Chapter Text
It took a frankly embarrassing amount of time for me to figure out where I was.
Granted, I had never been to Azkaban before, but really, how many prisons on small islands were guarded by soul-eating abominations? Once I had put together the fact that yes, this really was Azkaban from the Harry Potter universe, and no, I wasn’t dreaming or still dead, I addressed the elephant in the room. Or rather, the dementor.
Specifically, the fact that I was one of the aforementioned soul-eating abominations.
Acceptance of that fact was a tricky thing. I knew I had been, at one point before my becoming a dementor, dead. The exact details were muddled, but it was likely self-inflicted. Regardless, I was not pleased to wake up afterwards. Though, my specific situation did come with rather impressive benefits: I could fly, for one, and that was just the beginning. I was a dementor, with all that that rather horrifying statement entailed.
The irony was not lost on me, however, that my new species propagated that which I suspected killed me previously, namely depression.
Then again, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows—if those were even possible on the island, and given the weather, I strongly suspected that they were not—as my new species came with an impressive list of downsides as well. Irrespective of the existential horror that arose from knowing that reincarnation was real, I was a different species, and thus was intrinsically different.
My appearance, for one: I was much closer to the dementors described in the books than what was shown in the movies, a roughly 3-meter tall emaciated and rotting humanoid clothed in an incredibly tattered cloak.
And speaking of said cloak, I had no idea where it came from. All I knew was that I was wearing it when I became conscious, presumably at the moment of my reincarnation.
But back to my body; I did in fact have legs, albeit redundant ones, given that I either floated or flew everywhere. The only other notable thing was my face - empty, scabbed eye sockets and a gaping hole where a mouth should have been.
And then came the kicker: I had to determine all of that by sense of touch. I was blind.
Well, blind using the definition of not having the human sense of sight. I had a rather excellent sense of direction, and could sense both souls and the ambient magic in the air, letting me get a rather good impression of my surroundings. It was better than human sight in that it was omnidirectional. It was worse than human sight in that I could no longer see color.
I had come into existence a short while ago, but once I had familiarized myself with my new body and abilities, my first order of business was to determine the date. None of my knowledge would be helpful if I had been reincarnated outside the events of the story. I knew it was sometime before Kingsley Shacklebolt became minister, as he had purged Azkaban of dementors, and sometime after Azkaban was converted into a prison, but that still left a significant stretch of time to consider.
Though, there was a rather quick way to narrow the possible dates down: checking to see if the Death Eaters were imprisoned within, and if so, if Sirius Black was present. Should there be Death Eaters present, then I would have had to have been sometime between the end of Vold War One and the mass breakout in book five. Going a bit further, if Sirius was there, it would place me somewhere between Harry’s birth and Sirius’s escape.
I shifted slightly, taking in the prison from my vantage point in the air above it. Sirius really deserved better, and should have received the highest commendations for being able to retain even a tiny bit of sanity. Azkaban was much, much worse than the books’ descriptions made it seem. Even discounting the incarnations of death and depression that guarded it, the location alone was enough to sap the strength of anyone’s mind.
Or, well, any human’s mind. On a small tangent, it was rather obvious that my mind was different. I still felt I had mostly the same personality, but my emotions were much more… muted. And given my state of mind before my death? Well… I may have been on the other side of the border of being a sociopath then, but I certainly was one now. And that was discounting the instincts that came with the new body. Sure, most were useful, the most prominent benefit being that I knew how to fly, but others were slightly more disturbing. Namely, that Azkaban felt familiar, not quite like a home, but a place I had been in long enough to be almost comfortable in.
But back to the main point, Azkaban was a truly horrific location for any person not a dementor. Using the building as a prison was a gross violation of more human rights than I could count. Even the Aurors who were stationed here stayed as far from the actual prison as possible, living in a structure built into the dock. And even then, there were four, on the entire island. I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to be anywhere near the island, but even so, one would think that the wizarding world would show a bit more care as to the security of their best prison.
I shifted again in the air, letting out a rasping sigh. Slowly tipping myself forward, I let myself drop towards the rock below. I had been trying to avoid interacting with the prisoners, but I did need to know when I was.
Slamming into the rock, I drew myself up to my 12-foot height and turned towards the prison entrance. Invincibility to all physical forms of harm made for very interesting new priorities. While yes, I could fly downward faster than gravity could pull me, it was far more fun to simply let myself drop.
Regardless, I glided over the sea-soaked island towards the monolithic structure. There was only one entrance at ground level, a massive stone archway with a few steps leading up to it. The only other apertures were the windows, only accessible to dementors.
Searching the occupied part of the prison took surprisingly little time. The other dementors… didn’t seem to care at all what I did. In fact, they actually seemed more willing to listen to me than the Aurors, which was not altogether too surprising once I calmed down and looked at the facts.
As far as I could tell, I was the only sapient dementor. The others were certainly sentient, having the ability to react to stimuli, but so did just about any animal. True sapience, complex abstract concepts rather, seemed to be beyond them. They were more intelligent than your average dog, but not anywhere near the level of a human. They could understand instructions—I suspected they were responding more to the intent behind the instructions than the instructions themselves—and could organize themselves, in the sense that wolf packs organized themselves as well.
In any case, all that long-winded rambling was to say that I received no obstruction as I made my way into the prison.
The ground floor was the least-guarded in terms of dementor presence. Most of my kind either remained near the very top of the tower, or deep, deep below the surface. From slightly below the surface to a few floors above it, the dementor presence was the least prevalent in the entire prison.
Or rather, I suspected it was. At the very least, it was the least-guarded of the areas accessible by humans.
I floated down a wide hallway, passing empty cell after empty cell as I made my way towards the closest soul I could detect. Turning a corner, I started slightly as the last physical obstruction between my senses and the soul was removed. It was daedalian, intricate and complex. Not at all like anything I could have imagined, but a fractal, multidimensional geometrical shape. Constantly in a slow state of flux, it steadily wove itself into new labyrinthine patterns over and over and over again, never once repeating itself.
It was wonderful.
I drifted forward absentmindedly, shifting my focus to another soul off to the side, only a few cells away from the first. It too was infinitely intricate, and yet, completely unique. Even as both of them shifted and changed and grew, neither of them came anywhere near the other’s pattern. They both shone with something that was not light. It… prickled me, shocking me out of my trance.
That was the first actually unpleasant feeling I’d had since becoming a dementor!
And yet…
Even as the soul-light tingled, it called to me with an unconscious familiarity. The soul was both connected to me, and inimical to me. Contradictory. Interesting.
I returned my focus to the very first soul, tracing the shifting patterns in my mind’s eye. Strange, I thought, that a criminal—and I knew this one was a criminal, his thoughts betrayed his actions, even if he pleaded innocence—would have a soul so… and I hesitated to call it so, but beautiful.
But it was only beauty in the sense of complexity, that of nature and awe.
I examined it once more, drifting closer. The motion was calming, soothing almost, and if the soul-light didn’t irritate me I could likely spend hours upon hours simply mapping out this one soul. It shifted somewhat, the rate of change increasing. Not to too great an extent, but noticeable nonetheless. But what was the catalyst? What caused the acceleration?
It sped up once more, and I redoubled my focus. The swirling shapes were not yet changing so fast as to prevent perception, but they were more than double the speed they were previously.
Distantly, I became aware of something. One of my other senses, one more familiar to me: hearing.
“Wh-Wha’ do ye wan’ from me, eh? What more can ye take? Already gone… all gone… all GONE!”
The soul was aware of me. Fear, it seemed, or maybe simply conscious activity sped the shifting. I drifted away, deep in thought as the man collapsed once more, shivering and muttering. I brushed his thoughts, his mind open and almost broadcasting to me. He was a true criminal, a staunch believer in pure-blood supremacy. The actual crime that had gotten him arrested and incarcerated was lethal muggle-baiting, a repeated offense for which he’d been arrested for multiple times before.
I drew back from his mind and continued down the hallway. I could see the prisoners ahead begin to shiver and wake up as the leading edge of my aura passed over them. While it certainly was a useful ability, it would completely ruin any attempt at stealth, and more importantly, affected everyone indiscriminately within.
That was suboptimal, especially if I ever planned to interact with humans on friendly terms. Could I suppress it, or at the very least target it? Maybe.
First of all, what was the aura? Most of my abilities were intertwined, and one often led to, or even was, another. I focused on the newer senses I’d acquired with the reincarnation, the sight-analogue and the rest. And just like that, I understood.
My mind was… diffuse. It was not confined to a single point, as it had seemed to be when I was a human. Direction only held meaning in whichever way my body was arranged, and what I was ‘looking at’ was simply what held the most of my focus. My body felt more like an extension of me rather than something inseparable. I still went through the actions of pointing my face at whatever it was I was focused on, but by no means did I have to. It was an action I’d adopted to tether something to what I’d been previously, and to help with interactions later on.
What I’d been referring to as an ‘aura’ was simply unconscious feeding on any mind within the nebulous bounds of my presence. Then again, given the manyfold effects produced by the presence of my mind, aura was a good enough term to use as a catch-all. But now that I knew what it was, it was time to go about trying to fix it. Could I compress it? I narrowed my focus to simply my body, but that achieved nothing. I was going about it the wrong way.
I relaxed my focus again, this time trying to grab—metaphorically, of course—the edges of my mind. Somehow, I… missed. My focus went straight through the incorporeal bounds of my mind, scraping against the wall of the prison in what was almost a physical–
No, wait… That was a physical sound. I focused on a loose chunk of stone that had likely fallen off a wall somewhere and repeated my earlier action of trying to grab it with my mind.
The stone lifted into the air, unsupported by anything other than my will.
So… Apparently I was telekinetic? I was quite certain that that was an ability that dementors did not have in the books, only in the movies, and only used once, to open the door of the train compartment. This had… implications.
Nevertheless, they were better explored later. My current goal was to refine my control over my aura. After I had achieved that, I could consider the potential reasons behind the inconsistencies, but again, that was for later.
I returned my focus to my mind. I didn’t have much luck manipulating it… for lack of a better word, externally, but maybe I could do it internally? I’d been viewing it as something I emitted rather than just me. It was a conscious choice, like my turning to ‘look’ at things, one to maintain a connection to the relative sanity of the human I was before. I could let go of it, but I knew that if I did that, my mind would be irrevocably changed—more so than it already had been, that is. This would be a fundamental worldview shift, and I likely wouldn’t be able to turn back once I’d done it.
And yet, it seemed to be the only avenue left for progression.
I turned the corner at the end of the passageway, moving on down a stretch of corridor that had no prisoners. Stopping in the middle of it, I let myself drop to the floor, walking over to the wall and physically leaning against it. The sensations were slightly muted, but they still served as a point of focus.
And then, without fanfare or occasion, I let go, and my mind… was.
I was not my body. It was an extension of me, true, and one that I could control intimately, but it was not me. I was myself, a purely metaphysical construct, nebulous and unconstrained. I could feel the other dementors within the bounds of me, but the connection I felt with them was faint, only relational, not sympathetic. They had their own guiding intelligence, and all I had was my body.
I let myself spread further through three-dimensional space, feeling each and every soul within the bounds of my presence, and yet becoming more and more dispersed the further I went. It was not an extension of myself as my body was, but simply me. There were no unconscious actions that my consciousness performed. The contradiction made for an amusing oxymoron, but it held true nonetheless. I could feed off the souls in range, or I could even consume the souls themselves through the conduit of my body, but I and I alone chose who and what I would affect.
The ease with which my problem had been solved caused a tiny bit of dissonance, but it was irrelevant in the long run. I drew myself back in, withdrawing to the level I had been stuck in before, and left myself there. I continued towards the stairs to the higher levels. Sirius was a suspected Death Eater, so he would likely be on the same level as the rest of them; namely, the highest-security level, the highest level in Azkaban.
Drifting up the stairs, I made my way through several more floors, seeing more and more dementors as I climbed. But as I got higher, the severity of the crimes performed by the prisoners grew larger as well. Thieves gave way to murderers gave way to rapists. The minds of the prisoners were sickening. I only gave each the briefest touch, to determine identities, and it still was enough to make me want to relieve them of their souls to prevent them from ever returning to the wider world.
The question of taking justice into my own hands was irrelevant in this situation, though. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t, not without completely ruining my entire plan.
But there was a benefit to my perusal of so many minds: I very quickly found out the date. The prisoners in Azkaban with life sentences weren’t as helpful, but those with shorter sentences were desperately clinging to their sense of time, counting down the days until they would be released. It was late in February of 1993. The titular character of the Harry Potter series would be in the latter half of his second year. This was also the year that Sirius would be escaping, though that wasn’t scheduled until the summer, around July if I had the timeline straight in my head.
True, it was suspiciously convenient that I was placed so close to the main events of the series, but again, worrying about it could wait. I had far more important things to focus on for the foreseeable future.
Like, for example, the first mind I sensed as I exited the stairwell onto the highest floor in Azkaban. It was a female of indeterminate age—that is, she’d forgotten her own age, and I couldn’t see her to guess at it yet. But her mind… her mind was twisted, frayed and in tatters. Almost all that was left was pure and exclusive devotion to another.
It almost sounded romantic when I phrased it like that. But the next bit of information quickly shattered any notions of romance: the subject of all that devotion was a man named Tom Riddle. This was the mind of Bellatrix Lestrange.
I continued down the hall, brushing through the surface thoughts of each and every prisoner I encountered. Most were Death Eaters, more than had ever been named in canon, but the floor was not exclusive to Voldy’s band of trained monkeys. So far, I had not yet come across the one I was looking for.
I continued down a side hall, running adjacent to the one I entered the floor on. Then, ahead, I felt something strange: a soul, seemingly detached from a body. Was it a ghost? Here, in Azkaban? I moved towards it, and…
No, my initial impression was wrong. It wasn’t that the soul was detached from a body, it was just that the thoughts of the holder of the soul were different enough from the standard human that I missed them at first glance. They were simpler, guided by the intentions of the soul, but not intimately connected to it as a human brain was.
I turned a final corner and looked through the bars of a cell at a bone-thin and ragged—yet still quite large—black dog.
Hello there, Sirius.
I paused outside of his cell, contemplating the sleeping animal. Slowly, a tiny tone of mischief snuck its way into my thoughts. Sirius was one of the Marauders, he was a purveyor of pranks and maker of mischief. Of all the prisoners here, he would be the one who would be best suited to make light of his time here, joking to others about it and the like. And coincidentally, he was one of the very few people in here that didn’t, at least on some level, deserve it.
I reached for the door, creaking it open and floating inside. At the sound of the cell door closing, Sirius shot awake, blinking bleary eyes and swiveling his head frantically to try and find the source of the noise.
Then, his gaze fell on me, and he froze. Barely even breathing, he was trembling slightly, but otherwise making no motion whatsoever. The poor thing was terrified. Thankfully, that should vanish soon, even if it was replaced by sheer confusion.
I dropped to the floor, reached down, and with a single motion, scooped the dog into my lap while sitting down against the wall. Then, carefully excluding him from the effects of my aura, I began to pet the dog. For a few minutes, Sirius became completely motionless, his breathing stopping for a worrying few seconds. Thankfully, it restarted before I could begin to take preventative measures, and that was the worst of his condition.
After a few more minutes, he relaxed minutely, still remaining on high alert but no longer about to collapse from fear. We sat there for a while longer, but eventually, I set him aside and left the cell, taking care to prevent Sirius from following. As callous as it was, I wanted to make as little disruption as possible in the early stages of my plan, which meant he would be remaining in Azkaban until he learned of Pettigrew.
I drifted towards the nearest window and returned to the skies above the prison. I had some ideas of what I wanted to do, but no completely solidified plan. That would be changing. I had already decided to try and make things a bit easier for the main characters, but tossing canon out of the window would butterfly all of my foreknowledge out of the window in the blink of an eye.
From what I could remember, the third book went pretty well, at least compared to Harry’s other years, with the only real threat being the dementors, given that the entire thing with Sirius was a massive mess of assumptions and misunderstandings. Voldemort had next to no impact on third year, but in the next he would kick everything up a couple dozen notches.
And on the topic of said bastard child of an inbred, abused, desperate girl and a drugged-up rape victim…
Horcruxes. I needed to deal with the Horcruxes.
With any luck, the Kiss would be able to affect Horcruxes. It was something that directly affected souls, but on that note, I should test it on a prisoner, preferably one already close to death, to see what it even was. Having no experience with the Kiss and then attempting to use it for the first time on a Horcrux was just begging for a disaster.
But once I’d done that, then the easiest Horcrux to locate would likely be the Locket in Grimmauld Place. Sirius still remembered his time there, as those weren’t exactly happy memories, so finding it would be as simple as searching his mind for the exact location. Even better, I would be able to get it without anyone knowing, save for Kreacher. And Kreacher would be relatively easy to silence, whether it be by killing him or using the promise he made to Regulus to keep him quiet. And as much as I preferred the first option based on my personal opinion of Kreacher, the second would potentially gain a truly loyal house elf, which had the potential to be all sorts of useful.
Just off the top of my head, he knew the location of the cave the Locket was hidden in originally. Even if the Horcrux wasn’t there anymore, it was still valuable information. Furthermore, he was the house elf of the Blacks, and would have all the knowledge that came with serving that family for years.
Returning to my original focus, I continued making my plan. Within half an hour, I had a tentative plan hashed out, with ten main steps, albeit with nearly thirty sub-steps considering what those ten goals would take to accomplish:
1. Test the Dementor’s Kiss.
2. Go to Grimmauld and retrieve the Locket. If the Kiss worked in step 1, attempt it on the Horcrux.
3. Wait until Sirius’s escape, and follow him, helping only if necessary.
4. If possible, memorize the flavor of Harry’s soul to make tracking him easier.
5. Attempt to establish myself as a ‘friendly’ dementor, or at least one more focused on Horcruxes than humans.
6. Wait for an opportune moment, then reveal the existence of Horcruxes to the relevant parties.
7. Find a way to remove the Scarcrux without killing Harry.
8. Remove the Scarcrux.
9. Destroy any remaining Horcruxes
10. Give Voldy and all his followers a big smooch.
With that established, I began drifting back down to the prison again. I had no illusions that my plan would survive any contact at all with the enemy, so it was more a rough guideline of what I wanted to do, but it was a good framework to work with for now. And with that, it was time to execute step one: Finding a prisoner on the verge of death, and testing out the Kiss.