Upon Robards' recommendation, they apparated to the south-west corner of the park, the side bordered by Muggle terraced houses rather than the River Thames. Twilight was settling and there was a chill in the air as Harry and Draco looked up at the dark and stationary rollercoaster track, just visible over the high tree tops. Even in the dimming light it looked rickety, and Harry silently commended anyone willing to ride on such a thing without the assurance of any kind of magical reinforcement. 

"Yeah," said Draco slowly, scanning through the oak trees with narrowed eyes. "Doesn't look like there's much going on in there."

A couple walked by them, muttering that they were sure they'd closed all the windows, but it was best to go home and check, and Harry figured they were in the right place. He jerked his head over the road where the metal gates sat open but uninviting to Battersea Park. "Let's go see what all the fuss is about."

They crossed the traffic and were suddenly hit but the unmistakable hum of magic. "Tell me I didn't leave my taps running," Draco growled as they both pushed physically against the wards that had been set up to keep people away. They were strong; whoever had put them up really didn't want anyone getting inside that funfair.

"You didn't," Harry said through gritted teeth. "We just need to get over the threshold, come on, nearly...there."

As soon as they reached the gates though, they hit a shield charm which needed to be dismantled. Harry grunted and tried to ignore every instinct in him telling him to turn around and go home, to forget all about this place and make a nice cup of tea.

"You're not getting rid of us that easily," he growled, probing with his own spells to find a chink in the protective magic.

"Urgh," Draco moaned, rubbing his temple with one hand and waving his wand about with the other. "Is your brain suddenly feeling like it's smashing against your skull."

"Yes," Harry grunted as pain exploded in front of his eyes, making it very difficult to concentrate. "Fancy doing something about that?"

"No, I thought I'd just leave it be," Draco snarled, and set about repelling whatever charm had given them such violent headaches whilst Harry tackled the shield. He tried not to be stung by Draco's attitude, or worry who the mysterious date was he was letting down (that Harry was completely convinced existed now, or why else would he be so grumpy?)

"Almost...there..." Harry uttered, before suddenly finding the weakness he needed to exploit and tearing the spell apart.

They tripped over and stumbled into the park, the magic relinquishing its hold now they were through the gates. "I can see why no one's coming in," Draco panted, looking back at the open gates as if he could see the charms at work.

Harry nodded in agreement. "I think it's safe to say, whoever's in here knows what they're doing."

They walked further in, the silence of the abandoned park hanging heavy over them. There wasn't much in the way of open field to this park, so the fair started almost immediately, and they walked past the unmanned ticket booth within a few steps. Harry's head turned cautiously left and right, but there was still no sign of movement other than the swaying trees. "Lumos," he said, and Draco followed suit, bathing the amusements they were walking past in a pale blue light and deep, dark shadows. "Why though?" he wondered out loud. "Why try so hard to keep everyone out?"

Draco didn't answer other than to shake his head. Harry, however, was soon distracted but a sudden shift in the shadows, just out of the corner of his eye.

"Stupefy!" he shouted, hitting whoever was lurking and causing them to sprawl to the ground with a loud "Umph!" noise.

Harry and Draco raced over to the figure in between the spinning teacup ride and the cotton candy stall, their wands raised as the man moaned and rolled on his back.

Harry came to an abrupt halt. "Dung?" he said incredulously.

The man, Mundungus Fletcher, blinked in surprise and managed to half sit up. "Harry Potter?" he croaked in a distinctly East End accent. "Harry my boy! Oh ain't you a sight for sore eyes." He scrambled to his feet, and Harry could feel Draco's mild confusion without even turning to look at him, so Harry explained.

"Malfoy, this is Mundungus Fletcher, a former member of the Order of the Phoenix."

Draco stepped closer and arched an eyebrow over Dung's tatty coat, gold tooth and grubby bald head. "Right," he said, with the appropriate amount of scepticism. "And what, Mr Fletcher, can I ask are you doing here when everyone else is being kept out by a rather staggering amount of magic?"

"Ah," said Dung, raising his eyebrows. "Well I did that, didn't I? Had to keep people away, only way to keep 'em safe."

Harry instantly raised his wand again and darted his eyes through the darkness. "Keep them safe from what?" he demanded.

Dung shifted from foot to foot. "Erm," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Well, I might have got myself in a spot of bother. I'm very glad you're here actually Harry lad, think I may be over my head on this one."

Harry couldn't see or hear anything out of the ordinary in the dimming light, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Dung was used to getting himself in and out of nasty scrapes. If he was nervous, that couldn't be a good sign.

"Explain Dung," he said as Draco took a few steps away to survey the scene as well. "And do it fast."

"Right," Harry's light-fingered acquaintance said, throwing up his gloved hands. "Right yeah, it's just..."

Harry sighed impatiently. "I'm not so bothered about the illegal parts, Dung," he said genuinely. "I care about the dangerous parts."

That was all the reassurance Dung needed. "Sure," he said with more confidence as Draco came back to stand beside them, still giving Dung a wary look. "Okay, so I've got this guy, he likes his pets, makes old Hagrid look tame in comparison. He lives in the arse end of beyond in Australia or something, so yeah – he has some big ones."

Harry wasn't sure where this was going, but he nodded anyway, his eyes darting back around the lengthening shadows. The sky was still a swirl of sapphire and violet as the sun dipped below the London skyline, but down on the ground it was feeling like night was already on top of them.

"So," Dung continued, wringing his hands in the gloves that were unravelling at several points. "This guy, he um, might have himself a dragon-"

Harry immediately went into full alert mode. "Mundungus Fletcher," he cried. "Is there a dragon here!"

"No, no, no!" Dung quickly yelled back, but then instantly hushed again. "No, no dragon, what do you think I am, an idiot?"

Harry shared a glance with Draco, and chose not to answer.

"No," Dung carried on, licking his lips. "See this guy, he knows I can get certain pet supplies, from people who don't ask questions, but this particular request was pretty specific, so I thought I'd do it myself." His face fell and he sighed, looking nervously around behind Harry and Draco.

"Let me guess," Draco drawled. "You shouldn't have done it yourself."

The sound of a drinks can rattling along the ground pierced the air, and the two Aurors spun around, wands raised and pointed in the direction the noise had come from. Mundungus whimpered.

From under a popcorn stall to their right, something emerged from the red and white striped cloth that hung over the counter. Harry held his breath, wondering what it could be that had got Dung so scared...

It was a teddy bear. A walking teddy bear, about a foot or so high, that pushed the cloth up with a little paw and then once emerged, turned to look it's blank face at the three men standing in the aisle between the amusements.

"What the-" said Harry, bewildered. The beige teddy had a red bow tie and red writing stitched on its white tummy that said "I WUV YOU!" It waddled more than walked, taking a few unsteady steps towards the trio.

"You're my best friend, ya-huk!" the bear announced in a goofy, pre-recorded voice without moving its mouth.

"Dung?" Harry said, not daring to take his eyes off the bear.

"He wanted some toys right," said Dung hurriedly. "Just some teddies for this dragon to play with, keep him a bit occupied whilst he was teething. I thought – how hard can that be? Make them tough so they wouldn't just rip, fire-proof, maybe even give them a spark of personality."

"I want to play, ya-huk!" the teddy said, lifting its arms. The voice was throaty and American, and Harry assumed the noise at the end was a sort of laugh.

"So you made a teddy bear come to life?" he said, half thinking about immobilising the thing before it got too close.

Mundungus gulped. "Well," he squeaked. "It was just one to start with."

The popcorn stall suddenly smashed to the ground in a furry wave of motion. "Stupefy!" Harry yelled without thinking. "Impedimenta!"

That might have stopped some of the onslaught, but there was just so many he wasn't sure how much good it really did. Because it appeared, as the three men realised their spells were not working and broke into a sprint, that there was a whole battalion of walking teddy bears, and when they set their minds to it, they could actually move pretty bloody fast for having such little legs.

They all looked like the first bear, in that they had the same bow-tie and the same inscription on their bellies. But some were tiny, no bigger than the palm of your hand, others were a little smaller or taller than the first bear, and then some were as big as human children, probably up to Harry's waist if he'd had time to check.

But the smaller they were, the faster they seemed to move.

Harry was reminded of insects scrabbling and swarming as the bears clambered over each other in their eagerness to get to Harry, Draco and Dung. "Fletcher!" Draco yelled as they shot several spells over their heads. They didn't seem to be doing much good though; the teddies were just bouncing around the magic, and when they were actually hit by anything, they would just pick themselves up, shake it off and then start running again. "How did you go from one to hundreds, and why are they now trying to kill us!"

They skidded around a corner, the Ferris wheel looming above them as they took another sharp turn between a test-your-strength stand and a coconut shy. "They're not trying to hurt us," Dung cried, breathless. "They don't know how strong they are, they're just trying to play!"

They stumbled to a halt as the merry-go-round abruptly came to life beside them, music blaring and lights flashing as the colourful ponies began bobbing up and down. Another dozen or so bears were running across the ride between the poles, and Harry snapped his head around for an alternative route.

"Let's play a game, ya-huk!" they called out. "What's your favourite colour, ya-huk!"

"That way!" he shouted, darting around some large contraption that looked like it swung people upside down. "Dung, you have to help us out here, we need more info!"

"I needed more bears to experiment on," Dung hissed as they slipped inside a fortune-telling booth, letting the latest wave of bears rumble past as they searched for their new human friends. "I could have taken them home, but I needed a large open space to test some of the features, and I knew the fair was here. So I snuck in last night, right?" he whispered, eyes darting to the tent flap and back to Harry's face again and again. "I came when everyone was gone. And I got it working, I got this one bear to do it all, but then something happened, there was a flash or something, and then..." He gulped and looked at Harry and Draco miserably. "They all woke up. All of them. They were prizes in a shooting gallery, and there must have been three hundred bears all stuffed against the wall. At first I thought I could turn them straight back, or calm them down at least, but they mobbed me!" He pointed at his collar, where Harry now realised there was a considerable amount of dried blood. "Broke my nose, almost strangled me," he mumbled. "I managed to get away, but the best I could do was chuck up the wards and keep them inside. I was half worried I'd never get out of here."

"We still might not," Draco pointed out sombrely as the shadows moved outside the tent in the light of the merry-go-round. "Come on, we need to keep moving."

They slipped out the back of the fortune-telling stall, moving hastily whilst the coast was clear.

"So," said Harry as quietly as he could. "You have no idea how the other bears came alive after you managed the first one?"

Dung made a non-committal noise. "I did an amplification spell, I wanted to make sure this thing was robust, otherwise no point giving it to a dragon, is there?" He sighed. "Think maybe it, I dunno, infected the others from that first one."

"So how do we stop them?" Draco asked. They were running next to a thick copse of trees and behind one of the larger structured attractions, probably a haunted house or something. This was where the staff accessed the inside Harry figured, through the fire escape, rather than the guest entrance.

"All I've been able to do is blast them back," Dung said as they slowed and ducked into the doorway. "They're indestructible."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Good job," he muttered in frustration. "There must be a spell to un-animate them?"

"I think," said Dung, wagging his finger. "That if you could stop the original bear, the Alpha, that would stop the others too. They'd all just go back to being cotton wool and stitching."

"That's a nice theory," said Harry. "How certain are you?"

Dung seemed to only be half listening. "Oh, um, yeah," he said. "Pretty certain."

"That's not-" Harry began, but Dung interrupted him.

"You boys have got this now, right?"

Harry blinked. "What?" demanded Draco.

Dung shrugged skittishly. "I've told you all I know, I can leave this to you now, yeah?"

Harry spluttered, probably too loudly considering they were being hounded by killer teddy bears. "You want to leave us here? After the mess you've caused?"

"Look, I'm sorry about that," said Dung, having the decency to actually look reasonably sorry as he took a couple of steps back towards the wooded area. "But you guys are the professionals. I don't know how to stop these things, it's a miracle I've lasted this long!"

"You dirty, rotten-" Draco growled, but Dung spun on his heels.

"You'll be fine!" he yelled. "Good luck!"

Harry charged a few paces after him. "We don't even know what the Alpha looks like!" he cried in a shouted whisper to his retreating back, but Dung just waved a hand over his shoulder.

"You'll know him when you see him!" he assured them, slipping from view amongst the foliage.

"We'll know him...when..." Harry trailed off as he gave up chasing him, stopping just before the trees in disbelief.

"Great mate you've got there?" Draco said sardonically.

Harry turned and stomped back towards his partner. Some Valentine's this was turning out to be. Bloody possessed teddy bears ruining all his chances. "Come on," he huffed at Draco. "Let's go find this Alpha and work out how to kill it."