moment, maybe even feeling a small touch of healing as his light passed them by, and then collapsing down again as the cold and darkness pressed back in.
Harry was trying very hard not to think about it.
Otherwise his Patronus would wax until it burned away every Dementor in Azkaban, blazing bright enough to destroy them even at this distance...
Otherwise his Patronus would wax until it burned away every Dementor in Azkaban, taking all of Harry's life as fuel.
In the Auror's quarters at the top of Azkaban, one Auror trio was snoring in the barracks, one Auror trio was resting in the breakroom, and one Auror trio was on duty in the command room, keeping their watch. The command room was simple but large, with three chairs at back where three Aurors sat, their wands always in hand to sustain their three Patronuses, as the bright white forms paced in front of the open window, sheltering them all from the Dementors' fear.
The three of them usually stuck to the back, and played poker, and didn't look out the window. You could have seen some sky there, sure, and there was even an hour or two every day where you could've seen some sun, but that window also looked down on the central pit of hell.
Just in case a Dementor wanted to float up and talk to you.
There was no way that Auror Li would have agreed to serve duty here, triple pay or no triple pay, if he hadn't had a family to support. (His real name was Xiaoguang, and everyone called him Mike instead; he'd named his children Su and Kao, which hopefully would serve them better.) His only consolation, besides the money, was that at least his mates played an excellent game of Dragon Poker. Though it would be hard
It was their 5,366th game and Li had what would probably be his best hand of the 5300s. It was a Saturday in February and there were three players, which let him shift the suit of any one hole card except a two, three, or seven; and that was enough to let him build a Corps-a-Corps with Unicorns, Dragons, and sevens...
Across the table from him, Gerard McCusker looked up from the table cards toward the direction of the window, staring.
The sinking feeling came over Li's stomach with surprising speed.
If his seven of hearts got hit by a Dementor Modifier and turned into a six, he was going straight down to two pair and McCusker might beat that -
"Mike," said McCusker, "what's with your Patronus?"
Li turned his head and looked.
His soft silver badger had turned away from its watch over the pit and was staring downward at something only it could see.
A moment later, Bahry's moonlit duck and McCusker's bright anteater followed suit, staring in the same downward direction.
They all exchanged glances, and then sighed.
"I'll tell them," said Bahry. Protocol called for sending the three Aurors who were off-duty but not sleeping to investigate anything anomalous. "Maybe relieve one of them and take the C spiral, if you two don't mind."
Li exchanged a glance with McCusker, and they both nodded. It wasn't too hard to break into Azkaban, if you were wealthy enough to hire a powerful wizard, and well-intentioned enough to recruit someone who could cast the Patronus Charm. People with friends in Azkaban would do that, break in just to give someone a half-day's worth of Patronus time, a chance at some real dreams instead of nightmares. Leave them a supply of chocolate to conceal in their cell, to increase the chance they lived through their sentence. And the Aurors on guard... well, even if you got caught, you could probably convince the Aurors to overlook it, in exchange for the right bribe.
For Li, the right bribe tended to be in the range of two Knuts and a silver Sickle. He hated this place.
But Bahry One-Hand had a wife and the wife had healer's bills, and if you could afford to hire someone who could break into Azkaban, then you could afford to grease Bahry's remaining palm pretty hard, if he was the one who caught you.
By unspoken agreement, none of them giving anything away by being the first to propose it, the three of them finished out their poker hand first. Li won, since no Dementors had actually shown up. And by then the Patronuses had stopped staring and gone back to their normal patrol, so it was probably nothing, but procedure was procedure.
After Li raked in the pot, Bahry gave them all formal nods, and stood up from the table. The older man's long white locks brushed against his fancy red robes, his robes brushed the metal floor of the command room, as Bahry went through the separating door that led to the formerly off-duty Aurors.
Li had been Sorted into Hufflepuff, and he sometimes felt a little queasy about this kind of business. But Bahry had shown them all the pictures, and you had to let a man do what he could for his poor sick wife, especially when he only had seven months left before his retirement.
The faint green spark floated through the metal corridors, and the silver humanoid, seeming a little dimmer now, followed after it. Sometimes the bright figure would flare, especially when they passed one of the huge metal doors, but it always died back down again.
Mere eyes could not have seen the invisible others: the eleven-year-old Boy-Who-Lived, and the living skeleton that was Bellatrix Black, and the Polyjuiced Defense Professor of Hogwarts, all traveling together through Azkaban. If that was the beginning of a joke, Harry didn't know the punchline.
They'd gone up another four flights of stairs before the rough voice of the Defense Professor said, simply and without emphasis, "Auror coming."
It took too long, a whole second maybe, for Harry to understand, for the jolt of adrenaline to pump into his blood, and for him to remember what Professor Quirrell had already discussed with him and told him to do in this case, and then Harry spun on his heel and flew back the way they'd come.
Harry reached the flight of stairs, and frantically laid himself down on the third step from the top, the cold metal feeling hard even through his cloak and robes. Trying to move his head up, to peer over the lip of the stairs, showed that he couldn't see Professor Quirrell; and that meant that Harry was out of the line of any stray fire.
His shining Patronus followed after him, and lay down beside him on the step just beneath him; for it too must
