They almost made it.
Harry had headed directly up to Um-bitch's office, ignoring Hermione's frantic attempts to stop him without drawing attention to what she was doing. No one had questioned Runcorn making his way up to Level One, and as soon as he'd cleared the crowd around the lifts, he'd put on the Invisibility Cloak.
It hadn't taken him long to find the little pamphlet-printing workshop Mira had described on her return yesterday — before she'd cheerfully skipped off to get herself arrested (bloody mental...) — a dozen witches and wizards sitting at desks like they were in bloody detention, magicking stacks of pre-printed pages into little booklets — collating and binding them and shite.
He didn't care about them. He was here for one thing, and one thing only.
He didn't know how she'd gotten hold of Moody's Mad Eye, but someone had to have taken it off his corpse, they'd never found him and—
It was all that was left of the grizzled old warlock — a man who'd lived through two wars and put half the murderers and dark wizards in Azkaban behind bars, a man who'd deserved a hero's send-off, who'd died protecting Harry — and she'd mounted it to her door like a bloody trophy!
Maybe Harry couldn't give Moody the burial he deserved, but he could sure as hell stop Dolores fucking Umbridge keeping his eye as a fucking trophy. And make it at least a little harder for her to keep terrorising muggleborns, destroying her office and any files she might have left there, while he was at it. He'd brought along half a dozen of the twins' Decoy Detonators, their legs removed so they'd just explode on a timer. His plan, at the moment, was to pile all the paperwork and hideous kitten plates he could find in the middle of the office, set the detonators, grab the Mad Eye on the way out, and be back to the lifts by the time they went off.
Then he could go find Ron — bad luck, picking someone whose wife was on trial, and who had a job to do here (he really hoped they didn't make the Cattermoles' situation worse somehow, but he couldn't help a nasty, creeping suspicion that they would...) — and they could head down to the Courtrooms to rescue Hermione and Mira. He knew she thought she had everything under control, she'd thought it was ridiculous that he thought they were going to back her up somehow, but if there was one thing he'd learned in the past six years, it was that plans literally never worked out the way anyone expected. He always ended up making it through whatever adventure he got caught up in by the skin of his teeth, flying by the seat of his bloody pants. The fact that he was still alive was either dumb luck, or the fact that he literally couldn't be killed by anyone but Voldemort! (No, he hadn't said that aloud, he was sure Ron and Hermione would think he was going to do something suicidally reckless if he did, but it seemed plausible, okay.)
Point was, having backup here to help if her plan (which started with her getting arrested) went pear-shaped (which, Harry was having a hard time imagining it not doing so, given that she was planning on starting in a bloody cell) couldn't hurt.
His plan, on the other hand, was going perfectly...right up to the point he got distracted by a copy of Rita Skeeter's stupid book. He'd already chucked most of Umbridge's files into a messy pile, thought it couldn't hurt to flip through it for a minute, maybe get an idea of what kind of disgusting lies the 'reporter' was spewing about him and Dumbledore — in hindsight, he shouldn't have, the best that would've happened was he'd've been even more furious about...everything (he still didn't know why he'd pocketed it, rather than throwing it on the pile with the files) — when the bloody door opened!
In the split second he'd had to react, before Thicknesse, the new 'Minister', turned around and saw him and the wreck he'd made of the office, he could have pulled the Cloak back on. He could've just left the mess as it was, let the 'Minister' sound the alarm, grabbed the Eye, and snuck out in the chaos.
He could have, but he didn't.
No, with Mira's sharp criticism of his response to her sudden appearance in the kitchen yesterday echoing in his ears, he used that split second to draw his wand and throw not a Disarming Charm at the hapless stooge, but a Confundus, and flatten himself against one of the walls, out of the 'Minister''s direct line of sight.
The baffled idiot stepped forward, closing the door behind himself, blinking confusedly as he attempted to understand what he was seeing. "What the...?"
"Stupefy!" Harry hissed, his Stunner taking the man down the instant the door clicked shut. His momentum carried him forward, the thick carpet muffling the thump.
Cold panic washed over him, but after a frozen instant of indecision, he continued throwing papers on the pile. He'd drag Thicknesse into a corner, that should be far enough from the detonators they wouldn't kill him. He might get a bit scorched, but not worse than anyone who'd ever had Charms with Seamus. (Probably.)
He sacrificed the kitten plates for the sake of time — meaning, he didn't waste the time to pull them all down and throw them on the soon-to-be bonfire as well, someone would notice the 'Minister' was missing soon, he was sure — just dragged the man into a corner, pulled on the Cloak, set the detonators, and—
BOOM!
It took him by surprise, trying to work the Eye out of the door without opening it, too soon, and much larger than he'd expected, throwing him against the door hard enough to blow it off the bloody hinges.
FUCK!
Somehow, Harry wasn't on fire, but he was now lying in the middle of the stunned pamphlet-makers, half-covered by the Cloak, with the Eye — popped out of its "socket" by the impact — rolling across the floor, as kitten plates shattered in the background. (Good, creepy things...)
Clearly, the time for subtlety had passed.
"Accio Eye!" he shouted, scrambling to his feet and snatching it out of the air like a snitch, making a break for it in the ensuing chaos, pushing panicking Ministry employees out of the way, still...mostly covered by the Cloak, at least— He was pretty sure none of them had seen his borrowed face, but just in case, he ducked into the first empty office he found to make sure he was completely covered before creeping much more carefully back to the lifts.
It was...a little like watching a kicked anthill, trying to stay out of the way as the Hit Wizards scrambled to respond, alarms going off all over the place, lights flashing and sirens blaring.
The bloody lifts were locked when he got there, wouldn't bloody move, he'd had to find the bloody stairs, nearly been run over by a dozen more Hit Wizards storming up toward the source of the commotion as he was trying to slip down—
It wasn't until he finally found Ron — while he was actually looking for a quiet spot to take off the Cloak so he could just walk out as Runcorn, perfectly unsuspicious — that he realised he'd just blown up the Minister of Magic.
...FUCK!
(The giddy thought occurred that well, now he'd at least done something to earn his place as Undesirable Number One...)
Ron kept a look-out while Harry ducked into a toilet to take off the Cloak and try to make himself look like he hadn't just been in the middle of a bloody explosion. He'd been sort of shocked to see that he...didn't look like he'd been in an explosion. The cuffs of his trousers were a bit charred, but everything that had been covered by the Cloak looked perfectly fine, and the Cloak itself wasn't even scorched.
He shoved it in his pocket, deciding that this was not the time to question his good fortune.
Ron hadn't managed to fix Yaxley's office, but there probably wasn't anything to be done for it now. They'd agreed without really discussing it to just keep heading down, find the girls and get the hell out. It would've been suspicious, Harry thought, for Runcorn and Cattermole to obviously be moving together, but they managed to keep each other in sight as they continued down to Level Seven, where the stairs bloody well stopped for some God-unknown reason (probably just to make Harry's life more difficult), and then across the floor looking for another way down.
Harry lost Ron when they finally did find another staircase, a Hit Wizard stopping him and demanding to know what he was doing down here. Because the time for subtlety had long since passed, Harry, as soon as he realised that Ron had been stopped, turned and stunned the Hit Wizard in the back, dropping him like a stone.
"Blimey, Harry!"
Harry let out a low, unamused chuckle he felt suited Runcorn. "That's nothing. I think I might've put Thicknesse in hospital..."
"What?!"
"It was an accident! But I got the Eye, and Umbridge's office is toast— Come on, let's just find the girls and get out of here..."
Hermione found them before they found her, scuttling up the stairs from Level Ten. "Oh! Er."
"Yeah, it's us," Ron assured her.
"Oh, thank God. Come on, we only have a few minutes, we need to get back to the Atrium."
Harry hesitated. "What about Mira?"
"She's fine," Hermione assured him. "She stayed to talk to the dementors—"
"Talk to the dementors?!" Ron echoed.
Hermione nodded, completely seriously. "She convinced Yaxley she's a Death Eater auditing Umbridge, and Umbridge failed. Mira transfigured her into a cat and knocked her out, ordered the Hit Wizards to escort the muggleborns out — and they just...did it. And after she's done talking to the dementors, she said she was going to go promote someone to Umbridge's position, just— Let's just go, she'll be fine."
They almost made it.
If the Atrium hadn't been locked down, the fireplaces blocked off, they would have. But because Harry had had to go and blow up Umbridge's office, not to mention the bloody 'Minister', it was, and they were, and well before he could think of a way to convince the bloke who was apparently in charge to let them out, he felt the polyjuice begin to wear off, that horrible, flesh-melting sensation crawling over him.
"Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no!" Hermione muttered, clearly feeling it, too. "Harry! The Cloak, Harry!"
"We won't all fit!" Ron reminded her.
"No, Harry, put it on! You can't get caught!"
"But— You can't get caught, either!" Harry hissed back.
"No, she's right, Harry," Ron agreed. "Get away, then find some way to get us out. Go!"
Harry went, watching horrified from an out-of-the way spot near a wall as Ron and Hermione made a break for one of the fireplaces — trying to make it look, he thought, like they were alone and panicking (not that it took much acting) — and the Hit Wizards realised something was wrong, throwing Tripping Jinxes and Incarcerous at them to apprehend them. Hermione, he thought, hit her head when she fell, unable to catch herself with her arms already bound.
Harry was too far away to hear the conversation between the Hit Wizards as they levitated the others and started floating them back toward the stairs, but he really didn't need to to realise that the half dozen left behind, fanning out and casting Revealing Charms, must be looking for him. One of them conjured a paper aeroplane message, sent it zipping off toward the lifts — summoning the Aurors? Or the Death Eaters... Or...with Thicknesse having been recently blown up and Umbridge (ironically) transfigured into a cat, Harry didn't actually know who was in charge. He did know there was no Deputy Minister of Magic, but...
Whatever, it didn't matter. He could guess they were sending for someone to question Ron and Hermione, or to organise a larger search for him, or something. Nothing good, anyway.
He followed them all the way down to Level Ten, the same as the courtroom where he'd been interrogated once before, but rather than heading down the corridor to the courtrooms (he assumed there were at least ten of them, even if he'd only seen the one and couldn't imagine why they'd need more than one or two at most), one of the Hit Wizards unlocked the first heavy door on the left, casting a patronus and leading his fellows down this new corridor.
"Where're the dementors?" one of the younger Hit Wizards bringing up the rear muttered to another.
"Don't know, don't care, as long as they're nowhere near me..."
The Hit Wizard in the lead was apparently wondering the same thing. He didn't drop his patronus (presumably in case a dementor jumped out of nowhere at them), but when the corridor opened out into a larger guardroom, he asked the Hit Wizards on duty there the same question.
"Er... Half a dozen escorted the mudbloods to Madam Umbridge's hearings this morning with Johnson and Peters, Captain, and then the rest just...glided out around nine forty-five. I sent Caron after them to see what they were doing, and Masters up to the office to get reinforcements, but she never came back."
"There's been a situation," the man in charge explained. "On Level One. She probably got roped into one of the teams heading up there." The guard clearly wanted to ask what had happened, but the "Captain" didn't give him a chance, turning to the younger man nibbling at a chocolate bar behind a desk. "Caron?"
The young man shivered. "Creepiest damn thing I ever seen, Captain. They're just... They're in Courtroom Three. I don't know what happened to Director Yaxley and Her Pinkness—" The older guard frowned at the name — he had to mean Umbridge — but the Captain didn't even blink, and Harry found himself forced to stifle a snort of laughter. "—or Jeff and Ollie, for that matter, but there wasn't a single damn mudblood in sight, just this girl, sitting on— You know how Three's got that platform, with the little railing thing?"
"Yes, Caron, I'm familiar with Courtroom Three!" the Captain snapped.
"Yeah, well, she was sitting on the railing with her eyes closed, and all the fucking soulsuckers gathered 'round like they do, looming, and not one of 'em making a single peep, just breathing, and— Ugh! Gave me the actual, God's honest creeps, Sir. But since they're not trying to get out into the upper levels, I came back to report."
"Alright, we'll leave it for now. Caron, you and Baxter, and...Creighton, Loughly, go guard the stairs, make sure they stay down here — still dunno what the Pink Menace thinks she's doing, ordering those things here in the first place... Powers, run up and find Yaxley, he'll want to know about these two." He jerked his head at Ron and Hermione. "Merriweather, Flake, let's search them and get them into the cells..."
The Hit Wizards did as they were told, most of them heading back out the door through which they'd entered, including the older guard who didn't dare frown at his Captain for insulting Umbridge, though he sort of looked like he wanted to. The two still holding Ron and Hermione in the air, their feet inches above the floor, Hermione's head lolling slightly, stayed.
"Hermione needs a healer!" Ron insisted, even as the Captain patted him down. "Look at her, she's probably got a concussion or something!"
"She'll be fine," the Captain scoffed.
"And if she isn't, well. No great loss," the Hit Wizard holding her at wandpoint added with a cruel sneer. "She'll probably die in questioning, anyway."
The Captain silenced Ron's outraged objections. Harry had to literally bite his tongue to keep from giving himself away, his fingers tightening on the handle of his wand, positively itching to cast something a lot worse than a Stunning Spell at the Hit Wizards. If anyone he'd ever met counted as an enemy...
"Maybe if they gave her to you for interrogation, Merry," he drawled. "But it's my understanding the Dark Lord has people for that sort of thing. Yaxley will know who to contact."
Merriweather, who was now at the very top of the list of people Harry most wanted to murder at this exact moment, muttered something under his breath. His Captain didn't seem to catch it any more than Harry had, intent as he was on 'searching' Hermione's chest. Okay, strike that, that bastard was now at the top of the list! Ron's too, probably. He wriggled helplessly in mid-air trying to kick him, while Harry clenched his fists so hard he might actually be drawing blood from his left palm, trying to hold himself back.
And Flake, who sneered at his boss and said, "Ugly-arse mudbloods do it for you, Cooper?" bringing a near-immediate end to the 'search', might actually not be on the list at all.
"Fuck you, Flake."
"Sorry, mud-grubbers don't do it for me. Just check their fucking wands so we can lock them up before the dementors come back."
"Which one of us is the Captain, here?!" Cooper snapped, but he did take their wands and put them on the desk, opening another door that must lead to the cells. He left the key in the lock, distracted by a blond, snub-nosed man with robes that could give Snape a run for his money (black, fluttery, dramatic), sweeping in with a dozen more Hit Wizards and a couple of red-cloaked Aurors, demanding a report.
Harry pressed himself into a corner, the room suddenly far too crowded. Sure, he was invisible, but that wouldn't do him a damn bit of good if a Death Eater bloody well stepped on him.
Yaxley — this had to be Yaxley — must have agreed, since he ordered about half of his entourage back out into the corridor.
"Very well, very well," he said, cutting Cooper off impatiently. "Let's hear what they have to say for themselves."
He removed the silencing on Ron, who immediately said, "We're not going to tell you anything, Death Eater scum!"
Harry didn't recognise the spell Yaxley cast. It wasn't the Cruciatus, it was orange, but it still made Ron shriek in pain.
When he let up, Ron just hung there in the air, panting. Yaxley said, calmly, "You're going to tell me everything, boy, starting with why you're here today, because if you don't, some of these fine gentlemen—" He gestured at his goons. "—will be making a surprise visit to a certain ramshackle house where a certain lying little pissant is supposed to be lying in bed, far too ill to attend school this term. I'm sure you can imagine the consequences, legal and otherwise, for a blood-traitor bitch found to be lying about her son's whereabouts while he's off aiding and abetting a wanted fugitive..."
Threatening Missus Weasley?! Ron looked like he might be ill, going pale and trembling with rage and fear — Harry found his nails once again digging crescents into his left palm, his teeth grinding against each other in silent fury.
He didn't want to tell them anything, Harry could tell, but this was torture unlike anything he'd ever imagined. He — and Ron, too, he'd bet — had expected them to be violent and brutal, had been prepared to be subjected to all sorts of horrible punishments if they were caught, and had been determined not to give away the plan to kill Voldemort, but he didn't think Ron could withstand that sort of threat, and honestly, Harry wasn't sure he wanted him to. He didn't think he could live with being responsible for Missus Weasley being...
"Let's start with an easy one: who blew up Madam Umbridge's office this morning?"
"I– I don't know," Ron said, his voice shaking slightly.
The tip of Yaxley's wand glowed red. "The truth, Weasley. Was it you or Potter?"
"Harry," Ron admitted, glaring furiously at the Death Eater.
The wand-light glowed green. "Very good. And what was the purpose of the attack? What did you hope to gain? Was Umbridge or Thicknesse the target?"
"I don't know. We weren't here for— I didn't know Harry was planning on doing that."
"What were you here for?" Yaxley demanded, jumping on that slip of the tongue.
"We— Dumbledore told Harry before he died that there were– that there were certain...artefacts and if he could find them, they'd help him defeat You Know Who for good. We don't know exactly what they are," he added quickly, probably forestalling a question about exactly that. The light stayed green. "But we, um...received intelligence that one of them is here, in the Ministry somewhere."
All of that was technically true. Harry held his breath, hoping that the Death Eater would buy it.
"You don't think...?" one of the Aurors said, trailing off hesitantly as he turned to look at Yaxley.
"No, I don't. I'm sure he checked the Archives and the Collections before he went searching for whatever it is abroad. But it's possible Potter does," Yaxley said, a note of glee entering his tone. "Where is he, Weasley? Where is Potter? Is he in the Department of Mysteries?"
"I don't know," Ron lied, the light going red.
Yaxley hexed him, hundreds of tiny cuts opening across his face and hands.
Ron yelped. "I don't know, I swear! We came here together, but we got separated! He could be in the Department of Mysteries! But he could've just made a run for it! I haven't seen him since the polyjuice started wearing off!"
That was true. Ron, Harry decided, was bloody brilliant. Yaxley took the not-quite-lie and ran with it, throwing a leering grin at Ron. "There's a good lad. Cooper, throw these two in the cells. We'll deal with them later. Everyone else, head up to Level Nine, we're going through Mysteries with a fine-toothed comb. If we can catch Potter as well, the Dark Lord will surely reward us!"
"Should we tell...You Know Who?" the Auror asked.
For a second, Harry was terribly confused — didn't the Death Eaters all call You Know Who the Dark Lord? But then, "No," Yaxley said firmly. "Let her keep fucking around with the dementors and the muggleborn registration shite. We're going to take credit for this one! That goes for the rest of you, too! No one says anything about any of this until we have Potter in custody!" he added, a hard glare traversing the room. "Alright, let's go!"
They went. Every single one of them, even the two who'd been holding Ron and Hermione, leaving just Captain Gropes-a-lot, and Harry, invisible.
He gave the Death Eater and his cronies a head start, waiting until the Hit Wizard had put Ron in a cell and come back for Hermione, then grabbed Ron and Hermione's wands off the desk and followed him into the corridor with the actual cells. He knocked him out with a Bludgeoning Hex he felt was entirely deserved.
Hermione, not properly conscious, crumpled to the ground as she had when the first Hit Wizard holding her up had left with Yaxley. Harry winced, hurrying over to her, though there wasn't much he could do. He still didn't know much healing magic — Hermione had shown him how to mend a cut finger, he might be able to heal Ron's wounds, one at a time, but nothing about head trauma...
"C'mon, Hermione," he muttered, pulling her to stumbling feet.
"Harry?"
"Yeah, come on, can you stand?"
"Ooh... Maybe I'd better not..."
"Here, lean against the wall, then, while I find the bloody keys."
She sank down to sit as soon as he let her go, he and Ron were probably going to have to carry her when they figured out how the hell they were going to get out of here, he realised, digging through Cooper's pockets. There was only one key, apparently — Harry assumed it was enchanted, that these locks couldn't be opened by a simple Alohomora.
Ron was kneeling beside Hermione almost before Harry got his cell open. "Hermione? Hermione! Say something!"
"Ron?"
"Oh, thank God. Come on, get up, we have to get out of here! D'you have—"
Harry pressed his wand into his hand before he could finish the question. "That was bloody brilliant, Ron! Got any idea how to get out of here?"
He grimaced, wincing as he pulled at the cuts on his face, which probably didn't help. "No, not really. Best bet might be to lay low for an hour or two, until they lift the lockdown, you know? But Hermione really needs a healer, and I need to warn my mum..."
"Well, we can't take her to Saint Mungo's. Maybe the Tonkses'?" Harry suggested. "They did a pretty good job patching everyone up after...you know. But we'd still need to get out of here, first..." ...Unless they could find someone in here who would do a couple of healing charms on a known associate of Undesirable Number One. "Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to move you and Hermione to one of the courtrooms or like, a store-room or something, and I'm going to take the Cloak and find Mira, I bet she knows a healing charm, and then— Well, I don't know what then, but I'll feel a lot better sneaking around and trying to get out if Hermione's awake."
Ron nodded. "Sounds good. Here, help me get her up," he said, over Hermione muttering something that might have been, "Five more minutes..."
Mira, thankfully, was still in Courtroom Three when Harry reached it. Somewhat less thankfully, she was still surrounded by a dozen dementors, their aura making his breath fog as soon as he stepped inside, screams echoing in the distance no matter how he tried to ignore them — Not Harry! Please, not Harry!—
"Expecto Patronum!" Harry cast, a silver stag, almost blinding to Mimi's mage-sight, erupting from his wand to chase back the dementors' aura and shatter their collective concentration.
Honestly, Mimi didn't much mind. She'd already shared everything relevant. At this point, she was just sort of a bystander to their conversation, which was even harder to follow than house elf thoughts. She got the impression that the main reason they hadn't just forced their way into her mind while she was dealing with Dolly was that they had similar trouble interpreting human memory-structures. If they hadn't approached her carefully and gently, they could easily have wrecked her mind without learning what they absolutely needed to know. That and that they sort of seemed to recognise the DAPs, like they might be from the same plane, and yes, they were an existential threat to dementors, was about all she'd managed to pick up from them. (She might be an arrogant arse who tended to act like human limitations were more of a suggestion than a hard fact most of the time, but even Mimi wasn't stupid enough to try to legilimise a dementor.)
She was still open, rather than completely blocking them out, in case they had questions or something (and also because she wanted to at least get an impression of what they were planning to do, if she could), so she'd felt Harry enter, but she'd been too distracted running through the events of the past hour and change to assure him that she wasn't being attacked, and that he wouldn't be either, if he didn't provoke them.
They turned toward him in unison. Mimi's eyes shot open to glare a (slightly belated) warning at him. "Don't be a dick, Harry. They're not even trying to eat you or anything."
While a patronus might be repulsive to any number of dementors, enough to drive them off from a potential meal if he kept it close to protect himself, attacking them directly would draw the protective construct far enough away that at least a few would be able to get to him while it charged the others. It might be able to seriously injure one or two, force them out of the physical universe, even, but definitely not all twelve of them. And she was pretty sure if she asked them not to kill her idiot baby brother for attacking them, they'd flat out ignore her. They'd gotten what they wanted from her already, they had no reason to humour her.
"Yeah, and I'd like to keep it that way!" he snapped, which struck her as funny for some reason. "Look, can you take a break from your creepy little...whatever this is? Because Hermione has a concussion or something, and we're sort of trapped down here because there's this lockdown, and—"
"Yeah, well, that's what happens when you go around committing acts of terrorism, not sure how you didn't see that one coming..."
"Acts of terrorism?!"
"You blew up the office of the Senior Undersecretary making what looks a hell of a lot like a political statement and coincidentally seriously injuring, if not actually killing, the Minister of Magic," she reminded him. "What else would you call that?"
"An accident! It was an accident! I didn't know— That explosion was much bigger than I expected, and—"
"And now my muggleborns are all stuck in the Atrium while Johnson argues with Security and the Floo Office." He'd seen them, while he, Ron, and Hermione were trying to reach an exit, milling around confused and scared, though he hadn't really noticed them, confused and scared as he had been himself. "Great." She sighed. "I think we're done here, anyway." The dementors at least seemed inclined to leave, rather than continue their conference here. They parted to let her hop off the balustrade. "Which means you should either put out the light or move away from the door," she added pointedly.
"Er. Right." He stepped aside, taking his patronus with him, letting the dementors stream out. "Where are they— What were you—"
"They actually believe me about the impending demonic incursion, so I assume they're going to go tell all the other dementors in Britain. And then, if they do the same thing they did in my timeline, they'll just bugger off to another universe or something, because apparently things that can eat souls are scary."
"...Right," he said, as though that was ridiculous, and not a view shared by...practically all conscious beings.
She rolled her eyes, leading him out of the room. "They don't understand the concept of irony. It's tragic. Come on, I'll take care of Maïa and find a way to warn Arthur that he and Molly need to get into hiding before Yaxley realises Ronald and Hermione have escaped, but you three are on your own to get out. I have a recently-exploded office to reorganise, and it would be out of character for Death Eater Covert Internal Investigations Agent Calytrix to just order Ministry Security to abandon their protocol and lift the lockdown without apprehending you, or at least having completed a reasonably thorough search, and if they get suspicious of me, they'll probably ignore my orders to stop locking up muggleborns. Though I guess if the dementors do bugger off, that's still something..."
So, where did Harry fuck up? He took the legs off the decoy detonators (so the stored energy which would have been used to make them run around for a while first was added to the explosion) and rather ineptly attempted to link them all together so they would go off at once, fucking up the timer in the process. Also, Decoy Detonators pack a much bigger punch than he thought — generally speaking, they're not very nearby when they go off, so he severely underestimated how big a boom he was going to make.
Harry, at least, didn't really consider that Ron's parents might be used against them because he doesn't have any family. Ron almost certainly did know that that was a possibility.
I hope you all had a much better Monday than I did — this is going up late because I was at work for eleven and a half hours today.