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The first thing Hermione notices is the smell.
Not cold. Not despair. Not the creeping numbness that sinks into her bones when a dementor draws near.
Burning.
She almost misses it because Harry is shouting—“Expecto Patronum!”—and silver light explodes from him, brilliant and blinding, a stag charging forward with antlers lowered. Prongs slams into the mass of dementors swarming the lake’s edge, scattering them in a glittering arc of moonlit silver.
But they don’t flee.
They circle.
Time feels wrong—layered, doubled, folded in on itself. Hermione can feel the weight of the Turner's magic pressing against her ribs, the sense of standing inside a memory she already owns. She knows this moment. She remembers collapsing by the lake, remembers the cold closing in, remembers waking in the hospital wing convinced—certain—that Harry had saved them.
And he has.
But something is wrong.
“Harry,” she gasps, wand raised, eyes darting as another wave of cold sweeps over the shore. “They’re not retreating.”
They should be gone by now. Patronuses don’t bargain. They don’t hesitate. They drive dementors away.
Yet the creatures drift back toward the water, ragged cloaks billowing like drowned corpses, drawn inexorably toward Sirius—and toward their past selves lying helpless on the ground.
“They’re fighting it,” Harry says through clenched teeth. Sweat beads on his forehead, silver light trembling as he pours everything he has into the spell. “Hermione, I don’t think—”
A dementor lunges.
Hermione doesn’t think. She reacts.
“Lacarnum Inflamari!”
Blue fire erupts from her wand, a roaring wall of flame between the creature and the shore. She’s cast the spell dozens of times—controlled, measured, safe.
This is none of those things.
The fire changes midair.
The blue burns white-hot at its core, flaring brighter and brighter until Hermione has to shield her eyes. The flames don’t just strike the dementor—they consume it. The creature shrieks, a sound so raw and broken it makes her stomach twist.
Not the hollow rattle of breath through a dead throat.
Not the psychic scream that claws memories out of your skull.
Pain.
Real pain.
The fire eats through the darkness like acid. For a heartbeat—one horrifying, indelible heartbeat—Hermione sees inside. Not bones. Not organs. Something thick and oily and wrong, tearing apart as the flames burn hotter, whiter, brighter—
The dementor bleeds.
Black liquid spills from the creature, hissing as it hits the ground, evaporating into foul smoke. The shape collapses in on itself and is simply gone.
Silence crashes down.
Harry’s Patronus falters.
“Hermione,” he whispers.
She’s shaking. “Harry… it—it bled.”
Another dementor surges forward, drawn not to Harry’s silver light, but to her. To the fire.
The Ministry says dementors can’t be killed. Everyone says dementors can’t be killed. They’re manifestations. Wraiths. Eternal.
But that one—
Harry swallows, eyes fixed on the scorched earth. “If it bleeds,” he says very softly, “we can kill it.”
Prongs rears, stamping silver hooves against the ground. Harry lifts his wand higher, steadier now, the stag sweeping wide—herding the dementors, driving them away from Sirius, from their past selves, funneling them into a tightening arc.
“Hermione!” Harry shouts.
She understands instantly.
She steps forward, feet planted, teeth clenched hard enough to ache. “Lacarnum Inflamari!”
The fire roars again, focused now, directed—Harry’s Patronus corrals the dementors into a shrinking wall of shadow and cold, silver antlers hemming them in until there is nowhere left to go.
White fire consumes the night.
The dementors burn.
They don’t vanish. They don’t flee. They die.
Each one screams as the flames strip them apart, black blood boiling away into nothing. The cold lifts all at once, violently, like a vice released from Hermione’s chest. The air warms. The lake ripples gently, untouched, as though the darkness had never been there at all.
When it’s over, there is nothing left but scorched ground and the echo of screaming that will haunt Hermione for the rest of her life.
Prongs lowers his head, silver sides heaving, and dissolves into mist.
Harry stares at the empty shore. “We weren’t supposed to do that.”
“No,” Hermione says faintly. “Definitely not.”
For one terrible moment they simply stand there, the weight of what they’ve done crashing down on them—until Hermione gasps and grabs Harry’s arm.
“The loop,” she says urgently. “Harry, we have to go. Now.”
They run.
They save Buckbeak. They free Sirius. Time snaps back into place with cruel, inevitable precision.
The hospital wing smells like disinfectant and fury.
Cornelius Fudge is pacing, face mottled and red, mustache twitching violently as he rants. “—unprecedented! Absolutely unprecedented! The dementors—dead, Severus! Dead! Do you know what that means?”
Snape’s expression is thunderous. Dumbledore watches from the corner, quiet and unreadable.
“Dementors can’t die!” Fudge insists. “Everyone knows that! It must have been a dispersal, or an illusion, or—”
“Minister,” Dumbledore says mildly, “perhaps we should focus on the matter of Sirius Black’s escape.”
Fudge splutters. “Yes, well—that too—but the dementors—”
Harry lies very still in his bed. Hermione sits beside him, fingers clenched tight in her lap.
They exchange a look.
They will never tell the Ministry.
Some knowledge is too dangerous to share.
Eventually Fudge storms out, Snape’s robes snapping sharply behind him. The door clicks shut. Madam Pomfrey retreats to her office, muttering darkly about paperwork.
Silence settles.
Dumbledore remains.
He stands at the foot of Harry’s bed, hands folded loosely, blue eyes sharp behind half-moon spectacles. Moonlight catches the silver in his beard.
“Ah,” he says at last. “That is better.”
Hermione straightens instinctively.
“The Minister is quite correct,” Dumbledore says pleasantly. “According to the Ministry’s understanding, dementors cannot be destroyed.”
Hermione’s fingers dig into the sheets.
“And yet,” Dumbledore continues, voice gentle, “the Ministry has been mistaken before.”
He steps closer, lowering his voice—not because anyone might overhear, but because some truths deserve softness. “I have never cared for dementors,” he says. “Not as guards of Azkaban. Not as instruments of fear. And certainly not as guests at Hogwarts.”
His gaze flicks, just briefly, to Hermione’s wand.
“Creatures that feed on despair,” he adds, “often mistake themselves for eternal.”
Hermione swallows. “Professor—”
Dumbledore raises a hand. “No explanation is required.”
For a moment, his eyes seem to focus on something only he can see—scorched earth, silver antlers, lingering warmth where cold once ruled.
“I suspect,” he says mildly, “that history will record tonight as an unfortunate anomaly. A mystery. A regrettable loss of Ministry resources.”
He pauses.
“A mystery,” he repeats, “that will remain unsolved.”
Harry finally exhales.
“You acted to protect life,” Dumbledore says simply. “And you succeeded.”
He straightens, tapping his cane once against the floor. “As for the knowledge you now carry, I trust you to keep it where it belongs.”
“We will,” Hermione says immediately.
“Yes, sir,” Harry adds.
Dumbledore inclines his head, satisfied. “Sleep,” he says. “Tomorrow will bring enough trouble of its own.”
He turns to leave, pausing at the door.
“Oh—and you two?”
Harry and Hermione look up.
“Well done,” Dumbledore says quietly.
The door closes behind him.
The hospital wing settles into stillness.
Hermione leans back, breath shaky but steadying. Harry stares at the ceiling, heart finally slowing.
Some monsters, he thinks, are only unkillable because no one has dared to try.
And the loop closes.
Fin