Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

And the voids retreated back as smoothly as they came, the winds of nothingness lessening with each meter they traversed, as they slid back down the stairs, and departed.

Whether they truly had their own pseudo-intelligence, or whether Harry had finally succeeded in expecting them to go... that, Harry didn't know.

But they were gone.

Harry took a moment to sit down beside the unconscious Bellatrix on the stairs, and slumped down as she was slumped, closing his eyes for a moment, only a moment, he sure as hell wasn't planning to sleep in Azkaban, but he needed to take that moment. The Aurors would still be going down the stairs slowly, Harry hoped, so it wouldn't hurt to take just five minutes to rest. Harry was careful to keep his thoughts positive, cheerful, my, I'll just have some nice regenerative rest here, and then I'll feel better, rather than, say, my, I'll just collapse in emotional and physical exhaustion, because the Dementors hadn't yet retreated very far.

And by the way, Harry said to his brain, you're fired.

"I found him!" cried the old wizard's voice.

Who? thought Amelia, as she turned to see Dumbledore's return, carrying in his arms -

- the one sight, the one person, she would never have expected to behold -

- a man in torn red robes, looking scorched like he'd fought a small war, blood dried on many cuts. His eyes were open, and he was chewing on a bar of chocolate, held in his one living hand.

Bahry One-Hand was alive.

A glad cry went up, her Aurors lowering their wands, some of them already starting to rush forward.

" Stay on guard! " bellowed Amelia. "Check them both for Polyjuice - scan Bahry for small Animagi or traps -"

" Innervate. Wingardium Leviosa. "

There was a pause. Harry sensed, though he could not quite see, that the invisible woman was pushing herself to her feet, and turning her head to look around. "I'm... alive...?"

Harry was sorely tempted to say no, just to see what she made of that. Instead he hissed, "Don't ask stupid questions."

"What happened?" whispered Bellatrix.

And the Dark Lord gave a wild, high-pitched laugh, and said, "I scared the Dementors away, my dear Bella."

There was a pause. Harry wished he could see Bellatrix's face; had he said the wrong thing?

After a time, in a quavering voice, "Could it be, my Lord, that in your new form, you have begun to care for me -"

"No," Harry said coldly, and turned from her (though he kept his wand on her), and began walking. "And take care that you do not offend me again, or I will abandon you here, use or no use. Now follow, or be left behind; I have work to do."

Harry strode forward, not listening to the gasping sounds that came from behind him; he knew Bellatrix was following.

...because the last thing that woman needed, the very last thing she needed to start thinking before the psychiatric healer began trying to deprogram her, was to believe that her Dark Lord could ever love her back.

The old wizard smoothed his silver beard contemplatively, looking at where Auror Bahry was being carried out of the room by two strong Aurors.

"Do you understand this, Amelia?"

"No," she said simply. She suspected some trap they hadn't yet been able to fathom, which was why Auror Bahry was going to be kept outside the main party and guarded.

"Perhaps," the old wizard said at length, "whichever of their number can cast the Patronus Charm, is more than a simple hostage. Someone who was tricked into this, mayhap? For whatever reason, they left your Auror alive; let us not be the first to wield deadly curses, when we find them -"

"I see," said the old witch in sudden realization, " that was their plan. It costs them nothing to Oblivate him and leave him alive, and makes us hesitate -" Amelia nodded decisively, and said to her people, "We carry on as before."

The old wizard sighed. "Any news from the Dementors?"

"If I tell you," Amelia snapped, "will you run off again?"

"It costs you nothing, Amelia," the old wizard said quietly, "and may save one of your own people the fight."

Costs me nothing except my chance at vengeance -

But that was nothing compared to the other, the annoying old wizard was often right in the end, it was part of what made him so annoying.

"The Dementors have ceased to answer questions about the other person they said they saw," Amelia told him, "and they will not say why, nor where."

Dumbledore turned to the blazing silver phoenix on his shoulder, whose light illuminated the whole corridor, and received a silent headshake in reply. "I cannot detect them either," said Dumbledore. Then he shrugged. "I suppose I shall just walk the whole spiral from top to bottom and see if anything turns up, shall I?"

Amelia would have ordered him not to do it, if she thought that would have made the tiniest difference.

"Albus," said Amelia as the old wizard turned to depart, "even you can be ambushed."

"Nonsense, my dear," the old wizard said cheerfully as he strode off yet again, waving as though in admonition his fifteen-inch wand of unidentifiable dark-grey wood, "I'm invincible."

There was a pause.

("He didn't just really say that -" whispered the newest Auror present, a still-prim young lady by the name of Noelle Curry, to the senior member of her trio, Auror Brooks. "Did he?")

("He can get away with it," Isabel whispered back to her, "he's Dumbledore, not even Fate takes him seriously anymore.")

"And that," Amelia said heavily, for the benefit of the younger Aurors, "is why we never call him in on anything unless we absolutely must."

Harry lay very still on the hard bench that served as the bed of this cell, a blanket pulled over him, staying as absolutely motionless as he could while he waited for the fear to return. There was a Patronus approaching, and a powerful one. Bellatrix was hidden by a Deathly Hallow, no easy Charm would penetrate that; but Harry did not know what other arts the Aurors might employ to detect his own self, and dared not reveal his ignorance by asking her. So Harry lay on a hard bed, in a cell with a locked door, and the mighty metal door locked behind him, in absolute darkness, with a thin blanket pulled over him, hoping that whoever it was wouldn't look in, or wouldn't look too closely if they did -

That wasn't a point Harry could affect, really, that part of his fate lay entirely in the hands of the Hidden Variables. Most of his mind was concentrating on the ongoing Transfiguration he was performing.

Listening in the silence, Harry heard the quick footsteps approach; they paused outside his door, and then -

- continued onward.

Soon the fear returned.

Harry didn't allow himself to notice his own relief, any more than he allowed himself to notice the fear. He was holding in his mind the form of a Muggle device rather larger than a car battery, and slowly applying that Form to the substance of an ice cube (which Harry had frozen using Frigideiro on water from a bottle in his pouch). You weren't supposed to Transfigure things to be burned, but between the original substance being water, and the Bubble-Head Charm to protect their air supply, Harry hoped that this wouldn't make him or anyone else sick.

Now it was just a question of whether there would be enough time before the Aurors did a detailed check on this cell block, for Harry to finish this Transfiguration, and the partial Transfiguration he would do after that -

When the old wizard strode back empty-handed, even Amelia began to feel a twinge of worry. She and the other two Auror teams had worked a third of the way down the three spirals, in synchrony so as not to allow any gap in their coverage that could be jumped by cutting through a ceiling, and they'd yet to find any sign.