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One Honest Heart	By : Andreas Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5285 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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12. The Hunt

Even when I stayed after class, I was still one of the crowd, just another one of those troublesome people who demanded something in return for the money they donated. I was just another student trying, and repeatedly failing, to leach learning from the esteemed Mr. Henry Witherto. And in Henry's eyes, this also made me an idiot, and thus unworthy of his attention. Only idiots, he seemed to reason, would need Patronus training as grownups, and choose him as their teacher. In his own rude way, Henry was right about more things than one might have liked to admit, for fear of making his ego explode.

It quickly became clear that simple dawdling after class would not suffice. I could have been a potted plant for all the attention he gave me. So, I hemmed and hawked and said, in the tried and tested manner of journalists and students both, that 'it must be fascinating, spell research.' He looked up from his papers, arched an eyebrow and said 'Why?'. When I answered that with some kind of goldfish impersonation (he later told me, and I feel bound to agree), he simply turned back to his papers, and that was that for that evening. I went home and got pissed.

After my third failed attempt at luring information out of Mr Witherto, I went for the direct approach. I told him I was working on a story about the Patronus Charm, had done extensive research, and would like to see whether he could contribute anything I did not already know. It was the direct approach of a burning arrow towards an inflammable ego. His reply was that it always amazed him how people could question the blatantly obvious but take the ridiculous rambling of prophets as undisputable fact.

He then turned back to his papers again, and I thought even that approach - tried and tested on Ministry officials and close-mouthed cookery-contest crones - would fail.

When I was halfway through packing my bag, he began his lecture. I sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair, opposite his desk, all night through. The recounting of his research and latest findings followed no chronology that I could detect, was largely anecdotal, rapid and ruthlessly academic, and would have been almost entirely incomprehensible if I hadn't actually done the extensive research I'd claimed to. I'd read all his published work, plus bits of a manuscript I'd managed to weasel out of his publisher. I could fill in all the gaps, sometimes vocally, and make the required leaps of logic and chronology. The fact that he didn't manage to confuse or deter me elevated me, on the Witherto ranking, from common idiot to vaguely promising, if rather slow, imbecile.

The Dementor's defining trait, he explained, was its lack of life, the absence of the energy that keeps all other creatures sentient and aware. The Patronus, on the other hand, is nothing but life. It's a piece of ourselves that we release from the bounds of our body and mind when both are failing us. But life, though strong, cannot exist (at least not in this world) without a body to contain it. Therefore, it seeks a vessel to fill, and the only bodies not already full of life are Dementors and their demented victims. That is why the Patronus charges towards the nearest Dementor. It is, Henry said, rather like water pouring into a cavity in the ground. There is, he concluded with one of his trademark snorts, nothing nobler about our Patroni than about ourselves. Ergo, nothing noble at all.

That morning, I dreamt of snake-like Patroni slithering and sliding into a large black hole, in the centre of which lay the unconscious, bloody shape of Harry Potter. The following evening, our plan took shape, and one week later, the hunt began.

The idea, birthed by me but brought to maturity by Henry, was that Patroni, being pure energy, work on a level of reality where even distant absences of life (Dementors) would affect them, much as the North and South Poles affect a common compass. We theorized that with every other body in Britain filled with life (or rapidly decomposing, as Henry thoughtfully pointed out), Patroni would detect the missing Dementor and gravitate towards it in some barely noticeable manner. Throughout his many Patronus classes, Henry had observed that Patroni tended to pull north, towards Azkaban Fortress.

The theory was that if one cast a Patronus closer to the missing Dementor than Azkaban, it would be drawn towards the single Dementor instead of his many island relatives. When it hit me that the Dementors of Azkaban were indeed very many and thus likely to exert a greater pull at any given point within the British Isles, I felt very ashamed of my stupid idea and told Henry as much. He snorted at me and told me we were not dealing with something as common as magnetism here. Azkaban was not the North Pole. A Patronus needed no more than one body to sustain itself, and operating on a magical plane quite separate from the noise of nature, it would always seek the shortest route to an Empty vessel.

I'm not quite sure I understand all of his explaining to this day. The important thing, as ever, was that he was right.

So, we chose from the class those with the strongest Patroni: Hetty Amberseed, frightened of her own shadow and quite prepared to launch her weasel Patronus at it repeatedly and vindictively; Bob Willsome, the epitome of laziness who thought it a perfectly splendid idea to have unasked-for energy skip off to do his work for him; John Parsnip, the morbid melancholic who seemed to release an unwanted and frightened Patronus fairy from his listless body rather than actively thrusting anything forth (which he seemed incapable of doing just in general); and Mrs Wilma Winterbottom, your archetypical rotund matron who seemed to practically overflow with energy in all directions of life. A busty, bustling busybody who was of the firm opinion that people in general were terribly bad at managing their lives the way she would have. She had such an excess of energy that her expulsion of the Patronus was rather like a small, overcharged locomotive letting off steam.

We chose these people because of their strong and reliable Patroni, not because of their personalities. It seemed, Henry concluded after our first day, that the peculiar predilection for producing powerful Patroni on demand also brought with it a regrettable predilection for being powerfully peculiar. During the later days of the hunt, I would look back on my alternately chaotic and comatose cookery contest days with something akin to fondness.

Hetty was a suspicious, sniping old hag; Bob kept up a steady stream of complaints whenever he had to move his considerable bulk about; John unerringly found the black storm cloud to every silver lining; and Mrs Winterbottom was completely averse to Apparating even the shortest of distances. This aversion proved a substantial problem, as the plan required a great number of Apparations in quick succession. When Mrs Winterbottom was made aware of this fact, she said she would not have it, she simply would not have it. When her authority in the case of what she would or would not have was put into question, and Henry absolutely insisted she was vital to the success of his plan, Mrs Winterbottom turned into what Henry would later describe as a wobbly, plump pudding of woe (what he would later say behind my back, I really don't want to know). She lamented most earnestly that she could not be of service to such a fine gentleman but she had her principles and one of them was not to get splinched, for what ever would her poor children and grandchildren do without her around to organise their dear little lives? One suspects she had, at some point in her life, rather overdosed on Jane Austen. That, at least, was Henry's theory. Henry was very big on theories.

He was also very keen on getting his own way. He put on a sympathetic face, said 'there there,' and enveloped Mrs Winterbottom in a hug just before he Disapparated, distraught wobbly female in a firm grip. After the third time he performed a similar trick, grabbing Mrs Winterbottom in more and more unlikely places, Mrs Winterbottom took it upon herself to brush up on her Apparating skills and was always one of the first to arrive at a new location, eager to get the hunt over and done with. (This eager Apparating was later employed for visiting family and friends, for which we were undoubtedly cursed by many.)

The idea was to cover as much ground as possible in as short a period of time as could be managed, to cast Patroni at a great number of pre-selected locations in order to compare the results and thus form a map to the missing Dementor. Henry, never one to let prejudice stand in the way of progress, had contacted a colleague at a Muggle university to manage this. The Muggle, Charles Williams, used electronic measuring devices to detect the even the slightest hint of a specific trajectory in the Patroni we cast. He then entered these data into a book-like device called a laptop. Using equations that took into account the presence of other sources of Empty bodies (notably Azkaban prison) the laptop presented likely vectors that grew more and more specific and closer and closer together as the hunt progressed.

While we were all encouraged by these results, the constant Apparating tired all of us. And it didn't exactly help that Henry kept giving impromptu lectures on the mechanics of Apparation. Not even my pathologically inquisitive mind appreciated learning that while Apparation worked on the magical plane where natural nuisances like time and space does not matter, disturbances in the web it cast over our physical world can lead to serious problems. Apparation works by the traveller's forcing the part of this magical web that is connected to his destination to reform his physical form there while disintegrating it at his point of departure. His life energy, the same thing that spawns the Patroni, existing on that same magical plane and tied to this world only through the traveller's body, will momentarily flow into the great web only to pour into the new body at its moment of completion. As time has no meaning in the web, this can be said to take no time at all, and no one has calculated the time it does take on the worldly side of the transport. However, holes in the web do appear, for various unexplained reasons, and if such a hole were to be located between the Apparationer and his destination, the transmission of his body might be jumbled. The results are often so poor that the traveller's life energy won't even bother to attempt leaving the magical plane, merging instead into the web. Then, of course, one also runs the risk of one's life energy being distorted, and subsequent insanity.

I told him to shut up, and was promptly upgraded to opinionated dull-wit in the Witherto rankings. I think that was when he began taking a non-professional interest in my presence. He did stay unusually quiet for the rest of that day. And he stopped flirting with Mrs. Winterbottom, which I think rather disappointed her, to tell the truth. He was, after all, a dashingly handsome and quite brilliant bloody bastard.

Henry's Patronus always stomped around longer than anyone else's. That was, he said, because he knew how to make an effort, and thus, so did the spectral embodiment of his power. And he wasn't even trying to be funny.

When the vectors were through coalescing, everyone's spirits sank yet again. The smallest target area the laptop could produce had a two-kilometre radius and most of that ground was covered in dense forest. What made it worse was that the forest in question was the infamous Forbidden one. The only habitation within the target area was Hogwarts castle and we couldn't very well barge in there and turn the castle inside out to look for a Dementor that would hardly have gone unnoticed. So, the Forest it was.

Hetty acquired some sudden stomach ailment, Bob caught it from her with surprising agility, and John felt rather too at home in the dreary Forest to produce any sort of reliable Patronus. We did manage to convince Mrs Winterbottom to join us in the Forest for a while, but after a deranged Bowtruckle chose to forcibly adopt her as its tree of choice, she left in quite a huff and hurry, vowing never to return.

It looked like the end of the hunt, and we'd scarcely had a sniff of our prey. We'd never be able to do a systematic Patronus search of the Forbidden Forest without getting severely injured, or even killed, in the process. And none of our Patroni could sustain itself long enough to track through the forest and lead us like a bloodhound to the missing Dementor.

We were ready to give up, but then Henry came to think of that third element Charles had taken into account when calculating the position of the lost Dementor. That second source of beckoning Emptiness.
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One Honest Heart