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Deathly Hallows uberwank: Chapter 35, King's Cross
This'll have to do. If all else fails, appropriate icon is appropriate.

"By the way, Harry, now that I'm utterly dead, it seems a good time to tell you that I was quite the arse-bandit in my youth. Do stop feeling compassion for that wretched flayed child under your seat." - air_and_angels, here

So there's this line in The Princess Bride about how death cannot stop true love. That's true, I guess, but what's even more true is this: even death cannot get in the way of the unstoppable force that is Dumbledore's Final Thought!

As we begin, Harry is sort of semi-conscious, and we take a little time out while he adjusts to the situation and makes some quasi-philosophical remarks on the nature of being and things like that. It's all misty and there's a bunch of stuff going on where the surroundings are not hidden by the mist but forming from it, which is pretty cool, I guess.

After a while, Harry realises that he is naked. I'm sure there's a joke to be had here about that high-pitched noise that you can hear and how it's the sound of a million Dan Radcliffe fangirls imagining how this is going to look on film, but any humour in it has been utterly undermined by Equus (and I strongly suspect that is exactly why Dan Radcliffe did that play in the first place), so if you could just assume it's still funny and I said something incredibly witty about it, that would be good. Cheers.

Meanwhile, back in fiction, Harry puts on some robes.

Then he spends some time wondering WTF is going on and at some point during this, notices a weird noise, which he pretty much ignores for the time being. He looks around and sees a high glass roof and a room even bigger than Hogwarts' great hall. He wonders where he could be. We would all be wondering along with him if the chapter itself weren't called King's Cross, which does kind of give it away.

Right after this, Harry figures out what the weird noise is, when he sees what looks like a child, all cut and in pain, choking and curled up and generally in a crap state. He's wangsting over whether he should help it or something when he is saved from having to do any more thinking for himself by the arrival of... Dumbledore!

... Ah, fuck.

Dumbledore greets Harry by calling him "You wonderful boy. You brave, brave man", which strikes me as massively patronising. In his infinite wisdom, Dumbledore tells Harry to just leave the mash-up baby there, there's nothing to be done for it, so they leave it under the seat and fuck off. That's how we know this isn't the real King's Cross, by the way; if it was, there would be a bomb disposal squad already on the scene and Harry and Dumbledore would be getting arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities or shot or something.

So, I will freely admit this: I was one of the people who did not get what was going on with the flayed baby thing at all. According to JKR's site, it's "the last piece of soul Voldemort possesses" - the idea is that when Voldemort hit Harry with the AK, they were both sent to this limbo place - and Harry's soul appears unblemished (his scar and even his glasses are missing, by the way), whereas Voldemort's is so damaged already that his soul appears all stunted and wounded. I can't decide if this bit was done really well - I really do like this idea, even if I didn't understand it, but then I generally fail to get stuff like this right away anyway - or if it's maybe a bit too blurry, given that JKR also says she's been asked about this bit "a LOT". In any case, if it's the latter I can't really justify complaining about it given I've already been snarking over Dumbledore's annoying tendency to show up at the most appropriate moment and explain the plot.

This is what he now does. First of all he explains that Harry isn't, in fact, dead. Dumbledore is, though, because he always has to piss all over Harry's achievements in a way that makes it sound like he's being nice. They talk in circles for a while then, before Dumbledore eventually moves on to the next plot point to be explained, which is that because Lily sacrificed herself, her magical protection was in Harry's blood, and then because Voldemort took Harry's blood, that sacrifice lives on... or something, I stopped paying attention part way through, but it's something like that. I don't like to examine Lily's blood sacrifice in too much depth, because I have some idea of how blood cells are produced and I don't think they stick around for long (something like 2 million erythrocytes are produced in your bone marrow every second, and their life span is about 120 days, apparently) so let's just stop thinking about this, anyway, because this is getting stupid, JK Rowling didn't give a fuck about actual human blood cells when she wrote the whole sacrifice thing and anyway, it's magic, wizards did it, so STFU Fera.

Dumbledore's next bombshell is that Harry is a horcrux, although I think we gathered that from that one Snape-centric chapter we did a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, Harry was a horcrux by mistake, because Voldemort's soul was so unstable anyway that it came apart during the attack back in 1981. It's lucky, I guess, that this happened when Harry himself was attacked, and not - for example - when Voldemort killed any of the other people he randomly offed over the course of the series. I mean, imagine if he'd accidentally created a new horcrux, in the same way, when he killed that German woman and her kids in Chapter 12.

So, yeah, in summary: while Lily's sacrifice is in Voldemort, Harry can't die. Handy.

They spend a little more time sitting and listening to the whimpering scalebaby before Harry asks Dumbledore for some more explanation (for fuck's sake, Potter, don't encourage him!). This time it's to do with how it was that Harry used the Force back in Chapter 4 and somehow beat Voldemort. Dumbledore explains that, for some reason, Harry's wand was more powerful than Voldemort's (this is to do with their blood connection and the connection between their souls and other stuff, and as far as I can tell is nothing to do with the elder wand yet, which is confusing). So, yeah, that is why the wand broke. You'll remember that the wand in question originally belonged to Lucius Malfoy - Voldemort took it from him way back in Chapter 1, starting a steady stream of dick jokes that would persist through the book, and... wait, hang on, what? Dumbledore specifically refers to the wand as being Lucius Malfoy's. How did he know? I guess because everything that has happened in the last, say, thirty years was orchestrated by Dumbledore - right down to Harry developing a particular love of treacle tart and the colour underpants that Ron is wearing right now and stuff like that.

Or else this can be explained through something like "it's the afterlife" and therefore all knowledge is accessible. Hey, maybe Dumbledore managed to score a job in the afterlife, a sort of non-religion-specific St Peter, doing meet-and-greet duty and induction sessions for the newly dead. And, naturally, he ran into Snape about half an hour ago, and Snape told him everything about Lucius Malfoy's wand.

Or JKR cocked up, whatever. I would guess this option, since Harry also refers to "the wand that Voldemort borrowed", and I can't see any way that he'd have known, either.

Moving on, Dumbledore concludes all this wandlore stuff with something about how basically Harry is immune to Voldemort now and I fail to get WTF is going on. Then they have a little discussion about where they are, concluding eventually that they are in King's Cross station, which prompts Dumbledore to call Harry "my dear boy" again and explain that, "This is, as they say, your party". God, he's so condescending in this chapter. Anyway, "your party"? Who says that? It's like how there are cartoons, aimed at children but very much written by grown-ups, which have the tendency to completely fail at real slang and have kids saying awkward, forced things like "Crucial!" or "To the max!" all the time.

Presumably in order to make Dumbledore STFU before he says, "The invisibility cloak? I'd hit it!" or something equally wrong, Harry brings up the topic of, here we go again, the deathly hallows. Aren't we over these by now? Clearly not, for Dumbledore begins an extended wangst session, starting by essentially complaining about how great he is for finding the hallows, and there are tears in his eyes at one point, and then he tells Harry that he no longer has any secrets, which as we will see now, when Dumbledore spends a good five pages talking about Grindelwald and never once mentions the whole cocksucker club business, is bullshit.

OK, so whether JKR should have outed Dumbledore in-book is something I've discussed before, so I won't dig it up in too much detail here. However, if she was going to, this might have been the ideal place to handwave it in - there doesn't seem to be any kind of time limit or whatever going on here, and if the wizarding world really is cool with homosexuality as she claims (more on that in a second) then it would have been easy for Dumbledore just to say something like, "I loved him passionately" or "Young love blinds us, Harry!" or whatever, and Harry could say, "Of course" or something, enough to make it crystal clear that Dumbledore was gay and Harry was cool with it, and then the conversation would move on. Actually, reading this section in order to comment on it I notice that it is made fairly clear (a choice quote: "And then, of course, he came...", p573 if you want to verify that) but not so much so that it counts as in-canon gayitude.

But then, maybe this is totally not the right time for this one. Say Harry - you're a horcrux, you just got pwned but you pretty much need to go back and do some pwning yourself, DON'T TOUCH THE SCALEBABY, and by the way, I'm gay, just FYI. You know? What I mean is, if right after Dumbledore's death wasn't the right time for Tonks to throw herself at Lupin (and it wasn't; regardless of my own shipping preferences, it really, really wasn't), then right after Harry himself has been near enough killed might not be the right time for Dumbledore to introduce such a potentially weighty topic, especially if he's not sure how Harry's gonna take it. It could have complicated matters more than necessary, you know? Harry is pretty dense and would probably need it spelled out about a dozen times in increasingly graphic and/or schoolboy terms, plus we don't have much evidence to go on as to what Harry's thoughts on yaoi are, so I guess Dumbledore is just concerned that things might go more like this and be totally awkward:

DUMBLEDORE: I loved him passionately... alas, I allowed myself to be blinded to what he would become... this is love's folly... blah blah blah...

HARRY: ... Yeah, I understand, you... wait, what? You were in love with him?

DUMBLEDORE: Yes, but that is not important. Blah blah blah destiny. Blah blah sacrifice. Your mother's eyes, blah blah blah. [Continues] Now run along and defeat Voldemort, if you choose to, that is. Leave the scalebaby where it is, please.

HARRY: No no no wait. I want to go back just a second. You and Grindelwald? So are you, like, gay or something?

DUMBLEDORE: What, you didn't know? Don't you remember my chocolate frog card? "Albus Dumbledore is best known for his work on alchemy with his partner Nicholas Flamel, his work as a consultant on various Wizarding Wireless Network series about fashion, and his discovery of the twelve uses of dragon's blood (use number eight: lube). Professor Dumbledore enjoys chamber music and alpine skiing..."

HARRY: So... wait, two men kissing and cuddling?

DUMBLEDORE: ... Yes, Harry. Two men, kissing and cuddling. But this is not important now. What is important is your bravery... the sacrifice you have made... true Gryffindor...

HARRY: No, wait, go back for a second. Buttsex?

And so on. My point is, there's an awful lot of explaining the entire book going on already, and I'm finding this kind of boring right now, so introducing yet another loose end to be immediately dealt with would be, shall we say, inefficient at this stage.

Actually, scratch that, I don't really have a point. I just wanted an excuse to use the phrase "alpine skiing".

Although, actually, I said I'd come back to that post-DH interview, didn't I? Anyway, this bothers me - JKR said that she hadn't really considered (!!!) the wizarding world's general attitude to sexuality but that it was probably no big deal - that wizards like Lucius Malfoy wouldn't care about people's love lives because they are more worried about blood purity. I would have assumed that wizards like Lucius Malfoy would be interested in people's love lives for precisely that reason - i.e. they'd want pureblood witches and pureblood wizards to go out and make pureblood babies and not waste all those pureblood zygotes on gay. Hmm.

Oy. That was a tangent and a half, so let's just carry on with the chapter.

... Dumbledore won't drop the whole Grindelwald subject, even though I just said we ought to be carrying on with the rest of the chapter. He says that even before they fell out for real, the two of them disagreed about how they should use the hallows: for example, Dumbledore wanted to use the resurrection stone to reunite his family, whilst Gellert thought it would be better put to use - get this - raising an army of zombies. I've touched on this issue before, but - how utterly textbook teenage goth is that? I used to go out to scuzzy clubs when I was about 17 and drink vodka, dance to crap music with guitars in and kiss boys whose ultimate ambition was to raise an army of zombies - admittedly in their cases for sexual purposes and because nobody else would do it with them. (That was back when I looked like Snape, by the way. And given the size of this fandom plus rule 34, girl!Snape/Grindelwald does exist somewhere, y/y?)

'Kay, so having finally finished with the Grindelwangst, we move on to the hallows themselves. Dumbledore wangsts over the resurrection stone, explaining that he wasn't worthy of it because he wanted to use it to drag people back from the dead like in Buffy that time, and he wasn't worthy of the cloak either, because he borrowed that to look at it. Or something. Harry is the true master of the hallows although I can't figure out why, except that he is the hero archetype and therefore it would be him, wouldn't it? As Dumbledore tells Harry this, he actually pats his hand, which makes me want to punch him for being so bloody patronising. Harry laps it up.

The next loose end to be neatly tied off is why the Quest (as before, that's JKR's capital Q) to find the hallows was so difficult. And Dumbledore makes up some explanation about how he thought Harry would be reckless with them if they were too easy to find, and therefore Hermione needed to be there to be Harry's brain for him and stop him getting them before the end of the book before he was ready to possess them or some shit like that.

Also, we learn that Voldemort didn't know about the hallows at all. Although he did want the elder wand, which he knew was the best and biggest wand ever, but he didn't know about the hallows. I can't help thinking you'd have to be pretty special to know so much about the elder wand and yet never have heard about the hallows. Finally, Dumbledore admits that one tiny, single piece of his plan did not come to pass, and that was that he wanted Snape to end up with the elder wand. Why, though? I've already written the part of the next chapter where I rip this apart - we don't learn properly why this bit of the plan didn't work until Harry and Voldemort are monologuing at each other right before Voldemort dies (and yes, I know that "monologuing at each other" is kind of nonsense, but that sort of info-dump, explaining-all-the-plot-points thing is monologuing, in my view, regardless of how many people are involved) so I won't go into this now. I will, though.

That last paragraph does make sense, by the way. Really it does.

OK, so we're nearly through this extended therapy session, so let's get on with it. Harry and Dumbledore spend some more time just sitting in companionable silence. By this point, we learn, the whimperings of the scalebaby no longer bother Harry, so that's good. There's nothing like an annoying flayed child to mess up a perfectly good afterlife bonding session.

Eventually, they talk some more, and it is decided that Harry should go back to the real world to tie up the rest of the book's loose ends. (Fun fact: pre-DH I totally called this.) Therefore, the scene begins to fade to white like this is an episode of Six Feet Under or something. Dumbledore, too, starts to fade out, and as he does, Harry asks whether this chapter has been real, or happening inside his head. Dumbledore says that it was inside his head, but that doesn't mean it wasn't real. I find this statement annoying, firstly because it brings about a contradiction in my wanky, smug, sociologist's brain: as an atheist I think it's the worst kind of bullshit, but as a (*cringe*) Foucauldian I'd argue that the two can't be separated, because the very notion of "real" is a construction anyway. I'm such a cock.

But, you know, it's not even about the Serious Business deep down. It's about the fact that this is typical Dumbledore-style "Ooh, I'm all wise and stuff, listen to me and my pseudo-mysticism, check out my long white beard" rubbish. It's like he's only saying this stuff because he knows Harry is fading back into the real world and can't call him on it. At one point in this chapter, while Dumbledore is talking at Harry, there is a bit that says, "Dumbledore was being infuriating", so even JKR knows how annoying this is. She mocks us.

God, there is so much bloody talking in this chapter. It is long. I am trying to make this fun and enjoyable for everyone but it's a struggle because Dumbledore will not shut up and there is almost nothing interesting to be said. The next chapter, though, is good and it's got Neville in it, so that's something.

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