In Dire Extremity


"BOY!"

Harry could not suppress his wince as his uncle's shout echoed up the
stairs. He had been afraid this was going to be a bad summer, and it
looked like he was not wrong.

His summers were never good, but he had been dreading this one even
before the final events of the Tri-Wizard Tournament. The last school
year had started with such a mix of good and bad; he had been permitted
to attend the World Quidditch Finals, the first Professional match he
had seen. He had watched Ireland and Bulgaria play an amazing game,
ending with an amazing catch by Bulgaria's star seeker, a young
Quidditch player that was still in school.

The day had taken a bad turn when a group of dark-robed wizards had
attacked the tent city that had housed the guests as they had gathered
for the show, and to which they had returned to celebrate or
commiserate. They had brought in and tormented local Muggles that lived
in the area, and in the end, they had sent up a terrible skull symbol
into the sky, for which Harry had nearly been blamed.

That bad turn had been presaged, however, by something that, though he
was able to forget for much of that day, had come back to make him ill
with apprehension when he finally had to face returning to the
Dursley's. Fred and George, the irrepressible pranksters of the Weasley
clan, had dropped a candy in the Dursley home when Arthur, their father,
brought them with him to pick up Harry and bring him home with them.
Dudley, Harry's overweight cousin, had found the candy, as Fred and
George, acting on information gleaned from Harry's stories, had known he
would. Its name, the Ton-Tongue Toffee, turned out to be appropriate as
Dudley's tongue had swollen impossibly, stretching out of his mouth and
down to the floor. Arthur, Mr. Weasley, had dealt with the problem, but
he had not obliviated the Dursley family.

Harry had actually been shocked when his uncle had not mentioned the
Toffee on the entire ride home, and he had not been at all surprised
when Vernon had sent him to his room the moment they arrived at #4
Privet Drive, and told him not to bother coming out. He had locked the
door behind himself, sealing Harry in his room.

He had not expected to hear from his so-called family until they came up
to open his door and slide some food in. That is, if they intended to
feed him at all.

Harry had not had the energy to protest his treatment. His guilty
feelings about the death of Cedric Diggory, the Hufflepuff that had
refused to take the Tri-Wizard Cup without Harry, and died because of
it, left him thinking that he deserved this treatment.

What am I supposed to do, Harry wondered as he levered himself out of
the bed, where he had collapsed upon entering his room. The door is
locked, what does he expect me to do? Harry considered the wand he had
hidden beneath the loose floorboard in his room, but knew that to use
magic to open the door would not only anger his uncle and push him to
make his life even more of a living Hell, it would bring in an owl from
the Ministry. Given Fudge's reaction to his claim that Lord Voldemort
had returned, the Ministry would be more than happy to see him expelled
from Hogwarts, or even incarcerated in Azkaban, the wizarding prison
that had until his third year held his godfather, Sirius Black.

As he walked slowly across the room, he considered the likelihood that
his uncle would be holding yet another list of jobs for him to complete
around the house. Experience said it was fairly probable, and it would
be longer than he could possibly complete in whatever time they alotted
him. When he failed to complete all the tasks he was assigned, his uncle
would probably make him go without food.

The weakness in his legs as he walked across the room elicited a groan.
Normally he he came to the Dursley's re-fortified, which was good
considering how unlikely it was for him to eat well while he was here,
but this time he was already weak and ill-fed when he was picked up from
King's Cross Station. He had not been eating well since the Tournament's
end, and Voldemort's return, and it looked like the prospects of that
changing were poor.

"Coming, uncle," he hollered back, as he reached the door. He gasped
with relief when the door opened, realizing that the door must have been
unlocked by someone while he was out of it.

As he reached the end of the landing and looked down the stairs, it took
him a long moment to take in what he was seeing. A letter? He's got a
letter for me? Wait, that's written on parchment! Oh, no, someone's sent
Uncle Vernon an owl, no wonder he's angry. But his face isn't red. In
fact, he looks almost smug? And why is he carrying his new hunting
rifle? Are they going to try and leave me at Mrs. Figg's again?

Or worse, was that parchment something from the Ministry? A chill sent
shivers racing up Harry's spine. His mind raced, trying to think of any
time that he might have inadvertantly cast magic after leaving the
Hogwart's train, but he could think of none.

"Thought you'd just come waltzing back in here, did you?" Vernon
sneered, his little piggy eyes narrowed in hate, "free-loading off of us
again, did you? Well, your people were kind enough to write and let us
know what happened. Did you really think I'd let a murderer stay here
with my family?!" His uncle Vernon might be, but he had never shown the
least respect for Harry, much less liking. Indeed, he had rarely, if
ever, shown even so much as tolerance. A sinking feeling settled in
Harry's stomach like a lump of lead as he realized that his uncle must
have received a letter from the Ministry about the end of the
Tournament, and given the attitude of Minister Fudge to his claims about
Voldemort, it had apparently come across as claiming that Harry had
somehow been responsible for Cedric's death.

A spine-tingling chill froze Harry's inside as his uncle swung his rifle
up, and Harry realized that his uncle was not going anywhere to do his
hunting. He was hunting Harry, and in a much more permanent fashion than
his son, Dudley, had in his Harry-hunting days. He dove to the side,
wishing vainly that he had grabbed his wand before answering his uncle's
summons, but it was not for nothing that Vernon practiced his shooting
to impress the members of and visitors to the Club he was a member of.
The rifle tracked just ahead of Harry's path and fired well before Harry
had reached cover.

Harry felt a burst of pain and blinding force as the bullet impacted his
skull, even as gladness filled him at the thought of finally joining his
parents, then pain and consciousness vanished in an instant as the
bullet continued on through his head, accompanied by a number of skull
fragments that stirred Harry's brain tissue.

As Harry fell to the floor, dead, his uncle cursed his lack of
foresight. The shot had been made at an upward angle. Had Vernon thought
through his plan, he would have found a way to shoot the boy when he was
on the ground at his feet, thus creating a manageable blood splatter.

The crackle of flame caught his attention, followed by the intense and
horrible smell of burning flesh. Vernon made it halfway up the stairs,
wanting to see what was happening, when the house shook, distracting
him. Torn between them, Vernon in the end saw little of the two most
important events that day.

Above him, at the end of the hall where the dead body of the
Boy-Who-Lived, Savior of the Wizarding World, lay mangled and crumpled
in a heap, a sudden flame had appeared. Though flickering red and gold,
colors that did not denote great heat, the flames roared through cloth,
flesh, and bone with a hunger that revealed their strength, reducing the
last hope of the wizarding community to a simple pile of ash in a few
short moments.

This event was accompanied by the fall of charms and wards of great
power, wards that had covered the Dursley's home at #4 Privet Drive ever
since Headmaster Dumbledore had arranged for Harry to be left there,
protecting Harry and his relatives by virtue of Harry's proximity to
a member of his mother's blood-kin.

The fall of the great wards was a transfixing sight, so it might perhaps
be seen as unfortunate that the only individuals present to observe this
event were Muggles, whose memories of it would be wiped by the
Ministry's Obliviators. The wards became visible, briefly, a great
sparkling dome, translucent and shifting slowly in color between a pale
red, almost pink, and a light blue that vanished against the sky. The
final fall appeared visually as the shattering of that dome as if it
were a thin blown-glass sculpture, dropped from a height, shattering
against hard stone. Where the shards of magic hit the ground, they
pierced it, and left it blackened and charred. Where they hit the house,
they shattered against it, expending their energy as kinetic force. The
upper beams were snapped, the foundation cracked, and the house as a
whole dropped nearly a foot, but the walls held, though only just.

Certain that whatever cataclysm had befallen him was Potter's doing,
Vernon, after the exterior noises finally ceased and his cognition
recovered proper function, stomped up the stairs towards Harry's room.
He offered the remains of his nephew only the barest token glance, and
he ignored the last flicker of flame he saw there. His nephew was dead,
but he could still be made to pay for the damage he had done in dying.
His beloved owl, the pesky flea-bitten rat-eating pestilence that it
was, was still in its cage in his room. If he left it there, it would
die slowly of starvation, and stink everything up. If he let it go, it
would go to Potter's friends, the freaks, and they might come to check
on him.

He burst through Potter's door, fully intent on slowly plucking the
bird's feathers before wringing its scrawny neck as a last revenge
against the little brat that had been a drain on his family for far too
long. He made it only the first step into the room before collapsing to
the ground.

---

Dumbledore felt a chill pass over him but he shook it off. Casting the
Fidelius charm took great concentration, and he could not spare his
attention. He knew the sensation presaged danger to one of his close
friends or charges, but then, he had been expecting it.

As the year had ended, he had been forced to make the hard decision to
ask Severus Snape, who had been one of his agents in Voldemort's camp in
the first war, to return to the Dark Lord and spy for him once more. He
knew that Snape risked his life every time he came into contact with
Voldemort, or his Death Eaters. If ever they knew his allegiance for
sure, his life would end, of that there was no question. 

He had sent Remus Lupin and Sirius Black to gather the old crowd, the
Order of the Phoenix whose new Headquarters he was even now seeking to
conceal, even though he knew that Black was a wanted man, hunted by the
Aurors for crimes he had not committed, and which he had already paid
for with twelve years in Azkaban prison under the watchful malevolence
of the happiness consuming, despair producing Dementors that guarded it,
and who were even now eager to perform the Kiss, the final and lasting
removal of the soul, on the escaped prisoner.

Regardless of the source, he had to finish this casting before he could
turn his attention to it. As he had half-expected, the sensation ceased
before he completed the spell. A smile curled his lips as he spoke the
words of the spell. His confidence in his people was once more confirmed
as one of them managed to extricate him or herself from a dangerous
situation without assistance.

---

The Burrow, a quaint if somewhat dilapidated house, was filled with a
buzz of activity. With the return of five of her children from a
stress-filled year of school, Molly Weasley, harried mother of seven,
was busily preparing a welcome home feast for their evening meal.

She was also, and nor was she the only one, fretting about the boy she
loved as another son, by choice if not by blood. Unaware of the worst
excesses of the Dursley's, she knew enough at least to worry that they
would make no effort to ensure that Harry ate properly, which was
especially worrisome given the guilt and pain he must be feeling over
the terrible end to the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and perhaps worse still,
the Ministry's refusal, in the person of Cornelius Fudge, the Minister
of Magic, to believe in Harry's recounting of the return of
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Then too there was the issue of the lack of
support he had received. Even though he had had nothing to do with the
placing of his name in the Goblet of Fire from which the names of the
three school champions were to be drawn, the school had turned against
him, refusing to believe him, and he had been isolated.

Molly had to struggle to suppress her anger at her youngest son. He,
supposedly Harry's best friend, had joined the rest of the school in
abandoning Harry, choosing in his jealousy to believe the explanations
and rationalizing of strangers over the pleading protestations of his
best friend.

Unnoticed in the rush and bustle of a newly full house, a single clock
hand sat in a box, waiting to be presented to Harry as a gift, before
being placed on the Weasley clock, to represent his inclusion in their
family. Had it been on the clock, it would certainly have been pointing
at Mortal Peril and drawing all kinds of attention.

---

In the Headmaster's office, on Dumbledore's desk, there sat an intricate
clock. Displayed within a clear glass case that exposed its workings,
the face of the clock displayed only the time, as anyone might expect of
such a work, albeit in astronomical terms befitting the oddity of the
headmaster. In fact that visible face was but a charm. The true face of
the clock held a multitude of tiny arms of different lengths.

Where a normal clock would have numbers, this clock held a dense
grouping of concentric rings, each marked with a series of small labels.
Much like the clock in the Weasley home, each label was a status or a
place, rather than a time. The labels included relatively normal states,
such as 'Home,' 'At Work,' 'Traveling,' and so on. They also included
more esoteric entries, such as 'Casting,' 'In Peril,' 'In Mortal Peril,'
'Captured,' and of course, 'Needs a Lemon Drop.'

The tiny arms were even more complex, as they grew longer and shorter,
as well as spinning about. They even merged and split, to properly track
the focus of the observer, within the limits of the spell. Some of them
referred to individuals, such as Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore, and
Minerva McGonagall. Some of the hands referred to groups of a more
general nature, such as the Weasley Clan, or the Old Crowd, one of the
many euphemisms used by Dumbledore to refer to the somewhat illicit
Order of the Phoenix, a group dedicated to the defeat of the Dark Lord.

With no-one consciously observing it, the arms were a varied hodgepodge
arising from the unconscious curiousities of the numerous portraits of
former school headmasters and headmistresses.

Not far from this remarkable if apparently innocuous device, Fawkes, a
gleaming pheonix that lived with Dumbledore, and whom many regarded,
perhaps inaccurately, as the Headmaster's familiar, rested on his perch.

Contrary to what one might perhaps expect, it was not the heavily
enspelled clock, nor any of the other detection devices scattered about
the office, that reacted first to the death of a hero and the falling of
wards closely tied to the Headmaster.

Fawke's brilliant eyes snapped open. He stood, and lifted his wings, and
vanished in a gout of flame, long seconds before the alarms by the
dozens began to go off, banging here, clanging there, ringing by the
cupboard, wailing from the clock, and above it all, shouts and
complaints from the startled portraits, which moved about nervously in
their frames, questioning each other about what was going on.

After several minutes, silence fell as the alarms ceased their clamor,
the crisis passed, though a single hand, labeled "Wards - #4," remained
pointed at "Absent." Only the quiet whispers of the portraits held sway
over the office air, and the silence steadily grew as the portraits fell
silent, feeling the weight of uncertainty as no answers came to any of
the questions they had.

---

On Magnolia Crescent, a road not far from Privet Drive, the home of the
elderly lady that had often babysat Harry when the Dursley's went on
vacation lay mostly silent.

Mrs. Figg, the house's sole human inhabitant, had recently been
contacted by an escaped prisoner and a werewolf, and was currently
assisting them with contacting certain individuals, many of whom had to
be convinced of Sirius' innocence before their cooperation could be
regained.

On her wall a large clock hung. Like the one in Dumbledore's office, its
true nature was concealed by charms, though not ones cast by Mrs. Figg.
Arabella was a squib, incapable of casting more than the most minor of
spells. Still, she had enough magic in her to activate and deactivate
the existing charm, cast by Dumbledore, that protected the clock from
casual view.

Behind the charm, a clock hand labeled "Harry Potter," was spinning
slowly, unable to find a resting place. It had rested on Mortal Peril
only briefly, but there had been no-one to see, though once the house
would have been filled with cats. There would have been nothing they
could do or even see, of course, but now there were not even cats in the
house. She had gotten rid of most of them after tripping on one and
breaking her leg.

---

In a well-guarded room in the Ministry of Magic, a number of Ward
Monitors sat on shelves. Each was a simple glass sphere, much like the
crystal balls used in Trelawney's Divination classes. Like those crystal
balls, the Ward Monitors could be used to obtain visions, in this case
of the area being monitored.

They were also charmed and capable of emitting a quite strong wail, as
well as inducing a physical vibration in every individual within a
certain distance of the sphere, the distance being dependent on the
strength of the monitoring spell, rather than the strength of the wards.

The more powerful Monitors, including the Monitor which had for nearly
the last fifteen years watched the Wards that protected #4 Privet Drive,
could induce a vision in anyone within range when certain key triggering
events occurred.

In the corner of the room a small table stood in front of a wooden
chair, in which sat a middle-aged wizard, idly playing a solitaire game
of Exploding Snap to pass the time. The official Ward Watcher on Watch,
or so went his title, had a simple job. He merely had to react to any
Monitor that went off, by viewing the scene and informing the
appropriate authorities to deal with the situation, assuming such was
necessary.

Absorbed in his game, he failed to notice a certain orb flash brightly
with a coded pulse. Neither the sound, nor the vibration, nor the vision
reached him, though he was well within range of the sphere. It had been
silenced long before by certain elements of the Ministry that were loyal
to a man most believed dead.

A second silence spell enshrouded it as well, this one bearing a certain
tinge of irony. It was placed by a toad-faced subordinate of Cornelius
Fudge to suppress any official reaction to the soon-to-be demise of the
Boy-Who-Lived at the hands of the Dementors, the soul-sucking guards of
Azkaban. The silence of the sphere that would have warned her of the
futility of her plan held a smidgen of irony, but more lay in the strong
belief of the Minister that nothing truly dangerous had ever happened to
Harry, based on the orb's silence, therefore he must be mentally
unbalanced to make the claims he made. Had Umbridge, Fudge's
subordinate, bothered to check the sphere, and discovered the silencing
spell already laid on it, she might have learned the truth of Potter's
claims, and changed the outcome of subsequent events, at least in-so-far
as they would impact the Ministry.

When the wards finally collapsed entirely, the Ward Monitor gave a final
complaint and went dark. There were no procedures in place to check each
Ward Monitor on shift-change, or indeed, at any time, since it was
expected that a change in a Monitor's state would be immediately
noticed. After all, they were designed to be impossible to ignore.

---

Madam Hopkirk presided over a tightly run ship, monitoring all the
under-age wizards in Great Britain, issuing warnings and demanding
expulsion and wand-breaking for repeat offenders.

Harry had experienced their efficiency once before, when Dobby the
house-elf, who at the time was serving the Malfoy's, at a time when the
elder Malfoy was master-minding a plot to release the dreaded Monster,
which turned out to be a Basilisk, from the Chamber of Secrets, a
personal addition of Salazar Slytherin, one of the four Hogwarts
Founders, tried to protect Harry by preventing him from reaching
Hogwarts. The little elf, though he punished himself for his actions,
was insistent that Harry not attend Hogwarts, and tried to enforce his
intentions by casting magic with Harry's signature.

That had been the first letter from Madam Hopkirk, warning of his
inability to do magic and threatening expulsion. It had definitely
placed a damper on Harry's next summer, with the Dursleys aware that
Harry was not permitted to do magic. He had feared another of those
letters, and expulsion, when he blew up his Aunt Marge that summer, but
Fudge had pardoned him, fearing that Sirius Black would find and kill
him.

Neither Harry nor Fudge had at the time been aware that Black was
innocent, and Harry's insistence on this fact at the end of that year
was another point against him in the eyes of the Ministry.

As Harry's life ended in a blast of pain and fire, his wand lay
quiescent, nestled beneath the loose floorboards of his room. In all the
magical cataclysm that followed, none of the enormous magical energies
unleashed had Harry's wand signature.

The under-age magic detectors remained silent as Harry died.

---

In a different wing of the Ministry, in the Department of Accidental
Magic Reversal, skilled curse-breakers, talented obliviators, and
de-splinching experts were on call, but not on staff. The department had
a normal hierarchy of management, and at the bottom were the actual
employees, dispatchers who awaited calls for assistance, and sent out
the experts to solve the problems.

They also watched a bank of detectors, each responsible for a major
wizarding area, detecting a particular magical signature characteristic
of high-emotion fueled wandless magic, most often accomplished by very
young wizards and witches. These displays had to be monitored because
where they occurred to children whose parents were Muggles, there would
be no-one aware of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad to be able to
call them.

Harry had certainly experienced a severe spike in fear and anger just
before the bullet hit him, but no magic was cast then. There was a
subsequent spike of emotion fueled magic, but it was masked by the
falling of some of the strongest wards ever erected. The detectors for
the area of England that included Surrey emitted not a peep.

---

There were no magical monitoring devices in the spotless suburban home.
Nor, for that matter, was there much in the way of sugar or other
sweets, for this house belonged to dentists.

Yet it was here that the only human reaction to the events surrounding
Harry's death occurred, as a girl with bushy brown hair lay sleeping.
Tired from the tension of the train ride, and worried about her best
friend's reaction to her spur-of-the-moment kiss, she had gone to bed
almost as soon as she reached her house, unknowingly echoing her
friend's actions.

Her sleep was disturbed by terrifying dreams, and her parents were drawn
to her room by her fearful cries, to find her thrashing in her bed,
tears pouring from her eyes to soak her pillow.

With difficulty they managed to awaken her. She sat up, sobbing Harry's
name but knowing nothing more than that something had made her fear for
him. Unfortunately, she had no owl with which to contact anyone. For the
first time, Hermione Granger truly regretted having purchased
Crookshanks, for though she loved him dearly, he could not carry her
letters, and she desperately wanted someone to reassure her. Her logic
reasserted itself, as she knew that Harry was well-protected at the
Dursley's. He would be fine, and her fear for him was built on a
nightmare fueled by stress.

---

Vernon Dursley awoke with a painful crick in his neck. He groaned as he
rolled over, wondering why he was on the floor. Above him, as he lay on
his back staring upward, he recognized the shelves of broken toys that
marked the room as his son's second bedroom, grudgingly yielded to the
Potter brat when those letters had come, revealing that the freaks knew
where they had previously housed the boy, in the cupboard beneath the
stairs.

His neck popped and he gurgled at the pain as he turned his head and
stared at the owl cage that had been his reason for entering his
nephew's room. It looked closed, but he could not see anything in it.
"Must be huddled on the bottom," he mused, unable to see the bottom or
the back of the cage due to his severe angle of view.

Rolling over once more, he slowly levered himself to his feet, grasping
the door jamb as an aid to rising. Once settled in a solid stance, he
turned and looked at the cage. His eyes widened, then narrowed as he
stared at the empty cage. The door was still closed and latched, but the
bars were bent and twisted at the base, and the gold leaf was peeling.

He smirked and left the room, slamming the door behind him. He had not
even bothered to step over by the cage to look for the pile of ash he
expected was there. Obviously the bird had self-destructed in the same
fashion as his nephew and it had somehow knocked him out when he entered
the room. No matter, it was gone now, and Petunia and his Dudders would
not be back for . . . he glanced at his watch, momentarily surprised at
how much time had passed, another hour and a half.

"Plenty of time," he muttered, pulling open the door to the hall closet
and dragging out the vacuum cleaner. He looked around the upstairs hall,
wondering what sort of cleaning agent would get off blood, when he
realized that there were no bloodstains to be cleaned. "Bloody magic,"
he growled, knowing that he had seen blood spattered all over the
ceiling and walls.

He plugged in the vacuum and ran it over the hall floor, not giving a
second thought to giving his nephew's ashes proper treatment. If the
freak wanted to cremate himself, that was his affair, but Vernon
certainly was not going to pay for an urn.

Finishing, he put away the vacuum and grabbed his gun. He marched down
the stairs, firmly ignoring the outside of the house, and the shaking
and loud shattering noises he had heard. Settling himself in his
favorite chair, he cleaned his gun and contemplated moving. He had
little doubt that the freak's freaky friends would eventually come
looking for him, and that they would be most annoying if they were still
here.

"Time to look into that vacation home in Majorca," he said, grinning as
he ran a swab into the barrel of the rifle. There would be no need to
sell the house. The freaks would give up eventually, and they could move
back in, after he had some contractors in to fix whatever his freaky
nephew had managed to do before he died. Until then, they would enjoy a
long vacation.

---

"Well, Moody was in right off, obviously, and Arabella did not take
much, though there were a few minutes there when I was grateful that we
were between her and the fireplace."

Sirius chuckled, interrupting Remus Lupin, his long-time friend. "She
was definitely up for calling in the aurors and having me kissed before
you managed to talk her down, you sweet-talker!" He was referring to the
Dementor's Kiss, the soul-consuming final attack of the dark guards of
Azkaban, and it amazed Remus that Sirius could find humour in a death
that still loomed as his most likely manner of passing on.

"But given all that, why Tonks next? Dumbledore said to gather the old
crowd. She was not part of that. Heck, she has not even been out of
school that long!"

Sirius just grinned at his tired friend, who still showed signs of
strain from his unwilling transformation into a werewolf on the recent
full moon. He started ticking off points on my fingers. "She's my
cousin, she's an auror, she's my cousin, she's a metamorphmagus, she's my
cousin, she admires Harry, she's my cousin . . ."

"Alright, alright, already," Remus interjected, thumping Sirius in the
head and laughing. "We'll see about talking to your cousin. Just don't
blame me if she decides the cute doggy needs a perm!"

Sirius shuddered. An Animagus, he had learned to turn into a dog, a
great black beast of a dog that looked like a grim, along with two of
his former best friends, to accompany Remus during the nights of his
painful transformation. Moony, as they called Remus' wolf form, was less
likely to punish himself, tearing his own flesh, when he was accompanied
by his pack. As for his former friends, one was dead, betrayed by the
other, the same little rat that had framed Sirius for the death of the
first. His dog form, called Padfoot, reflected his human form, and so,
like himself, it was now gaunt, with long straggly hair that was often
tangled and snarled.

---

Tonks brightened as she spied the graying head of one of Harry's
protectors. The friendship between Lupin, Black, Potter, and Pettigrew
had been infamous during her school years, and her heart ached for
Lupin, the last of the close friends. Her smile faltered as she fingered
the letter from Lupin that had brought her here. She hoped that he
wanted something other than to question her yet again about her cousin,
and his one-time friend, Sirius Black, escaped murderer, who had
betrayed Lily and James Potter to their deaths, and then slain Pettigrew
and twelve Muggles, leaving Lupin alone.

"Hello," she said quietly, looking over her cousin's friend. Lupin
nodded to her, looking exhausted. He was thin but not painfully so, but
there were bags under his eyes, and his face was lined with marks of
pain. She totted up the days in her mind, and realized that the full
moon was not yet a week past. She remembered what a shock it had been to
learn that Lupin was a werewolf, that her cousin had been best friends
with a dark creature, particularly given that like her branch of the
family, Sirius had openly rejected the Dark Arts. Of course, that all
had been a lie, and she could not help a frisson of fear that chilled
her as she sat on the bench in response to Remus' welcoming gesture.

She smiled softly at the shaggy black dog that sat at Lupin's feet,
trying to tell herself that Dumbledore would not have hired Lupin if
Lupin had been involved in Potter's betrayal. Yet . . . had the old man
known that Lupin was a werewolf, before he hired him? Could it have been
as much a surprise to him as it had been to all the parents to learn
that their children were being taught by a werewolf?

The dog grinned up at her, its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth,
and Lupin snorted at it, though Tonks noted that his gaze was fond.
"Good morning, Tonks," he said finally, smiling, and Tonks smiled
hesitantly back at him, grateful that at least he had apparently heard
that she hated her first name. Nymphadora, honestly, what had her mother
been thinking?

Her hand slid surreptitiously into her robes, fingering her wand as she
noticed Lupin's tenseness as he finally began to speak, but she held
off, listening to his words, but ready to react.

"I suppose," he began, "you've read the Prophet's coverage of the
Tournament, and its end? It's not . . ."

"Bollocks," Tonks interrupted, her eyes flashing angrily. "I may not
have had a chance to teach him, like you did, but I'll eat my wand
before I'll believe that Harry killed that boy!"

She was startled out of her defensiveness about the boy who so easily
aroused her empathy, when Lupin's eyes flashed with humour as he nodded.
"As I was about to say, it's not correct. Fudge refused to even consider
Harry's version of events, but Harry is certainly not trained enough to
create a Portkey. Crouch was discovered, but he was observed the entire
time Harry was gone. In spite of Fudge's claims, he had no opportunity
to slip away and join Harry. I know Harry personally, and I agree with
you. He would never willingly kill. But that also means . . ."

Again Tonks cut him off. "That V . v . that You-Know-Who is back."

Lupin nodded solemnly. "It also means that Harry was right in his third
year."

"Right about what?"

"Hmmm . . . yes, I forgot that they kept that out of the press. Fudge
refused to believe him, and there was no point in pushing the view
myself, he would never believe me. You remember Peter, the fourth of our
little group?" He paused, then continued when Tonks nodded. She was
startled at the anger that filled his face. "He's alive, Tonks. He was
their secret-keeper, not Sirius. It was a double-blind, putting Sirius
forward as the obvious choice so that he would be the one attacked,
while the real secret keeper would be safe." Tears appeared in his eyes,
and the dog whined, licking his hand. "We had no idea that Peter was the
leak. He was already on His side. He betrayed them, then he framed
Sirius and let him take the fall."

"But, the finger," protested Tonks. "Didn't they identify it?"

Lupin nodded, shuddering. "I never would have believed that the little
rat had it in him, but he cut off his own finger and got away." Remus
peered into the Auror's eyes, trying to decide how much to trust her
before her joining was confirmed. Finally he nodded. "He's an
unregistered Animagus, Tonks. We called him Wormtail. And he's lost more
than a finger now. He cut off his own hand to bring Him back."

"He?" Tonks paled, her eyes fixing instantly on the dog. Padfoot
shimmered, and the escaped prisoner that every Auror in Magical Great
Britain was looking for stood before her, dropping quickly to his knees
and grabbing her exposed left hand.

"All three of us, Tonks," Sirius whispered, staring at up her out of a
gaunt face, his eyes an impenetrable black. "Prongs, Padfoot, Moony, and
Wormtail. We kept Moony company."

Tonks could feel her hands growing clammy as her heart raced. Could she
trust them? Could she believe them? Her right hand clenched around her
wand, wondering if she had a chance to fight back against the two
wizards if they really were Dark.

"We had him, we were going to turn him in, but he escaped. The Dementors
almost got me, but Harry," Sirius' voice was filled with a loving awe,
which finally convinced her that he could not be a criminal seeking to
kill Harry, not if he felt that way about him, "he saved us." He fixed
his eyes on hers. "Did you know he can cast a corporeal Patronus? In his
third year! I've never heard the like."

Lupin grinned. "You've seen the like, though." He looked at Tonks, who
still looked shell-shocked. "His Patronus is Prongs, his father's
animagus form, even though he was no more than a year old when he saw it
last, if he ever did."

Finally accepting that they might be speaking the truth, Tonks only had
one more question. "So . . . why are you telling me this?"

"Well, Tonks, after school, we became part of a group fighting
You-Know-Who, called the Order . . ."




Burning Day


An enormous fiery pain engulfed Harry as he came to reluctant
consciousness. He felt a tremendous shattering sensation, accompanied by
slicing pain and an intense burning, as if a thousand panes of glass had
been broken inches away from him, along with all of his bones, while
someone ran an open flame up and down his skin. He decided he was losing
his mind when he realized that somehow he knew the broken
whatever-it-was was green. He wanted to scream at the pain, but he could
not move. It was several long moments before the pain slowly eased.

Having expected to never open his eyes again, he was not surprised at
the difficulty he felt in doing so. He simply did not understand why he
was thinking or feeling anything. Surely he should have either ceased to
feel anything, or he should be meeting his parents?

Exerting his will, Harry managed to force his eyes to open. They teared
up immediately, scarcely able to stand the influx of light, as if they
had never encountered it before, but even so, he could make out the bulk
of his uncle reaching the top of the stairs. His perspective was low to
the ground, which did not surprise Harry nearly as much as his own
apparent survival did. He felt only a faint gladness that his uncle was
coming to finish him off. He was more than ready to finally be able to
hug his mother, to hear her voice, to feel her love. He only hoped that
his mother and father could forgive him for leading Cedric to his death.

When Vernon continued past him, walking towards the door to his room, a
sudden terror took Harry. Hedwig, he was going to kill Hedwig, the
faithful snowy owl that had been the first real birthday present he had
received in his life, and a shining symbol of the first true friend he
had made, as well as a beloved companion, often the only one he had.

With all the heart he had left, Harry desperately wished that he could
save her. As fire engulfed him, he felt hope dying within him, so it was
a terrible shock to suddenly see, as he blinked tears from his raw eyes,
bars appear before him. Had he truly failed, had he lived so terrible a
life that he would be imprisoned for all eternity?

The sound of a door opening caught his attention, and his mind struggled
for several seconds to catch up as he saw his uncle entering through a
door that seemed far larger than it should. That his uncle, coming to
kill him, had loomed larger than life had hardly seemed surprising or
worth noticing, but why would the door appear the same?

A hoot behind him awakened him to action. Without in the least
understanding how it was possible, he realized that he was between his
uncle and his beloved friend, and that he had been granted this one last
chance to protect her. With every bit of energy he had left, Harry
shouted "STUPEFY!"

To his startlement, all he managed was a cheep. He would have cried in
despair, except that somehow, in spite of the absence of the usual blast
of red light, his Uncle crumpled to the ground.

Still confused, he nonetheless comprehended that his uncle would not
stay unconscious forever. He had to get himself and Hedwig out of here
somehow. He struggled to turn around, his arms getting in his way in a
manner that made him fear that something in his nervous system had been
damaged. They simply were not responding the way they should. To his
shock and amazement, when his eyes found Hedwig, she herself seemed to
be enormously larger, nearly four or five times his size. He shrank back
as she approached, looming larger still. He froze as her wing swept out.
It encircled him and drew him close and he realized with something of a
shock that she was hugging him.

I'm in Hedwig's cage? Harry begged mentally for someone to explain what
was happening to him, as he tried vainly to understand how he could
possibly fit in Hedwig's cage, with room left over for her. How could he
be smaller than his owl, and how did he get here?

When he heard soft murmuring in a female voice, Harry was afraid that he
was either hallucinating, or nearly dead and hearing his mother. He
needed to save Hedwig before he passed on, regardless of what else might
have happened to him. He focused his attention on the one place he felt
sure that she would be safe and well-cared for without inconveniencing
anyone.

Redness filled his vision and he held his breath, hoping against hope
that whatever force had brought him to Hedwig would do him this one last
favor. Hidden within Hedwig's wing, he could not tell if he had
succeeded or not, even after his vision cleared, but her startled squawk
gave him hope. The startled voice of a woman that sounded at the same
time made him wonder if one of the teachers had been in the Owlery
sending a letter.

Voices filled his ears, almost drowning out the cacophony of squawks
that reassured him that he had reached his target. "At least you'll be
safe here," he assured Hedwig, as his exhaustion caught up with him,
stealing away his consciousness.

---

Awareness returned slowly as voices filled his mind. To his bemusement,
he recognized none of them; to his bereavement, he could still hear the
hoots and calls of the owls. "Why am I not dead yet?" he murmured. He
yelped in surprise when his voice came out in cheeps and chirps, though
he understood them.

It was then that he realized that the words he was hearing were
precisely paired with the hoots and occasional squawks that he was also
hearing. Somehow, he was now able to understand owls. It was not the
same as his Parseltongue, he noted. He had not even realized that he was
speaking Parseltongue at first. He never heard the hissing sound of his
speech. It simply sounded like English to him, unlike owl-speech, which
sounded like an audio-overlay.

A pleasant sensation ran through him, much like someone running their
hand through his hair, though that itself was not a common feeling in
his memory. The odd thing was the feeling was coming from his back, and
then his arm, and not from his head.

Forcing his eyes opened, he discovered he was able to lean his head back
almost upside down as he looked behind himself, discovering that he was
being groomed by Hedwig. He was more startled by what he could see of
himself, however.

"I'm a bird?" he chirped, dumbfounded.

"My Harry is a beautiful phoenix," he heard a smug female voice intone
and he realized that it belonged to Hedwig. It fit her, he realized.
There had been many times that he had seen smugness, pride, and
self-satisfaction in his Hedwig's bearing when she had successfully
delivered his letters, or just after she plucked at his ears with her
sharp beak.

"Hedwig?"

"Yes, my Harry?" Hedwig hooted at him, turning her head back and forth,
blinking wide eyes at him.

"Why am I so small?"

An articulate voice filled with pride and possessiveness answered him.
"You have had your first burning day, young Harry, and already your
feathers are coming in swiftly. Soon you will be proud and strong!"

Harry rolled his head around to stare up at the fatherly eyes of Fawkes,
eyes that twinkled much as Dumbledore's had when he had woken up from
facing Quirrel and Voldemort.

"Fawkes?!"

"You surprised me, you know? Most of the phoenix-blooded never change,
or change only after their first body dies of old-age, and so they have
then only their phoenix body. No great loss, of course, but those who
burn in their prime . . ." The great phoenix seemed to shiver, all of
his feathers fluffing and separating before settling down again. "You
will be great, young Harry. I knew it when I first met you, and I know
it now."

A sudden thought struck Harry, as he finally accepted that he had in
fact cheated death yet again. "Is . . . is this the power that Voldemort
knows not?"

Fawkes cocked his head to the side, focusing on Harry with a single
bright eye. "I know nothing of the power of which you speak, but I know
that when you burned for the first time, you made the prophecy one-sided
and inevitable. A phoenix cannot be slain by any power on this earth,
yet only one of you can survive. There is now only one end to this
conflict, unless you give up. Embracing death by burning and not
returning is the only path to death for one of our race!"

Realizing that Fawkes probably knew Dumbledore better than anyone, Harry
could not help asking, "Do you know why Dumbledore left me there?"

Fawkes sighed, fluttering his wings as Hedwig embraced Harry once more.
"Dumbledore is a very powerful and intelligent wizard, and he does often
see more than others might, but still, he does not always know as much
as he seems to. He projects an image of infallibility because to do
otherwise would, in his opinion, cripple the wizarding community with
fear. Like you, he bears a heavy burden, for somehow it is believed that
he can singlehandedly keep Hogwarts and all of its students safe. He did
truly believe that you were safer there than anywhere else."

"Safe? They killed me! Besides, he's probably half the reason that
they're all such sheep. They all just follow along with whatever the
papers print."

"I have often wished he could understand proper speech, so I could
better guide him, but I will warn you, if you speak to him, he is far
weaker than he appears. Always he questions and second-guesses himself,
but once he has made a decision, he has great difficulty accepting it to
be wrong, for to do so would damage the appearance of infallibility he
believes is so vital." He whistled. "I must go, Dumbledore returns," he
explained, as he leapt from the long table that held the writing
supplies, which was, Harry guessed, where he had managed to bring them.
Had he actually used the phoenix's fiery apparition?

I must have, he realized, you can't apparate into Hogwarts, and I didn't
have a portkey. I certainly did not go through the Floo.

"Don't think of Long-beard, my Harry. Long-beard cannot hurt my Harry
any longer."

Harry settled back into Hedwig's hug as she began to preen him again,
wondering if this is what it felt like to have a mother.

---

Harry had still been in her embrace when food was brought that evening,
but by morning he was fully fledged and nearly full grown, and he and
Hedwig were sharing a perch.

He heard a sigh of disbelief and awe from below him. He glanced down and
his sharp eyes immediately picked out and focused on the tear-filled
eyes and awe-filled face of a house-elf.

Hedwig shuffled further down the perch when he shifted his wings. He
thrust strongly with his talons, launching himself into the air as he
snapped his wings wide. This was the best time to test his wings. If he
injured himself, the house-elf would take care of him.

He snapped his wings wide and cried aloud with joy as his wings caught
the air. He circled easily, shifting his feathers slightly to adjust his
attitude in the air. It came so easily as he glided down towards the
house elf, who was sobbing in joy at hearing that joyous speck of
phoenix song. It reminded him of his first time on a broom, the freedom
he had felt, and the ease with which he had controlled the old school
broom, as if he was born to it, but even more so. This was truly what he
was born to.

He landed perfectly, eliciting startled hoots from owls that had
expected his first landing to end in disaster. The house-elf fell to its
knees, staring at him with impossibly wide eyes, dripping tears of joy.
Its . . . no, her hand, rose slowly and came forward, but stopped just
short of his brilliant red and gold plumage. That was one aspect where
he differed strongly from Fawkes, he had noticed. The older phoenix was
pure scarlet except for his golden tail feathers, while Harry was a mix
of red and gold all over. He stepped forward, brushing his pinions
against her hand, and she slid her hand down his feathers reverently.

After nearly fifteen minutes, realizing that the house-elf would be
happy to stay there forever, stroking him, he hummed, which produced a
throaty warble, and stepped back, then launched himself back into the
air. Behind him he heard the soft pop of the house-elf disappearing,
back to the kitchens, he expected, to spread the word.

He lighted back on Hedwig's perch, feeling the desire to fly through the
open windows into the blue sky beyond, but willing to accept Hedwig's
advice and wait for his full growth, which she assured him would be
finished soon. In the meantime, she was teaching him to preen, to clean
and align his feathers, and to get rid of loose feathers. She was
surprised that he had none, but Harry was not. Phoenixes did not molt
normally, he figured. Why would he, when he would get a new set of
feathers after every burning day?

---

Later on that day, Fawkes returned to the owlery. He discussed Harry's
powers as a phoenix only briefly. Harry had already demonstrated an
ability to teleport in a burst of flame. The other powers of a phoenix
were basically inherent, requiring no effort, aside from the ability to
painlessly drop a feather. Fawkes explained that this required only
concentrating on the desire to do so, but urged Harry to think carefully
before doing so.

It was not hard for Harry to guess why Fawkes emphasized this. After
all, one of Fawkes' feathers was the core of Voldemort's wand. Harry
definitely did not care for the idea of the murderous Dark Lord getting
his hands on a wand made from one of his own feathers.

Fawkes then spent an achingly long period discussing flight, and all the
intricacies of controlling flight, performing proper banking turns,
landing smoothly, finding thermals, and so forth. Harry did not have the
heart to tell the older phoenix that he had already flown and that all
of these difficulties had simply seemed to come to him, instinctively as
it were.

He deliberately ignored the tittering of the owls as they watched him
endure this lecture on things he knew naturally. He noticed Fawkes
casting a sharp eye upward every now and then, and when he did so, the
owls instantly went quiet, but their amusement kept overcoming them and
bubbling back up.

Finally Fawkes finished his lecture and Harry had an opportunity to ask
the questions he really wanted answered.

"Fawkes, sir, how is it that I can still cast magic?"

Fawkes tilted his head to the side, looking carefully at Harry. "I don't
know, young Harry. Maybe it is because your wand came from a phoenix
originally?"

Harry shook his head doubtfully. That answer simply did not feel right.
Besides, he did not have his wand. It was still under the floorboards.
Harry felt a sadness well up in him as he realized that his uncle had
probably already torched his trunk and all of his belongings. Still, the
most critical of his possessions were beneath the loose floorboard in
his room. His Gringott's key, the book of pictures of his parents given
to him by Hagrid, the invisibility cloak that had belonged to his
father, the Marauder's Map, and of course, his wand, were all safely
concealed.

"Once I am full-grown, how will I turn back into a human? Will I even be
able to?"

Fawkes bobbed his head in confirmation. "You will be able to, I believe,
but I do not know how you may accomplish it. I think it is something
like what Minerva does."

"Animagus?" Harry considered, bemused at Fawkes referring to his Head of
House by her first name. He wondered if Professor Snape was given the
same treatment. "So, when will I get to fly for real?"

Fawkes trilled, stalking around Harry, his head dipping and raising as
he looked Harry over. Hedwig hooted in excitement as Fawkes spread his
wings. "You are ready. Remember what I have told you."

Delighted, Harry launched himself immediately into the air, his wings
snapping in a powerful downstroke as he pumped his way up towards the
open windows. Behind him Hedwig followed, while Fawkes vanished in a
burst of flame, off to hide while Harry flew free, so that anyone who
saw his first real flight would assume he was the older phoenix.

Hedwig quickly began circling, and Harry followed her, warbling softly
as the air lifted him up, like a giant hand cradling him. Harry's heart
soared with him. Cedric's death, Voldemort's return, Vernon's rifle, all
seemed far beneath him now, not worthy of notice.

Breaking off from following Hedwig, he swooped, skimming the rooftops
and diving into the courtyards, pumping strongly to lift himself back
out. He felt like he was filled with an unending abundance of energy, so
different from the depressed torpor that had held him in his grip when
he returned to Privet Drive.

---

A sharp crack echoed down Privet Drive, though even had someone been
staring at the source of the sound, they would have seen nothing. Tonks
looked up from her post, and examined the new arrival.

Mad-Eye Moody, the former Auror who stumped up to her on a wooden
peg-leg, had in his day captured many a dark wizard, but he had spent
much of the last year trapped in a trunk by Bartemius Crouch, Jr., who
had been plucking his hair to use in a Polyjuice potion, a
transformational potion that allowed the wily Death Eater to assume
Moody's appearance. 

Crouch had stolen Moody's place as teacher of DADA the year after Remus'
stint. He had introduced his students to the Unforgivable curses, the
casting of which on a human was punishable by life imprisonment in
Azkaban. He had even cast the Imperious curse on Harry, only to discover
that Harry could throw off that curse more easily than most grown
wizards. He had also been responsible for Harry's entry in the
Tri-Wizard Tournament, and the time spent trapped in his trunk had aged
Moody, and left him even more paranoid than he had ever been. Tonks
could still hardly believe all the stories she had heard after joining
the Order, about what Harry had done at Hogwarts. She just wished she
could get a glimpse of him, but so far, he had not left the house.

The paranoid ex-Auror's nickname was due to the glass eye that took the
place of the one he had lost. Enchanted with powerful charms that let
him see through walls, disillusionment charms, invisibility spells, and
even invisibility cloaks, it could also look through flesh with no
difficulty, and it often spun in its socket, staring about in every
direction with little regard for where he was facing, thus earning him
the name Mad-Eye. Had he not had the eye, he would probably have been
called Peg-Leg, after his missing limb, replaced by a simple wooden peg
even though the magical community was capable of producing less
noticeable limb replacements.

Moody stopped on the sidewalk, staring at the house. They were both
under disillusionment charms, Moody having not yet been convinced to
contribute his invisibility cloak to the cause, but a pair of enchanted
cloak-pins let them see each other through the charms. Not that Mad-Eye
needed it, but it certainly made Tonks feel better.

"You see something?" Tokns hissed, staring at the house but knowing that
the chances of her being able to see whatever Mad-Eye was staring at
were slim.

Moody shook his head, glancing at Tonks. "Not what I see, it's what I
don't see. I don't see Harry."

Tonks started. "What? I mean, I know no-one has seen him yet, but I
thought he just wasn't coming out. They said he would probably be
depressed, but where could he be if he isn't in there. Is the house
empty? I mean, I saw the man drive up. Could it be the wards are
shielding it?"

"No, I see the aunt and uncle. Real thin, horse-faced woman, and an
overweight mustachioed man."

"You don't see the son? Maybe they're both at the park or something?
Harry does have an invisibility cloak, or so I heard. He could have
snuck out, especially with someone to cover for him."

"Something doesn't feel right here." Moody spun around, his magical eye
glinting as he looked farther and farther out. Suddenly he hissed in
disbelief and horror. He grabbed Tonks' robes, pulling her off-balance,
and forcibly apparated them both.

Tonks staggered, then shuddered as she felt a horrible creeping
coldness. She wished that she had found Harry, remembering what Remus
and Sirius had said about his Patronus. She did her best, focusing on
her happiest memory and casting, getting a modest silver light to shine
from her wand.

"Expecto Patronum!" Moody shouted, silver flowing from his wand to join
the light shining from Tonks' wand as they advanced on the tall figures
cloaked in flowing black robes. As the figures backed away, Tonks spied
the figure that had caught Moody's attention, a portly youth cowering,
his face pale and covered in sweat, his eyes wild and unseeing.

The Dementors, for that is what the figures were, finally drew away,
giving back before the formless Patroni cast by Tonks and Mad-Eye. They
lifted into the air and vanished into the night.

Tonks hurried forward, her hand fumbling in her robe as she put away his
wand and withdrew the large slab of chocolate that Lupin had convinced
her to carry. She forced the Muggle boy to eat some of it, while Moody
stumped around them, staring out in all directions, searching for any
sign of the fourth inhabitant of #4 Privet Drive. He saw no sign of
Potter, so he kept one ear focused on Tonks' conversation with the
Muggle boy while he watched out for Death Eaters, Dementors, or other
dangers.

"Come on, eat up, it'll make you feel better." The boy hardly needed the
encouragment. The first bite of the chocolate had seemed to revive him,
and he had snatched the entire block from Tonks' hand. Tonks felt her
stomach turn at the disgusting slobbering of the grossly fat boy.

"Where is Harry?" Tonks asked him, repeating the question until the boy
finally looked up.

"Harry?" he asked, finally. "He ran away, his first day back."

"What?!" Tonks jerked to her feet, blood rushing out of her face,
leaving her pale. Harry . . . had run away? Why would he do that?

They had discussed, briefly, the effect recent events might have on the
Harry and the general consensus had been that he would be deeply
depressed for a few weeks. They had been instructed to watch for
suicidal tendencies, not an active runaway!

Moody stumped up behind the boy. "Best you run home and not go out at
night again, boy!" He looked at Tonks as the fat boy scrambled to his
feet and ran away, puffing heavily. "We better get back to
you-know-where and let Dumbledore know."

"Right," sighed Tonks, focusing her attention on apparating cleanly to
Grimmauld Place, and trying not to think of how Sirius and Remus would
react to this news.

Standing on the street between two of the houses, she ran through the
address in her mind, and magically, the houses seemed to slide further
apart, a new house appearing between them. She and Moody were quick to
get off the street and into the house. It vanished from the street as
soon as they were inside.

---

As Harry swooped and dove around the castle, feeling more free than he
ever had in his life. He was also learning about Pheonixes, or perhaps
merely about himself. Though his first impression of Fawkes had been of
a sickly looking red chicken, a physical impression given by the long
neck and short, pointed beak, along with the crest, he was quickly
learning that it was not entirely accurate.

Where chickens, to the best of his rather limited knowledge, consumed
seeds, insects, and grubs that they scratched the ground to find, his
vision seemed more suited to a bird of prey. Flying high above the
castle, he could still make out every detail of an individual blade of
grass on the front lawn, and his eyes seemed preternaturally swift at
catching and focusing on motion.

Furthermore, in spite of having a body that looked like it would be
ungainly, he felt remarkably graceful in the air, and was readily able
to catch the wind and soar like an owl. Of course, that particular set
of preconceptions had already been destroyed by Fawkes in his second
year, when the older phoenix had brought him the Sorting Hat, and with
it the sword of Godric Gryffindor, one of the school's four founders, he
had also carried Harry, Ginny, Ron, and their mindless git of a DADA
teacher that year, Lockhart.

Still, it was one thing to see that such a body could be graceful and
elegant in flight, and entirely another to live it. As much as Harry
loved his Firebolt, little though he had gotten to fly it, with
Quidditch giving way the year before to that horrible Tournament, it
could not compare, he decided, to the freedom of flying under his own
power, lifted through the air on his own wings, with no chance of being
thrown from his broom.

Hedwig hooted to him from a distance, and he banked in a wide turn to
head in her direction. His heart leaped as he realized that she was
heading out over the Forbidden Forest. Once he caught up with her, she
began explaining the challenges involved in flying in a forest. They
were not yet doing so, of course, being well above the trees, but they
were close enough for her to point out concerns.

Once she felt confident about his understanding, she swooped into the
tree canopies, skirting the branches and Harry dove to follow her. She
led him on a high-speed chase as they winged through the wood. She was
quick to chide him and chivvy him back when he split away, distracted by
a glint of light in the woods. She warned him of traveling too far
within the forest proper. The acromantula, the great spiders, children
all of the spider Aragog, once Hagrid's pet, could weave webs and
netting thick enough to catch large birds, and their portion of the
forest held many webs, both active, and remnants of torn webs that could
still snag a wing and trap a bird that struggled in panic.

Too far in another direction and he would encounter the hunting grounds
of the centaurs of the forest, experts with the bow and arrow. They did
not shoot at owls, but most other birds were fair game. Harry knew
several centaurs by name, though only one had ever behaved pleasantly
towards him. He did not believe that they would hunt phoenixes,
particularly so near to Hogwarts. They had to know that Dumbledore kept
a phoenix. He also had to agree, however, that it was unquestionably
better not to test that theory.

Finally, Harry watched as Hedwig demonstrated her hunting skills. She
could not hunt properly during the daytime due to her night-focused
eyesight. The spells on post-owls made them well-able to travel in the
daytime, when they would normally prefer to be sleeping, but they were
not strong enough to allow proper hunting.

Almost unable to contain his enthusiasm, and feeling hungry after his
vigorous exertions, Harry undertook to put Hedwig's teaching into
practice. With a focus on silent flight, on moving through the air
without even a whisper, he swept from perch to perch, from one tree to
the next, pausing to search the ground below. It did not escape his
mind, as he spied a vole and entered a steep dive, careful to avoid the
wind whistling through his feathers, which would alert the vole to his
approach, that the more skilled he became at hunting small rodents, the
better would be his chances of catching Wormtail, the erstwhile friend
of his father's that had betrayed his parents to Voldemort, causing
their death, and had then framed his godfather, Sirius Black, leading to
Sirius' imprisonment for twelve years for Wormtail's crimes. Wormtail
was, after all, a rat Animagus.

Harry might have hated Voldemort for killing his parents, but that was
more an intellectual hate, a knowing that he had been responsible, but
it lacked the visceral feeling of having watched Sirius and Wormtail
together, of knowing, when Wormtail's escape ended his hopes of living
with Sirius instead of the Dursleys, that he had failed his godfather,
and that Wormtail was responsible.

His talons caught the vole in the neck, snapping it instantly with the
force of his plunge. Though he knew that an owl would have eaten the
critter whole, it seemed too large for that to him, and he had no desire
to experience coughing up a pellet. Besides which, he did not even know
if he could.

Holding the vole in his claws, he thrust himself back into the air and
beat strongly, rising quickly to settle on a wide branch, the vole
pressed to the branch beneath one claw. Feeling his hunger surge at the
sight of the vole, and not feeling one whit of the nausea he had
anticipated, his neck flashed down and his beak plunged into the skin.
Getting a good grip, he tore off a bit of the skin, then spat,
displeased at the taste of feel of the hair. That he should find the
meat distasteful, as a phoenix, normally an herbivore, not to mention a
rather non-aggressive bird, did not occur to him, nor did he notice the
changes in his bill, as it came to more strongly resemble that of an
owl.

With a sudden burst of insight, Harry employed a spell Hermione had made
him learn for potions, that plucked, skinned, gutted, and deboned small
animals. It was safer to use than manually separating them, especially
when the potion called only for bones, or only for fur. Manual
preparation could result in the accidental addition of an uncalled for
ingredient and subsequent failure of the potion, potentially in an
explosive manner. Once he had learned it, Harry had wondered why it was
not part of the curriculum, before noticing later on that the Slytherins
also seemed to use the spell, and realizing that this was merely one
more example of Snape's bias against the other houses, Gryffindor
particularly.

Left with four clean piles, Harry sidled down the branch, dragging the
now pure pile of meat away from the other elements of the vole. Hedwig
hooted at him in confusion, but Harry hardly noticed the sound now, his
hearing tuning it out and focusing on the English words that he heard at
the same time, and he grinned at her question. "Just a spell, Hedwig."

The raw meat seemed to settle nicely in his stomach as he flew back with
the white owl. As they swooped back into the owlrey, to a cacophony of
gossip and questions, Harry could not help but marvel at the drastic
change in his circumstances that had come about in such a short time.

Perhaps he should be feeling Cedric Diggory's death still more keenly,
since he now realized that he could possibly have survived the curse
had he been able to intercept it, but he was not. Instead, he was
feeling a sense of hope that he had never really experienced before, a
lightness of heart that he had felt only for a short while, the few
times prior that he had heard phoenix-song. He finally believed that he
might someday be able to defeat Voldemort, that Cedric's death would not
have been in vain.

He could hardly wait to be told that he had obtained his full growth.
Though he enjoyed spending time with Hedwig and Fawkes, he needed to
become human again, he needed to recover his supplies from the Dursley's
home, and he needed to let people know that he was still alive. He
wondered briefly whether anyone even knew that he was no longer at the
Dursley's, and if so, what they had done with Vernon. Surely shooting
the Boy-Who-Lived through the head would not go unpunished, however much
they had ignored Vernon's earlier mistreatment of him.

After resting for several hours, Harry noticed a general agitation
arising amongst the other owls, and with a start, Harry realized that
feeding time must be coming around again. He looked up at the window to
the outside, but knew that he was too exhausted from both his exertions
and his rapid growth to take another flight, but the thought of having
to deal with another hysterical house-elf, not to mention the increased
chance of drawing professorial attention if they noticed increasing
agitation amongst the house-elf population, made him increasingly
uncomfortable.

If only he had been an owl instead of a phoenix, he would have fit in
here perfectly, and gone completely unnoticed. Of course, had that been
the case, he and Hedwig would both be dead, but still, what he wouldn't
give to be an owl right now, to be totally unnoticeable. He wished he
knew how Dumbledore turned invisible without a cloak, an ability Harry
had learned about in his first year at Hogwarts, when he had encountered
the Mirror of Erised with the aid of his father's invisibility cloak. He
heard startled squawks around him, but when he looked, he saw nothing
more than the house-elf that had just appeared in the room with a crack.

That is odd, he noted. They did not react so strongly when the other one
showed up, and it was behaving unusually! This one is acting normal . .
. wait! Why isn't this elf reacting to my presence? Harry fluttered his
wings nervously, not really wanting to attract the elf's attention, but
unable to quite contain his curiosity. He held his breath when the
elf's large eyes drifted over the assembled owls, but they did not even
flicker as they passed over Harry, before it vanished with another
crack.

Harry tried to look down at himself, wondering why the house-elf had not
reacted in the same manner the first one had, but discovered to his
shock that he could hardly turn his head down at all, nor could he tilt
his head back, when he tried that. He could turn his head left and right
with no difficulty however. He stretched his wings out and looked to the
right, and saw brown and gray speckled feathers, with a white underside.
"I'm an owl!" Harry yelped, emitting a hoot, and Hedwig hooted with
gentle laughter.

Filled with a sense of elation, Harry turned himself back into a pheonix
with what he felt was surprising ease. Just a moment of concentration,
and the brown and grey wing was once more gold and red. 

Harry swooped down off of his perch and landed lightly on the floor.
Focusing on his self-image, Harry concentrated on becoming human. His
heart fell when nothing changed. "No! I won't believe it's impossible, I
won't!"

Needing comfort, Harry forced his tired wings to pump, lifting himself
back up and out of the owlrey windows. He soared down to Hagrid's hut,
knowing the gentle half-giant would love the chance to pet a phoenix,
and desperately needing that human touch. To his dismay, the hut was
closed up tightly. He fluttered at the window, pecking at it as owls had
done so often at the window of his room on Privet Drive, but there was
no movement inside.

Suddenly Harry remembered overhearing Dumbledore mentioning Hagrid's
mission to the giants. No wonder his hut was empty and silent. Harry
fought off the feeling of loneliness with difficulty, and alighting on
the thatched roof of Hagrid's hut, he gazed up at the school. Fawkes'
behavior made him realize that Dumbledore was probably in the castle,
but he did not want to face the Headmaster, who had a way of looking at
you as if he could see all of your secrets. Harry shivered, remembering
the several times when the Headmaster had given him a penetrating glance
just before asking if he had anything to tell him.

He supposed Snape might stay on over the summer, but he had no desire to
end up as potions ingredients. Filch, the caretaker, might or might not
stay around, but again, he had no desire to come in contact with the
always-angry man.

Losing his internal battle, Harry sank into loneliness, his awareness of
the world around him fading. He was startled when he realized that in
this state of depression, he could feel something pulling at him, a
tugging that seemed to be pulling at his heart rather than his feathers.
He remembered the way that Fawkes had come to him in the Chamber of
Secrets, and wondered if this was the same situation. Was someone
defending him? Showing him true loyalty, as he had shown Dumbledore,
according to the Headmaster, to be able to draw Fawkes to him?




Together Again


Harry vanished before he realized what he was doing, unconsciously
seeking the source of the sensation he was feeling. He reappeared high
in the air, and quickly spread his wings, circling lower as he followed
the feeling.

He dropped quickly as a voice drifted up to him.

"I can't believe he won't let me question them. Harry did not just run
away, he wouldn't do that! They must have done something to him! I told
Dumbledore that he couldn't be happy there. Why else would he have been
so quick to agree to live with me after I was cleared. Damn them! Harry,
where are you?"

Harry lit on a branch, staring down with wide, sparkling eyes at his
godfather, stalking through what Harry now recognized as the park near
Privet Drive. He was obviously fighting with the thought of disobeying
Dumbledore and doing something horrible to the Dursley's. Finally he
stopped and collapsed onto a bench, putting his head in his hands.

"I can't do it. I can't get sent back to that place. I can't leave him
with no-one. Dammit!" Harry could see his hands clenching into fists. "I
can't even feel good about looking for him. Maybe he's better off
where-ever he is. Better than being sent back to those damn pigs.
Curse it all, why can't Dumbledore see that?"

Feeling terrible about the pain his godfather was in because of him, but
agreeing that he did not want to be found and put back with the
Dursleys--they had killed him, after all--Harry swept down off his
branch and landed on the back of the bench, and launched into song. It
was a song without words, as Harry deliberately pushed past the ability
to speak and have it come out as bird sounds, to make the sounds
themselves.

He felt a hand come near him, and cocked his head, lowering the volume
of his song so that he could open his eye and look at Sirius. His
godfather was staring at him with eyes wide with wonder, his hand
outstretched, nearly brushing Harry's chest feathers, trembling. Harry
side-stepped along the bench back, bringing his chest into contact with
Sirius' raised hand.

His godfather let out a shuddering gasp, tears dripping from his eyes as
he stroked Harry's feathers softly. He looked at Harry, puzzlement
growing in his eyes. "You're not Fawkes," he muttered. He had been
surprised to be serenaded by a phoenix, but had assumed that Dumbledore
had sent Fawkes to try and lift his spirits, but the more he looked at
it, the more sure he was that this bird was not Dumbledore's.

"So where'd you come from, eh?" Sirius chuckled as the phoenix butted
its head against his hand, demanding more attention. When the phoenix
hopped from the back of the bench to the seat, Sirius leaned back,
offering his lap. With a prideful strut, the golden bird settled itself
on his legs, fluffing its feathers before looking up at him with a
piercing gaze and chirping demandingly at him. "Alright, alright,"
Sirius laughed, stroking the gorgeous red and gold feathers.

With his other hand he wiped his eyes, thinking of the phoenix feather
in his godson's wand. Looking into the bird's swirling dark eyes, Sirius
spoke to it softly. "Don't suppose you know where Harry is? I'm sure he
needs you more than I. But then, you probably don't even know who I'm
talking about." He ruffled the soft down under Harry's chin, and Harry
caught his finger in his beak for a moment, startling the gaunt man.

When he realized that the phoenix had not attacked him, but merely
nipped at him, much as some of the owls he knew were wont to do, Sirius
teased the bird. He found it had amazing reflexes, and would catch his
finger as he waggled it around in front of it. The phoenix never missed
its strike.

Harry felt a great weight lifting from his shoulders as he indulged in
this light-hearted play with his godfather. This was the Sirius he had
wanted to know, the happy Marauder, not the solemn, sorrow-filled figure
he had found when he first arrived.

His heart filled with joy, Harry leapt off of Sirius, lighting on a
branch and turning back to chirp at the startled man. Sirius, who
thought the bird was leaving him, stared at it in confusion.

Laughing, which came out as an uplifting trill, Harry flew over and
tugged on Sirius' robes. He was shocked when he actually lifted Sirius
from the bench with practically no effort at all, before he remembered
Fawkes' carrying four people up out of the Chamber of Secrets.

Sirius straightened his legs, contacting the ground again, as Harry
released him, darting to hide behind a tree. Laughing, Sirius chased
after him. As Sirius passed around the tree, Harry took off again,
darting ahead of Sirius, leading him on a wild phoenix chase.

Several minutes later a voice impinged on their game, and Harry's heart
leapt into his throat. Higher than Sirius, he could see the source, his
eyes piercing the foliage as if it was not present, focusing instantly
on a pair of Auror's robes. He flew back frantically to Sirius, wishing
he could convince him to stop laughing and trying to touch him. It was
clear to Harry that Sirius had not yet heard them.

Desperate to save his godfather, Harry slipped through Sirius' hands,
his talons gripping the robes over his godfather's chest. Focusing on
taking them both, he teleported them back to the bench. He wanted to
take him to Hogwarts, but he feared that Sirius was more than quick
enough to put two and two together if he associated the phoenix with
Hogwarts. The other places Harry could think of all had the problem of
too many people around who might recognize Sirius, and traveling by
Phoenix fire was far from discreet, other than the Shrieking Shack, and
that would only lead Sirius to the right realizations even quicker than
Hogwarts.

Sirius was still laughing, now with delight at the tickling, pleasant
feeling of transporting via phoenix flames, much nicer in his opinion
than most of the other means of transportation wizards used, but over
that sound Harry's keen hearing could pick up the sounds of the startled
aurors moving in their direction.

Desperately Harry searched his memory for a spell that would save his
godfather. It was only after he cast the spell that seemed to rise from
his memory, that he realized he had never learned it. Sirius felt an icy
chill flow down his spine and Harry chirped in surprise as Sirius
suddenly blended perfectly into the background. A quick Silencio
followed by a Petrificus Totalus ensured that movement would not give
him away, then Harry quickly lifted his wild-eyed godfather and set him
on the ground. 

He settled on the back of the bench himself, just as the aurors broke
through the underbrush. He cocked his head to the side as he remembered
Fawkes doing, before vanishing and reappearing high above the trees in
the same spot, high enough that the sound of his reappearance did not
reach them, low enough that his keen hearing could still pick up their
voices.

Sirius was startled, his heart racing when the phoenix with which he had
been playing, enjoying himself without fear for the first time in long
years, had suddenly attacked him. He understood, feeling a surge of
gratitude, when aurors burst into the clearing, not coming from the
path, but from the direction he had chased the phoenix. Wow, phoenixes
must be a lot smarter than I thought. I never knew they could cast
spells, he mused as the aurors searched around, discussing what they had
seen, before leaving.

"Ah, hell, that was just the Headmaster's bird, Dawlish."

"I tell you, I heard voices, I heard laughter, and it wasn't phoenix
song. You can't mistake phoenix song for something else, given how it
affects you."

"Well, there's no-one here, so let's just go."

Dawlish glared around the clearing. "Accio cloak!" he shouted suddenly,
focusing on the concept of an invisibilty cloak, but nothing happened.
He cast revealing charms here and there, but though his spell caught
Sirius full on, it had no effect on the phoenix spell.

Harry watched the aurors move on through the brush, muttering to each
other. When they finally apparated away, he flew down and canceled the
spells on Sirius, who still seemed stunned, as he just sat there,
staring at Harry with wide eyes.

"You saved me," he whispered, but Harry could see that his eyes were
still full of confusion, and no little wonder. That was hardly
surprising, given that it must have been quite shocking to be suddenly
hit by three spells. Harry was actually more surprised that Sirius had
so quickly associated the spells with himself, given that to his
knowledge, phoenixes, even Fawkes, were not capable of casting spells,
but then, there had been no-one else around to take the blame, and the
lifting of the spells had coincided with Harry's return, so perhaps it
was not so improbable for him to make the connection after all.

Harry watched nervously as Sirius shook his head and looked around.
Would Sirius figure out? Had he blown it already? Sirius sighed deeply
and grinned up at Harry. "I better get out of here before they come
back, eh? I shouldn't even be here. I'm supposed to stick to Remus until
Dumbledore can get me a new wand. Can't apparate out of trouble if I'm
on my own." Sirius shrugged. "I just couldn't sit around and do nothing
while Harry is out there somewhere, alone."

Facing Harry, Sirius bowed deeply. "Thank you for saving my life," he
said formally. Harry dipped his head in acknowledgment, his heart heavy
with guilt. Sure he had saved Sirius, but Sirius would not even have
been here if not for him. he shook off the feeling with effort. It was
not his fault that his uncle had shot him. It might be looked upon as
his fault that he had not let someone know that he was still alive, but
they did not even know that he had been shot, and it was not as though
he could simply tell them.

Sirius grinned then. "Nice meeting you! I've got to go now, but
hopefully, we'll meet again." With that, Sirius turned and started to
walk away.

Unwilling to let Sirius leave so easily, Harry flew after him, circling
overhead. Once again, a spell he did not and should not know came to
him, and he vanished from sight, following invisibly as Sirius
watchfully made his way to a thick clump of bushes, before ducking down
and coming out as a dog. That tactic completely failed to befuddle
Harry, who of course recognized Padfoot immediately. It did encourage
him to keep his distance, however. The last thing he needed was for
Padfoot's doggie senses to detect the scent of Harry on the phoenix and
put two and two together.

Padfoot had only made it a few streets when a man drifted out of an
alley and strode up beside him. Harry drifted a bit lower to listen in.

"Damn it, Snuffles. We'll find him, but this is not the way. How do you
think he would feel if you got taken while looking for him?"

Horrible, Harry thought, that is how he would feel. He recognized the
man as Remus Lupin, Moony of the Marauders. Unsure how much of Remus'
werewolf senses carried over to his human form, Harry resolved to keep
his distance from the man. Snuffles, the name Remus had used, was the
moniker they had tagged Padfoot with to keep the Deatheaters from
recognizing his name, knowing that Wormtail, their former friend, would
definitely recognize Sirus' animagus name.

Harry was very confused when Sirius and Remus stood in front of a house
for several minutes before moving suddenly, striding quickly inside and
pulling the door closed behind them as if spooked by something. Harry
swept up and down the street, but did not find anything that might have
spooked them.

Wondering if he would be able to find Sirius when he was not displaying
his loyalty, Harry concentrated on Sirius. Immediately, and as long as
he concentrated, the feeling returned. He shifted his thought to the
other members of his almost-family. To his surprise, both Hermione and
Ron registered as being in the house that Sirius had just entered.

In a spurt of invisible flames, Harry appeared in the Hogwarts owlrey.
Hedwig was sleeping, so Harry settled in to wait for her to wake, while
playing with changing his form, testing his limits.

He learned that he was able to take basically any avian form he could
imagine, even becoming a snidget briefly. He also discovered that
certain forms would disturb the owls, and he quickly learned what to
avoid.

---

Over the next week, Harry met up with Sirius almost daily, appearing
invisibly to be sure he was alone, though by the end of the week,
Harry's senses were so well-attuned that he could tell even before
teleporting whether Sirius was alone or not.

Sirius, in spite of the complaints of Remus, made a point of being alone
for several hours each day, somewhere fairly isolated, though he did not
use the same place twice. He and Harry spent those hours getting to know
each other better. Sirius discussed his friends, his godson, and the
status of their search every day, but he also spent time reminiscing
about the past while he had the luxury of Harry's uplifting song to keep
himself from becoming suicidally depressed.

Sirius also, mischievous scamp that he was, tested Harry, trying to come
up with spells, mostly of the joke or prank variety, that Harry could
not do. Harry delighted in this, though when Sirius had first challenged
him to turn Sirius' hair a bright green, Harry had been very uncertain,
wondering if he should feign incomprehension or inability, to make
Sirius question his conclusions regarding the source of the spells that
first day.

In the end though, Harry had been unable to resist the allure of being
taught to prank by the master himself, and even more so, the allure of
seeing Sirius laughing freely. Harry was always careful to undo the
effects of any of his spells before Sirius left, or before someone could
interrupt.

They were twice interrupted by Remus, but thankfully the aurors did not
make a return appearance, though they might have regretted it if they
had, given the number of prankish spells Harry had learned.

Harry did not realize that many of the spells Sirius coaxed him into
casting--Harry played hard-to-get daily, forcing Sirius to cajole him
into his first spell--were spells that Sirius had never managed during
his days at Hogwarts, but had always wanted to accomplish. By no means
all of them, of course, but Sirius found considerable delight in finally
seeing the effects he had pictured and tried to create before. Had he
not been put in Azkaban, he would certainly have managed to create
some of these before.

Harry had basically stopped thinking about the odd way that spells just
seemed to leap into his mind when he needed them, wordless comprehension
of how to manipulate the magic to achieve the effect springing into his
mind full-formed. He did not understand it, and he knew he was no
Hermione or Lupin. He did not expect to be able to figure it out. Maybe
after he could speak to those two, they could explain it to him, until
then, he would just enjoy it and memorize the interesting spells that
Sirius introduced him to.

They also played hide-and-seek and chase-the-birdy, but when Sirius
brought out Padfoot to play, Harry invariably drifted up to the top
branches of a tree and settled down until Sirius gave up. He had to
steel himself against the aching disappointment in Sirius' eyes. The man
clearly loved playing as a dog, but Harry could not risk that nose.

Sirius did not appear to suspect anything. That a bird would have qualms
about coming close to a large dog seemed normal enough to him, but he
seemed to think that regular exposure to the transformation would make
some of Harry's trust for Sirius carry over to Padfoot.

Their bonding came to an abrupt end on the sixth day of their meetings.
When Harry appeared above where he felt Sirius waiting, alone in the
mid-morning, he found Sirius crumpled on the ground, tears pouring from
the ground as his hands dug and tore at the earth.

When he dropped down and crooned softly, Sirius looked up with eyes
haunted and full of pain. "I failed him," Sirius whispered. "You
shouldn't even want to be near me. I failed him! That fat bastard shot
him! He didn't even do anything to provoke it, nothing at all!"

Harry could not suppress a startled gasp of astonishment. He had never
expected them to discover that, after the first surprise of learning
that they believed he had run away. He figured that Vernon had
successfully covered it up.

"We should have realized it when they started planning a trip. When they
left with hastily packed suitcases the same day that we learned Harry
was gone, we should have known! But we were too busy looking for him.
They burned him, but we don't even have his ashes!"

Harry had to change back, he had to show them that he was not dead! He
could not let his godfather waste away when he was still alive. He
needed him! Suddenly, he remembered his godfather and Remus Lupin
casting a spell that forced Wormtail to turn back into Peter Pettigrew.
If he could just get the idea across to Sirius . . . Before he could act
on this idea, the very spell he was thinking of sprang full-fledged into
his mind, and he knew he could cast it.

Harry felt horrible when he realized that he could have turned back at
any time if he had just thought of looking for a spell instead of trying
to use his ability to reshape himself. He was about to cast the spell
when he realized that given the state his godfather was in, and that the
others were probably in, if he turned himself in now, they would lock
him up and never let him get near danger again.

That would never do. That he would face Voldemort again seemed a
certainty, and he could not allow them to sequester him, not now that he
was finally learning things that he felt would really give him a chance.
No protection they had yet offered had kept the bastard from reaching
him, but they could keep him from learning.

A plan came together rapidly, as Harry sang wordlessly, to cover his
distraction and lift Sirius' spirits. The spell would turn him back to
himself, of that he now felt sure. He spent a moment thinking, and sure
enough, he was able to obtain from whatever resource his mind was using
the spells he would need to return to what he had decided must be his
Animagus form. If his ability to change his shape carried over to his
human form, with similar limitations, then he would be able to alter his
appearance sufficiently to pose as someone else.

He could get books from Diagon Alley, but they might be watching it,
especially once he revealed that he was still alive. It would be better
if he could hide out in a place they would not suspect, nor be able to
check. A smirk would have crossed his face, were his beak capable of it,
as a twist worthy of the Slytherin he might have been suggested itself
to him.

He remembered how Draco Malfoy, his continual rival at Hogwarts, had
sought twice to befriend him, once before, and once after he knew who
Harry was. Draco had ruined it both times by insulting those Harry had
already befriended, but if Draco was that eager for a friend . . .
though Harry did not know if that was still the case, it seemed likely.
The people that hung around him seemed more like lackeys than friends.

He could befriend Draco, and finesse an invite to the Malfoy mansion. He
would . . . what was he thinking? He knew Lucius was a Death Eater. No,
that made no difference. He could become a phoenix and vanish any time.
He would train with Draco, learn the spells that Draco knew, maybe get
access to a library with real Dark Arts, perhaps even get an idea of
what Voldemort's plans were, and no-one would ever think of looking for
him there.

Sirius had gathered him into his lap by this point, and had been
stroking his feathers for some time. Harry looked up, coming to a
decision. If his luck with learning spells held, he would try to learn
how a wand was made, and make one around his own tail-feather for
Sirius. Surely his love for Sirius would make it work for him! If he
could not learn, maybe he would be able to find out from the Malfoys
where he could get one made to his specifications.

When Sirius finally climbed to his feet, lifting Harry up, Harry was
ready to go and begin his plan. As Sirius left, his step still weighted
by sadness, Harry vanished, reappearing in the owlrey, snuggling up to
Hedwig, and vanishing them both into a safe region of the Forbidden
Forest, away from the centaurs and acromantula.

Ignoring Hedwig's protest as her perch suddenly became a tree branch, he
pushed off and drifted to the ground. A swift casting later, Harry
Potter stood proud and human once more. Not to mention naked. A series
of quick spells later, and Harry's trunk appeared on the ground,
unharmed, along with his wand and the other personal items that had been
hidden in his floorboards. They were quickly protected by powerful
indestructability and untraceability spells. The Ministry detection
spells were easily broken, as well.

It was as well that the spells had occurred to him, for what he did not
know is that his belongings had been lovingly located and collected by
his friends, and had been in what would have been his and Ron's room at
Grimmauld Place, and Ron and Ginny had been sitting on Ron's bed when
they all disappeared in a burst of flame.

Harry's swift enspelling blocked the locating charms that were quickly
activated. His breaking of the Ministry charm, on the other hand, was
done in such a way that the Ministry records, rather than recording the
spell as broken, recorded the wand as broken.

He dressed quickly, mending and resizing Dudley's old clothes as he did
so, the spells coming without effort or speech, even though he was human
now. He performed several quick tests of his abilities. His attempts to
lift a large stone, which would have been as nothing to the odd
weightlessness that a phoenix could induce, failed utterly.

His attempts to teleport across the clearing, on the other hand, left
him crowing in delight. His attempts at changing his appearance were at
first confusing, since he lacked a mirror. A quick conjuring later,
something that would normally not be taught until the NEWT level
Transfiguration classes, and Harry was smirking at the mirror, from
which his best friend Ron was staring back at him. He shifted again, and
Hedwig protested, as his hair faded to a white-gold, and his eyes turned
silver. He practiced Malfoy's trademark smirk until he had Draco's
visage properly smirking out of the mirror, only to then realize that
the mirror meant he was smirking on the wrong side of his mouth.

He returned to his own shape when Hedwig, having flown to his shoulder,
pecked his ear. His eyes popped wide, and he stared in disbelief. He
tried several more times, and discovered he could recover his original
appearance now only by shapeshifting to it, as if he was pretending to
be himself, much as he could pretend to be Ron or Draco. His natural
appearance now seemed to be over six feet, a far cry from his previous
record as the shortest in his year. He also looked uncommonly healthy and
remarkably well-muscled, and he realized that he was seeing fine,
although he was not wearing his glasses. Indeed, he did not know where
they were, as they had not returned when he summoned his belongings.

"Alright, Hedwig. I've got to write a letter, then I
want you to deliver it to Remus Lupin. You remember him, right?"

Her contemptous snort of "Of course I do," made him grin again, as he
realized that even as a human he could still understand her. He noted,
before he vanished the mirror, that his scar was gone, though he had
done his best to return to his normal form, employing no active
shapeshifting. Summoning parchment, a quill, and ink, Harry used the top
of his trunk as a hard surface. He wrote as obscurely as he could, but
incorporating as many clues as he could. He dared not write a clearer
message, for it might be intercepted and he did not want to put his
friends in danger.

---

Dear Moonstruck,

Getting shot in the head HURTS! And dying is not much fun either, but
I'm all better now.

You can tell Silverbeard that there is no way I am ever returning to the
Privacy of that house, no matter what he says or does to them. I durst
say I am through with them for good.

I was willing to allow you to believe me fled to avoid Silverbeard's
manipulations, but I cannot permit you to believe me dead as once you
thought a certain rodent.

I have found my true protector, and am in training to do what must be
done. The Phoenix shall meet the Basilisk in combat once more, though
the outcome be the same.

Give my love to all, and forgive me, if you can, for my unwillingness to
be trammeled by misguided protectiveness. Don't bother writing back, it
won't reach me.

The Golden Boy

---

Harry grinned as he folded the parchment into a makeshift letter and
handed it to Hedwig. He spent several minutes explaining that he wanted
her to return to the owlrey no matter where he was, even if she was
given a letter to bring to him. He promised to come by and check on her
regularly, and then he watched her fly off. His parting signature had
been a deliberate thumbing of the nose at Professor Snape, and he wished
he could be there to see his face.

Summoning the mirror back up, Harry adjusted his appearance. He toned
down his muscle mass considerably, not wanting to be dumped in the same
class as Crabbe and Goyle, Malfoy's heavy-set bodyguards. He kept the
black hair, but made it lie flat, and lengthened it, then swept it back
and tied it off. His eyes became a dark black, to avoid giving his
emotions away as he tried to befriend someone he had pretty much hated
for most of his school life. His eyebrows thinned, the hair shortening,
until they looked immaculately groomed.

He had no facial hair to speak of, but he tried growing a beard, to test
the look, before discarding the idea. Lucius was clean shaven, and Harry
decided he looked better that way, regardless.

He transfigured his robes to match the style of Draco's as he could best
recall them, then shrunk his belongings. He focused on Draco, to get an
idea of where he was, and staggered when he felt an intense flow of pain
wash over him. Why had it hurt so much? Was it . . . he felt it again,
and realized that he was not feeling pain because he was trying to feel
where Draco was. He was feeling the pain that Draco was feeling!

Putting his plan on hold, Harry vanished the mirror, scooped up his
shrunken belongings, and became a phoenix again. He bulled past the
initial strangeness of the spell, though he vowed to come back to it
when he had more time and figure out what had felt so odd about it, and
vanished.

---

Draco screamed, curling tighter into a fetal ball as his father held him
under the Cruciatus curse. He did not hear the phoenix appear, but he
did hear his father's curse, a normal vulgarity this time, when the
phoenix struck his wand from his hand, ending the spell.

Lucius stared at the bird in disbelief as it dropped to land beside his
son, glaring up at him as if in anger. Though he first thought was that
Fawkes had been sent to rescue the boy, he quickly recognized the
difference in plumage, though his agile mind was equally quick to
question it. He had thought that a scarlet body and golden tail was
uniform to all phoenixes.

"When did you befriend a phoenix?!" Lucius grated, struggling to suppress
his anger and his desire to curse his recalcitrant son yet again,
knowing that he would be wasting his efforts. He glanced at his wand,
wondering if it was worth expending the energy to summon it back
wandlessly. He still held the bottom half of his cane in his left hand,
which served as a concealing sheath for his wand.

"What?" croaked Draco in obvious confusion. His eyes struggled to focus,
and Lucius watched as the bird stepped closer, and tears dropped from
its eyes to splash on Draco's face, clearing his mind and body of
confusion and pain in an instant. "Wow," he breathed in wonder, staring
at the bird.

Lucius scowled, unwilling to believe that his son did not know the bird
already. There had to be some connection, or why would it have come? He
summoned his wand, ignoring the bird's glare, and turned, his cloak
swirling around him. "You will join the Dark Lord, Draco. You were born
to his service," he tossed over his shoulder as he stalked out of the
bare stone room.

Draco groaned, sitting up and putting his head in his hands. An
involuntary smile crossed his face as he heard the beautiful sound of
phoenix-song.

---

Hermione, Ron, and Sirius were sitting at the kitchen table in shared
grief, when Remus entered the kitchen, a stunned look on his face as he
stared at a letter in his hand. Hermione glanced up. "What's wrong,
Professor Lupin?"

Remus collapsed into a chair. "Hedwig."

"You found her?" asked Hermione, only mildly interested. Hedwig was a
beautiful owl, but her beauty would not bring Harry back. Harry's death
had been a blow to all of them, especially when they realized that he
had been dead for nearly a week before they even discovered it.

Dumbledore had seemed absolutely crushed, which was the only thing
saving him from being killed. If he had come in with his usual twinkle,
acting as though nothing was wrong, she thought Sirius and Remus would
have rended him limb from limb in their grief.

Remus slid the paper across the table. "Hedwig brought this."

Hermione stared at it blankly for a moment before grabbing it and
reading avidly. She stared at the signature for a long minute, before
looking up, her lip trembling. "This . . . this is from Harry?"

Ron looked up at the same time as Sirius, but he was closer to Hermione,
and he got it first. He ran through it quickly, then looked up as Sirius
snatched up the letter as it fell from his fingers. "That didn't sound
much like him," Ron said in confusion.

"It's in code," Hermione pointed out. "Silverbeard is obvious, that's
got to be Dumbledore. I guess he's still sore with the Headmaster for
not doing anything about Harry getting trapped into that Tournament and
having to see Cedric die." Ron winced at the subtle jab, remembering the
way he had shunned Harry most of the year, believing that Harry had put
in his own name.

"What's Golden Boy?" asked Sirius, staring at the paper with burning
eyes, his hands clutching it so tightly that his fingers had gone white.

Ron laughed. "That's the one bit that I recognized. Snape sometimes
calls Harry Gryffindor's or Dumbledore's Golden Boy. That's the only
thing in it that sounds like Harry to me. Except maybe the attitude
towards pain in the first sentence."

"Moonstruck is clearly a reference to me," commented Lupin, "what are
the other codes you referred to, Hermione?"

"He doesn't want to return to the Privacy of that house. He's clearly
referring to both Privet drive, and to the isolation that Dumbledore
makes him go through every year. And then, I think his use of durst
instead of dare has to be a reference to the Dursleys. He would never
use a word like that, normally."

"Well, whoever it is, he did know about the way Harry died."

"And the burning, and where Harry lived, who his Muggle family was, oh,
and he knows about Wormtail! That's the reference to the rat you thought
was dead."

"Can it really be? Could Harry really be alive?"

---

Severus Snape, Potions Master and teacher at Hogwarts, was sitting in a
comfortable chair in his rooms. They were furnished far more nicely than
any of his students expected. Rumours occasionally passed that the
Potions Master was a vampire, and slept hanging upside down from a hook
in the Potions classroom. In fact, his rooms were tastefully decorated
with a mix of colors, muted variants of the Slytherin and Ravenclaw
house colors.

He was sipping from a snifter of brandy as he pondered his fate. He had
known the boy was important and to be protected, much though he had
loathed him. He had had no idea exactly how important, or how badly his
actions would have backfired had he succeeded in getting the boy
expelled. He had thought of it as forcing the boy to go back to his
luxurious prison, there to be safely out of the way to serve as the team
mascot, keeping people's hopes alive while staying alive himself.

When Harry died, Dumbledore had finally revealed the entire prophecy to
him. Harry was the only one that could defeat Voldemort, that much the
prophecy made clear, and now Harry was dead. And worse still, he had not
died on one of his foolish adventures, sticking his neck out. No, he had
died at the hands of the very people that Severus had believed were
coddling the boy. 

Far from treating the hope of the wizarding world with kid gloves, they
had, based on the memory images Dumbledore had eventually managed to
extract from the house, treated him little better than the darker
families treated their house-elves. And in the end, they had slain him
solely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and being forced
to witness another boy's death, though that end could also at least
partially be laid at Fudge's feet, for the letter he had sent to Harry's
relatives had as much as claimed that Harry was a murderer.

Severus had witnessed most of the memories through Dumbledore's
penseive, spotty though they were, and it sickened him to realize that
he had treated Potter's son as badly or worse than Potter had treated
him, and for far less reason.

And now, the only hope he had held for escaping from the trap he had
entered in school when he had been accepted into Lord Voldemort's
service was gone, dead at the hands of a witless Muggle.

He looked up when a knock sounded on his chamber door. "Enter," he said,
activating the spell that unlocked the door. Dumbledore entered, which
was no surprise. He was practically the only one who ever visited
Severus' quarters. What was startling was that the twinkle was back in
the blasted old man's eyes.

"There is hope again, my boy," Dumbledore chortled, and Severus just
glared at him. "Harry may not be dead!"

"Oh, please," Severus growled, looking into his glass morosely, "his
brains were scrambled and then he was burned to ash. I don't know anyone
or anything that could survive that."

"Don't you, Severus? I do believe you have watched Fawkes before?" There
was a teasing note in Dumbledore's voice that ratcheted up the level of
Snape's irritation several notches.

"You can't be bloody trying to tell me the brat is a phoenix!"

"No, no," placated Dumbledore. "But nonetheless, it does seem that he
may have survived." He held out a letter. "I verified that this is
written on paper that was in contact with Harry's trunk less than a day
ago. As you may be aware, his trunk and all of his belongings vanished
out of a house that is under the Fidelius spell, which should be
completely impossible. What is more, they vanished in a burst of flame.
I do believe that Harry may have been chosen by a phoenix!"

Snape's eyes went wide as he stared at the last line. A growl sprang up
in his throat. "Golden Boy indeed, the little brat!" Dumbledore snatched
the parchment from his hands before Severus could rend it.

"If this is indeed Harry, I seem to have lost his trust," Dumbledore
sighed. "But if he is alive, then we have hope once more."

"I suppose that means you want me to go back to brewing stronger
location potions?" Snape snarled, feeling again the ache in his head
that brewing those potions had engendered. He had been working on them
from the time that Dumbledore first tried a location spell and had it
fail, to the day that they discovered Harry was dead.

"If you would," Dumbledore agreed, as if it were not a demand. Snape
snorted at the thought. When was anything from Dumbledore less than a
command?




Friends and Enemies


Draco pulled himself slowly to a sitting position, his mind racing even
as he struggled to get his body up to speed. He still could barely wrap
his mind around the sudden end of the pain, and of the residual aches
and shakiness he had anticipated.

This was the first time his father had gone as far as one of the
Unforgivables, which seemed terribly ironic to Draco, who had only short
weeks ago been defending his father against what he had believed to be
malicious slandering by Harry Potter.

Potter had claimed that his father was one of the Death Eaters summoned
to Voldemort's side, but Draco had known, without a doubt in his mind,
that that could not be true. All right, yes, his father had been one in
the first war, but everyone knew that he was under the Imperius at the
time. He was not responsible for the heinous things he had been forced
to do!

Or so Draco had believed. Now Draco was forced to face the truth.
Voldemort had been brought back, just as Potter had claimed, and his
father had fairly gloated over it. Given his father's actions of late,
particularly his claiming that Draco himself had been promised to the
Dark Lord as a Death Eater since his birth, Draco could not deny
Potter's claim of his presence at the post-rebirth gathering, but that
meant that it was all true. There was no time in there for Voldemort to
get to his father and cast another Imperius on him, which meant that
there had never been one.

Draco had always sought for his father's approval, even as he had
anticipated the approval and love of the wizarding world as a whole.
After all, was he not the son of one of the most powerful figures in the
world? Was he not rich, and pure-blooded, and handsome? When he had
heard that Harry Potter, Savior of the Wizarding World, was on the
train, he had instantly known that they would be best friends. Looked up
to by everyone, they were the same in so many ways, set above the common
rabble, the sort of wizards that others would look up to, and try to
emulate.

He had not expected the reaction he had received on the Hogwart's train.
Even before he had been sorted, everyone had known he would be in
Slytherin. He had bragged of it, knowing that it was the best house.
There had been no question of that in anyone he had known before the
train, but on the train itself, it seemed to engender respect only from
those who were themselves in Slytherin. The other three houses seemed to
instantly expect him to be evil.

Potter's reaction, when he had graciously offered to allow the scarred
boy to join with him, to take his rightful place at his side, had been
to reject him to take up with those horrid Muggle-lovers, the Weasley's,
a pox on the name of purebloods if ever there was one, his father said.
Draco's anger and disbelief had been deep and bitter at what he
perceived as a betrayal of the other boy's family and place in society,
and of those who held wizarding society together in the face of pressure
from muggles and muggle-born wizards.

---

Harry crooned for several minutes before Draco's eyes finally focused
again, his blank stare fading slowly. Harry flapped his wings slightly,
catching Draco's eye and drawing his attention before moving closer and
demanding petting.

He was startled by his own actions, realizing only after Draco responded
as intended and began stroking his rich feathers, that he had behaved
almost habitually. He had acted as though he were with Sirius. He had
vaguely understood that he was affection-starved, given the disgust his
remaining family had held for him all of his life, but he would never
consciously have expected Draco to be capable, much less willing, of
behaving so nicely.

When he heard Draco muttering curses and imprecations against his father
and Voldemort under his breath, he was reminded of his own relationship
with Hedwig, and Sirius' relationship with Harry himself. It seemed that
people were generally willing to be more open when not in the presence
of other people, which brought home to Harry the less obvious advantage
of being an Animagus.

To be sure, he had understood very well this year the danger of an
unknown Animagus, thanks to the spying of Rita Skeeter in her beetle
form, but it was only now that he really understood that he could spy
nearly as effectively even if he was not hidden. How many people had
disregarded Padfoot, or even McGonagall's cat form, he wondered? He was
reminded of the class' free discussion and interaction that first day in
Transfiguration, unaware that the professor was in the room, watching
them.

As Draco slowly calmed down, soothed by the repetitive motion of
stroking Harry's feathers, Harry was facing a fatal flaw in his plan. He
had believed Draco to be either a spoilt, arrogant prat who was unaware
of his father's true allegiances, or a spoilt, arrogant prat who happily
followed Voldemort and would become a Death-Eater when the time came, if
he was not already.

In either case, his plan had been dependent on Draco having basically
free reign to do whatever he liked, so that his invitation to Harry,
under other guise, would pass uncontested. It looked like this was very
unlikely at the moment.

Even so, though he still considered Draco an arrogant prat, he could not
quite accept the idea of leaving him to his torment. He knew first-hand,
to his horror, what the Cruciatus curse felt like. Granted, he knew it
from Voldemort, and he did not know how the elder Malfoy stacked up in
comparison, but it hardly mattered. However much of a prat Draco might
be, he did not deserve that. Not even Snape deserved that, loathe though
he was to admit it. Lucius, on the other hand . . . well, best not to
think of that.

Several minutes of pondering produced an idea for a spell, which quickly
coalesced in his mind, a phenomenon that Harry knew he should not put
off trying to understand much longer. Holding that necessary
self-examination in temporary abeyance, Harry cast the spell on Malfoy,
feeling only a slight qualm about casting it without the other boy's
permission.

With a final parting trill, Harry spread his wings. When Draco drew back
in uncertainty, Harry vanished, reappearing in the air high over the
mansion. Looking down, he studied it, memorizing it so that he could
return even if Draco was not present.

Finally, Harry turned his attention to his plans, in shreds due to his
new discoveries about his perpetual rival. Though he did wonder how long
this treatment had been going on, and how much of it was due to his part
in raising Voldemort from his nearly powerless disembodied state, he
quickly turned to more immediately important matters.

Once again, he needed to come up with a place to stay at which the Order
would not think to look for him. Hogwarts was fine in phoenix form, but
he needed to get books to read, and he needed to practice as a human,
not to mention practicing changing his form, none of which were
particularly safe at Hogwarts given how much Dumbledore seemed to know
about what happened there.

The Burrow, the oddly constructed wizarding home of the Weasley family,
might be available, if the other Weasleys were with Ron at the Grimmauld
house, but they probably had wards to detect intrusions. After all, the
only reason he could think for them to have left the Burrow was a Death
Eater threat, and they would want to be able to counterattack. They
would not be satisfied, he hoped, with merely getting the Weasleys out
of harms way and leaving their house to be destroyed. No, it would be
protected.

The Shrieking Shack was probably still in use for Remus'
transformations, Harry guessed, and even if it was not, changes there to
make it more comfortable for regular living would probably be noticed by
the inhabitants of Hogsmeade.

He had stayed in the Leaky Cauldron last summer, for a while, but he had
not been the one paying for the rooms, and so did not know how much it
would cost. More to the point, he expected Order members probably passed
through regularly, going to Diagon Alley. He would also prefer not to be
so close to the hub of wizarding society in England, after all the
terrible things the Daily Prophet had printed about him while he was
trying to survive the Tri-Wizard Tournament.

It was a terrible thing, he decided, to have the power to go anywhere,
and have no idea where to go. Wait . . . that was it!

Harry vanished once more, reappearing in the sky over a small village.
Elation filled him as he realized that he had successfully brought
himself to a place he had never been, with nothing to guide him but a
single memory that included nothing beyond the frame of a single room.
Unless he was quite mistaken, his phoenix apparition, if that is what it
was, was much more powerful and flexible than normal wizard apparition,
even above and beyond being able to pass through anti-apparition wards
such as those around Hogwarts.

With wide, sweeping circles, Harry searched the small village of
Godric's Hollow. His heart leapt in his chest when saw it. He suspected
that aversion charms had been cast on it, when he found the ruins of his
parents' house here, the partially burned and damaged wreck looking
little different, he expected, from its appearance on the night of his
parents' death. 

Something in the spells that night, whether by Voldemort, or his
parents, or by the Death Eaters after Voldemort's fall, had shattered
the supporting walls, dropping the roof down, and started a fire. "I
should have died even if Voldemort didn't kill me," Harry mused, looking
over the damage. He supposed it was vaguely possible that it had been
later damage caused by vengeful Death Eaters. From the descriptions he
had heard of the celebrations, it certainly sounded like there would
have been a clear period where they could have acted basically
uncontested, as the rest of the wizarding world celebrated the fall of
Voldemort.

He felt his feathers lift, a sensation similar to the lifting of hair on
the back of his neck when he felt someone watching him at Hogwarts, as
he drifted down through the air. He had barely begun to glance around to
see if someone was looking in his direction, when he realized, without
quite knowing how he knew it, that the sensation had come from passing
through the wards that shielded the house.

He landed lightly on an upthrust board, shattered at the end, standing
like a blackened sentinel over the dead home. Harry felt tears well up
in his eyes at the sudden feeling of loss that overcame him, but he did
not let them fall. The magic of a phoenix's tears was too great to loose
on sorrow.

Feeling a powerful urge to prove that he could build, that he could heal
what Voldemort had wrought, Harry came to a decision. Voldemort had
broken his home. Harry would rebuild it.

A touch of caution led Harry to study the wards. He feared for a moment
that he had erred greatly in coming here, that the wards would have
notified Dumbledore that they had been breached. To his amazement, his
eyes changed to accomodate his needs, and the wards became visible to
his eyes, a beautiful skein of colorful weaves that encompassed the
entire property. Slowly the meaning of the complex tapestry made itself
known to him, and he followed the design of the weave.

Dumbledore's touch was not present, that much he quickly discerned. This
was basically a muggle-repelling ward that projected the image of a
house much like those further up and down the lane. This similarity
assisted the repelling portion of the ward, which focused on ensuring
that no-one paid any attention to the house. It was fairly basic, and it
had an air of familiarity to Harry. He identified it eventually as being
similar to the feel of the wards that had been cast around the World
Quidditch Finals to prevent the Muggles from detecting the mass
accumulation of wizards and witches.

Barely realizing that he had actually begun to act, Harry deftly
adjusted the weave, vanishing into invisibility as he casually bound
the image of the property as it truly stood, combining it with a wizard
focused second half to the wards. When he finished, the muggle-repelling
ward was complemented by a ward that would quietly and unobtrusively
encourage wizards to take no notice of the property, even while ensuring
that if they did look at it, they would see only what they would have
seen before the ward was erected, no matter what happened behind it.

A third layer built up slowly, as Harry swept around the property in
something approaching a trance. When it was complete, nothing that
happened within the wards would be sensed magically, outside of them. A
final layer tied the three wards together, and integrated a recognition
charm so that none of the three layers would affect Harry, nor anyone he
chose, though he added no-one but himself to it as yet.

Descending to land on a pile of roof shingles in the center of what he
guessed was either a living room or a dining room, Harry returned to his
human shape. Looking around him, Harry tried to decide where to start.
He stared from one spot to another, but nothing was jumping out at him
as appropriate. A Reparo spell on the shingles beneath him might fix
them, but without repairing everything below them, they would just be
perfect shingles lying on the floor. As for what was below him, he could
not get at them without moving the shingles first.

Giving up momentarily, he focused on coming up with a spell that would
specifically repair a structure. Expecting to need multiple attempts to
complete the process, Harry decided to do as much as he could manage up
front. Closing his eyes, Harry focused on the fiery feel his magic had
taken now that he could find it. Steadily building up his power he
concentrated on the spell, to cast it in the new wandless fashion he had
learned, but in a new twist, he held back the final flow of power,
building it up as if behind a dam. The power built rapidly, ever faster,
and Harry's muscles began to tense up. It felt akin to trying to hold
back a sneeze, as an immense pressure accumulated behind his eyes. When
holding back the power began to actually hurt, Harry finally released it
with a scream.

It was a shame that there was no-one there to watch. A white light burst
out of Harry, passing over the house in an instant, erasing it from
view. It raced outward, filling the entire interior of the wards in an
intensely brilliant flare of magic. The wards bent outward under the
strain, and only the fact that the very nature of the spell repaired the
wards as they splintered held them together at all. Though Harry had
felt the weight of the magical power as he strained to contain it, it
seemed several times more potent as it washed around him. He could
literally feel the building coming back together beneath him, the
shingles beneath his feet lifting him up into the air as the rafters and
beams of the house beneath him were resurrected. Any happiness or
elation he might have felt was tempered by the extreme exhaustion and
emptiness that seemed to eat away at him as the magic flowed out,
seemingly leaving nothing behind but a great gaping hole.

Harry slumped to the shingles, barely maintaining his balance as he
collapsed. He could hardly believe the drastic extent of the
transformation. He had no idea at this point how much work remained to
repair the inside, but the exterior, so far as he could see from his
position on top of the roof, was completely rebuilt. The roof was
completely back in place. He dropped back onto his back, staring up at
the sky, breathing out heavily. The emptiness in his chest seemed to be
recedingly, but so slowly that he wondered if the hole would ever be
filled. 

He groaned and threw his arm over his eyes when the flat-bottomed clouds
that drifted past overhead moved out from in front of the sun, letting
it glare into his eyes. Somehow, it seemed wrong that the sun should
still be high in the sky. He felt too weak to try and climb down, much
less levitate himself down. He did not expect to be able to accomplish
the animagus transformation, as weakened as he was, but he tried it
anyway. To his considerable startlement, he transformed almost without
effort.

His wings still felt weak, and he did not have enough confidence to try
flying, nor did he feel up to vanishing, but he could feel the emptiness
filling much more quickly. He had no real idea why, though it obviously
had something to do with being a phoenix, but he did not object. At the
rate his energy was now returning, he could believe that he would
actually recover.

Harry did not wait for full recovery, however. As soon as he felt
confident of success, he vanished into flame, reappearing on the porch
stoop. He became human again, with no more effort than had been required
to become a phoenix.

He stretched slowly, fighting the ache in his muscles, his eyes closing
as he rotated his back. When he gave himself a final shake and looked at
the door in front of him, he felt a surge of disbelief and fear. His
hand shook as he reached out and grasped the doorknob. A loud click
sounded, startling Harry badly. He turned the knob slowly, and pushed
the door inward.

Harry's knees quivered. He shook his head, staring at what looked like a
perfectly normal house. He stepped inside, his eyes darting from the
unshattered glass windows, to the pearly white crown moulding, to the
gleaming banister on the stairs. "Dumbledore himself could not have done
this much with one spell," Harry whispered, feeling once again the pain
of knowing that he was different, that he would never be normal. A
moment later his heart surged, as his perspective shifted, and he
realized that this was evidence that he truly might be able to defeat
Voldemort.

Harry's step firmed as he walked into the entryway of his parent's
house. He reached out gingerly to brush the frame of a wizarding
photograph of his parents. His mother was holding him, wrapped in a
white garment, and he marveled both at how small he was, and at how
tenderly they both smiled at him, before smiling out at whoever was
taking the picture. Harry would lay good odds on Sirius or Remus being
either the camera-man, or standing behind him, to elicit the half-smirk
that adorned his father's face when the messy-haired man stared out of
the photograph.

Moving as if drawn by something beyond his control, Harry drifted up the
stairs, walking without thought directly to the room where his mother
had died defending him. His eyes filled with tears as he stared at the
beautiful room. His spell had put everything back together, including
the baby bed, with its high wooden rails, and the toys that dangled from
the mobile. When he stepped into the room, one of the hanging toys made
a revving sound, drawing his eye, and a strangled laugh, as it began
moving through the air, spinning the mobile. It was a tiny black
motorcycle, much like the one in Harry's childhood dreams, that his
living relatives had so derided.

The other elements of the mobile were equally recognizable. The
lily-flower motif on the wood of the mobile clearly represented his
mother, while the other elements were the Marauders. Remus was
represented by a crescent moon, a somewhat odd choice, since it was of
course the full moon that truly defined him. But a simple circle would
probably have not been recognizable, while a crescent moon was
immediately identifiable, and represented the moon's phases as much as
the moon itself, so he supposed it was appropriate enough.

His father was the only one represented by his animagus form. The stag,
drifting slowly through the air as the mobile spun, was clearly a work
of magic, its legs slowly moving as if walking, though their movements
were not timed to match the rate of the mobile's spinning. It also had
an exact duplicate of Prongs' rack, which a random stag would not be
likely to have.

The fourth and last toy made Harry's hand itch for his wand. A
triangular hunk of cheese could represent no-one but Wormtail, the
betrayer. Harry resisted the temptation to blast the toy, knowing it
would unbalance the mobile. Had the toy been a rat, Harry thought, he
would probably not have been able to restrain himself.

He was drawn almost unwillingly to the side of the bed. Reaching into
it, he picked up the blanket. He laughed softly, even as tears dripped
down his cheek, as he felt its texture. Much like Dumbledore's robes at
times, it was clearly enchanted. The printed figures on it, dogs, stags,
wolves, and rats in a field of lilies, pranced and ran across it.

Leaving the room that had been his almost fourteen years ago, he
wandered through the house. He found his parents' room, and he lost
several hours when he found a small stack of photo albums in a trunk
that clearly belonged to his mother.

It was as he was staring at a moving picture of his mother holding him
tightly, while bawling out a repentant Sirius who was holding a broom,
that Harry realized for the first time that his spell had not only put
the physical objects back together, it seemed to have restored spells
that had been destroyed just as long as the objects they had been cast
on.

Dropping into the state of mind in which he had first seen the wards,
Harry examined the house, and nearly collapsed in laughter when he
realized that the Fidelius charm had been recreated as well. Once more
Peter Pettigrew held the secret of his family's location. Did Wormtail
realize it? Would he have felt the spell's return?

Without stopping to consider that it should be impossible, Harry tagged
the person at the far end of the spell so that he could find him again,
then tore the spell loose and reached out to Sirius, the one that should
have been his parent's Secret-Keeper, and tied it to him. He did not
worry about asking. His godfather had often bemoaned his foolishness in
not accepting the role as Secret-Keeper, so he should have no reason to
object now that it was his.

His magical gaze swiftly examined the rest of the house, and the
exterior, and discovered that nearly every room had something magical in
it. Each would doubtless be a completely different spell, and probably
one he did not even know. Beyond even that, the Fidelius charm was not
the only house-surrounding spell that had been resurrected. He could
feel powerful defense charms and older notice-me-not wards, probably
employed while the Fidelius was being prepared or discussed. 

He sat unsteadily on his parents' bed, trying to come to grips with what
he had just learned and done. The spell he had already gauged as more
powerful than Dumbledore, not that he had any true way to judge that,
beyond his gut feeling, was now seen to be several times more powerful.
The Fidelius charm was a very powerful magic, and should definitely not
have been resurrected by a simple structural repair spell, and like most
of the other spells, it was a spell he had not yet learned, not even
through the strange mental abilities he seemed to have gained from his
phoenix form.

Harry's mind raced as questions ran through his mind seemingly without
limit. He could not understand what was happening to him. Becoming an
animagus was supposed to be difficult. It had taken his father three
years to accomplish it. He had become an animagus without learning
anything, without even trying, and he had become a magical creature. He
had not believed that possible.

He had cast a number of spells that he had never learned, never been
taught. They had simply appeared in his mind when he needed them. What
is more, he had cast them without a wand and even without words. Even
after becoming human again, he had cast that massive repair spell
without saying anything, and without using his wand. And of course,
there was the unbelievable scale of the spell he had just cast,
restoring not only the structure, but the spells. How was it possible?

He was torn between concern about what was happening, and relief
that he was finally showing the kind of power that everyone seemed to
expect from him.

Finally, he shook off the confusion, and focused on what he was doing.
He had a place to stay now, so all that remained was to find a way to
repair his plan after Lucius threw a wrench into it.

Before he could begin to plan, he felt a tingling. When he focused on
it, he could feel confusion, fear, and deep sadness, and it tasted
strongly of Sirius. He focused deliberately on Sirius and the sensations
did not change, confirming his thought, and informing him that Sirius
was alone.

Discarding his concern over his unmade or inapplicable plans, he became
a phoenix, and vanished into flame.

---

"I think I'm losing my mind," Sirius whispered to the beautiful unnamed
phoenix. "I failed my friends, and now I've failed their son, my godson.
I had no idea how bad it was for him there, but I surely know what it is
like to be lonely. I should have ignored Dumbledore, ignored the danger,
and taken him in anyway. Now he's gone, and someone else is doing for
him what I should have done."

"And now, now that I've failed completely, I can feel a secret hiding
inside me, as if I was their secret-keeper, as if I had made the right
decision all those years ago."

Sirius wound down, sitting on the large stone that rose from the ground,
shielded from the view of the nearby path by an impenetrable thicket of
smooth-leaved yaupon, where Harry sat watching his godfather. Not
telling his godfather the truth, not transforming and revealing himself,
was taking more out of Harry than he could have imagined. He felt nearly
as wrung out emotionally as his godfather clearly was himself. He had
not realized that Sirius would feel the spell being attached to him.

It truly hurt to see the mischievous light missing from Sirius' eyes,
and once more Harry found himself searching for a spell. A moment later,
when Harry finally showed himself to his godfather for the first time
that day, he was carrying a letter clutched in his talon.

Sirius took it with a startled look that reminded Harry that he had
clearly thought him to be a wild phoenix. Harry chuckled at the thought,
remembering the discussions he had had with Hermione about Fawkes.
Phoenixes, he had learned, were native to mountains in Egypt, Greece,
and much of Asia. There were no native wild phoenixes in England, though
he supposed it was possible that some had been transplanted to the
mountains of Scotland. Ireland had a native variant, but no one could
mistake an augery for a phoenix, no matter the relation. 

Sirius stared at the letter for a long moment, clearly wondering who
besides Albus Dumbledore could possibly send him mail by phoenix.
Finally he opened it. Harry watched as Sirius eyes tracked down the
familiar writing, Harry's handwriting, duplicated by spell, though
Sirius obviously did not know that. Tears dripped from his eyes when he
finally looked up, staring at Harry with an awed and hopeful gaze.

"You . . . you've seen him? You've seen Harry?"

Harry bobbed his head in an approximation of a nod, and Sirius smiled
tentatively. "He's safe? He's not in danger?"

Harry trilled affirmatively. Sirius nodded. "Well," he said sadly, "if
his protector has a phoenix as a familiar I guess that at least means he
isn't in the hands of someone Dark. No phoenix would ever consider
someone like Voldemort as a partner." Sirius stared down at his hands,
and realization burst in Harry's mind like an exploding star.

Sirius was lonely and feeling useless. Every job he did for Dumbledore
would risk his freedom. He was a remarkably skilled wizard, and he would
be beyond grateful for the opportunity to train Harry. There was no way
he could know less than Draco, and he had the same upbringing as a child
in a pureblood house!

The sound of someone approaching made Harry's decision imperative, and
he made it in an instant, once more diving impulsively into action. He
landed on Sirius' shoulder, grasping him tightly. They vanished into
flame just after Remus Lupin entered the clearing. Harry grinned at the
slack-jawed look of awe and surprise on Lupin's face as it vanished in
the flames.

---

Sirius stiffened in surprise when he felt the phoenix's talons digging
lightly into his shoulder. He heard a rustle in the brush just as flames
surrounded him, and realized that the phoenix was acting to save him.
Able to pay attention this time, as he was half-expecting the feeling,
he decided that being apparated by phoenix was like nothing he had ever
experienced. He felt wrapped in warmth and love, suffused and
invigorated by an affectionate regard that was vaguely familiar.

He stumbled when they reappeared. His hand reaching out for stability
caught on a banister and kept him from falling. His eyes widened as he
took in his surroundings, an overpowering sense of disbelief smothering
the lingering flames of love and warmth, as he recognized the walls of
his best friend's home, the home he had failed to protect.

He did not notice when the weight of the fiery bird that had brought him
here left his shoulder, so absorbed was he by the unbelievable sight of
this relic of his memories standing once more before him as if never
touched by Peter's betrayal and Sirius' failure.

A voice from the stairs shook him and drew his eye. 

"Welcome home, Padfoot."

Sirius stared at the figure risen from his dreams and nightmares, and
believed himself dead. "James? James, I'm so sorry!" Sirius could not
restrain the tears that fell as he looked upon the one person he would
have gladly called brother. His eyes darkened as the man shook his
familiar black mane.

"Sorry, Padfoot. Wrong generation." Harry grinned as Sirius finally
focused on his eyes, their brilliant emerald sheen no longer concealed
behind thick glasses. Lily's eyes looking at him from James' face could
only be one person.

"Harry?!" Sirius shook with an all-over shiver as he realized that he
was not dead. He raced up the stairs. Harry backed up several steps, but
held his arms open so that Sirius would not take it poorly. He simply
did not want the massive collision that came as Sirius reached him and
swept him up in a fierce bear hug to happen on the stairs. Sirius swung
Harry around, laughing through glad tears, and Harry felt his heart ease
as he realized that he had done the right thing.

At the same time, he got a slight sense of the kind of pain his friends
might be going through, and it worried him. He had never lost someone he
was close to aside from his parents, and that loss was old and dimmed
from memory, a loss that ached for what he would never know, not an ache
for what he knew and missed.

Finally Sirius set him down and looked around. "This . . . this is
James' house? But, how? I saw it burning. There was hardly anything left!"

He focused back on his godson. "And you, Harry? What's happened to you?
You're so tall!" He reached out and lifted the fringe of Harry's hair,
running his fingers over the smooth, unscarred skin there. It should
have made him suspicious, but he could not muster any suspicion. He had
been brought here by a phoenix, and they would not trust just anyone.

Harry frowned. "What happened to me? I was killed by the people
Dumbledore left me with, and made me go back to every year, for my
protection!"

"Just one more way for me to be like Riddle," Harry continued, turning
away to stare at the floor. "Seems I'm not so easy to kill. I felt the
bullet go in, Sirius." He turned back, his green eyes blazing as Sirius
felt his stomach turn as his godson described his own death. "Everything
went black, then I woke up again to the most terrible pain I have ever
felt. It even made Voldemort's Cruciatus pale in comparison. Didn't last
too long, but I had no idea what was happening then. I do now, though."

Harry sighed, then grinned up at Sirius. "You're going to have to help
me come up with a Marauder name, Padfoot. I can't believe you still
haven't named me."

Sirius shook his head, plainly confused and not following the course of
Harry's conversation well at all. "We can't name you until you have an
Animagus form, Harry. You haven't been trying to do that on your own,
have you? You should have asked me or Moony!"

Harry shook his head, still grinning. "You don't quite get it, yet,
Padfoot. I woke up from a terrible burning to find myself in a pile of
ash. I saw Vernon going into my room, and I knew he was going to hurt
Hedwig. I wanted to be there more than anything, to protect her, and in
a whirl of flames, I was. It did not occur to me at that point to stop
and think about how I could fit in her cage. I just stupefied him and
got out of there."

Harry's grin widened as he saw Sirius' eyes light up as he figured out
the clues. "You . . . you little scamp, you little rascal!"

Harry backed up a step, holding up his hands as if to fend his fuming
godfather off. He laughed. "I couldn't change back at first, but I
wanted to be near you."

Sirius nodded, the humour of it getting the better of him. "So I've
known where you were the whole time, almost. Where were you when you
weren't with me?"

"The one place where I could feel sure that Hedwig would be safe, the
Owlrey at Hogwarts."

Sirius laughed aloud, delighted. He surged forward, brushing aside
Harry's guarding hands with little effort as he lifted his godson into
another hug, then set him down and ruffled his hair. "Well, that was a
worthy prank, and no mistake! I'd say you've more than earned your name,
but I'll have to think on it. I suppose it was me telling the little
birdy about finding out that Harry was dead that pushed you to figure
out the transformation?" Harry nodded, and Sirius continued, "So you
sent a letter. Why didn't you return? And what in Merlin's name is
this?" He gestured wildly at the house around them.

Harry sighed. "Dumbledore wants to protect me, and for a long while, I
agreed with him. I didn't want any of this, not the fame, and certainly
not a violent madman out to kill me, so I was happy to be protected,
even if I hated going back to the Dursley's. He told me in my first year
that I'm protected by my mother's sacrifice, so I guess living there
with her sister must help the magic, or something like that. And the
Dursleys' certainly never tried to kill me before."

"But I've managed to do a number of things since I was changed, starting
with casting a wandless, wordless stupefy on Vernon."

"And a disillusionment charm on me," Sirius added, realizing with a
start that it had been Harry who had cast that spell. "How the devil did
you learn that?"

"That's what I'm getting at, Sirius. I've never learned it. I just
needed it desperately, and it came. The same with transforming back. As
long as I was fairly happy . . . and I was. There is nothing quite like
flying under your own power, you know. As long as I was happy, there was
nothing, but when I really needed to change back, the spells just came
to me. For the first time, I really believe that I might be able to
fight Voldemort and win. I've already seen three people die at his
hands, one of them in person. I've faced him, I know what I'm up
against, and as fast as I've been able to learn spells, and as much
power as I can feel in me now . . ."

"You know, when I . . . well, when I burned, I guess, one of the pains
was like something shattering. I thought at first that it was the wards
on the house, but I could sense it, like a great shell of green glass
shattering, and I would swear it was inside me. I think that some of my
power was blocked off or something. I've always been just average in my
spells, except every now and then, when I do something I shouldn't be
able to, like casting a Patronus in my third year. I think I must have
been reaching beyond that barrier, somehow. And now, the barrier is just
gone. Spells are so easy now, and I have so much more power!"

Sirius looked a bit uncertain at this, and Harry hastened to prove his
point before his godfather could interrupt. "You asked about this house,
and it's the perfect example! As I'm sure you've guessed, this is my
parents' house in Godric's Hollow. I apparated, or whatever you call it,
here without ever having seen it or been here, at least in my waking
memory, and I brought it back, including the spells on the photos, and
everything else, with a single structural repair spell, with all my
power behind it. I built it up like a dam and let it loose all at once."

Harry stepped forward, putting his hand on Sirius' chest, feeling the
magic within him. "It even brought back the Fidelius, Siri. It was still
attached to that rat, and I couldn't handle it, so I tore it out of him
and put it in you instead." Harry looked up at his godfather, his green
eyes burning into Sirius' soul. "I can trust you with my secrets, can't
I, Sirius?"

There was only one answer that Sirius could give to that.




Training and a Rescue


Remus walked quietly, thinking over the words he had prepared for when
he reached Sirius. He knew his friend had taken Harry's apparent death
hard, and to everyone's surprise, he had seemed to take the news of
Harry's survival even harder.

Remus thought he might understand the basis for Padfoot's current
depression. The letter they had received from Harry had mentioned a
protector. Sirius had hoped, if they could only manage to clear his
name, to be Harry's proper guardian, to protect and shield him from the
expectations of the wizarding world. Remus suspected that his friend
would gladly spend the rest of his life trying to expiate what he saw as
his failure.

A smile crossed his face as a fresher scent crossed his nose. "I guessed
right," he murmured, sniffing deeper and confirming the direction of the
scent trail. "Found you, Paddy."

He caught a confirming glimpse of a figure through the trees, and he
hurried forward. He stepped into full view of Sirius and stopped short,
his jaw dropping. There was a gorgeous red and gold phoenix settling on
to Sirius' shoulder. The werewolf barely had time to process what he was
seeing before fire swirled around them both and they vanished.

"Sirus!" he shouted, though he knew it was far too late.

Confused and disturbed, Remus retraced his steps, returning to the
safety of Grimmauld Place. His mind was alive with questions. Had
Sirius, whose face had been downturned, known that the phoenix was
there? Did the phoenix have something to do with his unusually down
mood? Where had he gone, or been taken?

"Wotcher, Remmy!"

Remus looked up at the cheerful greeting, and smiled wanly at the young
Auror, Tonks. "Did Sirius say anything to you when he left?"

Tonks shook her hair, which was a dark purple at the moment, a color
that matched the bubble of gum that she blew and popped before
answering. "Nope. He was deep in his whole silent routine. Why? What'd
my cousin do this time?"

"He left."

Tonks straightened up, glancing nervously at the curtained portrait of
Sirius' mother as she stepped closer to Remus. She hissed, knowing that
shouting in surprise, as she wanted to do, would wake the old bat up,
deafening them with her hateful shrieks. "What do you mean, he left?
Where'd he go?"

"A phoenix took him somewhere. I don't know where he is."

"Oh, well, why didn't you say so?" Tonks responded, grinning
nonchalantly. "Dumbledore must have needed him for something."

Remus sighed, gesturing for Tonks to follow him as he slipped quietly
past the magical portrait of the late Mrs. Black, and into the drawing
room. He glanced around, looking for Kreacher, the Black's aging
house-elf, a crazy little bugger by his account, always mumbling and
cursing to himself. Assured that he was not being listened in on, he
faced Tonks again.

"It was not Fawkes, Tonks. Fawkes has red feathers on his body, and
golden tail-feathers. This phoenix was mixed red and gold all over."

Tonks shrugged. "Sirius has gone off by himself for several hours almost
daily. Maybe he's been meeting this phoenix and going somewhere with it.
I wouldn't worry unless he's not back tonight."

Remus nodded slowly. "I suppose that is possible. I can't imagine where
the old dog could have found a phoenix to befriend, anyway."

---

Harry ducked a jet of red light, and side-stepped the next, then dived
to the bare wood of the floor to avoid what he thought was an impediment
jinx. He paused to aim and fire a stupefy, but he took too long in
releasing it, and was hit by a full body-bind. A burst of wandless power
threw it off invisibly but did nothing against the stupefy that had
followed behind the binding spell. He fell into darkness, and returned
at Sirius' quiet "Enervate."

"I'm too slow," Harry said, accepting Sirius' outstretched hand. Sirius
pulled him easily to his feet.

"At getting spells off, anyway. You are plenty quick on the dodge and
run. Must be all that Quidditch."

"And avoiding Dudley and his gang," added Harry, grinning. "What about
my spell speed?"

"Ah, that just takes practice. Right now, you've just learned an Auror's
training worth of spells, so you are overwhelmed by your options. It is
taking you too long to decide what to cast. The only thing that will
really help with that is lots and lots of dueling practice. You need to
get used to casting them all, and become intimately familiar with their
effects. Right now, you are capable of casting them, but you don't
really know them through and through," Sirius explained, conjuring
several chairs and towels in the otherwise empty room they had cleared
to use as a training room for Harry. "Oh, you'll have to practice
casting them faster, as well, but I think most of it at the moment is
just indecision. You'd know the answer to that better than I, at any
rate."

Sirius grinned. "I'm still in awe of watching you cast a spell perfectly
after watching me cast it once, but knowing how to cast the spell is
only the first step. You also have to know how it affects the target,
how fast it is in getting there, how hard it is to throw off or avoid,
and what spells can be used to block or reflect it. That's what will
clear up that indecision, and give you the experience to make the right
choices, and regular practice will make your choices practically
instantaneous."

"How much of a problem is it going to be for me, always dueling against
you?" Harry asked, walking slowly over to Sirius' side of the room,
where Sirius had cast himself into one of the chairs with a grateful
sigh. The chairs were resting beside the door, the only other notable
feature in the room. The walls were bare, scorched and marred by their
combat over the past several hours, and from the lengthy series of
example spells Sirius had cast while Harry watched and learned.

"Well, it's not great. During Auror training, you duel against a whole
slew of opponents, not to mention multiple opponents at a time. I don't
know that there is much we can do about it know, but a dueling club when
you get back to school might not be amiss." Sirius tossed one of the
towels to Harry.

"I'd have to teach them before they'd be worth fighting," Harry pointed
out, slumping into a chair, wiping the sweat off of his forehead.

"Not if you held yourself to their level. They would still give you good
practice in fighting against different styles and opponents. But I still
think that you teaching them would be a good idea, especially if you get
another useless Defense teacher."

"Yeah, I guess Crouch won't be back this year. Wouldn't surprise me
much, though. As much as Fudge doesn't want to admit anything, putting a
teacher in who has had the Kiss would be just like him. Still, how
different can their styles possibly be if they're all trained by me?"

"Simple, you just teach them the spells, and let them create their own
dueling style. They will all have different favorite spells and
combinations. It'll work out, you'll see."

Harry shrugged. "Maybe. I guess we'll see when . . . we . . ."

Harry trailed off and Sirius glanced at him. Harry's eyes were wide and
Sirius could see surprise and concern swirling in their green depths.
Before he had a chance to ask Harry what was wrong, Harry jumped to his
feet, turned into a phoenix and vanished.

Sirius tried to wait patiently, knowing that Harry could take care of
himself, but soon found himself pacing up and down the room, wondering
fretfully and futilely where Harry had gone to, and what he had sensed
that had demanded such immediate action.

They had explored the house together, with Sirius telling stories about
nearly everything, feeding Harry's desperate hunger to learn more of his
family. Sirius' heart ached when he saw that hungry expression on
Harry's face and knew that no-one had taken the time to actually talk to
the boy about his family. It was not as if no-one had known them.
Dumbledore and McGonagall had taught them, had watched and laughed at
most of the Marauder's antics. Hagrid had tried numerous times to keep
them out of the Forbidden Forest, just as he did with the Weasley twins.
Even Snape had known them, even if his perspective might be a bit
biased. Why had no-one told Harry about his parents before?

When they had finished exploring the house, and after Sirius had walked
Harry through all the stories he knew behind the pictures in the photo
albums they found, they had prepared two of the bedrooms to sleep in.
Then Harry had made dinner for them in the kitchen in the Muggle
fashion, while Sirius struggled with his anger as Harry told him where
he had learned the skill. Harry was her sister's son, yet Petunia had
treated him like an unwanted beggar, forcing him to do endless chores,
and to assist her in cooking meals that he got the least and worst
portions of. He was quite certain that Dudley would have had a far
better time of it if their positions had been reversed. Lily would never
have treated anyone in that manner, much less her own nephew.

The next day, they had cleared out a room to train in, and then Harry
had demonstrated his newly acquired and quite unbelievable learning
ability. Sirius demonstrated all the charms, hexes, and curses he knew,
and Harry had duplicated each one perfectly on the first try. He had
also managed to duplicate Sirius' tricks with Transfiguration, which was
even more surprising. Harry had always had a knack for Defense Against
the Dark Arts, and had managed a powerful Accio charm the past year, but
he had never excelled in Transfiguration. Now it seemed to come to him
as easily as anything else.

Finally Sirius collapsed in one of the chairs. His memories were not
calming him any. He knew Harry could take care of himself now, but he
could not help worrying.

He leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, when he heard Harry's
voice from downstairs. "Sirius," Harry called up, "I need you down
here!"

He had barely reached the door when he heard a haughty but pain-filled
voice. "Why the bloody hell can't I see anything?! What have you done to
me?"

---

Harry stalled as a phantom pain sliced across his back. He latched on to
the pain instantly, following it back to its source, even as it doubled.
It felt like his back was being lashed, and at the other end, he found
his school-time nemesis, Draco Malfoy. It was nothing that Draco was
doing that was causing his pain.

On the contrary, Harry knew, he was feeling Draco's pain, an artifact of
the tenuous link he had forged between them when he reached out to find
the blond Slytherin, when he had been part of Harry's plan. "But the
spell," Harry questioned mentally, as he transformed to a phoenix and
vanished, "what happened to the spell I put on him?" When he appeared in
a stone room, instinctively recognizing his surroundings as Malfoy
Manor, the same place he had found himself at the last time he had
followed Draco's trace, he instantly recognized the cause.

The elder Malfoy was laying into Draco with a whip. The teenager was
hanging from chains on the wall, screaming in pain, his back exposed,
with three bleeding stripes laid across it. Harry swooped down and
grasped the whistling whip in his talons, jerking it out of the
surprised wielder's grasp. It disintegrated under the influence of a
pulse of phoenix magic from Harry.

Lucius was not looking too well himself. His hands, no longer holding
the whip, were shaking in a manner reminiscent of Harry's after he had
been under Voldemort's Cruciatus. His robes were ripped, burnt, and
stained with his own blood from numerous cuts that reached through the
robes to his skin. Harry did not delude himself that this was due to
Draco's defense. No, these were the result of the spell Harry had left
on the younger Malfoy, a spell that turned back the results of any
malicious magic upon the caster. Those spell effects were the results of
spells that Lucius had attempted upon his own son.

Lucius did not react well to Harry's interference. He seemed to have
gotten over his earlier reticence about attacking a phoenix, or perhaps
he had merely needed to look up a spell that could they could not defend
against. Either way, he was quick to bring out his wand and snap a spell
off. Harry dodged it easily, but put a shield up just in case. Sure
enough, the spell light followed his motion, impacting and dispersing
against his shield. Harry did not wait for that impact, however,
immediately casting a disarming hex.

Unprepared for a spell from a phoenix, Lucius lost his grip on his wand,
which was whipped into the air. Harry swooped, snatching the wand. Lucius
cursed aloud and Harry grinned inside, thinking that he looked even more
disheveled than he had after Dobby had given him a blast in defence of
Harry at the end of Harry's second year. "I wish I could get a picture
of that for Sirius. He'd really appreciate it," he said aloud, his voice
coming out as amused trills and warbles. He settled on Draco's shoulders
and vanished in flame with the Malfoy heir, not noticing the pallor that
hit Lucius' face when Harry voiced his opinion.

The cessation of pain had apparently allowed Draco to fall unconscious,
for when they reappeared in the front hall of Harry's house, without the
support of the chains and wall, Draco slumped to the ground. Harry
dropped down with him and tilting his head, let tears fall from his eyes
to land on Draco's torn back. He was surprised the first time he had
cried to heal Draco, at how easy it had been to produce tears on demand,
but now it seemed routine. 

Finally able to get a proper look at the formerly haughty heir of the
Malfoy name, he was somewhat surprised to see that Draco was actually
wearing robes. They had been shredded in the back, exposing his pale
skin to the flick of the lash, which had scored fiery red welts across
it, healing now under the influence of the tears, but they were clearly
robes. Harry fluttered his wings to express his bemusement, unable to
shake his head while carefully dripping silvery healing tears. He should
have realized, but somehow, he had expected more normal clothing in the
absence of the formality demanded at school.

With Draco's skin finally healed, leaving a pale but unmarred back still
exposed by the torn robes, Harry swept his wings down, aiding in a hop
that left him a few feet away, and he settled in to watch and wait,
knowing that Malfoy should wake fairly soon.

Draco stirred finally, and sat up, then looked around blankly, and
shivered. His back was now free of injury, but he seemed lost, confused,
and frightened. Harry realized with a start that though he had been able
to bring Draco here, he could see nothing because he was not permitted
by the Fidelius charm. Harry was about to adjust the spell, when he
decided that it was not necessary. He had the secret-keeper ready to
hand. He just had to get Sirius to tell Draco where they were.

He transformed back, calling quietly up the stairs to get his godfather
to come down.

---

Draco looked around fearfully, his eyes passing over Harry as if the
other boy was invisible. "Why the bloody hell can't I see anything?!
What have you done to me?"

Draco spun around, his hand reaching around to feel his back. "Father?
Where am I? Am I dead?"

He heard the creak of a stair and turned quickly. His eyes popped open
as he stared at the frightening visage of a wanted criminal walking down
nothing, standing in a blank whiteness and staring at him with a mixture
of curiosity and loathing.

"You're a Malfoy," Black stated, and Draco nodded nervously, his bluster
failing him in front of Sirius Black, a man who had reportedly killed
twelve Muggles and one wizard with a single spell, and laughed when the
Aurors came, then escaped Azkaban, and remained free in spite of a
country-wide search.

He shivered as Black's eyes fixed on something about three feet away
from Draco himself. Was the man as insane as they said? It seemed
confirmed when he spoke to nothing. Draco peered in the direction the
escaped murderer was looking, but there was nothing there to be seen but
more blankness.

"What do you need, Ignis?"

Draco wanted to retort that his name was not Ignis, but Black spoke
again a moment later, his attention focused on Draco now, even as he
drifted downward, coming closer to Draco's level, unnerving him.

"Your father beat you? With a whip?" His attention drifted back to
Draco's left again, but returned sharply, before Draco had a chance to
feel relief at being out from under the killer's sharp gaze. Black's
dark eyes glittered. "If you are certain," he said softly. Draco
trembled as the murderer strode forward, on a level with him now, to
loom over him.

"Do you know where you are, Malfoy . . ." Black looked away a moment,
and when he looked back, he looked almost chastised. Draco was certain
now that the man was mad. "Sorry. Draco. Do you know where you are?"

Draco shook his head, but managed to speak, his voice hoarse, his mouth
dry. "Am . . . am I dead?"

"No," said Black firmly, his face hardening. Draco resisted the urge to
cringe at his dark look. "You are safe here. You are in my failure."

With those words, the whiteness vanished, and Draco found himself in
what looked like an ordinary middle-class wizarding home. He glanced to
the left, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Harry Potter, it
could only be him, with that messy black hair and green eyes, but he was
tall and strong, and the thick-rimmed glasses were gone, leaving those
blazing emeralds free to burn their way into his soul. Draco tore his
eyes away, his heart thumping as he felt like his nemesis had just seen
his darkest secrets. In spite of the anger he felt, both at the seeming
invasion of his privacy, and at Potter's presence alone, he could not
seem to scrape up any defiance in the face of the infamous Sirius Black.

Still, he could not quite parse the scene. It did not look as though
Black was holding Potter here. In fact, given where Potter was standing,
it was Potter Black had looked at, when he had seemed momentarily
apologetic.

"I don't know why Ignis decided to save you," Black said, his eyes
flicking to Potter. Draco followed the glance, and was surprised to see
a gleam in Potter's eye at the words, and a small nod. What in Merlin's
name was going on here? "But he did, and you are here now. So long as
you remain here, you will forget any rivalry that lay between you. As I
said before, you are safe here. You are behind a Fidelius charm."

So were Potter's parents, Draco thought, but said nothing, only nodding.
Nonetheless, Potter's green eyes caught his doubt, and Potter spoke, his
voice soft but deeper than it had been. To his surprise, there was no
hate, not even any dislike detectable in his rival's soft speech.
"Sirius holds the secret. That is why he had to tell you where you are."

Draco was shaken. He might not be quite as studious as Potter's Mudblood
friend Granger, but he had read about the Fidelius. It was a hideously
complicated charm. Black was even more powerful than he had thought, if
he had cast such a spell and centered it within himself. It had to have
been him. Potter certainly was not capable of such a thing. With the
Secret-Keeper within the concealed secret, something that also demanded
great power, there was basically no chance that anyone outside the house
would be able to find and rescue him.

"But he will have to explain to you . . . and to me, why he used the
words he did." Potter's voice had turned hard, though still quiet, and
somehow held a measure of command.

To Draco's surprise, though it seemed to confirm his earlier
observation, Black actually looked sheepish at that. He spoke,
hesitantly. "This . . . that is how I think of it, Harry. This is where
I failed them, and you."

"It was not your failure," Potter stated firmly. Draco glanced at him,
then back at Black to catch his reaction, feeling like he was missing
some sort of critical detail to actually be able to understand what they
were saying. Were they speaking in code?

"I convinced them," Black answered, his voice breaking, and Draco was
startled at the weight of sorrow it held.

Potter shook his shaggy mane, his green eyes holding fixed on Black's
dark pair. "You could not know. If you insist on holding that blame,
then you condemn me, your godson, for Cedric's death." Draco's eyes
widened. He wondered what Potter had convinced Cedric of that could have
led to his death. That was the only explanation he could come up with
that fit their words.

"That wasn't your fault!" Sirius shouted, his face flushing. Draco was
beyond startled when he noticed tears standing in the man's flashing
eyes.

Harry smiled softly. "I know that, now. No more than this place is your
failure."

Black just sighed deeply. "Enough, Harry. What are we going to do with
mini-Lucius here?"

"Don't call me that," Draco shouted, suprised to feel tears pricking the
corners of his own eyes. He held them back with an act of will,
unwilling to show more weakness in front of Potter, and hardly believing
that he had just shouted at a convicted multiple-murderer. He wished the
floor would simply open up and swallow him.

Potter glared at Black, and Black actually cringed. "Sorry, Draco," he
said. "That was uncalled for. You do look remarkably like him, you know."

Potter turned back to Draco, ignoring Black, and offered his hand.
"Welcome to my home, Draco."

Draco took his hand, feeling an odd sense of deja vu. With his welcome
seemingly assured, he could not help but ask, "How did I get here?"

The dark-haired boy grinned at that, throwing a mischievous glance at
Black. "Ignis brought you."

"Ignis?"

"Yeah, big bird, about so big, full of itself?" Black gestured
helpfully, earning a dark glance from Potter.

"The phoenix?! That phoenix brought me here? Did he cast that spell on
me?"

A calculating glance from Black, aimed at Potter, who flushed, lifted
Draco's curiosity to new heights. "Spell? What spell would that be?"
Draco stared at the tall, gaunt man. Had that really been a note of
teasing in his voice? Why the devil would he be teasing . . . no, wait,
Potter's flush confirmed that it was not Draco that Black was teasing,
but what did that mean?

"There was a spell on me. Lucius came back several times and tried
different curses, after the phoenix first showed up. Everything he
tried, from the Cruciatus to blood-letting curses and burning charms
turned back on him. It was great to watch, though I paid for it in the
end." Draco shivered, remembering the lines of fire as they had seared
his back, splitting him open.

Potter stepped forward, unnervingly close, and caught Draco's silver
eyes. "He won't hurt you again, Draco. He can't get to you here, I swear
it."

"What do you know about it?" Draco asked harshly, pulling back, confused
by Potter's behavior, and by the use of his first name from someone that
had always called him Malfoy.

His rival shook his head, looking down. "This is not the house I grew up
in, Draco. I'm here because my Uncle put a bullet through my brain."

Black shook his head. "You didn't have to tell him that, Harry!"

Draco shook all over, and tears once more prickled at the corners of his
eyes. He refused to allow them to fall, and he forced his voice to sound
normal. "So I am dead, then."

"No, Draco. You are not dead, nor am I. Nor even this overgrown mutt
here, though perhaps we all three should be. I survived my uncle's
attempt at murder, never mind how. Anyway, you are here now. This is the
house I lived in when I was a baby, the house my parents died in, and
Black here is my godfather. He is training me to duel. The Ministry
cannot detect magic done here. You are welcome to join the training."

"How can you say that so calmly, Potter?" Draco asked, unable to believe
Potter's complaisance about the loss of his parents, with the betrayal
of his own father fresh and hurting.

"The only time I remember them at all, is when Dementors get near me.
Then I hear their dying screams. Here I am surrounded by evidence of
their love, something I never had. It doesn't hurt so much, here.
Especially now that I have my godfather."

"Uhm . . ." Draco began, but fell silent, unable to bring up Black's
betrayal of Potter's parents in front of Black's face. He did not know
how Black had managed to conceal his crime from Potter, but he did not
want to see what the man might do to keep it under wraps. He gulped
nervously.

"So, uh, what happens to me now?"

Harry frowned thoughtfully. "My parents had four bedrooms and a sitting
room. We converted the sitting room to a bedroom, and the bigger of the
spare bedrooms to a training room, because I just can't bear to change
the nursery or my parent's room. So . . . we'll just have to add a
bedroom for you!"

Draco trailed along behind a grinning, bemused Sirius Black as they
followed the enthused black-haired wizard as he raced up the stairs and
down the hall. He felt a shiver run down his spine as a rush of magic
swirled up around the emerald-eyed teen. Harry's eyes seemed to glow,
and his robes lifted and snapped as in a phantom wind.

Harry laughed aloud and Draco felt his emotions forcibly uplifted,
carried on the rising wave of Harry's delight. Draco nervously asked
Sirius, "What about the Ministry?"

"He's found some way around it, but he's not using his wand right now
anyway. Besides, we're in a Fidelius."

They watched together, in joint amazement, as Harry was lifted from the
ground by the force of the magic swirling around him. His face was
almost euphoric as the end of the hallway simply slid back away from him
as he floated forward. He gestured at the wall to his left and a doorway
appeared. The door was of black wood, the frame was carved into red and
black snakes.

The door swung slowly open before them, and the nervous pair stepped up
behind Harry to see into the room. They could feel their hair lifting
and separating as though they were in a powerful thunderstorm standing
at ground zero just before a lightning strike. The room swelled out from
them with remarkable speed, the walls roughening until they could see
that they had become stone. Draco summoned his voice and spoke, barely
aduible through the sound of the changes. "Actually, Harry, I prefer
wood."

Instantly a wave of darkness spread out along the walls as they became
the same dark wood that made up the door. Draco felt like his eyes were
about to fall out of his head when his very own bed, that he would
recognize anywhere, appeared in the room, quickly followed by the rest
of his belongings. Another door appeared further in the room, and Draco
had little doubt that if he opened it he would find a closet with all of
his robes.

Draco had resisted his father because the very evidence of his father's
allegiance to the Dark Lord that confirmed Potter's words had also been
evidence that Potter's accusation that Voldemort was a half-blood was
also true. There was no way he would bow to a half-blood that had fallen
to Potter so often. Now, he was seeing that he had chosen correctly,
that as a Malfoy should, he had somehow landed on the winning side. He
would have to cultivate Potter properly, and would doubtless have to
repress some of his own prejudices about the rabble the other boy
associated with, but watching Potter in an ecstasy of magical creation,
there was no doubt in his mind that Potter would win this war.

Here he was, reaching out across who knew how great a distance, through
the multi-layered wards of Malfoy Manor, and the protections of a
Fidelius charm, and somehow summoning all of these belongings without
ever having seen them before.

Finally finished, Harry settled back to the ground, looking around
proudly. The magic around him slowly diminished, as he turned to grin
happily at Draco and Sirius. "There. You can stay here, Draco. I think I
got all your stuff."

"Did you create all of this, Harry?" Sirius asked, staring around at the
various furnishings and belongings. There was a chair that had a
discarded robe still lying across it, and several books were lying out
on the desk as though someone had been reading there.

"No, I brought it from Draco's room."

"In Malfoy Manor," Sirius stated flatly.

"Yeah . . . ," Harry agreed, looking at Sirius uncertainly, and Draco
felt like laughing. It was obvious from the poor sap's face that he had
no idea just how impossible what he had done was.

"And the wards?" Sirius folded his hands, looking at his godson sternly,
but Draco caught a glint in his eye, and realized that Black was teasing
him. How did that fit in with what he knew of their relationship? He
frowned. It didn't. Harry . . . er, Potter, had been the one chastising
Black earlier. How could they possibly both be the authority in the
relationship? He had no idea that his puzzled frown was only making
Harry more nervous.

"I didn't damage them, I promise," Harry swore fervently, looking at
Draco with wide green eyes.

"So how did you get through them, then?" Sirius asked, suppressing his
grin at Harry's earnestness and innocence.

"I . . . I just told them I was a Malfoy," Harry said. He winced
involuntarily as he realized what he had just admitted. Draco barked out
a laugh.

"Right, Har . . . er, Potter, as if they would ever believe you to be a
Malfoy!"

Harry seemed to puff up at that aspersion, and Sirius moved his hand in
front of his mouth, furrowing his brow as if pondering punishment, while
he concealed the grin that would not leave his lips, as Harry
straightened up, his spine stiffening, his green eyes hardening until
they looked like cold gemstones. His face lifted slightly, and a
supercilious smirk played across his lip.

"I'm quite certain I don't know what you could possibly be referring to,
Malfoy," Harry stated arrogantly, looking at Draco as if he were a dog
leaving that Harry was carefully avoiding touching. An aura of power and
command seemed to surround him, and Draco gaped at him, disbelieving.

"Malfoys do not hold a monopoly on power, arrogance, and riches,
Draco," Harry stated, as he swept past, leaving the room with his robes
swirling as impressively as Snape's ever had, his bearing haughty and
supremely confident.

Draco glanced at Sirius, his eyes full of disbelief and awe, just in
time to see Black collapse to the ground laughing uncontrollably. Draco
stared at him aghast. "And you duel with that!?"

Black merely laughed harder. Indignation bringing back a modicum of
Malfoy pride, and Black's behavior removing some of the dark man's
mystique, Draco whipped out his wand and cast a Mobilicorpus on the
helplessly laughing man. He carted him out of his new room, and left him
laughing in the hallway. He re-entered his room and closed the door.

He was of course not depending on the Fidelius charm to conceal his
magic use. The Ministry monitors had been removed from his wand by his
father long ago. 

He walked slowly around the room. There was a crackling feel to the air,
a residue of the immense amount of magic that had gone into creating the
room and filling it with his possessions. It only took a moment of
flipping through the parchments on his desk to confirm that Harry had
indeed brought his things from his room. They were covered with notes in
his own handwriting.

A thought occurred to him and he sat heavily on the bed as he realized
that to his knowledge, Harry had been raised by Muggles, and Black had
been on the run. The likelihood of either of them having a house-elf was
slim at best, which meant that he would have to learn to do without
their services. The only problem with that idea was that he had never,
in all of his life, been without the services of house-elves.

Muffled thuds, cracks, and booms caught his attention, and he realized
that Harry and Black must be . . . wait a moment, had he just thought of
Potter as Harry? How long had he been doing that? After several moments
of thought, Draco abandoned his self-recriminations. He had decided to
try and work with Harry, thinking of him as Potter would merely get in
the way of forging a new working relationship between them.

Mind made up, Draco left his room and followed the sounds to another
door in the same hall. He carefully opened the door, and ducked as the
red light of a stunner flew past his head. He slipped inside and closed
the door, casting a quick shield around himself as he moved along the
wall, watching the dueling pair.

To his surprise, while Harry was unquestionably better than he had been
when they had dueled during their third year, at Lockhart's ill-fated
Dueling Club, when Harry had been outed as a Parselmouth, he was
obviously slower to pick a spell and cast it than Black.

The older man seemed little the worse for wear given his twelve years in
Azkaban prison. He cast spells in rapid succession, even as he moved
fluidly around the room. Harry was moving well himself, a result of his
Quidditch training, Draco assumed, but he was slow to react to Black's
spells, while Black seemed to cast the counter to Harry's spells as
Harry himself was casting them, half the time. The other half, he still
reacted much more quickly than Harry.

"He's reading Harry's spells," Draco murmured, realizing the source of
Black's apparent prescience. Harry was somehow telegraphing what he was
going to do several instants before he actually managed to cast, giving
Black, who could obviously read Harry like a book, ample opportunity to
respond at the same time that Harry cast.

"Join in Draco," Harry urged, twisting to the side to avoid a flash of
orange light. "Attack me."

Draco smirked as he pulled out his wand and rolled away from the wall
towards Black. He did not want to accidentally get in front of the older
wizard. He cast a quick body bind at Harry, then dove behind Black and
cast again from the other side.

He only lasted a few minutes before Harry caught him with a minor hex,
but he removed it quickly. Just a few shots later, one of his curses
destroyed Harry's hasty shield just in time to prevent it from stopping
a stronger curse from Black, and Harry was thrown back, losing his wand.

Though they clearly could have continued, particularly since Draco was
well aware that Harry no longer needed a wand to cast powerful magic,
Black called a halt at that point, taking the spell off of his godson
before Harry had a chance to break it.

Black proceeded to go over the fight, explaining where Harry had
actually erred. He reminded them both that the sort of quick reflexes in
picking and casting appropriate spells that Black himself showed in a
fight would only come with regular practice. "We're not going to work on
stamina, just yet," he said, "but later on, we'll have some endurance
trials. I'll prepare some energy-boosting potions for myself and Draco,
to ensure that we can out-last you, and give your powers a good
stretching."

Harry nodded happily. "I'll go make an early dinner," he said. "since we
missed lunch. It'll probably be ready in about an hour." He left the
room grinning.

Draco looked at Black nervously. "Is he a good cook?"

Black nodded, flashing a smile filled with white teeth. "Harry's a great
cook. No worries, Draco. Why don't you go read for a while. You did
pretty well there, by the way." He did not see the need to mention that
this was the second duel of the day for both Harry and himself.

Draco nodded. He did not need to be told how he fared. He could judge
his own performance well enough. He knew all too keenly that he had not
measured up to either of the other duelers, and that he had made a good
showing against Harry only because he was fighting with a man that could
give most Aurors a flight for their gold.

He took the proffered retreat, however, returning to his room to try and
assimilate all the things that had happened to him over the past day. He
felt dizzy just thinking about it.




Three Plotting


Sirius followed a still grinning Harry down the stairs and into the
kitchen. "Lucius beat him?"

Sirus shook his head slowly when Harry nodded. "I knew he was a Death
Eater . . . even if he did get off last time by claiming he was under
the Imperius, but I never would have thought he would beat his own son."

"Me neither. Now I have to wonder what Lucius did to him whenever I beat
him at something, or Hermione made better grades." Harry sighed, setting
a pan on the stove and pouring a bit of oil into it.

"You can't blame yourself for what Lucius did!" Sirius said, watching
Harry's reaction.

"Oh, I know that, Sirius. It's just . . . it's an explanation, maybe,
for some of his behavior, that will make it easier for me to look past."
Harry turned away from the breading he was mixing in a bowl, and looked
pointedly at Sirius.

"You, my dear godfather, need to sit down and write a letter to Moony
before he goes out of his mind. Don't say anything about where we are .
. ." Harry looked up, sighing, and rolled his shoulders and stretched
his neck wearily. "I'm not ready to deal with everyone's pity and
sympathy just yet. I've got a scary feeling that my life is not finished
being turned upside down, and I don't want it to bite my friends. I can
handle whatever is coming, I can feel that, but I don't know if I will
be able to while trying to deal with everyone."

"I understand," Sirius said, summoning a quill, ink pot, and parchment.
To his dismay, the ink pot was open, and spilled when it stopped on the
table. He cleaned it up with a wave of his wand, and sat down.

"Just make sure they understand you are safe. I . . . I guess, you can
go ahead and say that you are with me, that I needed you. Oh, and tell
them we're behind a Fidelius, will you? I don't want them expending too
much effort looking for me when there is no chance of them finding me,
particularly since it might cause them to expose themselves to
Death Eater attacks."

"Should I mention Draco?"

Harry sighed thoughtfully. "No, not yet. I think that has to be Draco's
decision, so for now, don't say anything about him."

"Right," said Sirius, putting quill to parchment. He looked up after a
moment. "How are they going to get this? I don't recall seeing Hedwig
around."

"She's not here. I left her at Hogwarts. Ignis will take it."

Sirius grinned as he scrawled out his missive. "So, how do you like the
name?"

Harry laughed. "It's fine. But Ignis is no more full of himself than a
certain Padfoot is."

"Can I include Ignis' name in the letter?"

"Sure, just don't link us beyond that he's here with us. I don't know
for sure, but I felt you when you were ranting about me. I might be able
to feel if someone calls for Ignis."

"Right. Like you felt Draco." Sirius finished the letter and signed it
with a flourish. "That mean you might be able to pick up return mail?"

"At the very least, I could pop in from time to time. I don't want to
get too out of touch with what's happening over there."

"You know where they are?"

"Yep. I've seen the house on Grimmauld Place. I could even feel that
Hermione and Ron were in there."

Sirius grinned widely, showing off teeth that were much whiter now than
when he had first escaped, if still somewhat misaligned. "We need to get
that girl an Animagus form so we can give her a shorter name. Why
haven't you guys given her a proper nickname by now?"

"Because she reacts quite badly to Hermy and 'Mione." Harry looked up
from where he was coating chicken leg-quarters with breading, his hands
similarly coated. "I think she must have been teased a lot about her
name. She doesn't take it well now, so we've given up on trying to
shorten it."

Sirius glanced at Harry's hands as he folded his letter. "You planning
on cooking your hands, too? I guess we need to add cooking magic to your
regimen."

Chuckling, Harry flicked crumbs at his godfather, who batted them away
with a wide grin. "Very funny, old man. I've watched Mrs. Weasley
plenty, I'm sure I could do it. I like cooking." He looked up
thoughtfully. "It's odd, sort of. I mean, you'd think that I'd be happy
to not have to do the work I was forced to do at the Dursley's anymore.
But that's not the way it feels. It's more like, the work I did there,
especially the stuff that took way too long, was my one escape from
them. I definitely didn't care for their comments about it, but I could
see the results. Besides, it's rather nice knowing that I actually get
to eat as much as I want of what I make, and that I can do it because I
want to, and not because someone's forcing me to."

Sirius sighed as he sealed his letter, making no comment. Harry had said
much the same thing the first time he had cooked for Sirius, and as much
as it angered him to know that his godson had been put through such
things, there was nothing he could do to the Dursleys that would not put
him at risk, potentially leaving Harry alone. And that he could not do,
so he had to just grin and bear it, and do the best he could to be as
appreciative and supportive of Harry as he could. Not that there was
anything difficult about that. Harry seemed to impress him more and more
every day.

---

Though they were more used to fried than baked chicken, both Draco and
Sirius seemed to enjoy Harry's creation. The meal was a quiet one, as
all three had thoughts weighing on their minds, but that same silence
was a companionable one, made so simply by the love between godfather
and godson, and by the absence of the heretofore inevitable insults
between rivals.

Draco had been informed before the meal began that Ignis would be making
a mail run, and he had said that he would like to send a letter. When
the meal finished, Harry cleared the table with a wave of his hand, then
brought Draco parchment, ink, and a quill, ignoring the startled and
disbelieving look that Draco gave him. He suspected that Draco thought
that he was acting like a servant, but he figured that Draco was still
adjusting to the lack of the servants that probably took care of most of
his mundane needs at the Manor. In time he would come to understand that
it was nothing more than a friendly gesture; for now, Harry was willing
to tolerate the misunderstanding.

"Gringotts." Draco stated a minute or two later. Harry looked up,
startled, from where he was sitting and waiting.

"You wanted to know who I'm writing to, didn't you?" Draco looked up
from scraping his quill across the parchment and smirked. "I would be
curious, in your place. And I wouldn't be biting my tongue about it,
either, Gryffie."

Harry shrugged, ignoring Draco's teasing House reference. "Why
Gringotts? I'm not asking for rent."

Draco's eyes narrowed. Harry expected he was thinking something
surprisingly Weasley-like about the propriety of accepting charity, but
he made no mention of it. "I've a vault there, a minor's account. I can
make certain draws upon it, but it is under my father's control. I want
to move what I can from it to a new vault before he has the chance to
seal it." He sighed. "It is probably too late, but I need to try. Still,
any money that we take from him is money that won't be funding
V-voldemort." 

Draco suppressed his smile when Harry's face brightened at his words. He
knew that Harry disliked the tendency of wizards to euphemize their
references to Voldemort. He himself was not free of that tendency, at
least not yet, but he had no respect for the man. Fear, definitely, but
no respect, and having seen Harry's power firsthand, he felt comfortable
that if Voldemort showed up to protest the use of his name, Harry would
send him packing. Not to mention that they were behind a Fidelius charm.

Harry glanced at Sirius. "The goblins are basically independent from the
Ministry, right, Sirius? I mean, if the Ministry could have, they would
have confiscated your gold when you were arrested, and I know they did
not do that, or you could not have bought me that Firebolt."

Sirius nodded. "That's right. That's also why the Ministry can't freeze
the accounts of the Death Eaters, known or not."

Frowning, Harry slowly verbalized his thoughts, "The Ministry probably
tries to force the Goblins to do things, with Decrees and such-like. If
we could find some books or someone that really knows them, and learn
about them, we might be able to negotiate with them. You know, ask them
for help instead of demanding it, find something worthwhile that we
could offer to them instead of threats. We might be able to cut off some
of the funding for the Death Eaters." 

He glanced at his two companions, then turned his gaze to the wall, his
eyes unfocused in thought. "We couldn't ask them to break their word,
obviously. At the very least, it seems just vaguely possible to me that
somewhere in all their rules, they might have some leeway in
interpreting who in a family has the right to control access to a vault.
I mean, it can't be strictly by word-of-mouth, they have to handle
deaths and wills and such, but it can't really be strictly by law,
either, if they've got their own independent codes."

"You really think you could convince them to transfer control of the
Malfoy vault to me?" Draco stared at Harry incredulously.

"Oh, not if we just went in and talked to them, no. But if we research
first, and learn about their culture, and what they value . . . you
know, I've heard people claim that they value nothing but gold, but I
just don't see how that can be the case. A lust for gold does not give
you a work ethic, or a mind for numbers. They have to have values, and
desires. If we find out what they are, and can speak to them on their
level, then yet, I do think it is possible that they might . . . well,
as an example, maybe they could not just transfer control directly, but
they might be willing to tell us what steps we could take that would
trigger some rule or clause that would have that effect."

"And then they would be just applying the rules as written, just
following their code. No-one could fault them for that," put in Sirius
with a grin. "For your info, oh godson of mine, the old vaults are
mostly by individual contract. Particularly the pureblood ones have
rules and clauses that restrict the transfer of control in different
ways. For many of the families, marrying a non-pureblood is exactly the
sort of thing that would block access to even the primary heir. Getting
access to those contracts could do exactly what you described . . . give
us the steps to be taken to accomplish such a transfer against the
current holder's will. It probably wouldn't work on all of them . . ."

"But any one that it does, is that much less money for the Death
Eaters," nodded Draco smartly. "A great idea, Harry, assuming you can
find a source of information." Draco glanced at Black, wondering
silently why the man who had been Voldemort's right hand was so
unconcerned about Harry stopping the flow of funds to the Dark Lord. In
fact, Draco thought he looked rather pleased about it. Was he just that
good of an actor?

Harry just grinned, thinking of a certain pony-tailed redhead.

"Alright," announced Draco, carefully blotting his letter and then
folding it. "It's done," he continued, pressing his ring against it,
which magically sealed it with the Malfoy crest.

Harry nodded, standing. "I'll just run upstairs and send Ignis down.
Then I guess I'll have a rest." Without waiting for a response, he moved
swiftly up the stairs. Draco heard a door open and close above them,
then a muffled voice.

A flash of flame appeared above the table and the beautiful scarlet and
gold bird that had saved him appeared from the flames and settled easily
on the table. It cocked its head at Draco, then chirped at Sirius,
lifting its claw.

Moments later, Ignis had vanished with the parchments, leaving Draco in
a room alone with the infamous Sirius Black for the first time. Draco
glanced nervously at the powerful wizard, wondering where the man's
loyalties lay.

Sirius leaned back in his chair, tilting it up on two legs as he
stretched. "Well, little dragon," he said, dropping his chair back down
and fixing Draco with a piercing black gaze, "Harry has decided to open
his home to you, exactly why only he can say. But let me make this
perfectly clear . . . if you do anything to hurt him, or reveal anything
about him, no matter how small, to anyone, you will pay." Sirius
finished with a coldness that chilled Draco's blood, then twirling his
wand warningly, he stood and left the young Malfoy heir sitting alone in
fearful silence.

---

Harry, or rather Ignis now, appeared in the sky over Grimmauld place,
and briefly reached out, feeling the essences of those in the building.
Most of them he recognized, but one immediately registered as
unfamiliar, and to his dismay, it was in the same room as the one he was
looking for, Remus Lupin.

Unwilling to spend too much time above the house where he could draw
attention to it, he decided that he would have to risk it, and flashed
into the building. He appeared in the air between Remus and the
unfamiliar person. He looked at the young woman as he dropped to rest on
the coffee table that sat between them. She looked to be a little older
than Angelina and Alicia, the Chasers with whom he played Quidditch. She
was slender and shapely, with a heart-shaped face and a cute nose, wide,
surprised eyes that were a startling shade of burnt orange, and light
blue hair.

Remus leaned forward and Ignis--who had decided that thinking of himself
by his new name while in this form would help keep him from making
mistakes that might reveal himself--turned his attention back to the
werewolf that had taught him so much.

"Remus, is that . . . ," the blue-haired woman began, reaching out as if
to touch the phoenix's feathers, before holding herself back, not
wanting to startle the beautiful bird.

"Yes, Tonks," Remus replied, cutting off her startled words with
soothing calm, "This does look rather like the pretty bird that took
Snuffles away. And what do you have here, my pretty?"

Ignis allowed Remus to remove Sirius' letter, but hopped back a pace
before the werewolf could grasp the other letter. Remus sat back
thoughtfully. "Guess that one's not for us." He watched the bird for a
moment. "You think it's waiting for a reply?"

"Maybe . . . who's it from?"

Remus glanced at the envelope, tearing his attention away from the
phoenix and the other letter. His eyes widened. "This is the bird. It's
from Sirius!"

He tore into it, jerking the letter out and unfolding it hastily, his
breath quickening. Tonks leaned forward impatiently as Remus began
reading under his breath, muttering the words. He looked up.

"He's alright, and you won't believe it, but he's with Harry!"

"Where? Does he say where he is?" Tonks sat up straight, her hand flying
to her wrist, where her fingers moved, Ignis noted, as though she were
wearing a bracelet, though none such could be seen.

"No, only that we would never guess . . . and that they're under the
Fidelius . . . doesn't say who the Secret-Keeper is."

"He wouldn't. Not after the last time. But I wonder who cast it?"

"Sirius might have." There was a hitch of bitterness in Remus' voice.
"He wasn't under suspicion, he may well have been there while Lily and
James were learning the charm, he might know how to cast it."

"Does he say anything about Harry's new Protector?"

Ignis peered curiously at the young woman. She sounded deeply and
personally interested in Harry and who was guarding him, but he was
quite certain that he did not know her.

"No, only that Voldemort himself would have a time with him, and that
Harry is alright, safe, and learning. He also passes along a message for
Dumbledore from Harry. 'The time for safety is over. The time for
learning is here.' I guess he's fed up with being locked away."

"Who can blame him!?" Ignis once more found himself staring at the
unusual young woman as her eyes lit up with a protective fire. "After
what his guardians did to him! Oh, I wish Dumbledore would let me go
after them! I'd teach them to treat a young man right!"

"I'm sure Dumbledore would agree with you . . . unfortunately, I'm not
sure Harry would believe that. You remember the Hogwart's admission
letter we found."

"Right, the one addressed to the . . . to the . . ." Tonks shuddered.
"To that place," she finished hoarsely, tears glinting in her ochre
eyes.

"I doubt that Harry knows that they are addressed magically, that the
teachers never see the addresses." Remus informed her gently. "I'm
afraid that that may explain why he was so quiet about his problems. He
hid them so well . . . and I think at least part of it is due to
believing that the people that were supposed to care about him already
knew. I'm afraid that he probably believed that if he complained, no-one
would care, and he would only be hurt worse by that."

Tonks shivered, and hugged her arms around herself. Ignis shook off his
startlement at Lupin's words, rustled his feathers to draw her eye, then
sang comfortingly, lifting her spirits magically. She laughed, softly.
"Thanks. You know, Remus was right, you are a beautiful bird." She
reached out, gingerly, and emboldened when he did not retreat from her
hand, she brushed her hand down his feathers, feeling their soft
texture.

"Oh," added Remus, as he watched the youthful Auror interacting with the
phoenix. "He says the phoenix is named Ignis." Ignis chirped in
confirmation, then hopped backwards, out of their reach, and thrust his
wings hard, pushing himself back into the air enough to vanish into
flames. He still had another letter to deliver, and it was
time-sensitive. He hoped that his distraction by the unusual woman had
not cost Draco.

---

Harry grinned as he soared through the open window and out of
Gringott's, a thick envelope clutched tightly in his talons. His
confidence level rose every time he discovered a new facet to his
powers, and he had just done so yet again. He had appeared outside of
Gringott's and paused, wondering how he would be able to find someone
who would not only be accessible, but both willing and capable of acting
on Draco's letter. He had not wanted to merely hand it to the first
goblin he came to, for fear that it would get overlooked and acted upon
too late, if at all. At the same time, appearing in, say, the Head
Manager's office might provoke an instant defensive response. 

To his amazement, when he had mentally formulated a description of the
sort of person he needed to find, he almost immediately began to sense
the same sort of draw that had led him to Sirius. He had vanished,
following the guide, and found himself in a private office with a very
important looking goblin, who was even then looking over a stack of
papers with the Malfoy crest. Without realizing it, he had just found
the perfect goblin to aid him; the one charged with managing the Malfoy
account!

Now, as he soared over Diagon Alley and vanished, to reappear over his
new home in Godric's Hollow, he could not help but marvel at this new
power. Tomorrow, he decided, he would use this same technique to select
the right person to explain goblin culture to them. He might even be
able to use it to locate someone who could train him in his skills, or
teach him to make wands. He was not sure what the limits were, whether
of distance or relevance to his errand, but he fully intended to push
them. He wondered if this was an inherent ability of the phoenix, or
perhaps of magical birds in general, considering the effectiveness of
the owl post. 

He paused, then blushed as he realized that he was probably completely
mistaken about the whole thing. He had not paid attention to how the
letter was addressed; but surely, Draco would know who the Malfoy's
account manager was, and had probably addressed it to him by name. Did
it only work when carrying wizarding post? Was it somehow the post and
not the owl that knew where to go? How generic could the address be and
still work?

He pictured Hedwig flying off to deliver a letter addressed to 'the one
person best suited to train Harry Potter to defeat Voldemort.' Of
course, he knew already that owl senses or abilities, at least, could be
fooled or blocked, or else Sirius would have been picked up by the
Aurors within mere hours of his escape from Azkaban. Besides which, with
his luck, said person would end up being Voldemort himself, or one of
his Death Eaters.

Harry vanished again, reappearing in his room. He would go out and speak
to his housemates in a while, but first, he wanted to rest, and to
absorb the conversation between Remus and the unfamiliar woman . . .
what was her name again? Ah, yes, Tonks. Curious name, that, Harry
mused, before sighing. He was merely stalling, he knew that, but to face
the idea that Dumbledore might actually have not known about the
cupboard was startling and disturbed beliefs that he had held for a very
long time now.

It had taken quite a while for him to rid himself of his initial fears,
on entering the school, first triggered by the prospect of the unknown
test called the Sorting, of having it all turn out to be a mistake, and
finding himself back on Privet Drive forever. Even after the test turned
out to be a simple wearing of a talking hat, he had still been afraid
that he would screw up, something that he always did, according to his
family, and be sent back, especially when the hat had seemed to think he
shared characteristics with the house he had been told, but a short time
before, "turned out the most Dark Wizards."

Even after his friendship with Ron and the acceptance of the Weasleys
manage to convince him that his life was not normal, that his treatment
at the Dursleys' was not right, he had feared to bring it up, lest the
powers that be decide he was ungrateful, another constant complaint of
the Dursleys, and refuse to allow him to come back to the wizarding
world.

Facing the possibility that his constant return to the oppressive home
of his Uncle and Aunt was due only to his own reticence about the truth
of their treatment of him was daunting.

He finally, for the first time, really thought about the Ministry, and
how they behaved towards him, but most importantly, how the Minister of
Magic, Cornelius Fudge, behaved to Dumbledore. He did not know if Fudge
had been the Minister then, but if the head of the Ministry had been
anything like Fudge . . . He recalled the respect the Minister had for
Lucius Malfoy, and the apparent ease with which sufficient money could
purchase a blind eye.

Would Dumbledore have been able to keep him from ending up in the
custody of the Malfoy family or a similar Dark but rich and influential
family if he had tried to keep Harry in the Wizarding World? Would he
have ended up somewhere even worse if Dumbledore had not placed him with
his last living relatives, a placement no-one in the Ministry could
reasonably deny?

Finally giving up on his whirling, chaotic thoughts, Harry put them
firmly from his mind, and returning to phoenix form, he took up the
letter from Gringotts. Reaching out, he felt around for Draco, finding
in moments the the sensation that would lead him to his former nemesis.
He vanished, following the feel of the other boy, and reappeared in
Draco's new room, hovering above his bed.

Draco lay in bed, reading what looked to Harry to be a defense book,
though he found reading oddly difficult in this form. He dropped lightly
to the bed, as Draco set down his book, and looked at him. "Ignis," he
greeted, dipping his head respectfully, but keeping his silver eyes
fixed on Harry's beak.

He reached out slowly, tentatively touching the letter. When Ignis made
no move to attack him, he picked up the letter and began to open. As he
pulled out the first sheet, he heard the distinctive if soft sound of
Ignis departing in flames.

---

Draco pounded down the stairs a quarter of an hour later, finding Harry
and Black sitting at the table discussing something. "They did it!" he
crowed, holding up a small, golden key. Harry grinned at him, startling
Draco. He was still not used to seeing that expression aimed at himself.
Harry had definitely had more often a look of anger, disdain, or a
irritation when he saw Draco.

"Why did he save me?" Draco wondered once more, even as he pulled up a
seat and returned Harry's smile. That also felt odd. He was more used to
smirking at the Boy-Who-Lived than actually smiling at him.

"Obviously Lucius did not expect you to be able to communicate with
Gringotts," Black commented. "He probably thought that Dumbledore had
taken you to Hogwarts or somewhere else and hidden you away."

"Probably," conceded Draco, before looking between the two. "So what are
you two up to?"

Harry grinned, "Six foot plus, I think! Makes for a nice change from
being the shrimp!"

"You still haven't explained how that happened," Draco pointed out, now
that Harry had brought up the subject. He had wondered since he first
saw the new Harry what could have happened to him. He claimed to have
been shot with a Muggle weapon, but Draco doubted strongly if there was
any Muggle weapon capable of wreaking the sort of changes Harry had
undergone. Certainly he did not look or act at all like the troubled,
delusional, attention-seeking brat the Daily Prophet had been portraying
him as of late.

Harry grinned. "You're right, Draco. I haven't. As for your first
question, what Paddy and I were discussing . . ."

"Paddy!" interjected Black with a yelp, and Draco blanched, afraid that
the dark wizard would lose his temper.

Harry glared at Black. "You prefer Footsie?" Black shook his head,
crossing his arms and huffing irritably. Once more Draco was nonplussed,
finding it very difficult to reconcile the two's behavior with what he
knew of them.

"Anyway, as I was saying, Paddy and I were discussing wizarding
traditions. As I am quite certain you are aware, I was not raised by a
wizarding family, and Binns is hardly an informative source of
historical or cultural knowledge." Draco flinched and nodded under
Harry's piercing gaze. He had known that Harry was raised by Muggles. He
had not, of course, believed that they would ever go so far as to shoot
the Boy-Who-Lived, but then, clearly he did not know everything about
Harry's upbringing. That he was the next thing to a muggle-born had been
quite obvious from quite early on.

Draco was soon drawn into a wide-ranging discussion of wizarding
traditions and customs, from pure-blood houses, to the relative rank of
certain families, from holiday celebrations to weddings and funerals.
Eventually they focused on education, particularly Hogwarts. It was
shortly thereafter, when they touched on the Founders, that the
discussion bore fruit.

"They say that Slytherin and Gryffindor both had great castles, but that
they were lost after their deaths, or possibly after their direct
lineage failed," Draco explained.

"Actually, the tales I learned as a lad said they were lost when a Dark
wizard arose some three hundred years after the founding of Hogwarts,"
interjected Sirius.

"At any rate," continued Draco, acknowledging Black's contribution with
a slight nod, "No-one has ever located them since, though every few
decades someone claims to. According to the books, they've all been
frauds or mistaken."

"What about Rowena Ravenclaw, and Helga Hufflepuff? Did they have
estates?" asked Harry, curiously.

"I'm sure they did," agreed Draco, "but I don't know of any legends
surrounding them."

Harry frowned thoughtfully. He tapped his fingers on the table in a slow
drumming. Behind him a blackboard appeared on an easel, and words
appeared on it. The first line read "Goblins and Galleons," the second
read "Godric and Salazar's Estates."

"What's this then, Harry?"

Harry glanced behind himself and grinned. "To-do list," he said. "Those
two estates probably hold more than one clue to dealing with Voldemort,
and if they have been hidden this long, they may well serve as a good
place to gather forces for an assault, or to hide potential victims. If
they're anything like Malfoy Manor, there will be plenty of rooms to
use."

"There's no real evidence that they even exist," Sirius pointed out.

"They had to have lived somewhere. Even if their homes have already been
looted, it would still be an interesting search, but if they are hidden
as in the stories, then we should find them."

"And how are we supposed to find something that no-one has been able to
since they vanished?" asked Draco sourly. He was not fond of the idea of
going off on a wild goose chase, particularly since doing so would mean
leaving the protection of the Fidelius charm and potentially being
captured by his father. He rather doubted that his father would be in
any mood to be lenient or merciful the next time the two met.

"You let me worry about that," Harry answered him, grinning wider still.
Another line appeared on the chalkboard behind him. "Moony and the
Werewolves."

Sirius snorted. "That looks like a band name," he pointed out. "Do you
really think you can get them on your side?"

Harry's grin turned feral. "All we need is a cure that leaves them
healthy."

Draco and Sirius stared at Harry in disbelief. "A cure?!" Draco
sputtered. "You're crazy, Harry! There is no cure for lycanthropy! There
never has been!"

"There will be," responded Harry mildly, his grin fading to a secretive
smile. Draco stared at the black-haired boy's green eyes but found no
hint of deceit. Harry truly believed that he would be able to come up
with a cure. And without spending his life on it, as he clearly expected
to manage it in time for them to be part of Voldemort's downfall.

Draco shuddered at the strangeness of it. Only days ago he had been
undergoing torture in his own home, a bastion of support for the Dark
Lord, his own father a Death Eater, and now he was here at a table where
Voldemort's end was being plotted.

Another line appeared on the board. "Competence in the Ministry"

Sirius snorted. "Planning on taking out the Fudge, Harry?"

Harry frowned, his eyes narrowing. "He won't admit Voldemort is back. He
won't even consider the possibility that he is wrong, and he had the
Dementor's Kiss administered to Crouch before he could be interrogated
to ensure that he did not hear anything that might force him to admit
it. We can't afford that sort of person at the head of the Ministry."

Sirius nodded slowly, but warned, "You will only get one chance at that,
Harry. Fail, and he will do everything in his power to discredit you,
and probably make anything and everything you do illegal."

Harry nodded. "Saying Voldemort's name will be an Azkaban-punishable
offense. Yeah, I know. But even he can't get past a Fidelius."

Draco perked up. "He's already trying to discredit Harry, if the Daily
Prophet is anything to go by. But if you can find Gryffindor's place,
you might find his token. That would let you oust Fudge, if it would let
you hold it. But it ought to, you're as Gryff as they come," he sneered.

"His token?"

Sirius leaned forward, answering before Draco could respond. "Godric was
a Lord, Harry, a Peer of the Realm. Wizards don't generally place much
stock in English titles when they're held by a Muggle, but in the hands
of a wizard they have meaning. If I remember my history rightly, Draco
might be correct, Godric might have had a permanent peerage, represented
by a token, something like a signet ring or a seal. If his station was
high enough, and knowing him it probably was, then he or his heir,
denoted by the token if he had one, would have the authority to call for
a vote of no-confidence in the current government. If he wins the vote,
new elections would be held."

Harry shook his head. "I don't see the advantage, particularly. If I can
force Fudge to resign, there would be a new vote automatically, right?"

Draco shook his head. "No, a temporary Minister would be appointed by
the Wizengamot, which means selection by influence and money."

"Your father?"

"Possibly, but even if not, he would likely be able to block anyone that
Dumbledore put forward."

Harry stood abruptly, and started pacing. "It would have to be both,
then. We have to break the people's blind faith in the Ministry first,
or they'll just vote him back in, or someone just like him. We need to
force Voldemort to show his hand in a way the Ministry can't cover it
up, but without casualties, and the inability of the Ministry to deal
with it must be made obvious. At the same time, we've got to discredit
your father, Draco." He put his hands to his head, groaning. "I hate
politics."

"If there are no casualties, people may not take it seriously," Draco
pointed out. Harry paled.

"I . . . I can't just let him kill people," he sputtered, turning to
Sirius with a pleading look.

"Now you have some idea what Dumbledore goes through, and why he stays
out of the Ministry politics even when he gets the wrong end of the
stick by it," Sirius answered. "You need some charm, maybe, that you
could cast on the people about to be hit, that would swap them with fake
bodies to take the injury. They would have to pass a medical
examination, though. Unless you could arrange to thoroughly burn the
bodies. You would still need some way to deal with the people you saved,
though, not to mention that at some point you would have to come clean
and deal with everyone's reactions."

Draco looked back at the board. "Managing your first item would go a
long way in preparing to oust Fudge," Draco said, though he could hardly
believe he was saying it. How had he gotten himself involved in
rebelling against the Ministry and trying to defeat Voldemort at the
same time? "If you cut off the funds that my father and others use to
bribe, then they are left with threats. They can use threats and
blackmail against the Wizengamot or the Hogwart's Board of Governors
because there are few enough of them, but it is much easier to influence
the media with gold."

"Combine that with Godric's token and you would have a better chance at
shifting public opinion. You would cut off their propaganda dollars, and
have the chance at giving public speeches in support of a vote of
no-confidence."

"You would have to deal with the minor point that Fudge has made it
illegal to publicly state that Voldemort is back," Draco concluded.

"What?!" Harry cried, staring at the blond in disbelief.

"You hadn't heard? I thought you knew. My father mentioned it. He was
rather gleeful about it, actually."

Sirius laughed, a grim smile lighting his face as his eyes darkened
mischievously. "I've got the answer to that," he exulted.

---

Back in his room, Draco considered what he had learned. His rescuer was
plotting heavily, and intending to take out both Voldemort and the
current Minister. It was scarcely believable that this was the same
Potter he had known for so long. Well, granted, he clearly wasn't
exactly the same. His Potter had been a short, scrawny boy with no
obvious power. Harry was now a tall, strongly-built fellow with scads of
power just radiating off of him.

Most of his thought, however, was focused on Black. It did not seem
credible that the betrayer of the Potters, who had condemned Lily and
James Potter to death by revealing their location to Voldemort, could be
plotting the Dark Lord's overthrow. Yet if he was relaying Harry's plans
to Voldemort, then that part could make sense. Why then was he helping
Harry plot against the Minister?

From what Draco could see, and what his father had said in his hearing,
Fudge was the perfect Minister for Voldemort. Easily influenced by
money, the man was greedy, power-hungry, and had all the morals of a
cockroach. He was also bound and determined to believe that Voldemort
was gone forever, and could never return, leaving the Dark Lord to gain
power unmolested.

A new thought came to him then, as Draco looked around the room Harry
had made for him, and remembered Harry's visible power as he performed
such impressive magic. Might Black be a follower of power? Could he have
chosen Harry over Voldemort simply because Harry defeated Voldemort when
he was one? Or because Voldemort had failed to kill Harry when he had
him at his mercy, with a score or more of Death Eaters at hand?

Draco sighed in relief. He had finally figured it out. It explained
everything! Well, almost everything. It still did not explain Harry's
sudden changes in height and build and power, though he suspected it
might be connected. He thought back to their conversation, and realised
that Harry had deflected him when questioned about his changes. "He
never would have managed that before," he mused.

Regardless of whether it explained Harry, it definitely explained
Sirius. His initial odd, almost deferent behavior with Harry, the fact
that he was now supporting Harry when he should have been handing him
over to Voldemort, his willingness to go along with ousting the
Minister, it all made sense in light of a change of loyalty, of a
power-seeker following the winner in a battle.

Draco wondered how much of the apparent change in Harry's behavior could
be traced to that, to him having a follower, someone who believed in his
real power rather than in some intangible myth about him being the
Boy-Who-Lived. Sirius did not look up to Harry because he had lived, but
because he had won! What would that kind of belief do to Harry?
Certainly, it had increased his ambitions.

Draco smiled slowly, realizing that he himself had made just the same
decision as Sirius. He had seen Harry's power for himself, and finally
understood that he had truly defeated Voldemort, not merely survived
him.




Missing Heir

Not yet posted. 



Phoenix Games

Not yet posted. 



Making Plans

Not yet posted. 



Growing Conspiracy

Not yet posted.