A/N: Welcome to the fic.

A Note From 2017: There is a fanfiction under here, I promise, but it's important to me that you read this first. It's a long fic. This is barely a fraction. :-)

I wrote this fanfiction back in 2010/11 when I was only 17 and 18 years old. It was a source of joy and community for me then, and an odd but much needed expression of my sexuality. I'm incredibly proud of my work, and I love coming back to read this is a record of something incredible that I created (having been deeply dyslexic), and a record of who I was at the time – most of it.

When I was 17 and 18, I was ignorant about gender, race, and sexuality, and this fic also makes that abundantly clear. The fetishization of gay men and gay culture that is commonplace in the fanfiction community is problematic—which became more and more clear to me as I wrote the fic. I got more uncomfortable writing what I had originally set out to write and what my regular reviewers were asking for. Writing about all relationship types is wonderful, but there's a lot of stereotypes and harmful language that are perpetuated by ignorant authors on this site, including 17 year old me.

Second, I don't like the way I portray women in this fic. It is never okay to use "woman," "pussy," or "bitch" to describe someone of any gender negatively, because it's saying that the worst thing you can be is a woman. There are amazing women in this story, and I wish I'd done them justice with my language.

Third, fanfiction should be a place to live out our fantasies. Fantasizing about power dynamics or non-consensual situations is a legitimate sexuality that I share. We call that kink. I cannot, however, in good conscience, portray non-consensual sex and all of the power dynamics, coercions, and poor communication that are in this story without acknowledging that this is not a model of consent that is okay to use in the real world. If you're interested in doing any of that kind of stuff with a partner, please join your local BDSM community to learn how to do it safely and find people who want to do it as much as you do, or read about it on my blog, astudyinkink dot blogspot dot com.

Instead of using my time to edit this five bazillion page long fic to meet my standards, I'm now a BDSM/kink educator, a woman in tech, and in fierce opposition of our government's new leadership.

If you choose to read this, please enjoy it, but think critically about the literature you consume and how it portrays people in the world. It matters.

Also, oh my god, I was such a whiny, needy child- please disregard all future author's notes. :-)

This fic depicts a romantic relationship between the characters Harry and Dumbledore. In this story, they appear approximately the same age and are both over 18.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter nor anything to do with it, and I'm not making money on this. Your feedback is the currency of this work.

This is rated M for sexual situations, language, and some amount of violence. If you're not interested in reading actual sex, those sections are well marked and avoidable.

Enjoy!

Harry James Potter dodged a curse. He flung himself through a door, slammed it shut behind him, and sealed it with a quick "Colloportus!" He took a moment to get his bearings, but just then the room started to spin. At least he knew where he was; he was in the spinning room with a lot of doors in the Department of Mysteries. He tried to mark the door he'd come from, but it vanished in a blue blur of candle light.

The room stopped spinning and Harry looked around quickly, shaking himself to get rid of the nausea. Well, he knew where his attacker was. Guessing by the pounding behind one of the doors, she was still unable to get through. Harry paused to think for a moment. There were twelve doors—no, thirteen. There had been twelve during his fiasco in his fifth year, but since then one had been added. During Harry's Auror training, he and his coworkers had studied all of the rooms in the Department of Mysteries. Harry knew which doors led where (or, as well as he could with them moving occasionally), and knew about the contents of each room.

Except the Thirteenth Room.

Nobody ever mentioned the Thirteenth Room. Harry knew the others could see the door. He'd often see people stare at it and then look away quickly, as if frightened they'd be caught looking. Harry'd always wondered what was inside, but something told him never to ask.

So if Destra Jones (the unbalanced criminal Harry was assigned to detain) was in the Time Room, three doors to the right would be the Thirteenth Room. He bore that in mind as he tried to pick a room for regrouping.

Just then, Jones burst through the sealed door. Harry swore as the door slammed shut behind her and the room started spinning again. She aimed a curse at him, but it landed five feet to his left due to the spinning of the room. Was her vision bad? Maybe Harry could use that to his advantage—but not just now. The room stopped and Harry picked a door at random and dove through it.

The door snapped behind him and Harry locked it and sealed it.

The crack between the door and the frame vanished as the surfaces between them became one.

"What?" That had never happened before. Maybe he'd done the spell more powerfully that usual.

Harry leaned against the door and looked around the room.

"Oh no," he groaned. He'd never seen this room before. Doors moved around occasionally, and sometimes things were added or taken from rooms, but there were never newrooms.

Harry was behind the Thirteenth Door.

"Oh no…" He needed to get out of there. This was not the moment for exploration. "Alohamora! Alohamora! Aloha—shit!" Not only did the spell fail to open the door, the door melted into the wall. There was no door anymore.

He pressed his ear up against the wall where the door had been. He could hear Jones on the other side making muffled incantations. He reached up to push his hair out of his eyes.

He was sweating.

Harry James Potter had been the Boy who Lived, he'd been the Chosen One, and then the Master of Death and now he'd moved on and become an Auror for the Ministry of Magic. He may have been an Auror, but, he thought to himself, he was doing a shit job of it at the moment. He was trapped by his adversary in the unknown Thirteenth Room of the Department of Mysteries. This witch was dangerous, and it was Harry's job to put her away, but right now he wasn't being very useful. If his superiors saw him just sitting there listening to a wall with a dark witch on the loose, they would not have been thrilled. Ok, so maybe they would have overlooked it because he was Harry Potter, but Harry wasn't pleased with himself.

But that's not why he was sweating.

He was sweating because it had become eerily warm in that particular room.

And the door had vanished.

The room was becoming so warm that Harry decided he'd remount his effort to escape. He'd rather deal with Destra Jones than risk combusting. He'd already decided that the room was not the best place to be, but his urgency for escape was rising with the temperature. He backed away from the door.

"Reducto!" Nothing happened. "REDUCTO!"He pushed with all of his magical might and concentration, but the door didn't budge. He exhaled in frustration. He ran his hand through his damp hair, and looked around at the room for the first time.

Now that he looked, nothing in the room looked dangerous at all. In fact, at a glance, if Harry hadn't known better, he would have guessed it was being used as storage for some elderly lady. As he looked closer, he started noticing specific objects around him. There was a table with a set of wizard chess. In one corner were bowling pins and a bowling ball. On a rack were several impressive hats, and there was a stack of old vinyl musical records but no player. There was a stack of rubber ducks collected on the floor, a brightly colored box of sweets (which reminded Harry fleetingly of Dumbledore), and the largest time turner Harry had ever seen.

Perched against one wall was a Lightning Model Broom which had been designed specifically for Harry by a particularly cocky craftswoman. It was the best broom on the market— zero to two hundred in ten seconds, and on-the-spot turning. The handle was a dark, glossy green to match Harry's eyes, the twigs were jet black to match his hair, and on the end of the handle was a gold lightning bolt where the model name would be. It was marketed as the Chosen Broom and sold to all of the major Quidditch teams. Harry got one for free and rode it, despite how much his friends made fun of him for it; it was, after all, an excellent broom.

All in all, the contents of the room looked like a random collection of possessions—junk that one could find at most any second hand or antique store. There were only a few objects that stood out. A few were the broom and time turner, and another was a Pensieve, which was quite rare, and a large bottle of gold potion labeled "Felix Felecius: Luck Potion" in messy blue handwriting. There were actually only two objects in the room that Harry didn't recognize. One was a large, shimmering red egg nestled in a box. It was too large to be an ostrich, and too small to be a dragon. The other object was an anvil-sized, sky-blue crystal perched on the top of a tall shelf across the room.

Deciding that his situation was dire (as his robes were becoming unbearably warm), he justified commandeering any useful objects to get himself out. It took all of ten seconds for Harry to scan the room and pick out what could be useful. He grabbed the bottle Felix Felecius and, on a whim, took a small swig. Next, he grabbed the giant time turner and placed its long chain around his neck. He didn't use it; the Department of Mysteries wasn't exactly in normal space, and Harry didn't want to end up floating around one of Jupiter's moons, but he thought he might be able to use it later to catch Destra Jones.

Having had a swig of Felix, he decided to try cursing the wall where the door was again. He tried reducto a few times, but it didn't work. Without a great deal of thought, and mostly out of frustration and wanting to smash something, he pointed his holly and phoenix wand at the bowling ball, levitated it, and wordlessly shot it at the wall where the door had been.

It bounced off with an almighty thud, but something—Felix—told Harry to try again, so he did. He lifted the ball from the ground again with magic, sent it to the back of the room so that it had more room to gain speed, and shot it with full force at the wall.

Instead of the thud from before, the wall cracked. When the ball fell away, there was a web of fractures about two feet in diameter. Harry wondered how a bowling ball could damage what magic could not, but wasted no time in sending the ball flying at the wall a third time. When the ball fell away, Harry could see a small hole in the wall, maybe three inches in diameter. Bits of white paint and chips of fiber drifted fell to the floor.

Then Harry noticed that the white paint was browning around the edges of the holes. No sooner had he made this revelation than a creeping hand made entirely of flame clawed its way through the hole.

Harry's breath caught in his chest. Fiendfyre. That's why the room was getting so hot. Destra had conjured Fiendfyre.

He knew the counter-curse, but the Felix Felecius in him said to retreat. Was there another door?

He backed up, never looking away from the new hole in the wall. He knew he wouldn't trip over anything; he had Felix's help with that. The fiery hand from the door had grown into an arm, and the fire was burning the hole larger and larger.

Harry didn't trip over anything, but he did walk into the towering shelf at the back of the room. The shelf wobbled, off balance, but Harry didn't look away from the door. The giant, shiny blue crystal pitched forward off the shelf and dropped squarely over Harry's head, cracking his scull.

Harry crumpled under the hundreds of pounds of weight of the crystal, which then fell to the floor and shattered. Harry landed in a bed of shards that shredded his back. The time turner swung in an odd arc as Harry fell. The way it landed caused the hourglass it to start spinning, but Harry didn't notice. His skull was cracked fatally, and blood gushed from beneath his hair, contrasting with the glittering blue crystals. Not even the roaring of the Fiendfyre could wake him.

He didn't even notice when the crystal shards started growing. As if every second was a hundred years, each piece grew and reconnected with others around it. They grew upwards and across the floor and around Harry, squeezing him into a cocoon of shimmering blue. The crystal continued to climb and spread around the room. Soon all the objects in the room were encased as well: a room full of junk trapped like bugs in a piece of amber.

A bit of crystal lodged itself in the time turner, ceasing its revolutions and the crystal, now a giant spire twisting towards the high ceiling, stopped growing.

Harry James Potter disappeared from the Department of Mysteries on February 28th in the year 2019. Reports would say that he had been consumed by Fiendyfyre cast by Destra Jones. Destra Jones was killed a week later on sight for the murder of the Wizarding World's hero, and the Thirteenth Room was never mentioned, nor seen again.