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DMLE, Ministry of Magic
–Aurelius Cassian Vane–
As he sipped on the hot chocolate that somehow managed to taste stale to his senses, he went through the series of events that led to this day, to him being detained in one of the high security cells of DMLE, waiting to be processed, whatever that meant.
As a pureblood member of a rather bankrupt house, he had very little in terms of job prospects that did not require him sucking up to other, richer noble houses. It was an open secret that any Ministry Job worth its salt and almost all private sector jobs were controlled by the noble houses. It did not matter if they were Dark Aligned or Light aligned; all of them had either investments in business or were high level Ministry employees, who could decide whether a candidate went forward in the Ministry or not.
Most of the time, it was both, giving the nobles almost total control over the job market.
Which meant that after the pension from his father's death stopped coming in, he had to get a job, and to do that, he had to either suck up to someone from the Dark Faction or to someone from the Light Faction.
At the time, despite him being nobody important, he was still part of Slytherin House and knew exactly what was happening to members of both the Light Faction and the Dark Faction. His father might not have been the best father in, well, anything really, but he managed to instill a singular, very important lesson into his very being.
Paranoia. Distrust of Authority figures.
Looking back, he could somewhat forgive the man for borderline torturing him over small offences, always going back over his words and never giving him a single reason to trust the old man, except keeping him alive.
He knew that the members of the Light Faction were being killed left and right, for multiple reasons, the prime being Dumbledore's stupid, moronic rule of no killing that resulted in his own allies dying en masse, and also because the Dark Faction's wanton killing of fellow purebloods, despite claiming to champion their rights.
He also heard from the rumour mill at the time that more than Dumbledore, more than the Aurors even, the Dark Lord was the one responsible for the most deaths of pureblood wizards on the Dark Faction side, a fact that was ruthlessly suppressed until he was alive but had become an open secret now that he was dead, for good.
Hopefully.
Faced with the choice of choosing either fighting while being handicapped against people who had no qualms killing you or with people whose Lord might just kill over the slightest inconvenience, he did something completely out of left field.
It was a complete random find, actually. Something that had only popped up in his mind when he was spending the night in one of the abandoned classrooms with one of the books depicting Ancient Magical Architecture, instead of joining his fellow housemates in their sick fantasies. He had stumbled upon the story of Azkaban, as brief as it was.
He knew about the dreaded prison, like every other wizard in Magical Britain did, but nobody thinks of it actively. Nobody liked to do so. For good reason, obviously. It was a rather despairing place, to even read of, let alone to experience first hand.
That single thought changed the trajectory of his life. He knew that while the purebloods controlled most of the job market, that was only because there was a surplus of people seeking jobs.
He was sure that no one would want to work at Azkaban willingly, and even if they did, it would mean higher pay from the Ministry.
And as it turns out, he was right. The very pride that prevented him from sucking up to other purebloods to survive, also prevented him from quitting in the first week itself, as he felt the very joy of his life being sucked out as the time he spent with those terrifying creatures increased.
As the news came trickling in about the casualties sustained in the war, many of whom he had met during his time at Hogwarts, the urge to get out of Azkaban decreased more and more, until suddenly, one day, he found himself going through the routines, ignoring the please of the prisoners, ignoring the shivering of the newly arriving guardsmen, most of whom either quit or took a transfer within days, ignoring the Dementors even while maintaining safe distance, and went about his day, without thinking even once about getting out of Azkaban, or somehow saving enough to build a nest egg so he could leave this dreary place one day and start a family some day.
You know, to get his dead house going once more.
That was 12 years ago. Now, here he was, sitting in a DMLE cell, in his 40s, almost certainly already promoted to the position of Warden, and waiting for someone to interrogate him, so that he could go to a hotel in London and cry himself to sleep.
Decades of service at Azkaban, multiple promotions until he reached Deputy Warden, and hundreds of prisoners under his watch, he had never once felt as weak and helpless as he did last night.
He shivered all over, his body trembling, his mind ignoring the scalding hot chocolate spilling on his hands, as he recalled that terrible memory. Of going on his routine nightly walk, around the periphery of the entire island, and seeing a star shining brightly in the sky, then the brightness increasing until the alarms ringing on the island told him of something approaching the person.
Before he could even begin to warn or wake the lazy Warden, who mostly stayed here to collect a salary and stayed cooped up in his quarters, the bright projectile slammed into the other side of the prison's wall, creating quite a ruckus.
Despite the anomalous behavior, he knew he had a job to do, so he began running back to his station, to get a grip on everything. Before he could even take a dozen steps, however, there was a rumbling sound from the prison, before the white star burst out of the person and disappeared into the clouds.
Silence reigned supreme after that, and some part of him was relieved if that was going to be the end of it, because terrifying magic or not, if they were just here to break someone out, it was not his job to worry about that. At the end of the day, his job was to keep people in, not to go seeking them out if someone broke them out of the one prison no one was supposed to break into. He was just glad that no had died on his watch, since the Warden was just going to blame him for–
A whimper left his lips, trying to take a sip of the comforting hot chocolate, only to spill it all down his shirt, the memory of what came after shattering whatever hold he had over his sanity, as a tortured and strangled scream came out of his mouth.
All he could think of when he thought of the flash of light, twice as wide as the train that carried them to Hogwarts, that hit the prison's Main Wing was…
I am going to die! I am going to die! I am going to die! Die! Die! Die! Die!
In the middle of all this, he heard a quiet stupefy! before sweet darkness claimed him.
___xx___
–Amelia Bones–
"Merlin's Tits! What happened back there?!" She heard Moody curse as he lowered his wand, after stunning the one person they had managed to recover from the wreck of Azkaban, who was conscious when the attack happened, if they could even call that an attack.
Everyone else had been knocked out before they could see anything of note. All they could get from the others was a white star breaking in and out of the prison quickly before they were all knocked out.
Her eyes flashed to the giant hole in place of the ancient magical prison, with water bubbling from the ground, a testament to how deep the hole had been dug. It had been approximately an hour since they recovered all the employees and the Warden's body from the shores of the island, all placed neatly to the side, deliberately by the attacker, as if they did not want to kill the employees.
She knew that the Warden was anything but innocent, but had never been able to prove his crimes against the prisoners and employees in Azkaban, as the Ministry had declared that area a special Jurisdiction Zone where the laws were far more relaxed and required a majority approval from the Wizengamot to even investigate.
Ofcourse, special circumstances meant that they had barged in with Dumbledore, assured of the fact that the Wizengamot would trip over itself to give them blanket permission.
All the Unspeakables managed to get from the site was that this was magic completely foreign to them, that the magical traces found in the site did not match the required amount to inflict such damage. It was almost as if something non magical had done it, but that theory was quickly tossed out, as that was simply preposterous.
It was more likely that an entirely new type of magic had been used to destroy Azkaban. In direct contrast to that hole in the ground, was the Unspeakable's frankly obsession with the Dementors.
Or rather, what was left of them. The Dementors, previously thought unkillable, were simply hacked to pieces and left there for them, as if the attacker was making a statement.
Dumbledore had taken one look at everything before he had begun looking at everything, at a pace faster than Unspeakables even, coming to conclusions that she was sure the old man was going to keep to himself, at least the majority of it.
"I don't think we are going to get anything out of him," She was drawn out of her thoughts by Moody, who remarked with a sombre statement.
He was right. The Wizengamot will soon reconvene and begin demanding for heads to roll, either the attackers or theirs, it mattered not. The Deputy Warden, over decades of dedicated service, had risen up to the rank, and did not have even a single complaint. And now, in one fell swoop, his job was gone, his mind was likely in shambles, and now, he was going to be subjected to a mental scan, an invasive one if they did not get the required information.
This time, not even Dumbledore will be able to obstruct them, as the issue was that much more serious. Not only did they need to know if the Death Eaters and the other dangerous prisoners were alive or not, they also needed to find the people responsible for this.
Because she did not believe that it was a single person who did this, no matter how much the Unspeakables repeated that it was a single magical signature all around.
She simply refused to believe that one person could create destruction of this scale. She simply couldn't. Not when even the likes of Dumbledore and… You-Know-Who couldn't do it.
…..
…
..
"Blimey!" She ignored the curses and whispers around her as she locked eyes with Dumbledore, both saying the same thing at the same time.
"The Giant Killer."
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