the most inopportune times.  Like the last time Luna delegated food preparation duty to Voldemort.

There was a finger in my salad that night.  A finger.  I think the bastard did it on purpose.

See why I’m ordering takeout tonight?

It turns out that inferi retain some of their original personalities, even if their souls have departed.  Bellatrix, or ‘Belly,’ as Dobby likes to call her, still displays the same sort of slavish devotion to Voldemort that she did in her mortal life.  She would follow him around like a lost puppy if we let her.  I think her devotion went a little beyond the platonic as well, as disturbing as that thought is.

We once discovered her in Voldemort’s quarters in—well, let’s just call it a compromising situation.  She was startled by our interruption, and when she turned around she had Tommy’s little todger in her hand.  Only it wasn’t connected to Tommy.  The bloody thing had come off in her hand.  I always wondered whether the affection had been mutual or if…well, you know, rigor mortis and all.

Regardless, it put me and Luna off sex for a whole month.  We keep them stashed in separate quarters these days.  Mostly so Voldemort won’t be tempted to pry out her eyeballs again.  If they’re together for too long she will start petting him like a favorite dog and he will try to remove her extremities with his bare hands.

Last summer Luna insisted on taking the pair of them with us on our annual snorkack hunt.  Dobby got quite a workout.  Bellatrix thought it was amusing to chase butterflies and then pull off their wings.  Voldemort thought it was amusing to push Bellatrix off open cliff faces.  I lost count of how many times I had to stitch her back together.  Needless to say, we didn’t find any snorkacks.

Another failed experiment, I suppose.  The happy couple can’t be trusted in the same room, so Dobby has to watch them closely if we require them to work together for whatever reason.  I think he likes it actually.  He gets to lord it over them.  An inferius is even further down the social pecking order than a house elf.

“Is Tom chasing garden gnomes again?” I hear Luna sigh behind me.

“Looks like it,” I say, leaning out the window to get a better view of the goings-on.

Dobby has Voldemort cornered against a warded wooden fence at the end of the yard.  Voldemort has grabbed the gnome by its feet and is swinging the poor little bugger wildly at Dobby whenever he approaches.

“Maybe it’s time for another intervention,” Luna says mistily, her head peering around my left shoulder to look out the window.  “He really shouldn’t misbehave like that.”

“Meeeerrrrgggghhh,” I hear from my right side, causing me to jump a little in alarm.  Bellatrix has evidently followed Luna downstairs and is likewise trying to peer over my shoulder and see outside the window.  She is too close for comfort, and being dead does nothing at all for her breath.

“I’ll go rescue the gnome,” I grumble, trudging outside to put an end to this pathetic form of hostage negotiation.  I hear Luna and Bellatrix follow me.  I stop ten feet from the showdown, wondering when Dobby will do something drastic.

“Oy, Voldemort,” I yell.  “Cut out the shenanigans.  Put the gnome down and go back to gardening.”

Voldemort stops swinging the little guy around and glares at me balefully.  His toupee has fallen forward and to the right, nearly covering one eye.  He looks like a corpse who has embraced teenage emo culture in the afterlife.

Then he catches sight of Bellatrix.  He rears back and hurls the gnome at her as hard as he can.  Before I can react, it smacks her right between the eyes and she falls awkwardly to the ground.  The gnome sits up, shakes his head, and then toddles off drunkenly.  The little guy seems no worse for the wear.

Bellatrix, on the other hand, now has a dent in her forehead and a lazy eye.

I turn and look disapprovingly at Voldemort.  “You are not to do that again, Voldemort.  That is a command.  Do you understand?”

The lipless freak tries to sneer at me, or at least I think that’s what he’s doing.

“Yaaarrrggghhhh.”

“And don’t ever forget it,” I reply.  Seems like a good enough response as any.  I don’t really care what’s going on in the head of the crazy undead bastard.  So long as he’s trapped in there and unable to really disobey, I can put up with the occasional kerfuffle with a garden gnome.

But he’s gone for good as soon as we can find that last horcrux.  Whether Luna likes it or not.

I sigh and return to the house.  This is life as usual at Potter Cottage: the Master of Death, his mad wife, six thestrals, two wayward inferi, an owl, and a house elf.

I suppose things could have turned out worse.

                                                                                          FIN

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: Thus endeth the tale.  I hope you weren’t too traumatized.  I’m half-tempted to write a sequel where Voldemort and Bellatrix somehow escape their confines and have an adventure in the muggle world.  Doesn’t “The Continued Adventures of Belly and Morty” have a nice ring to it?

Anyway, hope you enjoyed it.  Drop me a review if you did.  Or if you didn’t.

Thanks to the folks at AFC and DLP for their suggestions on the rough draft, particularly Perspicacity, BennyS, and infamousdjb.  Part of the “Severitis” joke comes from a comment by Chime at DLP.