AN: Sorry this came out so late. I was keeping my friend company on her birthday! (along with much writer's block. I over-planned this chapter, and so the words wouldn't flow…)
Disclaimer: . Fill in the blank. If you don't know what goes there, then don't post fan fiction on the web.
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The next day, Draco woke up in a strangely good mood. At breakfast, He smiled at Harry and Ron, who stared back stupidly. When Hermione walked in, he had to resist laughing. As soon as she saw him, she seemed to remember the events of the night before, and then put her hand up to her forehead as if she had a headache coming on. She internally debated whether to have breakfast or to avoid Draco. She chose the latter, and he smirked as she left the room.
Draco found a strange pride in being able to unconsciously win the affections of someone who had despised him for years, even if she was a mudblood. He thought, 'Ron is blatantly obvious in trying to gain her affections and she's oblivious to it, but I act like an ass to her and she sneaks into my room at night to confess her undying love. If that's not talent, I don't know what is.'
After finishing breakfast and getting dressed, Draco decided to practice his Patronus yet again.
"Ginny, wake up," Draco ordered. Ginny stayed asleep. "Ginny," he said as he prodded her shoulder. "GINNY!"
"What?" Ginny said groggily. "Leave me alone, ferret."
"I need the wand."
"Bring it here." Draco brought the box with the wands in it to Ginny, who was on the verge of falling asleep again.
"Here they are."
Ginny took both wands, and with the willow wand, she muttered a spell over the oak wand. "That spell will return the wand to this room by noon. Just make sure you let go of the wand before it drags you along. I've charmed it to be able to go through walls, but I don't know how well you'll travel through them."
"How much do I pay you?"
"Just LEAVE!"
And so he did. He locked himself in his room and began practicing his Patronus. His good mood showed up in his work, because as soon as Draco muttered the words "Expecto Patronum," a silver-scaled snake slithered from his wand. Draco stared at the snake in amazement.
"I did it," he said in awe. "I diiiid it I diiiid it!" he sang as he danced his little victory dance.
He was so happy that he finally produced a patronus that each successive patronus he produced became a brighter silver than the last. It was when he produced an especially bright patronus that he realized that the best time to go to Azkaban would be while his Patronus was at its best.
He rushed over to his trunk to retrieve the parchment that contained the instructions for how to get to Azkaban. Once he had performed the curse to make the parchment legible, he gasped. The instructions had changed. Before, Some of the harder aspects of the mission had been delegated to fellow Death Eaters, but now they were all left up to Draco. 'There is no way I can do this all by myself,' he thought. Draco tried to remember if he had recently done anything that might have angered the Dark Lord. He couldn't recall any such event, and he wondered why Voldemort would give him such an impossible task.
The plan Voldemort had given him was much too complicated and required more than one person, which he didn't have. Maybe there was another way?
Getting in was not going to be a problem; it was the getting out with a convicted felon that was the difficult part. The only times he had heard of people escaping from Azkaban were of Sirius Black's and Barty Crouch, Jr.'s escape. The former he knew nothing about. The latter he knew occurred through an exchange, which he couldn't do because he didn't have anyone to exchange his father with.
Draco mentally went over the obstacles that he faced. Firstly, He had to sneak out of the Weasley's home without getting caught, but his time-turner could help him with that problem by letting him be in two places at once. He also had to get to Azkaban itself, then get inside, get Lucius, and get out before getting crazy. As an afterthought, he added, 'Without getting caught, either.'
Draco groaned in frustration. 'If only I had a Room of Requirements in a Box.' But then he realized, 'Getting into Hogwarts wouldn't be half as hard as getting into Azkaban. I could go there to get to the Room of Requirements, and if that doesn't at least give me an idea of what to do, I won't be any worse off.'
Draco quickly looked at the clock. It was nine-thirty. He needed to be back from Azkaban and have his father hidden somewhere by noon, giving him a grand total of two and a half hours to break his father out of Azkaban. This was going to be tough.
Draco crumpled up the parchment and threw it in his trunk. Before he could think of a way to sneak out of the Burrow, Harry burst through the door.
"Hey!" Draco said angrily. "Can't a man get a bit of privacy around here? What if I had not been decent?"
"Sorry," Harry said insincerely. "It's not like I haven't seen the same things before. Oh, that's right, I haven't. You're of much smaller proportions aren't you?"
"What do you need, Potter?" Draco asked, refusing to give in to immaturity.
"I just came to tell you that Mrs. Weasley wanted to know if you wanted to go with us to Hogsmeade. Everyone's going except Hermione, who says she has a headache."
Draco smiled. Hogsmeade was certainly closer to Hogwarts than the Burrow. "How long are you staying?"
"Oh, roughly until a bit after noon. We planned to eat lunch there."
"Perfect. I'll come."
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Draco found himself inside a random shop in Hogsmeade. Ginny had made the entire group stop at a bookshop for a book she seemed to desperately need, but she wouldn't let them follow her around the store, so while everyone else wandered around the store, Draco seized the opportunity to leave. He stood off to the side of the shop's front window so he could make sure Harry, Ron, Ginny, and Molly left before he made his way towards Hogwarts. The four didn't seem to notice that he had gone, and they went on to the other shops.
Draco, whose figurative head size rivaled that of a hot air balloon, felt a bit irked that his absence went unnoticed. How could anyone forget about him? He then decided to be grateful that he could press onward without any worries.
He left the shop and made his way down the familiar path to the school. When he arrived at the gate, he was surprised to see that it opened for him. He thought it might be locked, since school was not in session, but then he realized that it was probably only locked to those who weren't students or staff. He briskly walked to the side entrance to the school, and hurried up to the seventh floor where the room of requirements could be found.
He was a bit nervous at this point, since he hadn't been seen by anyone, and he was sure that he would eventually be ratted out by a painting. He walked up and down the corridor three times, passing the painting of Barnabas the Barmy each time. He concentrated on what he needed: something that could get him to Azkaban and back with his father without getting caught.
Finally, a silver door appeared in the wall. Draco walked into a room with a brick fireplace and a table set with curious objects. The only item he recognized was the pouch of floo powder. 'This room can't expect me to floo to Azkaban, can it?' he thought to himself. He looked at the other items. There were two identical bulbous, fist-sized green bottles, two small, white, uncorked vials that were so thin that the surface tension would keep the potion in the bottle, two ordinary-looking flasks of dismally grey potion, two chocolate bars, and what looked like an owl parcel bag. He looked closer at the potions, and saw that they were all labeled. The green ones were Transfiguration-Owl potions, the white ones said something like Restorative Potion (it was so small he couldn't be sure), and the grey ones were Emotionless potions. Even the pouches of floo powder had writing on them: Ministry of Magic, pumpernickel.
At seeing this, Draco became very confused. The logical side of his brain said that that was what Draco was supposed to say when he used the fireplace, but what kind of place was pumpernickel?
Draco once again looked at all the potions. He guessed that he was supposed to use the floo powder to go to "pumpernickel" at the Ministry of Magic, then he was supposed to use the emotionless potion before getting into Azkaban so that the dementors wouldn't prey on him, then he was supposed to find his father, use the emotionless potion on him, and then have them both fly out of Azkaban as owls, to later use the restorative potions and turn back into normal people.
He gathered everything into the bag except for the one pouch of floo powder, which he took over to the fireplace.
"Ministry of Magic, pumpernickel," Draco said. He then dumped the powder out of the bag and disappeared into green flames.
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He reappeared at one end of a long and narrow room. He stepped out of the fireplace, which was also brick, and saw a gold plaque hanging above the fireplace that said "Ministry of Magic, Pumpernickel." He looked across the room to the weathered wooden door at the end. He walked over toward it, and saw a tarnished silver plaque that said, "Azkaban."
Draco reached in the bag and drank the grey potion. Draco grimaced at the taste and texture of it. It felt and tasted like he was swallowing pulpy cotton. Slowly, all warmth and feeling drained out of him. He now had no emotions. He could only rely on instinct and logic now.
He grabbed the icy doorknob and stepped through. He was blind. He felt as if he were being dragged underground through the earth, and then a sudden jolt of icy coldness enveloped him, and he couldn't breathe. He continued to be dragged through the water, and then through earth once more before he surfaced on a cold, stony floor.
Draco choked and coughed up dirt, water, and mud. When he was finally able to breathe, he sat up, and looked at his surroundings. Everything around him was made of cold, grey stone, and if he hadn't swallowed the Emotionless potion, he would instantly have been pierced with fear, panic, and intense sadness. There must have been at least a thousand dementors there, all sucking happy thoughts from anything human.
Draco got up, grabbed his bag, which had miraculously survived the harrowing trip there, and found removed the wand.
"Lumos," he said almost robotically.
Now that there was light, he could see a narrow passageway ahead. The passageway moved in a spiral, with doors on either side. It finally occurred to Draco that he could probably "Accio" his father, so that he wouldn't have to go searching through all the doors.
"Accio Lucius!" Draco shouted. Instead of his father being summoned to him, Draco was summoned to his father. Draco remained unfazed as the wand pulled him through the spiral. The wand dragged him down the narrow hall, and he must have bumped into twenty dementors before he crashed into a door, as the wand was still trying to take him to his father. The only thing Draco registered was pain, but no emotion followed. He let go of the wand, and watched as the wand kept banging at the door. It soon made its way to the keyhole, and it managed to shove itself in, serving as a rudimentary key. Draco turned the lock, and the door opened. Draco pulled at the wand, but it remained stuck. He decided to leave it for now.
He entered the gray room to see his father collapsed on the floor. By the light of a small window the size of a small television high up near the ceiling, he could see a dementor hovering over Lucius. Draco had no sense of fear, and simply walked over to his father, and made his almost lifeless body swallow the dark grey liquid. Once Draco had emptied the potion into his father's mouth, the dementor slowly drifted away out the door, since there were no emotions left to feed on, and the man it was supposed to be guarding seemed dead.
Draco also took out the green bottle and uncorked it. An owl-shaped vapor flowed from the mouth of the bottle and dissipated. He poured the greenish liquid into his father's pale mouth. His father immediately began to shrink, and his long, white hair turned into ashen feathers, with dark grey tips. Soon, Lucius Malfoy was about the size of one and a half grown man's heads. He lay there motionless on the floor, looking more like a taxidermist's masterpiece than a live owl. Draco unceremoniously shoved his father into the bag, and went back outside to where the wand was. He took the transfiguration potion out, closed the bag, put it on the floor, and then drank the potion.
Draco shrank and sprouted feathers similar to his father's, but his were a golden color, and the tips were brown. Draco used his beak to fasten the parcel bag to his leg. He decided to practice flying. It was very difficult, because he had to be able to carry himself, two small potions, and his father. After a while, he got the hang of it, and was able to fly relatively decently.
Now all he had to do was get the wand out of that infernal keyhole. He flew up to the keyhole, and tried pulling it out with his mouth. This proved very unsuccessful. He couldn't feel frustration, though, so he continued on until his wings grew sore. He flapped his way down to the floor and rested. Draco then remembered that Ginny had put a spell on the wand to return to her room by twelve. So he decided to wait until noon to leave.
After staring steadfastly at the wand for quite some time, he saw the wand start to jiggle its way out of the keyhole. Draco flew up to the wand and clamped his beak onto it. The wand ripped itself from the keyhole and quickly went around the door up to the window high up in the cell, dragging Draco along with it. The wand strained to pull Draco and his heavy parcel through the small window, and finally managed to squeeze them all through. Draco had now left the world of thinking, and struggled to maintain his hold—or rather, bite—on the wand that flew at insanely high speeds over England.
This high-speed travel lasted for about fifteen minutes until Draco finally arrived at the Weasley's home. The wand slowed down, and Ginny's window opened to welcome the wand back inside. The wand and it's passengers dropped onto the bed, where Draco was allowed to finally get his bearings. He was very sore.
Draco poked his beak into the bag, and took out one of the long thin vials that held the restorative potion. Draco tried licking the potion, but the vial was so thin that the potion didn't want to come out. Draco's current lack of lips to suck with didn't help either. Draco's bird instincts took over, and he flew the potion over to the desk, where he dropped it, and the vial broke. He swooped down to lick the liquid, and as he began to ingest the white potion, he turned back to normal.
Draco suddenly realized that he was naked. When he had turned into an owl, the clothes had vanished. He hurried over to his bag, so that he could quickly run down the hall to his own room and put on some clothes. He grabbed his bag, and was about to go for the door, when he heard it creak open.
A feminine voice asked, "Who's in there? I heard something break."
The door opened to reveal Hermione Granger, who blanched at the sight of a naked Draco Malfoy holding a bag in a strategic location.
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AN: So it turns out that he didn't even have to use the patronus. I really hope this chapter didn't suck, because I haven't updated in a LONG time, and it wouldn't be nice to finally have an update, but then realize it sucked. Run-on sentence….lol. Don't kill me for not updating. It was hard to think of a way to get Lucius out of Azkaban.
Please continue to read my fic. I promise I'll do better on the updating. This chapter was just extremely hard to write.
