The wind gusted through Hogsmeade with force enough to wrap cloaks chokingly tight around the bodies of those foolish enough to be out in the autumn storm. There were not many; it was getting dark now, and too cold by far. Promising the warmth and comfort of heated interiors, the shop fronts were nevertheless almost completely deserted. A scraggly-haired witch here, clutching a desultorily squalling baby to her chest and keeping a tight grip on an older child with her other hand; a few wizards, determinedly going about their business, smothered in long cloaks; and Harry Potter, wandering down the street without aim or purpose.

Hands thrust into his pockets, a woollen jumper pulled over worn jeans, he paid little attention to his path. He was not supposed to be here; it was not a Hogsmeade weekend. It was not a weekend at all.

Hermione and Ron had both been concerned when he left the common room earlier, but Harry had waved them off, mumbling about taking a walk. He had not bothered to tell them that he had meant to walk away from Hogwarts. It was his home, or as near as he was allowed to consider it, and sometimes home seemed too small to hold his restless spirit.

And he was restless. Almost two years had passed since Sirius' death. Longer, really, than he'd had time to spend with his godfather. But Sirius had been the only family he'd cared to claim, and the only family that had cared to claim him. The loss hurt. There were things he could share with his friends, and things that, no matter how close they were, they could never be a part of. Without intent, his feet took him on the long winding road to the Shrieking Shack. It held the place of a shrine to his mind, a place so imbued with the spirit and history of the Marauders that he could sit within its crumbling, rotten walls, and feel some peace.

He had almost reached the gate around the property, bounded on one side by the slumbering forest, when he realised he was not alone. He had barely gotten his wand out of his pocket when the first curse hit him.

The wand went flying from his hand as he was hurled in the opposite direction, landing on his side against a tree with a sharp 'oof'. Before he had gotten his breath back the second curse hit him, and he could no longer move. Harry struggled without effect. In a distant part of his mind he observed how foolish it had been to leave Hogwarts. He should have known better. Really, he should have known better.

A delighted laugh floated through the air. Two shadows detached themselves from the trees. Both were large, one fat. They were cloaked in the dark robes favoured by Death Eaters. One laughed again, and Harry recognised it this time: Goyle senior. Which meant, of course, that the other gorilla was Crabbe.

"Harry Potter," Goyle exclaimed. "What a wonderful surprise. What are you doing out of school, hm?"

He waved his wand, and Harry was freed just enough that he could speak. Glaring at them, he clenched his jaw and kept stubbornly silent.

"This won't do at all," Crabbe said, his thick voice etched with a parody of concern. "Boys who misbehave are punished. Crucio."

The pain was awful. Harry writhed – or tried to, the binding curse keeping him immobile – as the nerves fired all through his body. A scream pushed its way past his throat, but he refused to give voice to it, and bit his lip till it bled.

Goyle chimed in then with a curse that Harry dimly heard but did not recognise.

There was no holding back the scream this time.

Harry lost sense of time, of hearing, of sense, of anything but pain. He was aware that he was screaming, was aware that Goyle and Crabbe placed different curses on him by the texture of the pain. The rain started, hard and pelting, and each drop felt like fire to his abused nerves.

He was aware when they stopped. A dimly seen figure hurtled into Goyle. The Death Eater shouted in surprise and anger, and raised his wand against the newcomer. There was a flicker of light reflecting on something long and thin, panicked yells, and an odd kind of gurgling.

Harry waited, but the curses didn't start again.

Blinking, he tried to focus. But his glasses had been knocked off, and what blurred vision he had was swimming alarmingly. A shadow moved over him; he flinched.

"Can you move, kid?"

The voice was neither Crabbe's nor Goyle's. It wasn't anyone's he recognised. He shook his head a little. "B-b-binding hex," he explained. The sound was too faint even for his ears, and he said it again, ignoring the rawness of his throat.

"Right. I'm not a wand-waver, kid. Best I can do is get you to shelter."

The shadow leant over him; Harry felt hands hoisting him up. He cried out at the contact, and the sickening motion of the ground, but the shadow did not falter at all. He lost sense of time again; it seemed that he blinked, and the blurry, ramshackle walls of the Shrieking Shack were around him, and the rain no longer slammed like needles against his skin. He almost relaxed then, but Wormtail knew about the Shack too.

"M-m-my wand." Harry frowned at the stutter in his voice; he couldn't stop it, could barely force the sound out.

"Later, kid. You need help first. I'll be back."

Harry cried out again, but the shadow was gone. He waited; he did not know how long he lay in the hazy darkness, fading in and out of consciousness, but the binding curse had yet to wear off. It seemed mere seconds before the shadow was back.

There were two of them this time, and he flinched again. He did not want to be back on the receiving end of Crabbe and Goyle's curses.

"Can I ask you now why you dragged me out here, Highlander? If I'd known you were coming to the village, I would have left faster."

"Shut it, old man. You were interested in the welfare of your wand-waving students. Do something about this." The voice of the first shadow; Harry relaxed.

"About what?" A shadow moved closer, and the voice turned quiet. "Oh. What happened?"

"Two men in fancy getups. The kid's paralysed."

The shadow leant over him, touching him, turning him gently over. He cried out again, the contact sending agony through badly damaged nerves. "Death Eaters, most likely. What spells did they use?"

"Crucio was the last. Others I don't know. Can you fix him?"

"I think so." The shadow was distant, now, next to the other one. "I'll need his wand and a few potion ingredients."

The voices faded, though he tried hard to listen to them. The shadows moved about him; once he saw Sirius, but he did not respond to his name. Then he saw Remus; the werewolf was not looking at him, but at Sirius, and there was a guarded suspicion in his expression that he had only ever turned on Sirius when the other was playing a prank. Harry cried, then, because Remus looked younger and less worn, and Sirius did not have the taint of Azkaban about him.

It was hours or years later that the binding hex wore off. Harry didn't notice; his limbs would not obey him, and he had no desire to move in any case, not while Sirius and Remus were watching over him. Sirius urged him to drink. The potion was warm and smelled of herbs; it tasted like summer grassland, the coppery texture of lightning, felt like the warmth of his wand spread all over. Sleep stole over him as his muscles relaxed and the pain washed away. He heard Sirius and Remus talking about him again, their voices distant through the soft curtain of consciousness.

"You know who this is, don't you? Harry Potter. The one the wand-wavers are calling their saviour."

"He's just a kid."

"I never said the wand-wavers were very smart. He should be alright now, just needs to sleep it off. I'll be in the village if you need me again, Highlander. So long as it's not for a fight."

Harry did not hear Remus' response, or anything else for a good number of hours. When he woke, it was to see dawn peeking through the crumbling wooden slats. He fumbled with his hand, found his glasses, and put them on. There was no one around, and he felt as whole as ever. He might have thought the previous evening little more than a nightmare, save for the two wands that lay next to his own on the dusty floor, and the blood and mud that had dried onto his clothes. The room smelled like wildflowers and hay; it was summer in the depth of autumn.

With a thoughtful expression Harry pocketed the extra wands, cast a cleaning charm, and made his way back to Hogwarts via the tunnel under the Whomping Willow. He met Ron and Hermione as they were coming down to the common room, yawning and rubbing their eyes.

"Harry!" Ron exclaimed. "You didn't come back last night, did you? Where were you?"

Harry gazed back at him. He felt preternaturally calm, and the taste of summer was like a touch of peace still lingering in his mouth. "With Sirius and Remus," he replied.

Ron and Hermione exchanged puzzled looks. "Harry? What do you mean?"

"They were watching over me. In the Shrieking Shack," he explained. "They were looking after me."

Hermione looked concerned. "Ah, Harry? You do know that Remus is still in Germany, right?" She said nothing about Sirius.

"I know." Harry shrugged. It wasn't important. "He was there, and he was younger, and so was Sirius. He'd never been to Azkaban."

Relieved, Ron clapped him on the shoulder. "It was a dream, mate. Good one, by the sounds of it."

"Not exactly," Harry said thoughtfully. "It ended that way. Death Eaters were there at the beginning, but Remus saved me from them."

His friends looked at each other again. "Just a dream, mate," Ron reiterated.

Harry did not argue. The two extra wands were shoved deep in his pockets, and he did not take them out.

The state of serenity lingered all day, even in his most difficult classes. Snape looked at him askance when he did not rise to the jibes that were customarily dished out in Potions, then gave him detention for not paying attention. Harry scrubbed the second year cauldrons without complaint while Snape gazed at him with piercing eyes.

"Is there something you wish to tell me, Mr Potter?" Snape inquired at last, when Harry showed no signs of speaking.

He shook his head, but after a moment said, "Is Professor Lupin alright?"

Snape frowned. "Why do you ask?"

Wavering, his scourer falling to the side, Harry shrugged. "I saw him last night," he murmured, watching the swirl of soapsuds in the cauldron. "With Sirius."

He heard the chair creak as Snape stood, heard the quiet footfalls come closer. "Look at me. Mr Potter."

Harry shook his head fiercely. He could no longer taste summer in his mouth. The cauldron trapped his gaze; he did not even blink in his desire to keep his eyes fixed downwards.

He heard the breath hiss through Snape's teeth. "As of two nights ago, the werewolf was alive and well," Snape said, tone carefully neutral. "That is the last report he sent. He had not intimated he was in any kind of danger."

Tears threatened; Harry blinked them back, feeling something akin to loss. "It wasn't Sirius, then," he said. "Sirius never would have cut his hair that short, anyway."

"What wasn't Black?"

"Nothing," he muttered, and refused to speak again for the whole detention. Snape did not push him, perhaps realising that Harry was closer to a tantrum of shattered emotions than he had been since the end of fifth year.

The detention was finished in silence. Harry made his way to the library, where he knew Hermione and Ron would be working in their usual spot.

"Did you find anything on MacLeod?" he asked by way of greeting, sliding into an empty chair and pulling out a stack of parchment.

Hermione shook her head; Ron was content to sit back and let her explain the results of their research. "Not much," she replied. "There's nothing in the library about Scottish demons. I owled my sister, though."

"And?" Harry prompted.

She shrugged. "A heap of stories about MacLeods. Not only is it a fairly common Scottish surname, but it's the name of a folk hero, and of the main character in a series of Romances." She blushed faintly; her younger sister had sent along a copy of one Muggle book. The cover had featured a man she commonly imagined as archetypal of 70s porn stars; the language she had seen while flicking through it had been flowery and filled with far too many adjectives – one for every noun – and Hermione could not help but read a few pages in a sort of horrified fascination. Ron had howled with laughter when he saw it, and she really couldn't blame him. Secretly she decided to save it for when Harry needed cheering up.

He was frowning just then, leaning the chair back on the two hind legs as he thought. "So nothing helpful," he concluded. "What about Green?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" Harry cracked his eyes open and looked at her.

"It's like he doesn't exist, mate," Ron said. "No records. I even asked Percy, and the only thing he could come up with was the resume filed with the Hogwarts notices." He paused, and added cautiously, "But it's not like that's unusual, or anything. The Ministry was a shocker for filing in the First War. Half of the Department of Records got destroyed, and the other half is as bad as they come. There's a team of clerks still working on sorting out the mess." Ron grimaced. "Percy sounded positively delighted when he talked about it. I swear it'd be the perfect place for him."

The three Gryffindors exchanged grins. Over the years, Ron's older brother had achieved a precarious balance between serving the Minister and loving his family, but the stress of being pulled in two opposing directions, both of which he strongly believed in, had left him short tempered and unhappy. The other two knew how much Ron wanted Percy away from the Minister, and back as his brother.

With a shake of his head, Harry returned to the matter at hand. "Where does Dumbledore get these people from?" he muttered in disgust. "I bet he doesn't even know who Professor Green is, or anything about him."

"He's a piece of the Shattered God."

The trio twisted in their seats to stare at Luna Lovegood. She gazed back at them dreamily.

After a moment, Harry cleared his throat and attempted to rerail his thoughts. "What?"

"Professor Green is a piece of the Shattered God," the Ravenclaw repeated. "He fell from the stars thousands of years ago, and when He hit the ground He broke into millions of pieces. Now all the pieces wander the world looking for each other."

Ron blinked. "What do they do then?" he asked curiously.

"They try to absorb each other, to make the Shattered God whole again."

Hermione asked the next question before she could stop herself. "How do they do that?"

Luna turned to face her, gaze seeming to focus on some invisible space beyond the Headgirl. "By chopping off their heads." The moonbrained Ravenclaw disappeared beyond the shelves while the Gryffindors sat blinking.

"Right," said Harry. He stared down at his unfinished DADA assignment. "Right," he said again.

The other two nodded.

With a shake of his head, Harry picked up a quill. "That was interesting."

Ron slumped in his chair. "This place is getting too popular. First the Greasy Git, now Loony Luna? It'll be the Ferret next. We need a new lurking spot."

"Ron!" Hermione chided. "Don't talk about them like that. Especially Luna – she's a friend."

"I guess we'll just have to wait until something happens," Harry said thoughtfully. "At least one professor knows about what's going on." There was a pause while the three students silently expressed their opinion of that. "DADA essay, anyone?"

It took a massive effort, but they shook off the bemusement brought on by Luna's interruption, and focussed on their school work.