(A/N) Look, I don't even know. I got no excuses. I don't even know if the people who read this story still have accounts on this website. All I know is I hate that this story remains unfinished. So on we go. It might take years, but Harry and co will reach their journey's end.
On level two of the Ministry of Magic, a gentlemen pressed the button for the lift. After just a few seconds, the doors drew themselves open, and the man attempted to step in. Then he paused.
In the corner of the lift, all standing very close to one another, was Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron and Ginny Weasley. It was not uncommon to see these four together around the Ministry headquarters. It was uncommon, however, to see them standing in a strange sort of semi circle around one particular corner of the lift. Almost as if, crazy as it sounded, they were blocking anyone else from standing in that one particular corner of the lift.
This is why the man hovered, foot hanging over the threshold between the lift and level two of the Ministry, and why he gazed at the four of them with a curious expression.
"Hi," said Harry. Like the others, his cheeks were flushed and his hands were restless. But he smiled as if this were not the case and, after Harry cleared his throat quite loudly, the others did too.
So the man smiled back, just as strangely as the four people were smiling at him. He stepped into the lift, pressed the button for his desired floor, and then enjoyed the most awkwardly uncomfortable three minutes of his life. The lift rose silently, and Ron Weasley's foot tapped impatiently against the floor. The man gave a sidelong glance to them, and for a second thought he spotted something red and blotchy behind were all four were standing. But Ginny suddenly shifted herself along an inch or two and gave the man a tight lipped smile.
Mercifully, the lift reached his floor. The man got out, not knowing quite what that was all about, and the lift doors closed behind him.
Ron let out a loud sigh of relief.
"Thank god for that," he said. "Thought he'd never leave. Do you think he noticed anything?"
"He might've caught a glimpse," Ginny replied, "but I moved in front of it quickly. I don't think it quite fits over him."
Harry gave her an offended glance. "It used to fit across me, Ron and Hermione well enough."
Hermione, meanwhile, run a nervous hand through her hair and turned around to face the corner they were all blocking off.
"Sneaking around with invisibility cloaks," she said. "God, it's like I'm fourteen again."
She adjusted the cloak so that it was perfectly covering all of the unconscious Zygon's body, and waited for the lift to reach the Auror floor.
Once there, managed to make it all the way to the meeting room they'd met in earlier, without anyone noticing that they were heaving an invisible load along with them. As soon as the door to the room closed, they all let go and allowed the body to drop to the floor with a thump.
"I don't know what a Zygon is," Ginny moaned, flexing her sore and throbbing fingers, "but I know it's heavy as hell."
Ron, who was bent double from the strain of all that lifting, turned his head to look at his best friend.
"Harry," he said. "What if you were right? What if it's an alien?"
Harry looked at Ron, blankly. The answer to that question was not within his reach. Fortunately, Hermione saved him.
"Never mind that," she said. "What do we do about Kingsley? The Minister for Magic has been abducted. It's all very well hiding this… thing under an invisibility cloak to avoid questions. But someone is going to notice that Kingsley is missing sooner or later."
"So we get him back before then," Harry answered confidently, remembering how he was supposed to be the Auror in the room. "We need to track Kingsley's movements over the last few days, try and pin point when the switch took place."
"And we're doing this all without telling the other Aurors?" Ron asked.
"We have to," said Hermione.
"This isn't Hogwarts, you know," Harry told her, careful to keep his tone light. "We don't have to hide our crazy schemes from the teachers anymore."
Hermione looked at him, and for a brief second her eyes seemed to flash with intense displeasure.
"Ignoring the fact that we're really all getting a bit too old to still be having crazy schemes," she said, "how exactly can we explain this? Ron's right. This thing might actually be an alien. If we go around shouting that, people will cart us off to St Mungo's."
While they debated, Ginny's keen sense of hearing picked up on raised voices and increased movement from outside the room they were in. She moved towards the door, and carefully creaked it open to have a look.
"Okay," Harry said. "Fine. We do this on our own. But you said it yourself, people will start asking questions before long, we need to find Kingsley and we need to do it now."
"Good," said Ginny, drawing the attention of the other three. "Because he's sitting five feet away from us."
She pushed the door fully open, revealing most of the Aurors on the floor huddled around a very frazzled-looking Kingsley Shacklebolt.
"Don't know what happened," Kingsley was telling the Aurors as they helped him into the nearest chair. "I was having breakfast yesterday morning and then it all goes fuzzy really. I woke up in some sort of cave, and there's explosions going off all around me, and a muggle man was telling me to run… so I did. Next thing I remember is walking into the Ministry Atrium."
Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny all stared at Kingsley. Then they looked to the floor of the meeting room, where a Zygon foot could be seen sticking out from underneath the invisibility cloak. And then they looked back at Kingsley.
Ginny closed the door (missing Kingsley describe the muggle to the Aurors as "wearing a scarf. A really, really long scarf").
"Well," said Ron. "That's a plot twist."
While he and the two girls stood in stupour, Harry began pacing the room and running his hands through his hair in acute anger.
"No," he said, starting out as a mutter until he was near yelling. "No! Something is going on. Some sort of game is being played, and all the players seem to be at least five steps ahead of us. That ends now!"
"We should wake it up," said Ginny, coming to stand over the Zygon. "Interrogate it."
"He didn't look like the type open to negotiations," Hermione countered. "Maybe he's better off asleep."
"I also vote we don't wake up the scary alien," said Ron with a raised hand.
And much like they tended to do all those years ago, everyone ended up looking at Harry. Once, he may have hesitated under their gaze. But there had been too many trials, too many tests of his mettle for reactions like that. He focused. Remembered his training.
"We don't know anything," he said. "So we start over. Go back to the beginning until we find a lead. The lights started all of this, but I looked into them the next morning, didn't find anything. Then there was the Doctor and Gringotts. We've already chased that up, it was dead end. The next thing, the next weird occurrence in this magnificent parade of weird occurrences… is sitting in our interrogation room."
The Aurors on the floor were preoccupied with tending to the Minister. Nobody really noticed all four of them striding purposefully across the room and throwing open the heavy iron door to the Window Chamber.
Yip the Yelper, shackled to his chair and gazing glumly at the floating image of Azkaban in front of him, looked up in confusion when he saw who his guests were.
"Ruddy hell," he said. "If Rita Skeeter were here she'd probably faint. Heroes of Hogwarts, all four of you. It's like that Muggle band getting back together, what do they call them, the Crawlies?"
"The Beatles," said Harry, coming to sit across from Yip while the others hung back. "Should give them a go. I'll send you a copy of the white album while you're in Azkaban, it'll change your life."
"Can't wait," Yip deadpanned.
"Who hired you to break into Hogwarts and why?"
Yip stared at Harry in disbelief.
"Isn't there some sort of etiquette to questioning a dark wizard? Don't you sort of build up to the big questions? Play mind games? Good Auror, Bad Auror, that sort of thing?"
"No time for that," Harry shrugged. "Who hired you?"
Yip rolled his eyes and relaxed into his chair.
"You're an embarrassment to Aurors everywhere Potter. I'm not telling you anything."
Ginny groaned from by the door, and approached the desk to glare at Yip.
"For heaven's sake, just tell us. We really have bigger fish to fry today."
"Thanks for the compliment," said Yip. "That makes me feel so special. Seriously, you people are awful at this."
"This is bigger than you , Mr Yip" said Hermione, seemingly trying to stern teacher approach. "The are things at work here you're not aware of."
"Save it," said Harry suddenly. "He doesn't know."
Everyone frowned at that, even Yip.
"He doesn't know who hired him?" asked Ron sceptically.
"Nope," said Harry. He looked at Yip closely, and then he chuckled. "He knows about the same as us."
Yip looked between the other three with a scandalised expression.
"I've outrun you for over a year now," he reminded Harry. "Ducked you at every opportunity. You have continually and consistently proven yourself to be stupider than me. What makes you think I'm so stupid now?"
"That," said Harry, and he nodded to the floating image of Azkaban.
Yip's eyes flicked towards it too, and the confidence bled from them.
"The rumours are true, you know." said Harry. "It's gotten way worse since the Dementors left. The guards know people think it would be the opposite, and that makes them very insecure. They're so eager to prove themselves. It's hell. And you, Yip, you're a scoundrel. Through and through. You'd toss anyone to the wolves to save your own skin, you've already proven that with Duggy. If you had any chance of not going to Azkaban, any co-conspirator you could offer us for some silver pieces, you'd have done it straight away. But the truth is: you're a pawn, Yip. You're a tiny little piece in somebody else's game."
Yip didn't deny it. His eyes switched between Harry's and that horrible image of his future home.
"This is a dead end," Harry said to the others.
He got up and the four of them were just about to open the door, when Yip stopped them.
"Wait," he called out.
They all stopped, and turned back to him expectantly. Yip took a last look Azkaban, and swallowed his pride.
"I don't have names," he said quietly. "I don't have faces to describe. But I can tell you the story. The whole story. You might be able to piece something together from it."
Harry took his hand off the door handle, strolled back towards the desk, and sat down in the chair with a genuine smile.
"Yip, my old mate, that is the best sentence I've heard all day."
"I have a system, everyone who wants to offer me work follows it. There's a list of phrases, codewords if you like, so no one eavesdropping gets wise to what we're talking about."
"What sort of phrases?" Harry asked.
Yip scowled. "I'm not going to give up my whole operation here, Potter. That's not the point anyway. The point is, a month or so back, I was drinking alone in the Pixie Wing's Pub. And I heard someone drop one of my codewords."
"You were approached?" Hermione asked.
Yip shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "No."
The others in the room shared a confused glance, and Ron attempted clarify. "But you said somebody spoke to you?"
"They did," said Yip, looking at particular spot on the table in front of him and not shifting his gaze. "But I turned to look, and there was no one there. There was no one anywhere near me. Then the voice spoke again."
"The voice with no body?" said Ginny.
"You're an Occlumens," Harry cut in. "Everyone knows that. It's in your file. Highly skilled Legilimens have tried to get in your head and failed."
"This wasn't Legilimency," said Yip, looking up at Harry with a sense of fear at the words he himself was speaking. "This was someone… talking in my head. Like the way you'd talk to yourself, but it wasn't my voice. And then they said they had a job for me?"
"Who were they?" said Harry.
"I don't know," said Yip, and when Harry seemed to roll his eyes, he sat up straighter. "I mean it! They never told me any more than I needed to know. That stuff at the Quidditch League Cup, and Prague? They were auditions. They wanted to be sure I was as good as I said. Only after that did they start asking if I thought I'd be able to get into Hogwarts."
"And they never told you what for?" said Harry sceptically.
"No, but to be honest…" Yip hesitated. He looked away from the other four people gazing intently at him, and took a heavy breath. "Towards the end, I started getting a bit spooked."
"You?" said Ron. "Yip the Yelper?"
Yip glowered again. "They wanted in. They wanted in there badly. They made it very clear, they had no issues with how I got into the castle or how I got out, as long as I did it. It was me that made them wait until the end of term, when the whole place is empty for the summer. They didn't care about the kids one way or another. That's what spooked me."
A small smile came across Harry's face.
"Yeopold Twosons. A thief and a killer, but not a monster."
"Something like that," said Yip, looking more uncomfortable than ever. And so he quickly moved on. "Look, I don't know who they were, where you can find them, or even what exactly they wanted me to steal… but not everybody has such a high code of ethics like me. You might want to close this case before they find themselves another escape artist."
Yip settled back into his chair, his story complete. Harry nodded satisfactorily, and turned to the others.
"Anyone fancy a trip to Hogsmeade?"
