Chapter 4

As best as he could tell, approximately a week passed before all the dementors were gone from Azkaban and at his new temporary residence in Bill and Fleur's hidden coastal home. At night, they floated throughout the house and across the beach around it, but never too far away from him. There would be several trailing after him at any time, and ice crusted almost everything in his vicinity because of it.

During the day, those that weren't determined to follow his every move clustered in the darkest parts of the house they could find. Because they mostly left him in peace during the brightest hours, that became the time he slept. The unceasing chill of their concentrated presence prevented him from getting a truly restful sleep, but he did at least get some sleep, and the dementors generally didn't wake him up until nightfall when they spread out once more.

The Ministry tracked down the missing Azkaban guards soon after they had all arrived at Bill's house. As the building had been warded under the combined efforts of the old Headmaster Dumbledore and a professional curse-breaker with the purpose of making it a wartime hideout and safe house, none of the Ministry workers could find the house itself, let alone anyone or anything inside it, so it quickly proved its worth in being chosen as a hideout yet again.

Harry and the clingier dementors were safely hidden, but this did not apply to the ones that wandered. They were easily found away from the house, and easily harassed by the witches and wizards trying to capture them (with very little success) or hound them with patroni. Considering their ultimate goal was getting the creatures back to Azkaban—where they provided the free service of guarding prisoners and the island in general and keeping said prisoners so spiritually downtrodden that they didn't even try to escape on their own initiative (all except the singular Sirius Black)—they failed on all fronts. No conventional magic could contain the dementors, only genuine non-conjured solid objects. Admittedly, the would-be captors had brought metal cages with them, iron, or possibly steel, cages with close bars, but all the patroni that tried to herd the dementors into one instead chased them higher into the air, out to sea, or onto this one part of the beach where they disappeared into thin air.

As entertaining as Harry found their attempts, it only made the dementors even more annoying than usual and he was constantly worried about being discovered with so much activity in his immediate vicinity. The black-cloaked soul-sucking creatures couldn't disappear unaccounted for without raising suspicions, and the longer this farce went on, the more those suspicions grew.

His saving grace was that the stress of the entire dementor population on the normal magicals limited the span of time they could endure for the sake of their mission. Teams came only twice a night and never stayed for more than an hour each time. The Patronus Charm was a tiring spell to maintain when just a few dementors were involved, and there were certainly more than a few.

He considered moving. Without an alternate safe destination in mind—safe for himself from others and safe for others from the dementors—he was forced to drop the idea. Locking them all inside the house might be possible, but it would be crampt and he didn't know enough about magical construction to have any confidence in expanding any rooms in the tightly warded building or digging a new subterranean room (whether breaking through the floor would compromise the wards or not, he didn't know) on the beach with factors like soft ground and water level to be considered.

Assuming he could keep all the dementors inside at the same time in the first place.

Maybe he should just start with that?

After staying awake well into the morning, not-shivering in the northern sea breeze with a few curious dementors flanking him, he went out to check for any stragglers and dragged the two he found back with him. He locked down every outer door and window he could find and went to bed to sleep until dusk.

Like clockwork, the Auror team hiked in from what Harry willingly assumed (he wasn't about to go out and confirm it) was their portkey landing spot just after full dark, but on this night they walked around confused and agitated while patroni lit the landscape with unhurried patrolling movements. They didn't stay as long as usual, leaving after searching for the dementors that had been present the nights before and which seemed to still be present based on the unnaturally low temperature but were absolutely nowhere to be found.

Inside the hidden home, Harry knew that locking the dementors in with himself wouldn't be a long-term solution. Confined during their active period, they seemed to go slightly stir-crazy, streaming through rooms and disturbing his sympathetic magic.

He had yet to see any sign of them falling apart like Hermione indicated.

The stains across his skin weren't fading either. Now that he had the chance to notice, since he wasn't watching dementors get chased around outside with concern, he could see that the gray areas shimmered oddly in the presence of patroni. It tempted Harry towards casting one himself, a thing he resisted doing to remain undetected. He didn't want such strong evidence of his magic lingering around, and he didn't want the dementors to flee from him in panic.

...Did a patronus cause them pain? Was it the light they generated, the feelings, both, or something else entirely? The Patronus Charm was not a well-understood spell, and still held its own mysteries, but he did know one thing already; it caused him pain. He felt it on his silvered skin.

It was like when his hands and feet were near numb with cold, and he took a hot shower to warm himself back up, that first painful minute of heat returning to his extremities.

It must feel worse to them.

Weeks passed, but Harry was careful to keep all the dementors inside with him, and slowly they calmed, content to stay confined as long as they were close to him. He started sleeping more, letting time pass, and did little beyond keep an eye on the dementors and wait.

Sustained by the dementors' presence, his hunger dulled to a background need, easily ignored.

He didn't really notice he'd stopped eating until the first collapse. A dementor came to him, touched his neck gently—they hadn't tried to give him a soul in a while now, and hadn't tried to take his in even longer, so the touch was unexpected enough to get his attention—and dissolved into black dust. The remnants of its magic fell to the floor in a heap and, like spilled water spreading on the floor but reversed, gathered around his feet. Harry tried to clumsily dance out of the pile but it followed him and he tripped into a dementor. Only faintly cold, and much smoother than the sand on the beach outside, it soaked into the skin of his feet and halfway to his knees.

The brief but steady influx of magic left him weak-kneed and whichever dementor he'd practically fallen on was the only thing keeping him upright while the newly added power left him feeling first denser, then oddly insubstantial.

After recovering enough to stand unaided—and shoving his way to the nearest chair—he looked down at his feet. They'd been turned black, or as close to it as he could tell in the moonlight. Turning on closest light confirmed it. It looked like he'd dumped ink on himself, but when he touched the newly stained skin, it was as dry and smooth as ever and his fingers came away clean. No dementor dust remained.

The... dementor essence? Dementor concentrate? Whatever it was. The result of the first death of a dementor was part of him now. Would they all come to him as they died? Would it happen the same way?

How had it happened? Was it triggered somehow (in a way he could repeat, maybe?), or did that dementor simply know and approach him? How long until the rest joined it?

What would so much of their magic do to him?

(Would he recognize himself at the end?)

He wished he could ask Hermione. Or Luna. Luna had a way of knowing things beyond normal ken. If only.

Exhausted by the sudden ordeal, he fell asleep in that chair.

He didn't react in time for the second death two days later, or the third a day after that, but the fourth... His eyes caught the approach of the fourth dementor and he reached out, wrapped his fingers around its neck, and extended his magic into it with almost violent abruptness. For a moment it was normal, like every time he'd reached in to relieve one of a soul.

Then it was fraying apart, shattering from around him.

Perhaps half the stuff ended up on the floor this time; the rest he inhaled on reflex, as it was stuck to his magic, and he spent several minutes chocking on it and coughing, trying not to suffocate. He definitely wasn't going to do that again. The dementors could keep coming to him and dying normally, he wasn't doing that again.

He hadn't even seen what caused the collapse, anyway. It just happened.

And it turned his lips and the total interior of his mouth (and as much of his throat as he could see) black. Like his feet. His lungs were probably black too.

The dust from the next death had to reach him through the crack underneath the door of the closet he confined himself in to sulk and to hope in futility of avoiding his not-alive-but-not-properly-dead-yet companions for just a little while.

The more dementors died, the more he slept, and for a while he became unaware of time passing. He had a feeling he woke infrequently, and his periods of wakefulness got shorter.

There were fewer dementors each time.

Hunger.

He struggled to wake up.

He was hungry, so hungry. When was the last time he'd been hungry?

It was hard to remember.

He blinked his eyes open. The room was dark, but he recognized the shapes of furniture and an open doorway anyway and knew he was still in Bill and Fleur's seaside cottage.

How long had it been? His memories became really vague after the dementors started dying... Dying... The dementors were dying. His heart sped up as the thought raced around his mind.

The dementors had been dying, falling apart, dissolving into dust, they'd been dying and it made him sleep and—

He pushed himself up on heavy, tired arms and looked around the room again, eyes very wide as he searched for any moving scrap of shadow, any familiar silhouette or thinnest shred of cloak—

The room was empty. He was alone.

The dementors were gone.

In disbelief, he got up from the bed and searched every room of the small house. The exercise of movement revived him—just how long had he been asleep?—and his reward was the failure to find a single dementor anywhere. They were well and truly gone, every last one!

He started giggling quietly, then chuckling, then laughing like a lunatic, near delirious with relief that it was finally over.

Hunger brought him back to himself, but it didn't erase the broad grin from his face at finally being free of the dementors. He wound back through the house to the kitchen, ate preservation-charmed bread and fruit and anything else he could find that he didn't have to cook to eat, ate until he was ready to pop, then crawled back into bed for the best sleep he'd had in recent memory.

Next time he woke up, he felt human again, and was absolutely thrilled by it. He desperately needed to relieve himself, he was hungry again, and he wanted a long, hot bath, but none of these minor problems could diminish his mood. He visited the bathroom, raided the kitchen for anything that was left after his last voracious attack upon its supplies, and then went straight back to the bathroom where he set the tub to fill and stripped out of his clothing.

And saw.

Fully exposed to the mirror, he saw. He was different. His eyes were still green and his hair was still black, but his skin was so pale now... The silver spreading up one arm, across his chest and back, and up his neck shone in the light. As if he'd been painted with metal.

And the black. It wasn't black as pitch, more like partially diluted ink, but it was a stark contrast to the silver and his exceedingly pale but natural skin. His lips and tongue were black, his teeth more of a gray. His feet and legs were black to the knees. His non-silver hand was almost completely black, past the wrist, except for a knife of normal color on his palm. There was a patch of it covering the side and back of his neck and one ear, and part of his scalp when he parted his hair to look. A thin streak decorating his hip made him wonder if the dementors had fallen all over him in their deaths to result in such an irritatingly patchwork result and he wondered how he'd hide it.

His friends would have answers, so he stepped into the bath and resolved not to think about it (or about anything else) for at least an hour.

Sleep held him to his resolution.

Biting cold woke him and launched him from the ice-topped bath. It was supposed to be magically heated. Patterns of ice grew across his skin as the water that should have been dripping off him froze instead, froze over his gray skin and on the floor around his feet. Scraps and shreds of tangible black mist collected into thin sheets as he looked at himself in horrified shock, sheets that started shaping into a too-familiar cloak.

He turned to the mirror and—his eyes were wrong, the green so dark, and his mouth, hanging open, black black black, like theirs—ice was appearing at the edges of the mirror but it concealed nothing—

His jaw was so stiff, he couldn't close his mouth, so he covered it, but his fingers were too long, too thin—

His breath came faster, but it sounded rattling—

The cloak slithered up around his shoulders and across his chest and started forming a deep hood.

He ran.

It took him an hour to calm himself back down, and hours more to restrain the dementor magic that had blown free inside him and overtaken his body.

He couldn't go home to his friends like this, not until he could control himself, not until he could hold the transformation in and stop it. Not until he could—

He remembered that warm taste, that beautiful feeling right on the tip of his tongue—

Not until he could stop himself from eating one of their—

It was so bright and inviting, he wanted—

No.

He would not.

It was dark when he arrived, the sky so thick with clouds not even the full moon's light could sneak through to light the land.

Perfect flying conditions for him, of course.

He had come straight from the cottage, pushing himself as fast as he could, following the taste of the memories left imprinted on the cottage. It led him unerringly towards the original sources of those memoires, the perfect compass.

On the edge of the warded grounds he returned to the earth, reforming his lower legs out of the powerful black fog that kept him in airborne. He wiggled his black toes in the grass—wiggling his toes was always his favorite part of changing back—and pulled the shifting, ethereal cloak back down beneath his skin. It regained and healthy, human warmth a moment later.

A deep breath filled his nose with the smell of clean night air, not memories, and he smiled.

It was as easy as changing clothes now, as smooth and fast as his godfather becoming Padfoot ever seemed to be, and he'd spent enough time practicing.

His steps were silent as he approached the tall, crooked house, but the lit windows and familiar murmuring voices lifted his heart.

The door opened as he reached it, releasing warm air carrying the scents of a hearty dinner, and halting all sound inside. Luna was the person at the door, with multiple heads of red hair and a few in other colors scattered behind her.

They didn't care that his smile was black, that his hands were different colors, or that his dew-damp feet looked like shiny obsidian. He was welcomed inside with open arms.

The long disappearance of Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived and Vanquisher of the Dark Lord, hadn't gone unremarked. Far from it. It hadn't been slow to notice either, since his inexplicable relationship with the dementors had almost immediately brought the Ministry's attention to himself when all the dementors up and vanished over the span of only a few days. The dementors had been briefly found again of course, which he already knew, but absolutely no hints of the wizard were found with them, and eventually the dementors were gone again as well.

Rumors and speculation spread like fiendfyre through the populous: he was running away from the dementors and they continued to chase him even now, all around the world; the dementors finally gave him the Kiss, and did any number of things to get rid of his body; he'd been turned into a dementor; he'd recruited all the dementors for his own nefarious purposes (whatever they were, as they seemed to change by the day); someone else kidnapped him and used him as bait to get all the dementors under their control; he took them all from Azkaban in order to set up a union on their behalf (the Quibbler's explanations of the union's establishment, organization, policies, and impact on Azkaban's security was well detailed across several issues); that he learned how to permanently destroy the dementors but in the doing lost his life... There were more stories than his friends could recount.

So his first public appearance wasn't in Diagon Alley, or the Ministry, or even anywhere within the United Kingdom. No, he was first spotted again in Bulgaria.

It had been Hermione's plan, arranged through owl correspondence and a few personal visits, for Harry to drop by on her and Viktor Krum while they were together enjoying their rekindling romance. (The romance part was genuine, she admitted with a blush, but not nearly as whirlwind as the papers made it seem.) Doing it this way should help him both ease his way back into Britain and help distance him from his association with the dementors by implying he'd been abroad the entire time and perhaps planning the beginning of a professional quidditch career.

A single sighting was enough to set things off, in a restaurant with the internationally famous Seeker and his girlfriend. The paparazzi got their photos, the photos hit the papers, and an entirely new wave of speculation completely unrelated to dementors ran rampant.

He didn't follow Hermione home after that but got 'caught' in France instead almost two weeks later with the Delacour family while the other foreign Triwizard competitor and her Weasley husband were enjoying a casual vacation with her family. This meeting had been more of an exploitable coincidence than a deliberate plan, but it was helpful all the same in setting the stage for his return. The extra time with Bill and Fleur also served to ensure that the disguise concealing the dementor-based discolorations of his skin was remaining strong.

Then he retuned home and paid a visit to Diagon Alley where he looked weary but none the worse for wear from his implied travels.

A predictable Ministry summons followed—

"I was just out of contact for a while, didn't my friends tell you I'd be gone?"

—and they accepted his explanation with little question, though it may be more accurate to say that they had to accept his explanation and couldn't keep questioning him for no legally justifiable reason, regardless of how much they might want to. They let him go home, anyway.

With the ongoing investigation into the dementors' disappearance now separated from him (and the dementors themselves no longer hounding him), he could live freely once more. His time in the limelight was blessedly brief and, with the disguise covering him, it was easy to continue on as if the mess with the dementors had never happened.

Of course, some weren't so willing to let it go.

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