Disclaimer: Harry Potter is not of my making

Chapter 1

If he survived the next five minutes, this was going on the list of things he definitely did not want to wake up to. It would, in fact, usurp the number one spot from 'In bed with Voldemort naked' (a situation spawned in his deepest nightmares) because even that, while excessively horrifying in a way that called for Lockhart-level obliviation, was more survivable than being cornered by a dementor trifecta while his wand was beyond his reach. Unlike his previous encounters with the floating horrors, he didn't have a wand in hand, didn't have the chance to grab it even though he could see it just there, and didn't have a handy backup professor to save him either.

Harry was in his bed, just where he'd been shocked awake with the sudden chill of three dementors who shifted to block his way to the door. One hovered between him and the nightstand on which the wand lay, and a scabby desiccated hand was reaching towards his throat as it bent down towards him. He jerked out of the way of the nearest dementor just in time to succumb to the nightmare visions and now his mother was screaming

Voldemort's laughter, green light

Quirrel—the basilisk—Kill the Spare—Sirius—Dumbledore's black hand—Dumbledore falling from the tower—I open at the close...

With a frantic gasp of air, Harry blinked back to reality. Everything was cold, and the middle dementor had reached out while he was incapacitated. He scrabbled at the stiff fingers closing around his neck. His effort and subsequent failure to escape was matched only by his heart trying to beat its way out through his ribcage. The futility Harry didn't want to acknowledge forced itself upon him regardless in the form of his field of vision shrinking around the dementor's head and turning black. The long bony digits were as solid as a steel collar as the hooded head got intimately close.

Harry was almost glad the lighting in his room was so dim—the only source being the thin moon and distant stars enchanted across his ceiling—because at least his last sight wouldn't be what lay beneath the monster's hood. Glacial air washed against his face and forced his body to seize up completely just before the last shreds of sight faded. That immobility didn't stop the soul-deep shiver of revulsion as the hole of the dementor's maw pressed slowly but firmly down around his mouth. The touch was so incredibly wrong in a way that transcended his power of description that Harry was glad he wouldn't survive to recall it, but he had to get through the rest of his soul being consumed first to get to the point of never feeling anything again.

Stuck in a peculiar state of consciousness, Harry wondered how long being Kissed really took and if those eaten by a dementor got to go on their next great adventure. Did having your soul eaten void your train ticket? The feeling of the dementor's most insidious magic distracted his thoughts.

It was like a thick fog forcing its way into his mouth. It tasted of cold, and age, and sharpness, and then his mouth was numb and he could only feel the pressure of it against his tongue. His throat, though, that burned as the soul-harvesting power flowed down into his chest and around his heart to a place just beneath it. From there, where it gathered around the central concentration of his magic and spirit, it branched out into thousands of tiny threads that worked their way all through his veins, twisting around every thread of magic flowing through his body and pulling them all loose. Every drop of magic he possessed snapped back to the center of his body and the invasive magic gathered around it, sealing it in. Reaching through his mouth, down his throat, to his contained power and the last anchor point of what made Harry Harry, the dementor twisted its magic like a rope and pulled him free.

Well, it tried to. It felt like trying to pull Walburga Black's painting off the wall, with Harry as the wall. Even as the rope of magic reaching down his throat densified with the dementor's efforts to drag him out, Harry seemed to be just as stuck into place as the acerbic portrait had been. The dementor may have loosened his magic from the rest of his body, but it and the soul from whence it came wasn't budging a hair. Unable to recognize either its failure to Kiss the wizard or the stalemate as Harry's soul simply refused to cooperate with its soul-sucking efforts, the dementor kept trying.

It took only a moment for Harry to see that his theoretically assured demise was, in truth, going absolutely nowhere, and he wondered what to do now. As the stray thought of whether or not he was still breathing crossed his mind (and skirted carefully around where his air had to be coming from), he poked around his magic. Sure, it was surrounded by the dementor's magic, but the dementor hadn't managed to take it so it was, for the moment, still his.

The wizard concentrated on moving—just a twitch, barely enough to bend a finger if he'd been in control of his body—and a needle of his magic pierced through the solid cold shell confining it. Faster than the dementor could reseal the hole, Harry stretched the tiny breach wider and cast a thin wire of shining energy shooting back around the rope of dementor magic to attack it.

Whatever progress he made by tearing scraps of magic off the thick rope was erased by its own fluid state; like water, he could not mar it for more than an instant and anything he flung loose flowed back into the whole. But there were other ways of stopping water, so there had to be other ways of stopping this.

He snaked his magic all the way up to the dementor's access point. The warmth of his own magic restored Harry's sense of taste just as he twisted the thread into a noose right where their mouths connected and jerked it shut, cutting through the rope of thick shadowy magic just like he would close a water valve.

Almost as if he'd shoved it, the dementor jerked away from him with a faint whining shriek. It's mouth lifted away from his own and its hand spasmed open, releasing him to collapse limply onto his bed. He would have called the subsequent great lungfuls of cold air the breath of life itself if it weren't for the severed lightless magic uncoiling as it slithered down the inside of his chest to gather around the shell that was starting to fracture and release bright magic without the dementor to control it.

His mouth tasted like grave dust, but it was a testament to both Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans and the culinary talents of Luna Lovegood—who couldn't cook a meal to save her life—that he had tasted worse things.

Before he could recover enough to do more than shiver, the second dementor had caught hold of him.

After failing to cooperate with the second dementor as well, Harry was quicker to free himself and also recovered in time to escape the grasp of the third by dodging past the retreating second to snatch his wand from the bedside table and finally cast the Patronus Charm. Prongs, looking more mercurial than Harry remembered, chased the first two from the room while the third, which had lost its chance to have a go at his soul, was trapped in the room and floated up into a corner of the ceiling as far away from Prongs as it could get.

The patronus and wizard pair stared at it as the thing curled in on itself and the cold retreated from their immediate vicinity by a noticeable degree. When he went to leave his bedroom, careful to stay beside Prongs, Harry saw the pair of dementors floating only a short distance away and facing in his direction. Still in shock, he absentmindedly decided that leaving his house would be a good idea.

In something of a numb haze, he and the ethereal stag herded the two dementors before them out of his house. They let the third follow in their wake. Once everything (three dementors and one patronus) and everyone (just him) was out, Harry locked down his house, directed Prongs to chase the dementors away, and apparated.

Several hours and one sunrise later, Harry was explaining the incident to a gaping Hermione, Ginny, and Fleur when the three dementors tracked him down once more. With four patroni standing guard, they kept their distance but refused to actually leave. When two more showed up, Harry and Hermione decided to go to the Ministry while Fleur and Ginny ran the five creatures off the Weasley land and then went into the Burrow to inform the family about the latest Inexplicable Harry Incident.

The Ministry's solution, when the dementors followed him there as well (much to the terror of everyone in the Atrium), was to send a team of Aurors to escort Harry to Azkaban with the hope that the wraith-like prison guards would follow him and then stay where they were supposed to be. Simultaneously, Hermione would be reporting to the Unspeakables with a pensieve-viewable copy of Harry's memory in hand. If anyone would know how to keep dementors away from a person or place, it would be the mysterious researchers.

Going to Azkaban ended up being a predictably bad idea. Dementors swarmed him as soon as Harry set foot within the repaired fortress. They came in such numbers and close quarters that they overwhelmed the human guards and Kissed him several more times after he cast Prongs to protect the overwhelmed Aurors that tried to barricade themselves into the kitchens.

Every dementor that touched Harry left a portion of its magic behind and helped him gain experience in escaping them ever quicker. By the time the guards rallied, Harry could stay on his feet after being released and was absolutely certain he would never get that horrible taste out of his mouth even if he ate solely treacle tart for a week straight.

The prison calmed down after that spectacular welcome, but when Harry left under the belief that the dementors were back under control, he was called back less than an hour later by Aurors who reported that several of the dementors had gone rogue to hunt after him. He found himself honor-bound to stay on the island after that because all the bloody dementors would get agitated and leave to pursue him whenever he moved too far from them.

This led to him staying in a converted storage room near (but, for the good health of everyone else, not too near) the guard barracks for the next several days, as Hermione and the Unspeakables failed to uncover any information helpful to Harry's plight. The dementor magnet tried to stay in his room as much as possible as it was enchanted to be comfortably warm, but if he stayed inside it too long, the dementors that gathered to lurk at the door would stress the charms to the breaking point and he would have to leave to lure them away and give the Aurors the opportunity to fix them.

Most of the time he wasn't in his room he spent wandering around the outside of the building or sitting on the roof with Prongs, for as long as he could sustain him. Sometimes he would visit the guards and play a round or two of poker, but he couldn't stay long without feeling guilty about the persistence of the dementors and tiring the guards with unnecessary castings of the Patronus Charm. While wandering or lurking somewhere, he would periodically be subjected to the Dementor's Kiss, but he learned to wrap himself in his stolen dementor magic, disguising himself as one in a way, to make them temporarily lose interest in him.

Cloaking in this manner exhausted him quickly, and chilled him as quickly as the dementors did. He couldn't cast a patronus while doing this—the two magics were anathema—but when Hermione asked him for a demonstration when she came to check on him one day, they discovered that Harry radiated the same cold as a dementor when this method of concealment was active.

Hermione may have been fascinated, but Harry was less enthused. All he wanted at the moment was to be able to go home again and for the dementors to leave him in peace.

And to figure out who tried to kill him and how they got dementors through his wards to do it. Couldn't forget that.

A suspicious lull in the dementors' activity was followed by an ambush while Harry was asleep. They broke through the locking charms on his door and he barely had enough time to yawn and roll over towards them before warmth-leeching leathery fingers circled his throat in that strangely careful yet inescapable way.

Harry relaxed and readied his noose of magic to break the Kiss as soon as possible. How many times was this now? He'd stopped keeping track a few days ago, but half the dementor population must have made an attempt. (Or it was the same handful trying over and over again; some of them were starting to seem familiar...)

Fingers touched his face, his lips, and Harry tried to twist away from this new touch, almost accidentally throttling himself in the dementor's grasp. The hand pulling his jaw open dropped something small and hard into his mouth. He lost control of his thread as he gagged on the object. Before he could try to cough it out, the dementor's mouth pressed against his and initiated the Kiss.

Their magic always came quickly but this time it flooded through his mouth and down his throat, carrying the thing he'd been fed along with it like debris in a rain-swollen river. He struggled to remake his noose and halt this unnatural Kiss, but before he could make any progress, the dementor halted on its own.

A moment later he was released and trying to catch his breath from the bed. The dementor that had Kissed him, and the handful floating behind it, watched him carefully but didn't approach him again.

The round little something, for he'd been able to tell that much as it was shoved down his throat, felt like a tiny glacier as it burrowed into his magic unimpeded by either it or the dementor magic left behind to assimilate with him after each failed Kiss. As he lay twitching, colder inside than out and feeling more violated than he had after the first Dementor's Kiss, Harry was torn between very much wanting to vomit, the inability to actually do so, and the knowledge that it would be too late to stop what was happening even if he did.

The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the cluster of floating cloaked figures that looked more like specters of death than ever before.

Harry woke up warm with Hermione's blurry face looking down at his. As soon as his eyes blinked open, she captured him in a hug. Her joyous screams of "You're awake! You're finally awake!" brought a small wave of redheads plus two silvery blondes into the room.

A series of hugs and reassuring hand grips later, Harry was informed he'd been unconscious for three whole days and that everyone was terrified the dementors had finally killed him. No one could wake him up. Hermione questioned him about what he could remember, and he thoroughly vexed her when he informed the frizzy-haired witch that they'd forced him to eat a weird maybe-rock and he'd promptly passed out. The battery of tests that followed this—from Hermione, healers, and a pair of Unspeakables—was inconclusive. The healers in particular were disturbed by the dementor magic they found in him, but they couldn't do anything about it without harming him. It wasn't causing him any ill effects, so he insisted on leaving it alone.

On the bright side of things, the dementors finally seemed content to stay in Azkaban after Harry was removed and had shown no signs of leaving again.

The peace was not to last.

It happened a few hours after he went home, accompanied by friends who intended to stay with him as much as possible until they were assured that the dementor situation was resolved. Harry was listening to Hermione argue with Bill about the technical aspects of his wards; Gabrielle was fidgeting with his left hand while she listened to her brother-on-law and Hermione and waited for her sister to return; Ron and Ginny were off to the side discussing the completely shocking win of the Chudley Cannons the day before; and Arthur was reading the newspaper while he waited for Molly and the twins to return with food for everyone.

Harry was only half paying attention to Hermione's current theory when he let his thoughts drift to Dumbledore and what the old Headmaster might have said. He was certain that he'd have a theory regarding the dementors' inability to remove his soul; he had been far too well read not to.

Just as Harry decided to go to Hogwarts to consult Dumbledore's portrait as soon as he had a chance, Gabrielle's hand suddenly tightened around his with a faint gasp. Harry glanced at her face, only to see her wide-eyed with shock. About to question her, Harry heard a voice he thought he'd never hear again outside the Headmaster's office, and he jumped from his chair in surprise.

"Why hello, Harry, how are you?"

Harry's eyes found the ghost of Albus Dumbledore himself standing before him. All conversation in the room abruptly stopped. Apparently the others could see him too. That made him feel a little better, though he was no less baffled. To the best of his knowledge, the old headmaster had gone on to his next great adventure.

"You seem to be in quite an unusual predicament, young man. But tell me, how did you happen to swallow the Resurrection Stone?"

The newspaper slipped from Arthur Weasley's slack fingers. Harry's face paled in horror while everyone else in the room looked back and forth between the pair.

"I swallowed ... the Resurrection Stone? That's what the dementors did?!"

"Dementors you say?"

"The dementors have been trying to Kiss Harry for about two weeks now. From what he's said, no matter how hard they try, they can't get his soul loose," Hermione explained for Dumbledore. "There have been some side effects," she murmured with a quick glance at him.

"They tried every day while I was in Azkaban, and they followed me everywhere. But then they came while I was asleep. It woke me up, put a rock in my mouth, and then… and then it gave me the Kiss and the rock…. It was so cold." Harry shivered and rubbed at his throat. The sensation of it going down was burned into his memory. "But why would they…. How did they even find it? I dropped it in the Forbidden Forest, so it would never be found."

"Perhaps they are connected to the Hallows. They have long been thought to be servants of Death, though that is not the only theory concerning them. If they were able to find the Stone, lost as it was, they must have some reason for bringing it to you. You have used all three, have you not?"

Following a tedious check-up visit to the Department of Mysteries, he was really glad Hermione accompanied him home, because he found the soulless body of a Death Eater just inside his door and another dementor. Certain there hadn't been any dementors left in the house last time he'd been there, and that he'd locked the wards thoroughly, he started casting immediately for how the sort-of-dead man and the dementor had gotten inside.

Had this been the same person who let the trio of dementors in last time for an assassination attempt? It didn't seem right, since there was only one dementor this time, but there may be evidence remaining with the body.

A few minutes into examining his wards for any new flaws or discrepancies, the wizard was made aware that he'd gained immunity to the fear effect of a dementor's presence when the one he'd been ignoring grabbed his arm.

Hermione, who'd gone back outside to alert the Aurors of the attack, came back in to find Harry and the dementor standing, and hovering, in the entrance hall staring at each other. "Harry, what?"

"I don't know, Hermione," he replied without looking at her. The dementor didn't visibly react.. "Did you call the Aurors for the Death Eater?"

"Yes, they'll get here in a few minutes, they're getting a healer from St. Mungo's first."

He looked at her then. "Could you wait outside to let them in the wards?"

"Of course. Are you…?" Not entirely sure what to say, she waved vaguely at the dementor, which had reached out to redirect Harry's attention back to itself. When Harry grabbed its hand in his own, she shivered, unable to imagine touching one of the creatures.

"I'll handle this, whatever it is now, while you help the Aurors, alright?" And Harry dragged the creature off to the closest room, the sitting room, and out of sight.

Confident Hermione could handle things, he released the dementor he'd dragged by the hand into the sitting room and stared at it. It hovered in front of him and reached out to grasp him gently around the neck, like all of the others he'd encountered up close. A few long minutes passed as nothing further happened. Eventually the dementor seemed to lose patience and, with its free hand, took Harry's own hand and guided it into its hood to grasp its throat in the same way.

What?

Harry couldn't help it; his eye started twitching as he wondered why, in Merlin's name, the dementors had to do strange things to him and him alone. Oh, right, it was because they couldn't eat him!

It floated closer and Harry's vision went predictably black as its void of a mouth closed over his in the beginning of another Kiss. But instead of the typical flow of dementor magic he'd grudgingly come to expect, it seemed to gather at his lips hesitantly, as if waiting for some signal, before only a thin tendril shot carefully down the well-trodden path to his magical soul. Then it prodded one of the large patches of dementor magic that had slowly merged with his own after each failed Kiss. The thin string of magic hooked in and drew back, drawing a small stream of his own power back with it, all the way back up to his mouth. When it slowly sucked the string into its own mouth, but no further, Harry stood there bewildered.

Was the dementor trying to take his soul in a new way? Slurp it up like a long strand of spaghetti? But it stopped pulling, and had pulled on the portion of his magic similar to its own. And his soul was as firmly seated as ever.

He waited for the dementor to act further, and began to sense the magic of the dementor from within it now, as it formed a sort of tunnel down deeper into its being. Was this what a dementor felt when it Kissed someone other than him?

It was almost as if the creature was trying to teach him to mimic itself, Harry realized. Why would a dementor teach him this? The gentle pulling sensation grabbed his attention, and he sent his magic flowing, with a hearty level of apprehension, down into the dementor. He found a shining light cradled in a bowl of darkness so dense it was nearly solid.

He poked around the shining light, the warm and—

It was a soul. He found a soul. The Death Eater's soul. The discovery gave him the brief urge to scream.

Just as he had been guided down, he found the string of his magic being wrapped around that bright little ball under the dementor's direction until it was encased. For another long minute, after the help withdrew, nothing happened. He couldn't move, his magic wouldn't release the soul this dementor had clearly consumed, and the dementor didn't move either. So he tried to pull his magic back, but stopped, unwilling, when he started pulling the soul up too.

Harry really didn't want to proceed, but this was clearly exactly what the dementor wanted because he could feel its magic smooth out around his, almost as if it were relaxing so the soul could be given up with greater ease. Feeling distinctly horrified, Harry pulled the soul up and out and drew it into his own mouth. A deep chill suddenly appeared deep at the bottom of his own magic, and he lost control of the string pulling the soul. He barely noticed the dementor's hand withdraw.

For a very brief moment Harry felt the second soul beside his own, and then it slid past, drawn like a magnet down into the coldness that he knew was the Resurrection Stone before vanishing into it.

His vision finally cleared and he stared at the dementor, not really seeing it, before realizing he was still holding it around the neck. He let go as if he'd been burned and backed up from the dementor quickly, unable to believe he'd just been taught by a dementor how to give the Dementor's Kiss and take a soul.

He ran around the dementor and out of the room. It followed him all the way out of the house and then flew off unprompted.

Hermione, still waiting for the Aurors and healer, became quite concerned when she saw the pale-faced state of her oldest friend. It took her almost ten minutes of convincing, after dragging Harry back into his own kitchen (the Aurors could knock when they finally showed up) and providing a cup of tea, to get him to explain. The explanation was short, and so unexpected it took a moment for the atrocity to fully register.

"The dementor taught you how to take a soul!?"

This demanded something stronger than tea.

Revised 2018-05-11

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