"Alright, alright, you win," said Mad-Eye, mirth still audible in his voice, "you win, you're clearly Lily's son. Go on, wreak havoc, confuse Death Eaters, inconvenience You-Know-Who with my sincerest blessing. Keep Black away from us, though, he's an adult and I'm still having him arrested on sight."

Wait, thought Harry.

What?

They couldn't pin Sirius with murdering Peter Pettigrew, even if Peter Pettigrew somehow managed to convincingly play the victim, because Peter was not in fact dead. There'd been twelve other people there, of course, but Muggles didn't actually have legal personhood status any sooner than 2002, because the magical legal system was amazingly racist. So for the other twelve deaths Peter had caused, at best they could maybe hit Sirius with a 'causing a disturbance' charge, for which you couldn't be arrested, only fined. And his supposed betrayal of the Potters wouldn't count, either; Fidelius Charms were a specific exception to the 'accessory to murder' rule, since 99.9% of the time there were extenuating circumstances and it had been generally agreed, in a brief moment of sanity in the Wizengamot, that it was not acceptable to jail people for breaking under torture. So ... "Arrested for what, exactly," Harry had to ask, although he couldn't stop himself from grinning widely. You're clearly Lily's son. He was going to etch that into his memory and keep it forever.

"Breaking out of Azkaban, obviously," smirked Mad-Eye smugly. "If you can't be held responsible for it, then it had to have been his fault, hadn't it?"

A-ha. "Is that even technically a crime?" wondered Harry. "Nobody's ever done it before."

Mad-Eye paused, tilted his head thoughtfully. "You know," he said, "I'm not sure. I'll have to look it up. But the point stands, nobody's gonna let us get him exonerated after this media circus, not for a long while. I know perfectly well he didn't kidnap you, but a jury could easily be convinced he did, Time-Turners exist. What are you going to do for the next - when do you turn eleven - anyway?"

"July of ninety-one," supplied Harry. "Five and a half years, give or take. I mean, my goal is to fix the thing where Voldemort is a completely inadequate amount of dead," Mad-Eye snorted at that, "but I suspect it will take longer than that. In the meantime I will probably find some way to make life annoying and possibly slightly surreal for the Death Eaters. And then I will presumably do the same for Hogwarts, although in the case of the school it'll be less 'annoying' and more 'surreal', I expect."

"I see," said Mad-Eye. He still looked amused. "I don't suppose you're actually James Potter possessing the Boy-Who-Lived."

Harry blinked.

"No? Yes? Do I win a cookie?" smirked Mad-Eye. "If you are James, Lily's clearly been a very good influence on you and I approve."

" ... no, I'm not my dad," said Harry, "but I am definitely taking that as a compliment. Hey, do you happen to know where Remus Lupin lives?"

To his credit, Mad-Eye did not seem even slightly disoriented by this apparent non sequitur, or disappointed in his incorrect guess. "I'm fairly certain he doesn't have a permanent residence, actually. If I happen to run into him I'll tell him you asked."

"Okay, thank you," said Harry, nodding appreciatively. "On that friendly note, I think we're done here. Let me know if you need anything I can do without compromising my information security. Our wards reject unauthorized owl post, but you should be able to send me a Patronus message if you need to. For future reference, my Patronus looks like," Teddy laughing, expecto patronum, "this."

Mad-Eye gave silvery Prongs a bemused, critical look. "You should have started with that," he said frankly.

"What?"

"It looks exactly like James' Patronus. I would be hard-pressed to believe the Dark Lord could cast a Patronus Charm that convincingly resembled your father's," explained Mad-Eye. "Or one at all, for that matter. You should have started the argument with that, it would have been much shorter. Not nonexistent," he shrugged, unapologetic, "but shorter."

"That," said Harry, "honestly did not occur to me." It really hadn't; he had always simply assumed that the shape of his Patronus was meaningless to anyone who had not seen his father's Animagus form. But given that Remus' Patronus was a wolf and Sirius' Patronus was a dog exactly like Padfoot, in retrospect it had probably been silly of him not to realize that Prongs would also be recognizable as his father's Patronus. Which, of course, most or all of the old Order would have been familiar with, since it was their primary method of secure communication.

"Definitely James' son," laughed Mad-Eye. With a wave of his wand he produced a silvery-white ferret. "This is mine. Dumbledore's is a phoenix. Proudfoot's a raven and Savage is a Jarvey. Last time I checked, anyway, and I check every week."

These were known facts to Harry, but he nodded anyway. This wasn't classified information - you couldn't fake a Patronus even if you knew exactly what you were meant to be faking - but he still appreciated the trust implied by Mad-Eye sharing it. "Good to know, thank you. I will endeavour not to further interrupt your life with death threats or Death Eaters." He finally drew out the anti-tracking charms he'd been putting off with this conversation, then. They might be on better terms now, but Mad-Eye had as good as told him that Sirius was still on the hit list, and Harry didn't particularly feel like being followed home. So he spent the time - not that long, if you weren't in the middle of being shot at - and then waved a friendly wave at Mad-Eye, said, "Bye!", and Disapparated for home.

(Well, not quite. He took a few extra stops, a few random places around the country, to stack a few more anti-tracking charms and Disapparate again. As previously noted, you just do not mess around when Alastor Moody is involved. But he did eventually go home.)

Sirius turned up about fifteen minutes after Harry did, looking rather disgruntled.

"You look cheerful," he observed. Harry hadn't been able to stop grinning since he returned. Mad-Eye had, at least half-seriously, considered the idea that Harry was actually James; Harry was absolutely taking that as a high compliment, right along with you are clearly Lily's son. And, more importantly, he'd (unless Mad-Eye was lying) successfully convinced the most paranoid Auror ever that he was not actually evil. That meant he was probably not in danger of not getting to go to Hogwarts. He would get to see the castle again. It was, for all practical purposes, his childhood home; he had known the pain of living a year where it was too dangerous to go to Hogwarts, when he slept in a tent and argued with his friends and had nowhere to go that was home. He had a place now where he was safe, the home with Sirius as his guardian that he had always wanted as a child, but all the same there was something very deeply soothing about knowing that the gates of Hogwarts would be open to him.

Sirius was not smiling. "You don't look cheerful," Harry replied uneasily.

"Well," said Sirius, tossing Harry the key to the Potter vault at Gringotts, "the good news is that Dumbledore didn't catch me." He reached into his jacket's inside pocket, which was Undetectably Extended, and produced Harry's Invisibility Cloak. Harry had to take a long moment of hugging the shimmery, dark fabric tightly - warmth and safety and family - before he looked back up at his godfather, who had dropped heavily onto the couch, rubbing his temples.

"What's the bad news?"

Sirius sighed. "The bad news is I couldn't find the Diadem."

Harry was taken aback. "You couldn't find it?" he repeated, slightly incredulous.

"Wasn't there," said Sirius, making a helpless gesture. "Neither was the Vanishing Cabinet you mentioned, but I found the statue, I'm pretty sure. I tried Summoning it, too. No dice."

Well, that wasn't good. "I really really hope you're just inexplicably blind and I'll find it when I look," said Harry uneasily, settling anxiously into an armchair and leaning on his hands thoughtfully. The Cloak settled across his lap, under his elbows; this probably looked really strange from an outside view, but months without his only real connection to his parents was too long; he wasn't at all willing to let go of it just yet. "That's three now that we don't have any idea how to find. And I'm almost positive that when I found the Diadem, it'd been there since the fifties or something, whenever it was that Tom applied for a job the second time. If it's really not there right now, that would imply that someone moved it, either as a result of something I did differently, or - "

Talk about your painful realizations.

"I am going to be really scared if this turns out to mean I have a time-travelling enemy," Harry said.

"That seems unlikely, doesn't it?" said Sirius dubiously.

Well, obviously yes, but magic existed. "I mean, not more unlikely than me accidentally time travelling in the first place," pointed out Harry. "Probably." After all, he was the Master of Death, that did make him technically unique. Although seeing as he had gone to a lot of effort to prevent this becoming common knowledge, it was theoretically possible that somewhere in history someone else had managed it and then just not told anyone. Somewhere in the 'nobody has any clue who's got the Elder Wand' period, presumably. But at any rate it certainly made Harry unique within a few generations. So maybe it would make more sense for it to just be him. "But what else could it be?"

"There was an extremely obvious Azkaban breakout, even if the Prophet seems to have somehow failed to notice you were involved," offered Sirius. "The Death Eaters know I wasn't one of them, or at least the smart ones do, and the dumb ones are the ones that ended up in jail - "

"Oh," said Harry, interrupting him.

Sirius blinked. "What?"

"I just figured out why the Prophet reported me kidnapped instead of reporting me as responsible for the breakout," Harry explained. "They didn't not notice, they just figured you were an easier target than the legendary Boy-Who-Lived, especially since I'm a little kid right now. I'm so used to the Prophet using me as a punching bag that I forgot that it's not the editor that has a grudge against me, it was Fudge. You, on the other hand, ostensibly are a Death Eater, and we already know they don't care about accuracy."

"Ah," said Sirius. "Right. Sure. Okay. Anyway, as I was saying, Lucius Malfoy knows I wasn't on his side, and it's possible he knew about the Horcruxes since he has one, right? Maybe he somehow guessed that was my goal and he got there first. We did wait several months."

Considering that was a headache. "I guess it's possible," allowed Harry, frowning, "but I really don't know how he could have figured that out. And Draco was working on the Vanishing Cabinet for months, if Lucius knew there was a Horcrux in the Room of Requirement it seems like something should have happened there ... " he sighed. "But I don't have a better answer."

Sirius shrugged. "We'll figure it out. Improvisation is the Marauder standby. So how'd your thing go?"

"Well, uh, I nailed Wormtail to a wall and then Mad-Eye chased me into the Forest of Dean and flung me into a tree and yelled at me a lot," summarized Harry. Sirius raised dark eyebrows at him, as if to say, and this made you happy why?, and Harry snorted. "I also eventually convinced him I'm not Voldemort. You're still gonna get arrested on sight but I'm probably not." He paused. "Which means the Prophet is probably going to continue reporting that you kidnapped me, actually, Mad-Eye told me he doesn't think he could convince them or the Wizengamot that you aren't a Death Eater. Damn, that's going to be weird."

"What, casually showing up at school for your first year and having everyone think you're a kidnap victim?" said Sirius. "Surely you've done weirder things."

"I mean, yes," admitted Harry, who honestly could not deny that his life was very strange at all times, "but still. Molly will be absolutely beside herself with concern - hey, did you know that's a real thing?"

"What?" said Sirius. "What's a real thing? Molly Weasley being really concerned about things? That should go without saying."

"No, no, the idiom. I found out my second year in Auror training, 'beside themself' is a turn of phrase based on an actual thing that happens to magical adults," said Harry, grinning. "It's the funniest shit I've ever seen, some kind of weird magical heart disease, they duplicate themselves and almost invariably start arguing. About as rare as Muggles spontaneously combusting, though."

"Uh," said Sirius, who had been giving him the now-familiar fascinated look that said I probably used to know that and then forgot about it, until Harry got to the bit about Muggles, whereupon his eyebrows rose in surprise. "Harry, you know Muggles don't actually spontaneously combust and the small number of documented cases are all assassinations by wizards, right?"

" ... I did not know that," said Harry. "Hermione uses that statistic sometimes, it's accepted fact among Muggles that people just very rarely catch fire for no reason." There were even existing explanations for it, like probably it was really hot and dry out and are you sure there wasn't any gasoline nearby? and so on. Although, on reflection, when you knew that magic existed, this was kind of an obvious explanation. Still ... "How do you know that?"

Sirius winced. "There's, um, there's a wizarding children's book called Stupid Things Muggles Think with a bunch of 'fun facts' like that," he made air quotes with his fingers when saying fun facts, "and, you know, cute little cartoons of for instance Muggles catching fire and caricatures of Muggle doctors with little question marks over their heads?"

"That is both adorable and terrifying," observed Harry.

Over the next several months they made lists of known and suspected Death Eaters (depressingly short, especially after you took out all the ones that were in Azkaban already), and argued about what the appropriate approach was. Some of these people needed to be destroyed wholesale (the Carrow twins); some of them really just needed to be gently nudged away from evil (Narcissa Malfoy), some of them weren't Death Eaters yet but were still awful (Dolores Umbridge); and most of them probably didn't actually deserve to die but definitely deserved to have their lives made weird and difficult. Although it was ostensibly the Most Important Thing to get the diary away from Lucius Malfoy, they ended up deciding it probably wasn't the most pressing thing. Either Lucius was behaving in unexpected ways, in which case they ought to get more information before trying anything that involved breaking into his house, or he wasn't, in which case they didn't need to worry about the diary until Harry's second year at school. So eventually there would be heroism, but first, really, there would be some Marauding.

The first problem they ran into, of course, was that with the exception of the Malfoys (in whose home Harry had briefly been imprisoned) and the Lestranges (with whom Sirius had had to socialize when he was a child), they didn't actually have any fraction of a clue where any of the people on their list lived. And the closest thing the wizarding world had to a phone book was the Floo system list, which didn't help because it didn't have actual physical addresses on it, just official descriptors. For instance, if they looked up the Notts, the record would just helpfully tell them that the ancestral home of the Nott family was called Nachtwald, or Nottswood if you were feeling particularly unsanguine about your ability to correctly pronounce German words to the level of accuracy required by Floo travel.

"We're going to have to figure out how to break into people's houses via Floo, aren't we," said Harry, with a sigh.

"Yep," said Sirius.

"You ever done that before?"

"Probably," said Sirius, shrugging artfully.

" ... can you remember doing it?" clarified Harry.

Sirius grinned his don't worry we'll just improvise grin. "Nope."

Harry spent time with Hermione whenever he got a chance. This was mostly a swimming-pools-and-ice-cream sort of friendship, because they were ostensibly six and seven, but sometimes he tagged along to visit the community library, or got hold of approximately grade-level practice books so that they could "do homework" together. He noticed Hermione's parents talking to one another in French, and was reminded in mild surprise that Hermione had spent so much time in France as a child that she'd been fluent by the time she met Fleur. So he asked, playing the curious child, one day over post-swimming-pool lunch, "Are your parents French?"

"Yeah, Mum and Dad moved here from France before I was born," said Hermione brightly.

"Oh, neat. I have some relatives in France," said Harry cheerily. He expected Fleur would eventually want to visit her 'British cousin', and it would be good not to have everyone be totally caught off guard by the event. Although he wasn't sure if he or Sirius might have at some point said something that contradicted a claim that the fictional dead Evelyn Murphy was a French national. "I think my mum's family moved before she was born 'cause they liked the schools here better," was the explanation he settled on. He looked at Hermione's father, who was checking the cooling status of a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies. "How come you guys moved?"

"Egregious racism and anti-Semitism among our neighbors," said Mr. Dr. Granger easily, shrugging. "Most French natives are perfectly pleasant people, but we had a few experiences that rather soured us on the country. Cookies are done, would you like one, Adrian?"

Well, that explained a lot about Hermione Granger, didn't it. Harry was beginning to sense he'd missed a lot of things about his sister-in-law's childhood, simply because she'd chosen not to mention them. Like being made fun of in primary school for her hair and her teeth and her books and her Shakespearean name, and learning to speak louder and louder so that people would hear her. Like a childhood of visiting the place her parents had grown up and never staying, not quite belonging. She must have read everything there was to know about wizarding history just so she could go to Hogwarts and not feel like an outsider, and it had happened anyway.

No wonder she'd been miserable, that first two months of first year.

(No wonder she'd known about Polyjuice, the potion meant for pretending you belonged. No wonder she'd been more interested in that than Christmas.)

There wasn't much Harry could do about all that, but he could be her friend, at least.

And that did seem to be helping, doing what Harry remembered happening over the course of his first few years at school. Hermione was getting better at modulating her volume, now that someone listened when she talked (though there remained ear-splitting shrieks when she was excited). She was getting calmer, having someone ostensibly her age who seemed to genuinely want her around. Harry was glad he could do some good there. Already Hermione was more like the Hermione he remembered, for all that she was seven years old. He wasn't that good at pretending to be a little kid, and 'Adrian' was probably working through elementary schoolwork more quickly than any child should be capable of. Harry wasn't quite inclined to stop, though, because so far the Doctors Granger hadn't noticed anything strange, merely complimented Sirius occasionally on his 'precocious' child. And because he suspected that by managing to outdo Hermione at intellectual pursuits, he was providing a motivational goal, which Hermione - always the smartest person in the room - had never had before. At this rate she'd have her GCSEs done before she got her Hogwarts letter.

Now he'd just have to see how fast he could get Ron to be his Ron instead of the sheltered, tactless idiot he'd befriended in first year. (He missed his Ron, his brother, his deputy, his shield, his oldest and dearest friend. The eleven-year-old boy who thought his scar was wicked cool and all Slytherins were the scum of the Earth, who had seen himself in the Mirror of Erised, because his greatest fear was to be overshadowed - that boy wasn't going to hold a candle to the man who had fought a war with Harry and Hermione. Ron had grown so much in seven years. Hermione had mostly simply relaxed, acquired knowledge and friends and confidence, learned to choose her battles and fight them with ruthless effectiveness. She had always been essentially the same person, which was why Harry had gone to the young version of her to find familiarity. Ron would not be familiar at all, and Harry was not really looking forward to it.)

Fleur, on the other hand, continued to be a tiny blonde bundle of reckless enthusiasm, whenever Harry found time to visit her (once every few weeks, usually). She always wanted to go flying, which he was delighted to participate in, and even on foot she raced around at a speed he was hard-pressed to keep up with when his legs were shorter than hers. Sometimes she crashed headlong into things, giggling all the while, and probably only managed not to get injured by virtue of being nine years old and magic. And then ten years old and magic, and still flying too fast and still crashing into things. Not yet did the quarter-Veela girl show any signs of being the cautious, unfriendly person he had met when he was fourteen and she was seventeen.

Harry was kind of concerned about it.