Note: The first chapter has been revised

Chapter 2

They kidnapped him. Harry, on the shores of Azkaban yet again, still found it hard to believe.

The dementors—the three around him specifically—had actually kidnapped him from his own home. (Which brought up a whole different problem, because How did they keep getting in? His wards were dementor-proof, he had checked them over and over again, Hermione had checked them, even Bill Weasley, the professional curse breaker, had checked them; no one could find the hole in his security.)

He wished they would stop changing their behavior; after the first one had taught him to perform their Kiss, they started coming every few days, one or two at a time, to give him souls. If, Heaven forbid, Harry was with friends when a dementor came to visit, he always took it out of the room so they didn't have to watch. It was the best way of limiting their exposure to the creatures.

They didn't insist on witnessing him use the Dementor's Kiss, but the Unspeakables did. Unspeakables Navy and Teal, the two apparently assigned to studying him, took copious notes from their observations and tests.

Harry only allowed them to watch on three occasions because, on the third, Teal asked if he thought it was possible for Harry to Kiss a fellow witch or wizard.

He kicked them out after that—"Unless you want to find out personally, you won't ask me that again!"—and refused to see them after that day.

All difficulties aside, he thought he'd reached a stable relationship with the dementors at that point. Unhappy as he was about Kissing them to send whoever they'd eaten through the Resurrection Stone (he sincerely hoped these people were going on their next adventure and not just fading into nothing), they weren't dogging him every minute like they had been in Azkaban and he was glad for that.

Of course it didn't last, which is how he came to be flying without a broomstick in the middle of the night. The dementors carried their shivering wizard the whole way back, and even when they landed, one kept hold of him.

Now that only one was latched on to him, though, he was debating the chances of success for twisting his arm free and apparating away. It, like all dementors, had nigh-inescapable strength, so his chances were fairly low and he didn't want to side-along apparate a dementor.

On second thought, he really didn't want to side-along a dementor. Because, Merlin, if just touching them was bad, what would being shoved through a straw and pressed bodily against one be like? He might be getting used to them touching him (unfortunately), but apparition was an entirely different level of stop thinking about it.

Admittedly, he was trying to distract himself from why the dementors could have possibly brought him here. What, beyond Kissing him, could they possibly want him for? Did they want him to stay in Azkaban for easy access, or for something worse?

And was the dementor holding him familiar or was he just imagining that?

The fact that Harry was considering apparating (along side all the other things he was trying not to think about) struck him as odd because he knew that Azkaban, just like Hogwarts, was a non-apparation zone. He knew it for certain because, for one thing, allowing apparation into a prison would be a colossal security risk, and for two, any experienced apparator could sense anti-apparation wards. Harry, like many adult magic users, subconsciously knew whether or not they could apparate out of an area. So he shouldn't even be thinking about apparating away from Azkaban, yet he was.

While he ignored the dementors leading him forward, he decided to check the apparation ward that should span the island and the ocean for a generous distance around it. The ward was perfectly intact. Except for the hole that opened when the trace of his magic touched it.

That was... That was what wards did when they recognized the magical fingerprint of someone authorized to access, alter, or move through them. His home wards did that, Hermione's wards did that, all the Weasley family's wards did that; the wards of most of his friends (those he visited) did that. Everything he was keyed to did that for him to some extent.

Azkaban's wards should not.

Only a few people had such access to Azkaban: the head guard, a select few from Magical Law Enforcement, and people in the Department of Mysteries. As far as he knew or could guess, what they were authorized to do was limited. Azkaban's ward system was old and and some aspects of it were immutable. He assumed the apparation forbiddance was part of that. It would have made sense in a way that even the illogical wizarding world had to recognize.

Yet, he...

Not content with Harry's inattentive meander, the dementor dragging him forward pulled him into a faster walk up the path to Azkaban's only entrance.

The guarded entrance. With guards who recognized him and stared—faces unnaturally pale in the light of the large lanky dog patronus—at him and his escort. The patronus lifted its head to watch them, ears perked in alert, but did not approach. The taller of the two guards, a man with curly brown hair, called out as his group got closer. "Mister Potter! Are you all right? Do you need any help?"

"Yeah, I think I'm fine." He was being dragged past their station and into the looming prison. "Send word to Hermione Granger that the dementors have taken me, would you?"

"That's all? Are you sure?" The brown-haired Auror guard took a step towards him, wand half raised. The other guard, a bald man with a moustache that Harry was fairly sure was named Tim Meadows, started writing immediately.

He shouted back reassurances as the relentless dementors dragged him into the prison fortress proper and out of their sight. There were more Aurors inside, of course, and all shocked by his unexpected return if not his company, but there was just as little time to converse with them as there has been with the first two.

Their destination was deeper in the island, down through the lower levels of the fortress to areas where only dementors could be found. Harry's compliment of dementors increased as they descended into the darkness, he could sense their numbers grow even though he could not see them.

His own dementor magic rose within him unbidden, cloaking him like a second skin and making him feel disturbingly inhuman. The loss of feeling in his feet from the penetrating cold didn't help, but the worst part was the reaction from the Resurrection Stone.

It began as a little icy vacuum, like it always did when he took a soul, but it grew the further the dementors took him.

They stopped in a large room full of the dark creatures. Not even the gnawing glacial void the Resurrection Stone had become was capable of holding his attention when he saw the short pedestal glowing faintly in the center of a ring of dementors. It was a pale blue when he floated in, but that shifted as he was drawn towards it: to lavender and then rose, never staying the same color for more than a moment.

Whatever the pedestal was, the Resurrection Stone wanted it. Reason enough to stop as soon as the dementor gripping his arm released him at the inner edge of the circle.

Well, that and the dementor next to the pedestal.

It was smaller than the others, with a cloak so black it seemed to gnaw away at the light around it. There was no hint of a head inside the hood, nor were there hands extending from the ends of the sleeves. Compared to the others, it also seemed denser, heavier to his senses.

And...

Hollow?

All the dementors felt slightly hollow, particularly after they came to him to be Kissed, but they were like shallow holes in the ground compared to a bottomless pit.

Then again, the strange dementor may just seem that way while it floated next to the glowing (orange shifting halfway to red, then back to a lighter orange) pedestal. The pedestal felt as full as the dementor felt empty, and with the Resurrection Stone almost demanding he go closer to it, it wasn't difficult to guess what the stone was full of.

But how were it and the oddball soul-sucker connected?

Moving only slightly closer, Harry stared carefully at the glowing soul stone to fix as many of its details in memory as he could. Carvings lined every edge like the bars of a cage and covered the floor for over two meters around it. Only the one dementor was within the circle, and it turned to follow his progress as he glided around it, careful not to cross the outer boundary.

Time felt slow as he circled the carvings multiple times, trying to see everything closely at least once.

He didn't know how many times he went around, but he knew exactly when he stopped because it was the moment he crossed the line and the dementor touched him. The pull between the pedestal and the stone had sent him spiraling gradually inward.

Black mist seeped from the sleeves of the cloak, closing around the hand that crossed the edge of the circle. Harry resisted it pulling him forward, but that didn't stop the mist crawling up his arm like creeping vines to spread across his chest and back. They thinned and halted at the level of his hip and partway down his other arm, but twisted eagerly around his neck. He pulled his mixed magic up to fill his firmly-shut mouth a heartbeat before one steady tendril moved up over his chin and to his lower lip. It pressed down weakly, stopped to gather itself, pressed again slightly harder, stopped again, and did nothing further.

Harry waited, immobile, but still nothing happened. Unsure about how to get away from the dementor that tied him up in itself before trying to get through his mouth and down to his soul, his eyes drifted down to his encased hand. Breaking the magic's point of contact always worked with a normal Dementor's Kiss, so he sent power down through his arm and into his hand.

The semi-solid essence shifted on his arm, tightening, aware of what he was doing.

Could he break free of this wraith if he distracted it?

Lips twitched, and he sucked in a tiny knot. It spun in his mouth, coiling and uncoiling, and was refused from going further towards his core or the black hole just below it. The dementor sighed, which sent a tingling wave up from his hand and everywhere it touched his skin. More darkness gathered in a pool below it and activated the chains of runes going to the pedestal.

The soul light leaking from the stone brightened as the runes became tiny fragments of blurry unlight matching the dementor above them. Together they pulled on him, yearning to connect. The Resurrection Stone matched them from within, breaking his control over the magic in his mouth.

The dark little coil in his mouth dove deeper immediately, taking its opportunity to wind down to his soul and to the Resurrection Stone. The pedestal flashed, sending pulses of light over the runes and through the dementor. Harry sent as much power as he could muster down his captured arm and made it explode around his fingers and scythe through the black mist, shredding it to pieces.

Free, he jerked back violently, out of and away from the circle. Everything inside it shuddered before calming down and returning to an inactive state.

Half a dozen bits of multicolored light had reached Harry before he escaped and now decorated his lower arm. One, on the tips of his fingers, looked worse for wear and started falling apart before his eyes. He gathered the little thing in his hand before it could fade away.

Harry clutched his soul speckled arm to his chest. They were so warm...

But the dementor magic holding them in place was already dissipating, as it always did once separated from the dementor.

So the souls wouldn't be lost forever (for a given definition of 'lost,' said a tiny part of his mind), he brought his hand to his mouth and licked them up one by one into his own magic to guide them to the Resurrection Stone. He felt an urge to continue licking the black off his hand but, after staring hard at the appendage, lowered it to his side instead.

The Resurrection Stone's pull was nowhere near alleviated with the pedestal still crammed with them, but he wasn't going near the stone again without researching all the carvings and planning a way to handle the dementor connected to it.

For now, he was tired of this strange place and wanted to leave. The nearest dementors shuffled among each other as he approached. "Take me to the entrance," he demanded, tone quiet but firm. They fidgeted, uncomprehending, and he had to shove his way among them and towards the particularly dark and empty section of wall that was the room's entrance before they got the idea of what he wanted.

When he reached the surface, the few dementors that had followed him the whole way finally departed, retreating to the lightless lower floors. Alone and back in familiar territory, he walked—and one didn't realized how much a person could miss having feet until they couldn't feel them for an extended period of time—to the entrance, hoping to find a guard or two on the way.

He found them all clustered in the barracks. The first to see him at the edge of his vision flicked a waiting patronus at him before getting more than a glimpse of who was there. The large bird glided through him harmlessly, but the traces of dementor mist left on his skin burned away with a sharp sting.

"I'm still not a dementor," Harry quipped, trying not to sound as exhausted as he was. The patronus, an eagle he saw this time, flew back into the room over his head.

They responded with surprised and joyous shouts—"You're back!" "You're okay!" "Mr. Potter!"—and ushered him in. Scant minutes later, he was wrapped in a spare guard's cloak and had a heavy mug of hot chocolate in his hands, Azkaban's one necessary luxury.

From them, Harry learned he'd gone missing in the bowels of the old fortress for several hours. His disappearance beyond the levels wizard-kind feared to tread had been before dawn. When he failed to reappear within an hour, frantic hours of unsuccessful effort to locate him followed.

The underground levels were a hive of dementors; a full team of patroni casters was necessary to venture beyond the first sub-floor. Reinforcements were called in to form such a team at noon, but there was no sign of him anywhere on the lower floors. Equally noteworthy and alarming was the minimal number of dementors they encountered, something that made their search easier but elevated the situation from a 'This is bad but he's had a strange connection to the dementors for weeks now' type of concern to a 'Oh no, Harry Potter and a whole bunch of dementors are all missing' crisis.

As soon as the search team reported back, Azkaban was placed under lockdown.

Now it was evening and Harry was back, alive and without any dementors.

"All the dementors followed me down to the bottom of Azkaban," he said lightly, and with a degree of indifference and confusion. "Are you sure it only goes for four floors, though? It seemed a lot deeper than that." At a loss to explain a descent that occurred entirely in the dark, Harry stopped talking to take a draught of chocolate. It was heavy on his tongue, but warm and sweet, and it made him feel so much more human...

The Aurors were asking him questions. Well, mostly just the steely-haired one sitting right in front of him. The head guard? Maybe. He had the 'never laughed in his life' tone of one.

Unamused tones aside, all the voices were starting to go blurry in his ears...

"Harry!"

Hermione's shrill voice jolted him awake. He jumped out of his chair automatically, reflexively trying to draw a wand he didn't have. Upright far too suddenly, he lost his balance and toppled forward into his friend.

She nearly fell herself but held up under his weight. Apologies for startling him so badly rained from her lips as she got the yawning wizard back to his chair.

"S'okay, Hermione, don' worry about it." He rubbed at his eyes and face with both hands, trying to wake himself more normally while his racing heart slowed to normal. "Bloody dementors brought me here in the middle of the night, can you believe it?" He combed his fingers through his hair and grimaced; he needed to bathe. "And there's a super dementor in the basement!" Concern that Hermione hadn't started talking yet pulled his eyes up to her face.

"A super dementor?" Her eyes flicked from his hands to his face and back.

"Yeah," he looked down, following her attention, "did you know—" The words froze in his mouth. His hands were different colors. "What...?" The right one was normal but the left one was an ashy gray, not at all the color it should be. Pushing up his sleeve revealed broad strokes going all the way up his arm, further than he could see without disrobing.

She took his hand and felt around it and his forearm gently. When a few mumbled spells did nothing, she dropped it. "Tell me what happened."

After a deep breath, Harry began. "Three dementors came for me in the middle of the night. After they carried me all the way here, they took me down through the lower floors..." He recounted events quickly, to both Hermione and the nearby Aurors whose guardroom he'd dropped off in.

He did not detail exactly what the odd dementor had done to him. He also held back about the pillar of souls, since his ability to use the Dementor's Kiss was far more secret than his immunity to it. Hermione knew, of course, as did the Unspeakables and a few other friends of his, but no one beyond that group was aware and he wanted to keep it that way.

"Nothing else really happened after that. I wandered back up here and here I am." Hermione's expression told him they would be discussing everything he left out later. "Is there any more hot chocolate left?"

Much to his delight, there was.

Harry wasn't normally one to stand in front of his mirror bare-chested, but the gray lines scattered across his skin—the ones that perfectly mirrored the paths that dementor's magic had taken on their way to his mouth to get to the soul inside him—provided plenty of reason. The stripe up the front of his neck and over his chin and lower lip disturbed him the most. Hermione wasn't sure whether the marks would fade, but he sincerely hoped they did.

Had the stain been caused by the magic itself, or by the patronus that flew through him and burned it away? So much speculation, so little certainty.

"And you say these marks aren't the most important part?" the witch asked from behind him, where she was checking the spread of gray across his back.

"You have to see it. The dementors' stone, it was full of souls and surrounded by runes. Did you bring the pensieve? I looked all over the thing so I could show my memory of it to you."

Hermione huffed. "Of course I brought it! I was going to bring it anyway; I've never heard about a stone holding souls before. The runes you saw should tell me about its purpose, maybe even explain the dementors' connection to it. I wonder how old it is? Anyway..." She stepped away from him and flicked her wand. The discarded shirt he was reaching for disappeared from its place and reappeared on him, covering all the marks except those on his arm and neck. "Did you extract the memory already?"

"No, I was waiting for you to arrive. Let's go to the kitchen, we can set up the pensieve on the table."

Harry rubbed at his arm as they left his bathroom. His discolored skin didn't feel any different from normal skin, and if he closed his eyes, he would have no idea where the light tan gave way to gray. But the memory caused phantom sensations to shoot up his arm when he looked, as if the dementor had hold of him again.

A deep breath released the tension that was building up, and he relaxed his gray hand as he sat down at the kitchen table. Hermione plopped the beaded bag down and fished her arm around for a few seconds before pulling it back out, pensieve in her grasp. It was a small pensieve, approximately two thirds the size of Dumbledore's, and still highly polished with newness. The witch had made it herself while pursuing a runes mastery, out of common white quartz and enchanter's silver. In the year since its completion, there had been little reason to use it beyond testing it.

It worked perfectly, of course.

"Here it is." She placed it carefully between them and pushed her bag to the side. "Are you ready, Harry?"

"Yeah." He touched his wand-tip to his forehead, on the opposite side of his old scar, and focused all his attention on the memory, from when he entered the deep room to when he left it. It took nearly a minute for his magic to catch onto the memory—he hadn't done this very often and was still slow to pull memories—and he dragged it carefully free, pulling only on its visual and auditory aspects.

Bringing more of a memory forth, such as the other physical sensations and even magical ones, was possible but rarely done, and Harry didn't want to inflict even the memory presence of so many dementors on his long-time friend, let alone make her feel what that dementor had done to him. Watching again would be quite enough.

The silvery memory wisp was dropped into the pensieve. Shapeless, it spread out in the shallow bowl. "This is what happened. On three?" Hermione nodded and stretched her hand over the surface. Harry's hand joined hers, not quite touching. "One. Two. Three!" Their hands dropped simultaneously, fingers dipping into the memory, and the pensieve pulled them in.

Harry found himself at the inner edge of the circle of dementors, between his memory-self and Hermione. The two of them were both staring at the soul stone, which Harry had looked at plenty the first time, so he approached the central dementor to get a better look at it while they were safely separated by time and space.

He still couldn't see anything inside its hood, unlike all the other dementors which still had heads, albeit difficult to see and vaguely formed ones. In fact, it looked not unlike a lethifold—a creature he had fortunately never seen outside the pages of books—twisted into the shape of a cloak.

A sharp inhalation spun him around. Hermione wasn't looking at the pedestal in the center of the room anymore, she was looking at him. Why was obvious.

Memory Harry looked... He looked dead, for lack of a better term. His skin had lost all its color and the trailing black fog of the dementors hung about him, fainter than around a dementor but undeniably there. It pooled around his feet and lower legs, lingering there most heavily and partially obscuring them.

Hold on. Was he actually floating there?

"It's so much more pronounced," Hermione whispered to herself, fascinated and afraid.

What.

Harry didn't know if he voiced his confusion, but Hermione responded as if he had. Or perhaps she was just talking out her observations. "You look a little like this when you use the Dementor's Kiss, but the change isn't so, so extreme... How did you feel just then?"

His memory-self, still for so long, started approaching the pedestal.

"I felt... It was a kind of cold. Not the opposite of warm, but as if warmth did not exist and wasn't even possible. And the Resurrection Stone," Harry brought a hand to his abdomen, "it was pulling, trying hard to get the trapped souls." He watched his own memory as he remembered it, amplifying his unease with his next words. "I felt like a dementor."

The sharp look she sent him had him wishing he'd held that last bit back, but he couldn't deny it. Dementors probably didn't feel exactly the same, but the eternal cold, and the pull they exerted on the positive emotions and souls they tried to take from humans... Both strongly paralleled his experience.

"I know you aren't a dementor, Harry." She tried to reassure him. "And even if you felt very much like one, remember, it was temporary. Besides, look around you. I can't count all the dementors in the room, but you still retained your sense of self. Some physical changes don't mean you aren't you."

"Yeah..."

She could hear that Harry wasn't completely convinced. "Listen. It's the magic the dementors have given you that's doing this, right?"

"Yeah, 'given...'" he grumbled. More like forced.

He got a hard poke to the arm. "Look at it this way; having dementor magic doesn't make you a dementor any more than having Voldemort's horcrux made you him. Understand?"

Hermione was right. Hermione was absolutely right. "Yeah. Okay. I understand." He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck.

"Good!" Her hair bounced with her enthusiasm. "Now, the main reason we're here is to look at this," she gestured to the pedestal and runes surrounding it, "so let's get started."

Hermione conjured a thick roll of paper that unrolled about a foot of itself in front of her and made a fountain pen appear in her hand. These items were illusory, and would not exist after they left the pensieve, but she would be able to recreate her notes in reality.

By the time the dementor caught Memory Harry, the two of them had only moved a quarter of the way around the circle. Hermione cut off her notes and rolled them up to watch the interaction of pedestal, runes, dementor, and Memory Harry intently. She jumped when the inky mist spread up his arm like a starved devil's snare, gasped when the soul-light flared and Harry broke free, and shivered when he consumed the souls left on his arm.

They floated up and out of the pensieve as Memory Harry left the room. Hermione's hands clenched around the absent roll of notes and pen for a heartbeat. Then she pressed them against the surface of the table and looked up from her pensieve and into his face. "Can I ask... why... the souls?"

"To send them through the Resurrection Stone. To send them on. If I hadn't, they would have just faded, down there in the dark... Or maybe the dementors would have eaten them. Again."

"The afterlife." That was all she said about it. She blinked slowly and allowed a moment of silence before moving on. "I'll need to view that memory several more times, and it will take time to write and analyze all my notes. Do you want me to stay here, or...?"

"You can go home if you want. I can't really contribute anything more than the memory itself. Did you learn anything about the stone from this first look?"

"All I can say is that it was created to store something. Whether that something was souls, or something else and it ended up holding souls instead, I don't know yet." She summoned a small crystal vial from her handbag and levitated the memory into it. It was stoppered and put back inside the bag with the pensieve. "This will probably take several days of study, but I'll let you know what I learn as soon as possible."

"That's brilliant, Hermione, thank you." Harry slumped back in his chair, relieved. Hermione could figure out anything she set her mind to, and hopefully this mess with the dementors could finally be ended.

"Now, I'm hungry. Let's say we get some lunch!"

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