Hogwart Hijinxs Additional Chapters

The next day was spent practicing the necessary spells and trying to master a good dementor impression. In the morning, we all ate breakfast and then informed Molly we would be doing our summer homework. If she checked on us, Ginny, Luna and Maggie would act just suspicious enough that Molly would assume we were planning a prank.

We apparated into a building in Knockturn Alley which had multiple rooms for the sole purpose of discreetly doing business or storing things. Mundungus was already there along with a rowboat. I thanked him and made an offhand comment about sneaking out to go swimming in the ocean. One of the great things about being thirteen was that “secret” activities could plausibly be normal activities done without adult permission.

Once Mundungus left, we changed into our dementor robes. They were made of loose black rags that hung way past our hands and feet. The hood was thick and charmed to cast a shadow over our faces even 

Hermione attached the portkey, a thick branch we found in the woods, to the front of the rowboat with a permanent Sticking Charm. We all climbed into the boat, looking rather silly sitting in a boat in the middle of a storeroom, and Hermione activated the portkey with a simple tap of her wand.

The choppy ocean waves immediately hit us and the boat jerked for a moment before moving with the waves.

“We’re around fifty feet away from the wards,” said Hermione, after casting several detection spells.

Fred, George, Ron and I each took up one of the oars and rowed in the direction Hermione was pointing. Harry cast some warming charms over us.

“Okay, we’re here,” she said, reaching her hand out and touching a solid, transparent wall. It rippled with magic where Hermione touched it.

“So, who wants to go first?” Ron asked.

“I’ll go,” I said, standing up. “I’m a good enough swimmer to tread water for a few minutes even dressed in dementor robes.”

I jumped off the rowboat and into the ocean. It was not cold, thanks to the several warming charms on, but I had never swum in anything more than a swimsuit and the robes got heavy with water. I felt for the wards, placing my hand along them and then sunk down underneath the waves.

The wards ended around three feet beneath the waterline, so I swam underneath and then burst to the surface on the other side.

“All good, it’s about three feet down,” I said.

Ron opened his mouth and moved it, but I couldn’t hear anything. The wards must have blocked sound. I gave a thumbs up, then pointed down and held up three fingers. Hermione flashed me a thumbs up in return.

The five of them got out of the rowboat and into the water. Hermione cast a spell on the rowboat, presumably to make the floatable boat easy to take several feet underwater and sunk down. I dunked my head bank underwater and watched them sink down, swim forward and then swim up to the surface.

“Finite,” Hermione said, pointing her wand at the rowboat. It bobbed up the rest of the way to the surface.

Fred and George tipped it sideways to let all the water out and then we clambered in and cast drying spells on ourselves.

We rowed the rest of the way to the small rocky island. The waves dashed against the rock and we made sure to find an area with a small standing area a few feet above sea level. The side of the boat smashed against the rock and was barely holding together by the time all six of us had climbed out. I vanished the boat once we were out.

“It looks like climbing might be harder than anticipated,” Ron said, gazing up at the solid twenty feet of rock stretching up above us.

“We could take turns levitating each other up,” I suggested. 

“I also have my broom,” Harry said.

Harry took Hermione up on his broom, floating halfway up so Hermione could catch us with a spell in case the levitation spell broke. Fred and George levitated Ron and I up, bit by bit.

“Okay, that’s it, now just float us forward a few feet,” I called once Ron and I were all the way up to the top.

Fred and George did so, and then at a signal from Hermione ended the spell, leaving Ron and I to awkwardly fall a foot onto the ground. Then we turned around and levitated the twins up. Harry and Hermione landed and Harry put his now shrunken broom back in his pocket.

Azkaban was a tall triangular building stretching up into the sky. The triangular shape probably had something to do with magical numbers and defenses. I couldn’t wait to start Arithmancy in September.

At the base were a few smaller buildings. We were on the far side from the smaller buildings, and presumably the entrance to the prison itself. The whole area had a dark and depressing aura, and I was chilled to my bones despite the multitude of warming charms. Life felt hopeless and I wanted to run away and go back to the Burrow.

“Cheering charms,” Hermione said, casting charms on everyone. 

The mix of dementor exposure and cheering charms left a weird and artificial feeling in my body, but they seemed to even out, albeit leaving me highstrung.

We cast a chilling spell on the air around us. Getting it to move with us was rather tricky but Hermione, Harry and I, because three was a strong number, did a chant in Latin from a book Hermione brought. Then we cast levitating spells on our shoes, so we were a foot above the ground and some notice-me-not charms.

“Ready?” Ron asked.

“Let’s do this,” the twins said, looking manic. Perhaps the cheering charm had hit them a tad too strongly.

We moved around the side of the tower, walking towards the base buildings. On the way, we passed two dementors. They went by us without stopping. I wondered how much the dementors were able to tell the difference between the prisoners they were nominally guarding, the Aurors they were supposed to take Orders from and a handful of teenagers in Dementor outfits. 

From everything I read, the dementors were content to remain with a large population of souls to torment and took very basic orders from the Ministry, but didn’t actually seem to understand that they were guarding prisoners. I marvelled at the stupidity necessary to think that building a prison on an island of soul-sucking abominations that the Ministry had only a semblance of control over was a good idea. 

The one story building at the base of the tower seemed to be the Auror outpost and processing center. It was just to the side of a wide staircase stretching up into Azkaban Tower. There was a window with a view of the entrance where an Auror was reading the Daily Prophet, not seeming to pay much attention. We climbed, or rather floated, forward and up into the prison and the Auror didn’t even look up.

“Uh, there’s not a prisoner database or anything,” Harry pointed out.

“Yeah and asking a prisoner for-”

“-directions seems like a bad idea.”

“Well logically the highest security Death Eater prisoners are either at the very top or beneath the ground floor and there doesn’t seem to be a floor lower than this,” I said.

“Ugh, we have to walk all the way up?” Ron exclaimed.

“Unfortunately,” I said, it was at least twenty stairs.

It turned out to be precisely twenty stairs, making Azkaban a total of twenty-one stories. I assumed that was an Arithmetically powerful number, twenty-one being a multiple of three and seven, which were the two most magical numbers.

“So… much….stairs,” Ron panted.

After a brief break for water and protein bars, we decided to go turn right and walk through the triangular shaped floor until we found Sirius.

The cells did not have labels, which would have been handy. Presumably there was some book detailing where all the different prisoners were in the guard building. We could not shine a flashlight in everyone’s faces or call out for Sirius, as that would have been an obvious sign that we were not dementors. 

Luckily, all the prisoners seemed way too out of it to be suspicious about us splitting up into pairs and peering into each cell rather than floating ominously. I recognized a few prisoners from the old Prophet articles I had read about Death Eater trials or a copy of Nobility of the Twentieth Century that had pictures in it.

Most people seemed to be huddled in the back corner of their cells, wrapped in the prison robe Azkaban provided. It was horribly inhumane. The prisoners had to be freezing, had no activities or mental stimulation, had been in solitary confinement for over a decade and were being psychologically tortured by the dementors. Not even Death Eaters deserved that.

Eventually, we found Sirius’ cell. It was Ron and Hermione, checking the left side cells that found him and silently beckoned us over. He was rather easy to identify as Sirius was not in fact, a person, but a skinny black dog.

The door to the cell opened with an Alohomora. Seriously, the lack of security was downright insulting. The Ministry seemed to just be relying on the fact that everyone assumed Azkaban was impenetrable and that nobody would be stupid enough to break in. But surely the prisoners who were already in here, and had nothing to lose, would try to escape. A wandless Alohomora wasn’t that hard. Most adults could do wandless first-year charms with only a little effort. Or a Bombarda, or similar effect. Wandless magic tended to be rather explosive at the beginning, if done without the conduit of a wand, but an explosion would achieve the goal of unlocking the door.

Had people escaped from their cells but gotten caught? It didn’t seem likely given how little the dementors seemed to notice us moving about and the casualness of the Auror we saw through the window. Maybe the Ministry was relying on people either trying to escape by sea and drowning or trying for the Apparition point and getting caught, unable to Apparate without a wand and with so much dementor exposure. But a really determined and desperate person could probably steal an Auror’s wand and apparate out. Had people other than Crouch Jr. escaped before and the Ministry had just hushed it up?

While I was musing about the security, or lack thereof, of Azkaban, Harry had knelt by Sirius, or rather Padfoot, and was trying to coax him back to human form.

“We’re not dementors. I’m Harry, I’m your godson,” Harry said, his hood taken down.

Padfoot turned back into Sirius, a emaciated man curled up on the stone floor.

“Prongslet?” Sirius said, reaching towards Harry. “Why are you a dementor?”

“We dressed as dementors to break you out of here. Can you walk?” Ron asked.

Sirius confidently stood up, took a step forwards and his legs crumbled, pitching him face first towards the ground. Fred and George each caught one of his arms.

“Don’t worry mate.”

“We’ve got you.”

“Fabian? Gideon? I thought you died. Am I dead?” Sirius asked in wonder. “James! James, why are you so tiny and squishable?”

“Squishable?” Harry asked.

“Squish,” I said, cheerfully reaching up to pinch one of his cheeks like an old auntie. 

“Yeah, he’s out of it. Let’s go,” Ron said.

We all put our hoods back on and walked out of the cell, a few Death Eaters glancing up at us but not seeming to realize anything was wrong as we passed.

There was a brief moment of panic when we passed by two Aurors (or were they Hitwizards?) on patrol. We bunched together, hiding Sirius in the swarm of dementor robes and the Aurors passed by without comment, their patronuses dancing on ahead.

It probably helped that the Aurors had no way of communicating with dementors. Or rather, dementors could understand some commands but Aurors could not understand dementors. And it was ludicrous to think that the swarm of slightly off dementors would be doing anything wrong, much less actually be a bunch of teenagers attempting a jailbreak.

With this attitude, we walked right out of Azkaban, keeping care to keep Sirius in the middle of our group and shielded from view. The dementors didn’t seem to have a schedule or a patrol or anything, just wandering as they pleased.

We stopped outside the guard building, which the Apparition point was located inside of, to cast Bubblehead Charms on ourselves and and then hide them under our hoods and facial obscuring charms. Hermione cast one on Sirius and made it invisible, which seemed to work.

When we entered the building, the two guards on duty immediately leapt up.

“You can’t be in here. Leave!” one of the guards said.

“That’s Sirius Black!” the other said, gaping at Sirius who was being held up by Fred and George.

Hermione released the air based Draught of Despair. It took a few moments for it to kick in, during which one of the guards rather stupidly tried to question what we were doing rather than calling for backup. 

Once they breathed in the potion, the guards were trapped in their worst imaginations. One was curled into a ball while the other kept crying out for “Martha”. Hermione swiftly stunned them and then cleared the rest of the potion from the air with a few air-purifying spells.

“That was surprisingly easy,” Fred said. 

“Are there only two guards on duty?” George asked.

“I guess, and maybe a few more pairs patrolling the prison,” Harry said.

Hermione strode forward, opening the doors to other rooms. There was a break room, a bathroom, the Apparition room and what looked like a storage room for prisoner’s possessions.

“Oh good, I assumed they kept this stuff at the DMLE,” I said, walking into the last room.

The drawers were organized alphabetically, much to my relief. It was easy to find Black, Sirius and pull open the drawer. There was a wand, a bundle of fabric and a pair of boots. Hermione grabbed them and shoved them into her bag and then we walked out and to the Apparition Room.

“I’m not sure if this will set off alarms or if the Ministry can track where we apparate to,” Hermione said. “Also since only Fred, George and Zo can apparate, somebody is going to need to Side-Along two people.”

“I can take two people, but I still have a problem with fingernails, mainly mine. I and whoever I am taking should go first so whoever is behind can vanish the DNA evidence,” I said.

“Sirius and I’ll go with you,” Harry said.

Fred and George handed off Sirius, who seemed to think this was all a vivid hallucination, to me. Harry came and took my other hand.

I swiveled, disapparated and apparated to the forest at the chosen location.

“That wasn’t so bad, I only mildly feel like vomiting and I didn’t lose any fingernails,” said Harry, already regrowing his.

“I lost all seven of mine” I said, pointing my wand at my fingers.

By the time I regrew all my fingernails, Fred and Ron and then George and Hermione apparated.

We apparated two more times, repeating the same procedure, and eventually appeared at the top of a large hill, somewhere in Scotland. We pulled off our dementor robes and walked by foot down the hill, to make it harder for the Aurors to track us, if they even were able to track us through multiple apparitions in however many hours it would take them to notice the breakout. It still was better to be careful.

After walking nearly half a mile, we apparated again, applied some notice-me-not charms and then apparated a final time back to the parking lot in London. 

“That was shockingly easy given how-”

“-unbreakable Azkaban is supposed to be.”

“Is this real?” Sirius asked, looking at Harry and finally seeming to realize he wasn’t hallucinating.

“Yes, it’s been twelve years since Voldemort’s defeat. He’s not dead by the way, but he’s a wraith. You know Harry, that’s Fred, George and Ron, they’re Arthur and Molly Weasley’s children. That’s Hermione and I’m Zo,” I explained.

“Nice to meet you,” Sirius blinked. “Did you just break me out of Azkaban? You’re children.”

“We should probably get into the car, we do look kind of suspicious,” Hermione said.

“Er, where are we going? Are we just going to hide Sirius in the attic?” Harry asked from the backseat.

“I was thinking we would go to Andromeda’s,” I said, turning around from the driver’s seat to look at everyone.

“My cousin Andromeda?” Sirius asked.

“I appointed her my Regent for political stuff last year and she’s also teaching all of us politics because I need to learn it, Hermione and Zo think it’s interesting and Ron’s just along for the ride,” Harry said.

A short car ride (flight? car flight?) later, we were knocking on Andromeda’s door.

“Sirius is innocent,” Harry blurted out as soon as she opened the door.

Andromeda’s gaze swept over all of us, now looking vaguely guilty, and Sirius, who was still in his prison robes.

“I am going to need a very long explanation for this.”