Chapter 6

He ended up at the Burrow again. After getting out of London's airspace, he'd kept flying without a destination in mind, but eventually found himself on the familiar lawn. Drawn back yet again by the memories of those who lived within.

Luna didn't open the door this time. The house was quiet, and all the first floor windows were dark. A few windows higher up glowed, so someone should still be awake. But would he be welcomed like this? He couldn't change back right now.

They accepted him last time.

He needed help.

He floated up to the nearest lit window and peered in. It was Ginny's room—a simple guess based on the fact that he could see Ginny (her hair at least) in the bed on the left—and the light came from a desk lamp right beside the window. Hermione was sitting at the desk, face pillowed on her folded arms, hair falling across her face. He hadn't seen her fall asleep at her work like this in a while, and he wanted to smile at the sight.

He mustered his weak magic and wrote a message on the window glass, then tapped at it. She jerked awake immediately and he backed away from immediate sight to wait for her to wake up fully. The witch rubbed at her face, brushed her hair back, and blinked at the window. Blank incomprehension cleared in a heartbeat—'Hermione its Harry I'm here'—and she lunged over the desk to clumsily lift the window open. "Harry!? Harry, where are you?"

"Hermione." She twitched at the sound of his voice. He floated back into range of the light and her eyes locked onto him immediately.

"It's really you..." she breathed. Bolting upright, she shoved her chair back. "Downstairs, I'll let you in!" Before he could protest she'd slammed Ginny's bedroom door open, startling her awake, and disappeared down the staircase beyond. He glanced apologetically at the redhead struggling to disentangle herself from her sheets.

The front door of the Burrow opened below him and Hermione called up, staring. He floated down in front of her and she jumped forward to hug him tightly, too relieved to care that he was a dementor.

He redirected his hand from her neck to her shoulder—she flinched at the light brush of his warmth-stealing bare skin—and pushed her away carefully until she released the hug. Apologetically, she retreated a step. "Sorry, Harry, I forgot."

"You forgot?" Raising an eyebrow may have been pointless and impossible, but the sarcasm still carried through, even if his voice made it sound a bit like rage instead.

Hermione understood and smiled, sheepish. Deep concern welled up over her joy at seeing him again. "What happened to you? The wizard who tried to kill you, that splinched himself, the Aurors found him. He was put on trial for theft, murder, and attempted murder, and convicted, but he made so many claims about you turning into a dementor. Most of them were dismissed as ridiculous lies, but... I tried to get to you again, to get you out of the Ministry, but you were gone. There was nothing saying where they'd taken you—"

"The Unspeakables." She inhaled sharply. "The Unspeakables took me. They knew who I was."

Her hands were shaking. Fear and rage blended in the air around her. "I almost don't want to ask."

She was saved from asking by Ginny's arrival at the front door. "Hermione, it's the middle of the night," she grumbled. What are you—" As Hermione turned around and Harry shifted to both look at her, she caught sight of Harry. A strangled noise escaped her throat and she ducked back behind the door. Then peeked around it, mumbling, "Hey, wait a minute." She eyed them, taking in the clearly unthreatened witch and the nonhostile dementor behind her. Hermione may have been the only person (who was not an Unspeakable) to see him like this, but she had also told everyone in Harry's confidence, which included Ginny. The witch realized what she was looking at. "Harry?"

"Hey Ginny." He waved at her.

Ginny blinked, then giggled. She stopped abruptly, face serious. "I'll wake up the others. We've been really worried about you." The door was left swinging as she disappeared from the doorway and rushed back upstairs. They could both hear the commotion beginning.

Hermione turned back to him. "Are you okay?"

His silence, and lack of reaction, was telling.

She looked down. Her fists were tightly clenched now, and she seemed seconds away from cursing someone. Until her righteous fury drained away, set aside for the moment. "Can I do anything to help? Will you tell me about it?"

"I can't stay here. They'll come looking for me soon. The ones that are left."

Behind her, widows started lighting up one by one. "'The ones that are left'?"

"I took them." The grass beneath him and around him began to frost over. His breathing was harsh. "Everyone who got in my way. I pulled them out." In the silence, he calmed himself, and the ice stopped spreading before it reached her.

It was difficult to read her face, but not her flavor. Hermione was upset by his words: angry, sad, afraid, worried. The feelings spun until she set herself on anger and it gained the depth of resolution. "So. You killed a bunch of Unspeakables in your escape. They know who you are, so the survivors will probably come here looking for you. We can deal with that. Come on inside," she turned towards the Burrow and waved at him to follow. "I'll contact Bill and Fleur if Ginny hasn't done that already, and we'll get a plan together."

"Will you... cast a patronus first?"

She stopped. "Are you sure?"

He wanted to say no. "Yes."

The large thick-furred dog stayed between the two of them as he floated into the house after its caster.

It was like an Order meeting without all the members. Harry sat in Molly's knitting chair in the corner of the room with Hermione's patronus—and then Ron's when she started getting tired—guarding everyone else in the room from his presence. His appearance had been shocking but did not distract anyone from the discussion. Not when his safety was in question.

That he needed to leave the country was decided easily enough. That he should leave the continent involved a little more debate but was also agreed upon. His destination? A simple question from Hermione solved that too.

"How do you feel about Australia, Harry?"

Everything after that was detail.

He was taken to France in an expanded briefcase that had an opening barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. The Delacour family hid him for the next week while Hermione prepared to move. News about his bloody escape was spread far and fast, used by the British Ministry to enflame the public. Officially, the dementor found in the alley escaped and viciously ripped out the souls of its brave guards and was now running at large. Unofficially, any association with Harry Potter (who'd disappeared again, but now there was precedent for such behavior) was carefully avoided.

Most of his time in France was spent resting. Each time he'd taken a soul, he'd gotten the dregs of magic left from the witch or wizard. It gave him just enough magic to unlock his chains, and then enough after that for a few spells if he needed them. The stolen magic had taken hold enough to be used but, as he came to learn, not enough to truly grow and restore his previous strength. It wasn't his magic and he couldn't transform back to human without magic that was truly his.

Magic came from the soul. He still had his soul, but it was buried deep within his dementor magic. Ever since the Killing Curse hit him again. The dementor magic kept him alive at the cost of locking away his soul for its own safety.

So how did he get his soul unbound? How could he do that when the dementor magic—which made taking souls so easy because it was created for that purpose—was what his own soul was shielded by now?

The magic that wasn't his was responsive enough when he held his wand, but inside, it slipped through his fingers constantly. His efforts to shape it were fruitless. Another dementor may have been able to help him, but they were all dead and he was their cursed legacy.

He kept trying.

Moving from France to Australia was very easy on his part. It was harder on Hermione, who essentially smuggled him like contraband, but the several hours journey suffered not one setback or hiccup.

The witch moved into her new apartment in the city of Mackay without fanfare. Her obliviated parents lived across town, still as dentists. This is where she found them on her last visit, she explained, her visit during the first summer after Voldemort's true death.

It wasn't successful and she had been forced to leave essentially empty handed. She had done a lot more research into the memory charm and recovery since.

He spent a lot of time in that internally spacious briefcase on the off chance that British Unspeakables or Aurors would follow here all the way to Mackay. Her apartment was spacious enough with its spare bedroom that he could have stayed there while Hermione was gone at work or working invisibly on her parents, but he was rarely there alone.

Hermione was rarely without her worn leather briefcase.

All it took was an accident. On the way to visit the Doctors Granger and Granger DDS, she literally ran into her father on the street outside their practice. She fell and dropped the briefcase, which snapped open when it hit the ground. After so much exposure, she was accustomed to the effect he had and had learned to resist it with mental fortitude and an occlumency trick with her patronus.

Her father, also well within range had no such defense. The dementor's cold, nightmare inducing aura pulled upon the man's worst memories in the mere seconds before Hermione slammed the briefcase closed again.

It didn't matter if those memories had been hidden. Being told by his own daughter that she was going to war and that she was sending them away for their own protection, that she was erasing herself from his and his wife's lives completely so they didn't try to stay and stop her and didn't try to come back to look for her, and the feeling of watching all his memories of his precious little girl growing up being folded away... It was his worst memory.

Being exposed to the dementor cracked the obliviation, and he said his daughter's name with recognition for the first time in years.

The closed the practice that day. Harry, a barely visible blur of shadow to the non-magical parents, very carefully pulled at the feelings of heartbreaking loss while Hermione mitigated the damage from the unraveling of the obliviate. With him to drag the worst memory, the key memory, to the surface through the memory charm, he compromised it and gave Hermione the opening and needed to release the rest of the memories of her from the spell.

She saw to her father first, then her mother, and he and Hermione's patronus watched over their reunion together.

Inevitably he told her his own troubles with his magic, but she had no ideas for helping him until a flash of inspiration struck two days after her parents' mnemonic recovery.

"What if I could help?" she asked after demanding he explain again, in the middle of the night, why he couldn't free his own soul and theoretically (hopefully) his own magic. Just so her comprehension was clear.

"Help how?"

"Help you get to your soul."

"That would be wonderful, but how?"

"You could teach me how to kiss," she said simply, and for a second he had no idea what that was supposed to mean—

To Kiss. Not to kiss but to Kiss. Like him. "Hermione—"

"Hear me out! The dementors taught you to Kiss while you were still human, I remember what you said! So why can't you teach me? If you taught me, I could help you uncover your soul!"

It took her all night to convince him. To persuade him into attempting this. He told her they could try tomorrow, when she was well rested, and she had to persuade him again after the delay. She told him to quit stalling because she wasn't going to change her mind, he said he wasn't stalling, and then they were facing each other.

There was surprisingly little fear in her for a person at imminent risk of losing their soul, and a bounty of trust.

His hand paused half-raised between them. The sight of it—gray and lifeless—had never been so sharply unwelcome before. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. What do I need to do?"

"I'll... show you. Just put your hand here," he guided her right hand, her wand hand, to his neck, and bent her fingers around his throat. "It will help with... what comes next."

"Okay." Her eyes didn't leave his face as his own right hand copied hers. He could feel her heartbeat.

His head bent down, his black petrified mouth covered her slightly open one, and his power, the dementor power, gathered in his throat. He twisted it into the thinnest strand he could and then extended it forward into his friend. It was easy to find her soul. It shone brightly, radiating magic and warmth and light and life like a beacon. The thin dark line of his own magic was a painful contrast as it reached her.

It wanted to wrap around her, enfold her and take her into himself, but he thought of her friendship, tasted the trust that was still stronger than fear, and kept his power thin, his touch light.

He didn't cover her soul. He pushed the thread of magic into it in just one place, giving it to her, and waited for her to make it her own. It took a long time, or so it seemed, but the little black spot he left faded into a silvery one that blended with her, blurry at the edges and slightly cooler than the rest of her.

His questioning prod was met with a faint pull. He poked at her again, this time to pull back on the new silvery part of her magic, and drew out a thread from it to match his. He continued to pull gently until she relaxed her grip on it and let it reel out. With only that merest extension of her, and not her entire soul, he withdrew. The most dangerous step was over. Her fear faded.

She followed him back to himself, down into the darkness he'd become with his own light hidden from him, and would have been lost without him still leading her. It was no mystery now why he was having so much trouble, and it was a wonder he knew where his soul was at all. He was covered in the dementor darkness and he had to wrap her thread around himself to get her started.

Then he waited. Waited for her to get her bearings, waited for her to start exploring on her own, waited for her to find her way through the cloaking magic to where his own soul should be.

He supported her patiently. It would have been the smallest effort to break that thread and send her snapping back to herself, but he cradled it and held himself still. He did not distract her from her probing, nor retaliate against the intrusion.

Time passed, but she showed no signs of tiring. That she was still rooting around was clear, but he'd lost track of her exact progress. It went on long enough for him to wonder if this would really work.

Until she touched him.

She pulled out a thread of magic, pulled it through the darkness to freedom. He used that bit of himself to follow her as she dove back in along it, finding him again and quickly.

They couldn't uncover him, but together they formed so many gaps and holes in the shield that magic began to flow outward once more. When she departed, the darkness left behind wasn't so complete any longer.

She passed out from fatigue as soon as they separated. He left her on her bed before setting to work. When she woke up several hours later, a pale face with green eyes and black lips was there to greet her with a broad grin.

Harry's mind wandered as he walked back to Hermione's apartment, a single expanded-interior bag loaded with foodstuffs and a few other random things slung over one shoulder. Nearly a month had passed since he'd become human again, and the nightmares were starting to fade.

That's what he told her, anyway.

In truth, the aftermath of everything the Unspeakables did to him and, more importantly, the deaths he'd caused by willingly eating the souls of several people, continued to haunt him. The hold of the rituals imposed upon his mind and magic were broken now, but his will had never truly been suppressed by them. They had been the devil on his shoulder whispering into his ear: how easy it was to take emotions and souls, as simple as breathing; how warm it made him feel inside when all around him was cold; that the people brought to him were criminals who'd deserved to go to Azkaban and thusly also deserved the traditional punishment and would have had it if he hadn't taken all the dementors' power into himself...

That he needed all the strength he could gather in order to escape, and that he wanted the people using him to suffer the same end as the helpless brought before him.

He chose to kill those people, to effect his escape and get revenge on his imprisoners.

He hadn't relished killing Death Eaters, he didn't celebrate Voldemort's final defeat, but he had taken pleasure in ripping out the souls of the Unspeakables and leaving lightless eyes behind him. There was still no regret in his heart about it, and shame haunted him all the more intensely.

It was hard to stay human with such an ache in his beating heart. The temptation to slip back into the seeping numbness and apathy of the cold and lightless magic was a perpetual trial. He tried to take at least a little comfort in the pain ("It hurts because you're human," Hermione told him) but it was still pain.

At least his lapses saved the witch the effort of casting cooling charms in her apartment.

The day he accidentally (for her father, intentionally for her mother) broke the obliviate on Hermione's parents was the only time he met them. When they came to visit, he made himself scarce. If someone tracked Hermione down in pursuit of him (a likely but not completely guaranteed possibility since her immigration to Australia had been formalized in the muggle world), a more enterprising or thorough hunter could discover him through legilimency on the muggle relatives that couldn't defend themselves from it. The brightest witch of her generation was trying to develop a way of blocking the invasive mind magic that would work on a non-magical person, but until that happened, he intended to ensure there was no trace of him in her parents' recent memories.

(Equally, he didn't want to tax their spirits.)

Viktor Krum didn't see a hair of him either when he came. Because he was perfectly capable of defending his own mind, Hermione did trust him with vague confirmation that she had helped Harry escape beyond British shores, but confessed nothing else. It was for his own plausible deniability. (And because he was her boyfriend. Harry didn't want to stick around for that.)

(He hasn't kissed Hermione—the honest truth—and he especially hasn't Kissed her. "No one will ever know that happened, especially not your love interest!" She agreed to hold her silence on the matter while tears beaded at the corners of her eyes from how hard she was laughing.)

When he returned from the spontaneous camping trip and after they swapped stories—her mother was passably comprehensible in Bulgarian, who knew (certainly not Hermione) and he spent half a night flying away from a hungry bunyip (he was never camping there again)—they began debating his future options.

Going back to the UK was not among them, not for a generously long time. Being in Australia illegally caused some extra problems but was surmountable in a few (most also illegal) ways, but which of those ways would be best was dependent on what he wanted to do. Whether or not he wanted to stay in Australia was the first choice he had to make. He knew he couldn't stay with Hermione forever, at the very least.

Maybe he really should travel around the world? China would be interesting. Or Egypt; he remembered Ron's stories of the family trip there. Maybe he could go the Caribbean or some of the islands in the Pacific? Luna would probably have some suggestions...

He let himself into the apartment and started unloading goods from his bag. Hearing him, Hermione walked in from the direction of her bedroom and he greeted her immediately. Ready to launch into a chat about what she thought the best place to visit first might be when he set off on his imaginary globetrotting adventure, all thoughts flew from his mind regardless when she returned his hello with, "They were here."

His mouth tasted of ash.

Harry Potter and the last dementor needed to disappear.

Hermione was going to work on getting him a passport with a new identity, to ease his way, but until that day came, he would journey within Australia. It was a big country, an island nation so large it was its own continent, so that wouldn't be hard. There was a lot of land to get lost in, mundane and not.

He had no fear of getting stranded, for dementors could fly. He had no fear of starvation, for dementors did not eat. Thirst was no challenge when one could summon water from the air, and beasts posed no threat when he ranked among the most dangerous.

Wand holstered at his belt, rucksack of supplies on his back, and cloak hung about his shoulders, he was excited.

Hermione pressed a camera into has hands and gave him one last rib-cracking hug.

Hallowed fabric shimmered like heat haze, folding him out of sight in half a heartbeat.

When one didn't want to be found, wasn't it best to become lost?

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