Dial-Up Dementors

DISCLAIMER! This Harry Potter story was written for fun. All rights belong to the wonderful lady (JK Rowling) who gave the world Harry Potter to read and enjoy. Looking forward to the next movie! Yeah, fanfiction is a great place to stretch your imagination and enjoy someone else's creativity!

Chapter 10: Winter Term and Second Task

Hogwarts grew tense during the first week of the winter term. With the return of the students who visited with their families, the professors pretended that there was no potential conflict in the student body. At supper the third night, Draco Malfoy stood to leave the Great Hall when Susan Bones flew from her seat at the Hufflepuff table and confronted him before he reached the doors.

"You are not my brother! Andrew is dead! You are a monster – something created from his dead body by an evil wizard and an insane witch!" she shouted into his face. "Monster! Infirni! You are all these things at once!"

Tears fell from her eyes as Susan drew her wand and pointed it at the boy who stood still and awaited her judgement.

"Andrew was murdered that night! What pit of hell did you crawl from to pretend to be living?" she shouted as Professor Sprout finally reached her student and wrapped her arms around the girl. Still shouting, Susan repeated, "You're nothing! You're a homunculus pretending to be a person! You don't even have a soul!"

Professor Sinistra arrived to guide Draco from the Great Hall while Dumbledore and McGonagall remained in their seats at the head table. Sprout took Susan out after Sinistra vanished with Draco. Flitwick cleared his throat and said, "You must deal with this issue, headmaster."

"Nonsense, in a week or two, things will calm down and Miss Bones will begin to see that Mr Malfoy is indeed her long-lost brother."

Looking at McGonagall for support of the idea to address the issue, Flitwick found none. Andromeda Tonks however was more willing to deal with the issue and she opened communications with Director Bones. The terse letter she received back told her to mind her own business and diminished Andromeda's hopes. In conversations with Flitwick and Sinestra, Professor Tonks threw out the idea of going through Gringotts for help with resolving the issue of Draco Malfoy/Andrew Bones.

Hogwarts found two students in unbearable anguish and used Dobby Potter Elf to move things along. Draco attended his astronomy class on Thursday night and lingered at the back of the group of students as they hurried down the stairs to return to their warm dormitories. Positioned at the back of the group, Harry kept his wand handy to shield against any jinxes or spells cast in his direction by members of his own house in hiding along the dark passageway. Earlier in class, he'd kept the smirk on his face small when the professor remarked on how pleased she was with the quality of the essays that had been written by the students the previous week.

When Draco remained on the roof alone, Dobby appeared before Harry and pointed back to the rooftop. Without questioning his reliable house-elf, Harry hurried back and found Draco standing at the edge of the short wall raised to prevent anyone from falling to the rocks far below.

"Come to gloat, Potter?" Draco asked without any snobbish tone.

Harry replied, "No. I don't know what to say to you."

Draco nodded. "Join the club. I don't know who I am – what I am."

"There's nothing in the library about your situation," Harry said. "My friend, Hermione, and I looked, and Madam Pence sneered but helped us."

"Tell Miss Granger that I send my thanks for her efforts," Draco said. "I won't call anyone any pejorative ever again."

The white-haired teenager said, "I think about jumping every day or finding some way to escape and go to the werewolves. The newspaper article…my brother…the older boy was given to Greyback that night. Maybe I can find him, and he'll bite me."

"Draco, it's hard to endure all this crap," Harry said. "But you have to."

"No, I don't. I'm not a real person. My entire life is a lie," Draco replied. "I'm not a pureblood scion of a great and powerful magical family. Bones is right to question if I even have a soul. Andrew Bones had to die for some monster from hell to crawl up and inhabit the shell I inhabit today."

"No! No! You do have a soul! The same soul you were born with!" Harry said. "Come with me to the Come-And-Go room. We'll ask Hogwarts about books and parchments that talk about this."

"It's not worth your time," Draco said. "Some night I'll just jump."

There was a loud pop as Dobby, Flower, Oakleaf and Pinemeedle appeared with a dishevelled Narcissa Malfoy. The witch was thin, and her skin looked very shallow as if she'd not slept or eaten regularly for weeks, but the light appeared in her eyes when she saw her son. Harry noticed the witch was dressed and ready for travel in the middle of the night.

"Draco! My dragon!" she cried softly. "I need to hold my boy!"

Draco froze and stared. Very slowly she took one step forward while he remained frozen.

"Mother? Are you my mother? You killed me to make me into another boy!"

"I loved you the instant I held you in my arms! You were never hurt!"

"I'm not real. I'm a monster! You made me into a monster!" he declared. Then he asked, "Do I even have a soul?"

Narcissa took another step forward and Draco made one too when she replied, "Your smile…the light in your eyes when you laughed with me in the nursery! Yes, you have a beautiful soul! It is full of life and will be blessed all the years of your life."

By now mother and son had reached one another, and they fell into an embrace too tight to break for many minutes. Eventually, Mrs Malfoy looked up and caught Harry Potter's eye.

"Thank you for sending your elves. I couldn't breach the wards at Hogwarts until they led me through tonight. I have begged the headmaster for these many weeks to speak with my son."

Dobby popped back onto the astronomy tower with a shrunken trunk that held Draco's belongings. The normally excitable elf was sombre when he said, "Missy Cissy and her dragon go now. We's take to goblinses who gets you out of Magicals Britains tonight. Mr Dragon be's Malfoy heirs and moves vaults far, far away so no one wants to finds you."

"They'll come after us," Narcissa said. "Bones is a powerful witch."

"Missy Hoggiewarts gets you gone and gives Boneses reasons to not look. Go now," Dobby insisted as the other three elves appeared. Before another word could be said, Narcissa and Draco popped away.

Harry hurried down the stairs to his dormitory. The next morning, Susan Bones and Hannah Abbot were missing from the Hufflepuff table, and the story slowly spread around that sometime the previous evening, Draco Malfoy had thrown himself off the Astronomy Tower. The house-elves found his body early that morning and already buried him after a cursory autopsy by Auror Proudfoot who was the DADA professor in the winter term.

Harry asked Dobby about the incident once and his elf explained, "Missy Hoggiewarts can't get to Missy Cissy, but she knows Dobby knows wards at Malfoy rock pile. She sends Dobby and Mr Harry Potters's elves to get Missy Cissy and a couple trunks of stuffes. Missy Hogwarts sends letters to goblin for Hoggiewarts at banks and he makes all arrangingments to get witch and dragon into country far away."

The Daily Prophet reported the sudden, unexplained appearance of the comatose Lucius Malfoy in the casualty department at Saint Mungos Hospital in the middle of the night two days after the reported suicide of Draco Malfoy. Professor Tonks received a single letter from Gringotts that she never shared with anyone, not even her husband. The wards at Malfoy manor were dismantled by the goblins without any notice to the ministry and the goblins quickly sold the contents before demolishing the house. The stone of the walls and glass from the windows were sold to builders across muggle Britain. The wards around the land were dismantled and the property was sold to muggle farmers and developers.

CHANGE SCENE: Second Task

February was cold but without any excitement until two days before the second task. At luncheon, Harry noticed the headmaster suddenly rise from his seat at the head table with his wand in his hand. Drops of magic fell continuously from the tip of the wand, though perhaps not as frequently as in November. Dumbledore was staring at the door of the Great Hall that burst open to allow the visitors from Dramstrung and Beauxbatons to enter the chamber with Headmaster Karkaroff leading a handful of his students, and Madam Maxime leading Fleur Delacour and three other students.

Albus welcomed the visitors as though he'd been expecting their arrival. McGonagall fussed that she'd not been told and there weren't quarters prepared. Madame Maxime replied, "We brought our quarters again. Did you not feel our arrival through your wards, Dumblesdore?"

The headmaster appeared serene and unconcerned at that announcement, but Harry wondered if the drops of magic falling out of the headmaster's wand had begun to affect the headmaster's magic. Fleur and her classmates found seats for themselves at the Hufflepuff and Gryffindor tables while the Dramstrung students settled at Ravenclaw and Slytherin. Headmaster Karkaroff and Madame Maxime were provided with chairs at the ends of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, as far away from Dumbledore as possible in the Great Hall.

Harry looked concerned for a moment and Neville asked what his friend had noticed.

"Well, those chairs for Madame Maxime and Karkaroff, they look like the chairs in some of the oldest portraits in the castle. I think Hogwarts provided them with those seats."

Officials from the British Ministry for Magic appeared outside Hogwarts the next day to construct the seating for the Second Task. Officials from France and the other European countries also arrived to oversee and inspect the work. The few students who ventured out into the February weather witnessed several loud arguments between the British and European wizards. Two of the bleachers collapsed during construction so reporters and photographers were added to the mixture of shouting wizards. Finally, the head boy and head girl appeared and ordered the underage students to return to the castle.

Fleur spoke for a long time with Harry and Hermione that evening and handed over several documents to Hermione to forward to her parents. In all that time, Cedric Diggory never made the effort to greet his opposing champions.

The morning of the second task, The Daily Prophet ran a photo of Black Lake from the bleachers that had been constructed. The headline read 'How Is Interesting?'

Even though attendance at the task was mandatory, more than half of the Hogwarts students wandered and back to the castle before the champions began their swim. Apparently, each champion was to swim to the village of the mermen who lived at the bottom of the lake and retrieve the Medallion of Sovereignty for their nation that had been placed in the cold water. The time limit was one hour to return with the artefact and therefore win. Fleur had consulted with some French naval personnel and wore a wetsuit that would help protect her from the cold water and used the bubblehead charm. Victor Krum transfigured his upper body into a shark's and dived into the water, speeding through the water. Cedric Diggory used the bubblehead charm but wore regular swimming trunks from a century ago.

Once the three champions were in the lake, the spectators found they had to play word games or cards. For once, Ron Weasley's chess set was popular with his classmates. As the hour for the contest ended, Fleur and Victor returned, each bearing the large medallion from their governments. After another ten minutes, when Cedric had not returned, Amos Diggory demanded that Dumbledore find his son.

"How do you propose I do that, Amos?" asked Dumbledore as though the idea had never crossed his mind. Director Bones cursed the headmaster out loud and sent four Aurors into the lake with bubblehead charms to find the young wizard. They returned after another twenty minutes with the body of the Hogwarts champion. The wizard had become entangled in some kelp that wrapped around Cedric's arms and legs. The Aurors could not find the wizard's wand and that explained why he was unable to recast the bubblehead charm when the first one expired.

"If you'd been prepared properly, the Aurors could have found him in time!" shouted Amos holding the body of his son. The photographers and reporters intruded on the man's grief and were cursed severely before they retreated with photos for the next morning's Daily Prophet.

Hufflepuff threw itself into mourning for their dead champion and Professor Sprout fought with Headmaster Dumbledore to excuse almost the entire roster of students from Fifth-through-Seventh years to attend Cedric's funeral. Members of the Hufflepuff network arrived at Hogwarts to create port keys just outside the wards and transport the students to Ottery Saint Catchpole for the funeral. Again, The Daily Prophet intruded and published photographs from the service that should have remained private.

Then the Department of Mysteries sent a pair of Unspeakables to retrieve the British Medallion of Sovereignty from the Black Lake. Scanning the lake with their magics, they were unable to find any sign of the medallion! Sometime in the intervening days following the task and the funeral for Cedric Diggory, the medallion had vanished. The mermen claimed no knowledge of what happened. The medallion, a magical artefact that signified British sovereignty within the ICW, had been loaned to Chief Warlock Dumbledore by the Department of Mysteries for the task because the French and Bulgarian ministries had loaned their medallions for their champions to recover.

Madame Maxime and Fleur Delacour gave extensive interviews expressing shock and horror that once again the headmaster at Hogwarts was at the centre of controversy about losing an ancient artefact. Headmaster Karkaroff scoffed and explained, "The fools sent the real thing? We sent a reproduction – the medallion was created by Mother Magic herself to name our nation. And now the British have lost theirs. What do we call your nation now, Magical Feckless Wonders?"

Victor Krum never spoke about the missing medallion. When he arrived in the village of the mermen, he'd found both the British and French medallions were already gone. He took the one for Bulgaria and raced back to the shore. When Diggory never returned, Victor remained silent – the British champion might have gotten to the village before Victor and lost the medallion on his return swim in the same way he'd lost his wand. Or the French champion had taken the British medallion.

Krum never shared his suspicions with Karkaroff, but he did watch Madame Maxime closely for the rest of the day and decided the tall witch seemed very pleased with her champion's performance. Both of the small delegations remained to attend the funeral of Cedric Diggory and the headmaster and headmistress gave joint press conferences decrying the continued careless attitude of Albus Dumbledore (and his entire staff) toward the magical artefacts placed into their care.

"If they allow the Goblet of Fire and the Medallion of Sovereignty to the destroyed or lost without any concern, why do you give them your most precious magical things – your children – to care for?" Madame Maxime asked in her last interview after the sad funeral for Diggory. Shortly thereafter, the French pumpkin flew away once again and the tall ship from Dramstrung sank beneath the waves of the Black Lake. They would return in June for the Third Task.

CHANGE SCENE: Preparation for Third Task

The rest of February, and then March and April passed with students growing even more dependent on the Essay From A Friend. The professors from Hogwarts were thrilled with the Exceeds Expectations and Acceptables of their essays from their students.

In late May, Dumbledore remembered that Hagrid needed to plant and grow an impenetrable maze on the Quidditch Pitch. Because 'Hagrid' was two months late beginning the task, the groundskeeper would need the help of Professor Sprout and her seventh-year Herbology students to get the shrubs placed properly and grown to a height of ten feet in less than two months. After making a clumsy overture to the head of Hufflepuff, Dumbledore found himself spending several hours each day on the Quidditch Pitch overseeing the planting of the shrubs in the proper arrangement and casting spells to encourage the plants to grow.

While being interviewed by a reporter from the Daily Prophet who slipped into the school to discover the venue for the Third Task, Dumbledore turned the conversation into a lecture on the likely hood that on the night of this final task, the Dark Lord would return to terrorize Britain once again. The newspaper's headline the next day read, 'Dumbledore Plants Shrubs While Worried He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Plots to Return'.

Interlude 1

Barty Crouch, Jr. spent his days robbing muggles. It was simple to summon billfolds from men and purses from women. It took him several weeks to discover the little plastic cards were as valuable as the paper and coins in the wallets. He'd spent several days recovering from withdrawing from abusing Polyjuice and slept in a hotel room with a notice-me-not charm in a hotel in Birmingham. He figured out how to turn on the telly and after two days learned to change the channels and adjust the sound. He transfigured his robes into muggle fashions and left the messy hotel room with dirty towels and room-service dishes everywhere. Using a muggle train to move to Liverpool, he began his career as a pickpocket, creating interference on the security televisions, and learning to hide among the muggles.

There'd been no word from Pettigrew or the Dark Lord in the weeks since the First Task and the Dark Lord's instructions of 'Don't come to my hiding spot! Dumbledore has to be tracking your movements!' meant Barty was on his own until the Dark Lord's resurrection in June.

'How is he supposed to get Potter if I'm not at Hogwarts?' Barty wondered while he enjoyed lunch at a muggle restaurant using some muggle's credit card to pay. He liked the boot, pants, shirts and coats the muggles sold for cheap prices (especially when he paid with some muggle's credit cards).

Barty smirked and found he didn't care what happened to the Dark Lord. Muggle girls were pretty, and he'd found the first night he ventured into night club they pursued him without any use of spells or compulsions. The young women were enthusiastic and taught Barty several things he'd never experienced before.

Interlude 2

Amos Diggory and Amelia Bones mourned together with their hatred for Albus Dumbledore. The loss of the Medallion of Sovereignty in the second task gave them an excellent platform to return to again and again with Minister Fudge. The French remained touchy as a potion cauldron ready to explode, the general membership of the Wizengamot wanted Fudge's head (if they couldn't have Dumbledore's) to pay for the horror that was Severus Snape teaching at Hogwarts for thirteen years. In the weeks following the trial, Dumbledore had not called the whole of the Wizengamot together – Amelia called for a quorum each time she needed to try a court case but the general membership had not gathered since December.

Cornelius cursed Dumbledore daily, sometimes each hour. His undersecretary still mourned his dead son and the Director of the DMLE mourned the horrors of the lost family. The news that Lucius Malfoy – still comatose – had appeared in casualty at Saint Mungo's generated speculation that intensified when news leaked from Hogwarts about the suicide of Draco Malfoy. Amelia cursed Dumbledore but restrained herself from going to the castle. There was never any sign of Narcissa Malfoy anywhere.

On a whim, Cornelius went to Gringotts and demanded the contents of the Malfoy vaults be turned over to the Ministry. The ensuing kerfuffle between the Aurors guarding the minister and the goblin security team sent to deal with the situation made the front page of the Daily Prophet for two days. Three Aurors were admitted to Saint Mungos so they could each have an arm regrown. The fourth Auror in the minister's guard had to have a foot regrown, while Cornelius was admitted to have the bones regrown in his spine after being cursed as a 'spineless-something-or-other' in the goblin language.

Interlude 3

Remus Lupin was an extremely busy wizard – he met regularly with some goblin managers and with visitors from the ICW about his inventions. Without any pretence of subtlety, these wizards and witches encouraged the wizard to move to Switzerland. They argued that Magical Britain would never accept his breakthroughs in technology working with magic.

"Without doubt, one morning, Dumbledore will send fifty Aurors to arrest you and lock you away in Azkaban for daring to modernize his fiefdom," one wizard stated.

"I can't leave. My nephew – Harry Potter – depends on me. As long as I am here in Surry, he has a safe haven to hide in during the summers."

The next day, the ICW wizards began talking about bringing the teenager to Switzerland this summer where the ICW would arrange for the 'unofficial' uncle to get legal custody. Their interest in the teenager only grew when Remus revealed that Harry was the inventor of the magic mirror spell for scanning existing documents into this 'computer' thing that was going to revolutionize the magical world.

Interlude 4

Peter Pettigrew was a coward. He'd always been one but only admitted it to himself in the last six months after living in hell all that time. Fleeing from Ron Weasley at the end of the boy's third year at Hogwarts, he'd travelled in his rat form hiding in muggle lorries and trains from England to the south of Italy. Then in his rat-faced wizarding form, he'd apparated across to Albania. The magical forest there offered a safe location to hide for a few years until things calmed down and some Dementor caught and kissed Sirius Black – maybe Moony too. Then it would be safe for Peter to slip back into England and become someone's pet once again.

But fate put Peter in front of the Dark Lord while the evil so-and-so was possessing a monstrous snake that prevented Peter's transformation into his rat form and escaping. Assuming his death eater had come searching for him, Lord Voldemort immediately set out on a wild plan to return to England, regain a body and launch his reign of terror once again. Why stealing the corpse of a baby to possess appealed to the Dark Lord could only be attributed to the wizard's insanity. Worse, the snake accompanied them back, again using muggle lorries and trains. Over a dozen muggles died of snake bites though only six bodies were found – the snake at three of them and the other three were drained of blood to feed the homunculus form before the bodies were banished.

Then back in England, the Dark Lord searched about and found one of his most loyal Death Eaters under the imperious unforgivable. Working with the Dark Lord's magic, Peter was able to capture the father (Barty Crouch, Sr.) and free the son. Barty Jr. cast the spell that put his father under the imperious curse and kept it there.

Rather than work with Junior to perform a resurrection ceremony to return him to human appearance, the Dark Lord decided to look for a more complicated ritual that would allow him to recover his inhuman appearance that so terrified wizards and witches.

Questioning Barty Crouch, Sr. extensively, and learning about the Tri-Wizard Tournament, the dark lord became obsessed with a convoluted scheme that involved using Harry Potter's blood at the end of the next school year to use in a resurrection ceremony. Barty Crouch, Jr. was sent to Hogwarts to live in Polyjuice pants for ten months before arranging for the boy to be delivered to the Dark Lord.

The collapse of the Goblet of Fire at Halloween meant Potter could not be entered into the tournament. The trial of Severus Snape infuriated Lord Voldemort to hear his secrets revealed before the whole of the Wizengamot and the revelation of a mysterious imposter being in the DADA professor's office, meant that Barty disappeared. There was no word from Barty and the Dark Lord feared that meant his most-loyal follower had been captured and kept incognito by the DMLE or Unspeakables.

All this meant that Peter was forced to deal with the snake and a touchy baby-shaped Dark Lord, day in and day out. He'd begun stealing nappies from muggle stores as well as all the food needed to sustain the homunculus and himself. Then the Dark Lord required Peter to 'milk' the snake of her venom every ten days to make a formula to increase the magical core that struggled to stabilize.

'I could just apparate away,' Peter thought. 'Apparate away and hide as a rat again.'

But he was never brave enough to try and break whatever charm the Dark Lord had placed on him to care for the baby so carefully.

END OF CHAPTER