August 19, 1997
"It's not crazy."
"It's both irrational and utterly mad."
"Say that again, I dare you."
"We can't break in Azkaban."
"We aren't, we're breaking others out."
"It won't work."
"Sirius did it."
Harry sat at the head of the dining table with a calm expression on his face as everyone who lived in Invisibility Way wanted to argue with him. Susan sat on Harry's left hand side, her crossed arms and raised brow radiating the same indifference that Harry felt. Fred, on his right, grinned with his hands behind his head and his chair propped back on two legs.
It was almost funny how Susan and Fred both easily expressed the two emotions Harry felt while everyone argued: disinterested and amused.
Harry planned on waiting while everyone argued and whined and complained. Then, once they let their complaints out, Harry would remind them that they agreed to follow his lead when they joined his gang.
Harry was going to die for them, the least they could do was shut the hell up and listen to his plan.
"All done?" Harry asked lightly when everyone eventually fell silent. "Brill." He looked around the table, letting his eyes land on everyone. Susan, Luna, Draco, and Ron. All four ready to work. Charlie and George, confused but quiet. Sev and Tonks, almost identically exasperated, a laughable look. Then the Malfoy's- Lucius looked pale, probably sharing Harry's memories of a time spent locked up together.
Sirius, on the other side of Cissa, looked thoughtful. And he'd spent more time than anyone unfairly locked up there. It figured that he was the only one not arguing. Lupin looked concerned, which sent a brief flare of anger through Harry and he quickly averted his eyes before it consumed him.
Harry didn't need his concern.
Blaise and Neville had been quiet. Blaise picked at his nails with an indifferent set to his face that Harry appreciated. Neville had raised logical concerns - the when and how's - that Harry said he'd explain.
And now that everyone was quiet, Harry would.
"You joined the gang and you agreed to listen to orders," Harry reminded them all cooly. "If you don't like it anymore, too bad. You'll do this or you're out."
"Blood in, blood out," Ron said.
"It's a hell of an exit interview," Fred grinned.
"And dear Johnny can tell you it isn't a pleasant experience," Susan said sweetly with a sharp smile. She was so smug about finally getting to kill someone, Harry was glad it took her so long to do it. He didn't want to listen to her brag about her one direct kill forever.
He'd reminded her that he killed someone for the first time at ten and she claimed it didn't count. Even if the muggle in the park didn't count though, Lockhart did and Susan couldn't argue against that.
There wasn't a trophy for being the first one in the gang to kill someone, but there was a mantle and Harry sat there happily while he gave orders to his gang.
Nobody left so Harry nodded curtly. It wasn't the full gang, but it was enough for the mission.
Honestly, Harry felt good about his odds with just Susan, Fred, Sirius, and Tonks. Sev too if he'd quit scrutinizing Harry with an indecipherable look in his eyes. He'd had the same look since Harry told him they'd be blowing up Azkaban the day before.
And it, like everything really, was pissing Harry off.
What right did Sev have to act like Harry was behaving like some mad man when he'd been the one to remind Harry, to scream it right at him, that Harry had an expiration date that was approaching quickly?
Find the tiara.
Get the cup from Gringotts.
End the war.
The only change to the plan was that Harry didn't feel much like there was a war going on at all anymore. Not the one he expected. There were no more explosions in Diagon Alley. There were no more raids.
There were quiet and legal arrests. People weren't disappearing, they were just standing for trial and being locked up.
There were rallying speeches from the Minister, calling for unity in the face of evil while he hid his evil behind a pretty mask.
It wasn't a real war anymore and Harry wanted to fix that.
He'd never done well in silence and subtlety, it was better when things were what they were. If Timmy wanted a war, then he needed to treat it like one.
"I need to know exactly where Azkaban is," Harry told Tonks evenly. The only, only, betrayal of Harry's inner unease at returning to the prison was a twitch in his thumb; an impulse desire to tap it on the table or smooth it across the wood. He pushed the desire down and flexed it on the tabletop instead.
No need to give Sev more of a reason to stare him down so intently. Harry thought that if he even let a single muscle on his face twitch that Sev would stay arguing and Harry didn't have the patience for it.
Everything got on Harry's nerves recently. Everything pushed his temper to the surface. George had cracked a joke that morning when he walked in the bathroom while Harry had been brushing his teeth and it was only Fred that kept Harry from taking a swing at his twin.
Seeing Theo hold Rosie at the meeting table had been enough to send Harry out back to smoke while Fred told Theo he couldn't have the baby at a meeting.
It was like Sev took Rosie from Harry and something snapped. The loss of his goddaughter in his room had been a sharp reminder that she wasn't Harry's.
He didn't get to see her grow up.
And it was infuriating.
It was better to channel his rage to a worthy target, and nobody deserved it more than Timmy and his prison full of muggleborns.
"Harry?"
Harry shook his head of his errant thoughts, the ones that took him to distant places coupled with empty eyes, and focused. Tonks was staring expectantly at him for some reason.
"She said Azkaban is in the Great Sea, nearly 200 kilometers off Edinburg," Susan murmured from the side of her mouth.
Harry nudged her leg with his foot in appreciation and forced himself to focus on the present. The past was over and the future was coming no matter what. The present was all Harry could deal with.
"So we apparate there?" Harry asked Tonks. It was blurry, buried beneath a thick fog, but Harry knew Tonks had gotten him from Azkaban. Which is why her shaking her head made no damn sense.
"We can't," she said. "The only one who might be able to is Ritters, but even then the rest of us can't apparate through their wards."
"What wards are they?" Susan asked. She silently summoned a quill and held it above her parchment, ready to write down whatever Tonks said.
"Nobody knows," Sev cut in. He remained impassive when Harry gave him a withering look. "It would require the Head of the DMLE to break through the wards."
Harry rolled his neck and glanced toward Neville.
"Rufeus Scrimgeour," Neville reminded him quietly.
The name sounded vaguely familiar to Harry and it was Draco who jogged his mind to put a memory to the name.
"He wrote to you," Draco said with a roll of his grey eyes. "He wanted to 'assist you' and refused to quit his job."
"Aah." Harry squinted up at the ceiling thoughtfully while he tried to see which path would get them to blow up Timmy's prison quickest. "We could pretend to let him join, or imperio him, then kill him after either way. I don't need a cop who's working for Timmy in the gang."
Not once Harry got what he needed anyway.
"Bill," George said abruptly. He'd been sitting like Fred, with his chair tilted back, and it slammed on the floor while his hand waved in the air as if he were back in school.
"What about him?" Susan asked, a touch impatiently. Apparently Harry wasn't the only one with a simmering temper. It was less obvious in Susan, but Harry saw it all the same.
"Why don't we see if he can identify and break the wards?" George said, garnering nods from Ron and Fred. "He's a curse breaker, Harrikins, surely he can do it."
"Don't call me that," Harry snapped. He considered George's recommendation while George pulled an apologetic face that Harry ignored entirely.
There was a time and place for jokes and right then was neither.
"Do you think Bill can at least identify the wards?" Harry asked. "I can go with him, see if I can tear them down then?"
"And if you do, then they'll be replaced twice as strong the next time," Lucius said, finally saying something useful. "The best course of action—"
"Is to send William, Fleur, and the mutt," Sev said, speaking over Lucius smoothly. "Allow them to identify the wards, then we can identify the best way to approach the issue once we know what we will be facing."
Harry maintained a politely blank look as he met Sev's eyes and held them from across the table. His explanation sounded perfectly rational, but also much too convenient. Sev hadn't wanted Harry to go back to Azkaban in the first place, and now he had a sound excuse to push it off for at least a day or so.
It was Rosie and her big eyes staring up at Harry, her chubby little finger wrapped around his finger, that Harry thought of as he silently conjured his devil ghost.
"Come over as soon as you can," Harry said, speaking to his patronus while he held Sev's eyes challengingly. "I've got an important job that needs done soon."
Harry sent his patronus off with a lazy wave of his hand. He got to his feet without breaking eye contact with Sev.
"When Bill identifies the wards, we're going," Harry said firmly. He looked away from Sev to smile charmingly at the others. "Best to brush up on your patronus charm. If you need help, ask Lue."
With that, Harry turned to go through the kitchen and back outside where he'd been spending most of his time. He didn't want to fly or faff about in the garden, he just didn't want to see anyone.
He didn't want to see Luna with her sad eyes. He didn't want to see Blaise with his scar and see his eyes reflecting Harry's own worries- who was next?
And he damn sure didn't want to see Theo and Rosie walk around the house together.
Fred said Harry should be glad that Theo was stepping up - and Harry was, in a way - he just didn't want to see it rubbed in his face.
So Harry went out back, sitting with his back against the little metal broom shed full of bombs and other stolen equipment that gave him his idea for the mission to start with. He sat in the grass with his head tilted back, letting the sun warm his face, and closed his eyes.
Susan and Fred joined him quickly, sitting just as silently on either side of him. And when Fred grabbed Harry's left hand and Susan grabbed his right, Harry felt more weighed down than before.
"I'm not mad," Harry told them without opening his eyes. "I'm not flying, I'm boiling."
Almost in tangent, Fred beat her by a fraction of a second maybe, they squeezed Harry's hand.
Susan laid her head on Harry's shoulder and Fred tilted Harry's to lean on him.
"We all are, love," Susan assured him. "Everyone's been boiling since PJ."
"It's time to boil over," Fred said. "Time to spread the misery, eh?"
"Yeah. Exactly."
Sev might not see what Harry couldn't explain, but Harry clearly wasn't entirely unable to explain himself because Fred and Susan were there.
It took Bill two days to make the trip to Azkaban with Fleur and Sirius, another day to get back, then three more days to decipher the wards that they'd found on the prison. By the time Harry called for another house meeting, with Sirius, Lupin, Bill, and Fleur that time, he was ready to explode.
Every damn day there were more and more arrests made. There were articles discussing the threat of muggleborns and their 'unidentified sources of magic'. In the muggle papers there was nothing, some vague references to dementor attacks, maybe, but Ritters sent Harry the information he'd managed to dig up where muggles who once had a baby were now obliviously child-free.
And Harry just knew that the muggle babies had to be muggleborns that were being snatched up early, experimented on, and their corpses tossed when Timmy couldn't figure out how to take the magic from their cores.
It was disgusting and made Harry wonder what Timmy was doing to the others in the prison and the suspected ones locked in the new Ministry warehouses. The new game Timmy was playing was the Slytherin game that always made Harry feel like an outsider to the house he had fit in nearly seamlessly.
Sev or Ron, probably even Draco and Lucius, would maneuver the field more carefully, like a Slytherin 'should', but Harry was ready for action.
Bill's delay had been inconvenient to Harry's desire to do something, but Susan reminded Harry of a different task - one that they'd been working on for a while - that would be helpful. And with Rosie staying with Theo, and Harry remaining outside when he was awake and not eating breakfast, it hadn't been hard to complete it during that time.
Honestly, as much as Sirius bragged, McGonagall had been right. Animagus transformations were really just about focus and desire. And Harry really desired to mark another thing off his to-do list, so he focused.
"Here's the issue." Bill slapped a map on the table six days before the others were scheduled to go back to Hogwarts. The map was a detailed floor plan of Azkaban, maybe even accurate. Harry could easily admit he didn't know a damn thing about maps, but it looked as complex as Hermione's school notes always had and she'd always been correct.
Almost always been correct.
"Harry, look." Bill pointed at a corner of the map then drug his finger across it to point at another diagonal slant on the map. "These are the only entrances and they're going to send a distress signal to the ministry the second they're breached. If it's a scheduled breach, or a high enough ranking DMLE employee with proper papers, then they ignore it. If not?" Bill moved his finger and pointed at six different places. "Dementors move in until aurors arrive to investigate."
"So we take the wards down?" Susan said, standing behind Harry by Bill where Harry could see the map more clearly. "Before we trigger them?"
"We have to be practically on them to remove them," Bill said. He pointed at one of the slashes that Harry assumed marked doorways. "It's runes, which makes even Harry's mad-magic a bit useless."
"So we go through a cell window?" Ron said, also rising to his feet to peer at the map thoughtfully. "Get in, get the others out, blow it up, leave."
"And how the hell do you expect us to fit through cell windows?" Sirius asked Ron from where he sat with a sullen look on his face. Harry wasn't sure if it was the recent trip to Azkaban or something else bothering him, but he needed to drop his attitude. If Harry couldn't snap off at people without being called crazy, neither could Sirius.
"How'd you do it in the first place?" Neville asked Sirius quietly and curiously.
"As a skinny, starving, pathetic dog," Sirius said. "So unless any of you mastered animagus transformations…?"
Harry's eyes flew over his shoulder to meet Susan's and their lips curled up in mirror image smiles.
"Hypothetically, you're saying that animals can sneak past the wards without triggering the dementors?" Susan asked Sirius, her eyes dancing with glee while she watched Harry.
It had been Sev who responded, suddenly sounding panicky.
"Harry, care to share with the class?" He drawled his question, but the fear was there all the same.
Harry, who hadn't felt anything aside from apathy intermixed with bouts of intense rage, in days, suddenly felt mirth bubbling through his veins.
It would be so simple.
"Nope," he told Sev with a bland smile. He turned to Sirius and tilted his head curiously at him. "If we got past the initial wards as animals, 'hypothetically'," he said, using his fingers to quote Susan, "would we be able to transform back to get people out?"
Sirius straightened up in his chair and put his elbows on the table before propping his chin in his hands and suddenly grinning at Harry.
"Pup, are you telling me you did it?" he asked, eager at the idea, a stark contract to Sev's worry. "When? How?!"
"With all my fuckin spare time, Sirius," Harry said evasively. He nearly laughed when he looked at Susan. "You'll be just fine."
"You'll never fit through the windows." Susan laughed for the first time since before the Ministry, before Hermione, before Rosie. "Oh my god, Harry, imagine it."
Harry tried and he had to actually bite his cheek to keep from laughing.
"But can an animagus pass through the doorways?" Harry asked Bill, speaking slowly so he could remain serious.
Bill frowned and scratched his head. He looked toward Fleur who looked equally bemused.
"I don't see why not," he finally said. "But I didn't design the wards and runes are crafted uniquely."
"Yes or no, Willy?"
"Probably yes."
"Brill." Harry smiled and felt his body relax. He looked around the table and tried to remember who could do what. "Sirius and Susan, you're going. Tonks, Bill, Fred, and Lue, you're going. And…" Harry twisted his lips to the side as he tried to decide who else would need to go and cause the least amount of pushback. "Lucius and… George."
Sev raised both brows at Harry and Harry shrugged.
"You can come if you don't argue," he said unapologetically. "But I figured some of these people are going to be messed up, so I'd send them back to you, Fleur, Cissa, and Lupin."
"You have truly lost it if you believe that I will wait here while you attempt to rob a prison of its prisoners," Sev said. He got to his feet and shook his head. "We will leave on the second."
"Why the second?" Charlie asked, looking none too pleased to be left out of the group.
Harry answered that for Sev, assuming they had similar ideas on the matter.
"Because they're probably going to try and pick up muggleborns at the platform, yeah?" Harry scowled, all his previous amusement gone. "So if we go before they do, then they might just toss them somewhere else. If we wait just a couple days, then we can get them out too, can't we?"
"Harry Potter, champion of muggleborns," Lupin smiled and looked approving. "Your mother would be quite proud."
"Hermione too," Luna added softly, adding a layer of solemnity to the group.
Harry hummed and stuffed his fists in his pockets. It was no offense to his mum or Hermione, but Harry wasn't doing it for them. He wasn't even doing it for muggleborns in general.
He just wanted the war to truly start so he could finish it.
***
Charlie,
I'm writing this while your girlfriend tries to help my husband become an animagus.
She's brilliant, your girlfriend.
It's why you can't come with us to Azkaban. I don't know how risky it'll be, I don't know if it'll end in a fight or someone going mad from the dementors. But I can't risk your life because I won't risk Susan's happiness.
Susan loves you, she told me so herself. I, personally, don't care much for you, but Susan thinks you're it for her, and I do care for her.
So you can't die. You have to make it to the end. I won't let Susan be another Theo when I'm not here to pick up her pieces.
The gang made me a book for my birthday. It's all the things we did while we were in school together. I want you to have it because I figure one day you and Sue will have a bunch of fire loving, red headed, kids and it makes a good bedtime story.
Take care of her when I can't.
Your brother-in-law,
Harry