The biggest issue of breaking into Azkaban wasn’t getting to the island. These were things Harry had long since researched.
No, the biggest issue was that Azkaban was always surrounded and inhabited by thousands of dementors alongside a small patrol of wardens who probably weren’t being paid nearly enough for that kind of job.
Imagine you arrived on Azkaban island, let’s say on an invisible broom.
Tough luck, dementors could feel you.
Kiss kiss, bye bye.
Imagine you arrived on the island with an invisible boat.
Tough luck, dementors could feel you.
Kiss kiss, bye bye.
Get your hands on one of the official portkeys that could breach the erected wards? Apparate outside the prison?
Tough luck, once again, the dementors’ response to any non-authorised personnel roaming the prison was to kiss first, ask questions later.
Harry had theorised that Neville’s cloak could likely bypass the creatures, but considering that he knew for sure that an animagus could pass by unnoticed, that’s what he was going for. He wasn’t going to play games with his soul, he wasn’t suicidal.
That’s why he was standing on a small rock jutting out of the stormy sea looking at the towering dark structure that was Wizarding Britain’s only prison to his knowledge.
“The prison is warded against house-elf interference,” Harry said. “So after this, I’m on my own.” He turned to Dobby who was resolutely standing beside him in the ocean spray. “If I don’t return by morning, alert Snape and let him decide if he wants to attempt something, or tell the headmaster.”
“As master commands,” Dobby said with an incline of his head that he likely would never manage to get rid of.
Harry breathed in deeply, filling his lungs with oxygen and guesstimated the distance to the prison.
About a mile.
He sighed and looked down at the black churning sea below with a frown.
He liked swimming as much as anyone else, a cheeky month or two on the seaside each summer, but this was…
“Fuck it, we ball,” he told himself before jumping forward, arms extended, head first.
In mid-air, his human form slowly shrunk, disappearing and leaving behind nothing more than a healthy red shell.
Harry the lobster peeled his eyes underwater, using every indication he could, alongside his magical sense to swim in the proper direction.
Lobsters generally walked on the ocean floor instead of swimming, but could be quite fast when prompted by danger, reaching speeds of up to 18 km/h. Considering there was only a mile until Azkaban that meant five or so minutes of somewhat tiring and uncoordinated animal movements that Harry did not want to describe in too much detail.
‘I fucking hate this,’ he repeated to himself like some sort of mantra as he saw things beneath the waves that he never wanted to see and was torn around and disoriented by powerful underwater streams, keeping his direction only because he could feel the disgusting presence of the dementers not far ahead.
It was as he neared the prison island that a particularly big fish took a bit too much of an interest in Harry, which almost screwed him over, forcing him to revert into human form and blast it away with wandless magic before turning back.
Finally, sopping wet and already exhausted, he raised his eight little legs to scrabble slowly but surely up the black rockface.
With such a small body every meter became a dozen and the large looming face of Azkaban turned from large to absolutely enormous.
It was after Harry had finally managed to reach more inwards, towards the structure of the prison that he saw he’d entered the island on the right side.
There was one benefit to being a lobster that he hadn’t considered before he’d properly sat down and planned his break in with the newly gained animagus form in mind.
Lobsters, at least, could climb walls, with the help of a little bit of wandless magic that was. The form was light, so even if being an animal interrupted his usual control of sorcery, he could still help himself along.
Being a bird would have been infinitely easier, he would have just had to pick a non-rainy day to fly in through a window depending on his size.
A lobster had the opposite issue.
A calm day where the sea wasn’t churning and the air wasn’t full of seawater was a day on which a lobster could dry out.
Harry approached the vertical wall of the triangular structure and slowly let his small sharp legs feel their way up as he started the climb. The wind was powerful, but thankfully helpful as it simply pushed him further into the wall as the torturous climb began.
It was somewhat scary climbing as his eyes swivelled and saw the countless dementors floating about like particularly angry and sentient bedsheets, but the animagus form provided the promised protection.
Thankfully he only had to reach the window on the first ‘floor’ of the prison, where he quickly dropped to the floor after seeing there was no human warden around.
Those would likely be concentrated around the actual entrance.
After all, the windows were too small for a human so there was no worry of a break in or break out that one couldn’t hear from the requisite blasting that would take.
Harry looked around the grimy and salty interior of the prison, the cells lining up along the triangular interior.
Wizarding Britain was small, it couldn’t possibly have that many criminals, and the size of the prison confirmed it. There were maybe 16 cells on the first level, and half of them were empty.
The inmates, thankfully, were sleeping, which allowed Harry to seek out the stairs leading upwards which he laboriously crawled up, straight under the cloak of a dementor.
A look up confirmed that the abomination did not have much meat on those bones and that no, despite popular belief, they did not wear pink women’s underwear.
Harry continued upwards to level 2, knowing that his target was likely going to be all the way on the top, in maximum security, as the muggles would call it.
The tower didn’t have many stairs, and Harry counted about 50 prisoners before he finally reached the top floor where a long-haired female figure was screaming wildly in one of the cells.
His magical senses extended to their maximum as he was about to ascend the last step and he felt no relevant wards that could inhibit his progress.
Now one could wonder at this point how he would interrogate Rosier when he found him considering that turning into his human form would attract the dementors like flies on shit.
Harry’s answer to this question was an assumption.
An assumption that whoever was present within one of the cells, did not attract the dementor’s attention, beyond the obvious of course.
He looked at the three gliding figures haunting the upper floor.
They’d likely congregate on any cell he entered due to the higher amount of emotions present, but even if they noticed he was an intruder, they wouldn’t be able to enter the cell without a warden.
After all, the iron bars on the prison cells didn’t just protect the public from the prisoners, they also protected the prisoners from dementors.
Dementors in the end were still constrained by material reality and couldn’t simply phase through objects. Thank Merlin for that.
Harry examined the cells as his little legs carried him past one after another until he stopped in front of the last one on the block.
A pale, dishevelled and gaunt figure was looking back at him with blinking eyes.
“A lobster?” the man asked confusedly in a croaky voice.
Harry steeled himself and entered the cell through the gaps in the iron bars after confirming one last time that there were no anti-animagus wards on it. Then he allowed the transformation to fall from his body, shooting him upwards and revealing his black robed form.
“Rosier,” he greeted through gritted teeth as he made a decision and the death eater, a faded mark clearly visible on his left arm, gaped at him.
Talking to Rosier had never really been part of his plan. The man likely wouldn’t talk, being highly loyal to the dark lord. Legilimency would do the job, he’d practiced enough and someone whose mind had been ravaged by dementors for more than a decade now wouldn’t be able to offer up any meaningful resistance.
Harry shivered as the cell suddenly grew colder, the dementors in the corridor approaching.
He whipped out his wand and first cast a silencing spell on the entire block, doubting that any of the wardens had magical senses refined enough to feel all the way up.
His wand was just about to turn to Rosier when the man crumpled together, forehead smashing on the grimy floor.
“Young master, you’ve come to save me!” he exclaimed loudly, making Harry supremely grateful for the spell he’d just cast.
Harry stared at the wretch of a man boring in front of him as his mind raced.
“You know who I am?” he asked softly.
“Of course,” Rosier muttered, head twitching, dirty matted hair swaying too and fro. “The papers, they bring them sometimes. I saw an article on the duelling tournament in Finland. Marvelous, glorious, to think I was blessed enough to help create such a wizard!”
The blunt admittal struck Harry like a club right across the face. Helped create.
It was as clear of an indicator that Rosier had the information he needed.
“Show me your memories, Rosier,” Harry said kindly. “I need to verify some things before we can leave here.”
“Of course!” Rosier explained, looking up with fanatical blue eyes.
“Legilimens,” Harry cast with a twitch of his wand and disappeared inside the inmates head.
What greeted him was the same coldness that permeated the prison. Rosier had been imprisoned for a very, very long time.
He swam through it, the death eater serving as a guide himself due to his rather helpful delusion.
Harry navigated his way through the memories in a reverse chronological order, seeing the crimes Rosier had committed in the war. Crimes vicious enough to make his skin crawl.
It was as he approached the man’s Hogwarts year however, that Harry felt the mental structure shifting in his head, it felt like he was standing in a house that was about to collapse.
He accelerated his pace until he found the memory of his mother’s assault, confirmed the usage of a magical artificial insemination method, skipped back, found the core memory he’d been looking for for so many years.
Rosier’s collapsing mind started fragmenting completely, parts of the memory simply drifting off into the aether of what was most likely death.
Harry nevertheless saw the boy, for he was nothing but a boy at the time, meet a cloaked figure in his family estate with his father, the older Rosier.
The father was sent out of his own office, deferentially bowing to the black-robed man sitting on an armchair.
“I have heard much about you, young Evan. Your dedication to the cause is… impressive. It is not often that I recruit amongst those still in school, but I have a task that needs to be completed. A task that will grant you entry into my ranks if you succeed, earlier than any other before you,” Voldemort said.
“My Lord,” Evan said, falling to his knees feverishly. “Name it and it shall be done, this I swear on my life!”
A hint of a smile could be seen beneath Voldemort’s hood. “Your fervour does your name service,” he stated, before pulling a vial from his sleeve and handing it over to the schoolboy. “There is a mudblood in your clas-”
The memory suddenly cut off and Harry was violently ejected from the mind of the death eater into the cold of reality.
He stood there, shaking, looking down at the blank eyes of Rosier who was looking up at him from his kneeling position, a smile on his face.
Harry slowly raised a leg, pushed the death eater with his foot.
The man toppled over like a puppet with its strings cut, head smashing on the floor.
“After all of that, you die on me?” Harry whispered, barely refraining from kicking the corpse. Then he paused, furrowed his brows and extended his leg backwards to deliver a kick to the dead man’s torso that lifted the entire body off the floor and hurled it at the stone wall in a symphony of flesh against rock.
The man had been emaciated, tortured by dementors for a decade and apparently devoted enough to showcase his memories through the pain of dying. Too weak to survive a mind invasion, too loyal to admit it.
Harry suddenly started breathing harshly, not feeling like there was any oxygen entering his chest.
He slowly sank to his knees, hand clutching his heart as he looked at the floor, trying to steady himself.
The implications had never been clearer.
Rosier obviously thought that Voldemort was his father, not seemingly caring that Harry was a half-blood.
However, the main take-away was that while Voldemort had ordered the assault, it was still possible if unlikely convoluted that he had used someone else’s genetic material.
The answer that he’d been looking for for so long didn’t feel real in his head and pragmatism quickly took over.
He was still in Azkaban, with a corpse at his feet. A corpse with the indent of his foot actually.
Now what?
-/-
AN: The last chapter had a bit of a comedic tone, it was mostly to disperse tension before going right back into it for the next few chapters.