Disclaimer: All characters and creatures that appear in this chapter belong to J. K. Rowling. I am only borrowing them and am writing for fun, not profit.

Harry's new wand arrived on the same day as their booklists. He was indescribably relieved when he picked it up and felt the warmth flowing through his arm; while Ron was still gaping at his prefect badge, Harry gave the wand a casual wave and a few red and gold sparks shot from the tip. He frowned.

"What's the matter, mate?" Ron asked jokingly. "Wrong type of wood?"

Harry shook his head. "Nothing, it's just… my first wand was a lot better."

"Don't see what you're complaining about." Ron set his badge carefully down on the table, as though afraid it would burn him if he held onto it too long. "If I lost my wand again I'd be stuck borrowing for the rest of my Hogwarts career."

"Yeah, I suppose so." Harry carefully set the wand back in its box. He himself didn't understand where the feeling of disappointment came from, but at that moment he would have liked nothing better than to have his old holly-and-phoenix feather wand back in his hand.

Hermione chose that moment to burst through the doorway, waving her own prefect badge. When Ron glowered at her for her surprise that he'd been made a prefect rather than Harry, she quickly changed the subject to Harry's new wand.

"So you got it? Oh, that's wonderful! It would have been horrible to start your O.W.L. year without a wand."

"Yeah," said Harry, not looking at the wand in the box. "That's great. Really great."

Hermione gave him a puzzled look but didn't comment, instead contenting herself with examining the wand. "Ash and phoenix feather, thirteen inches," she read aloud from the attached note. "Supple." She set down the bit of parchment and bent to look at the wand again, though she did not touch it. "Wow, Harry, this is really well-made. I bet Ollivander puts in more effort for custom orders."

"Yeah, probably." Harry forced a smile onto his face. "Anyway, congratulations, you two."

Harry took his time going to Ron and Hermione's party that night (he had, as a matter of fact, been cautiously examining his new wand), so by the time he came downstairs most of the Order were already there and he was able to blend into the crowd. Harry was just opening a second butterbeer and trying to enjoy himself when one of the last people he would have expected to see walked through the door.

"Was wondering whether you'd make it tonight, Diggory," he heard Moody growl from the doorway.

"I was afraid I wouldn't be able to," Cedric replied. "We had a meeting that ran late, I was afraid the Minister was going to keep us all night… Hullo, Harry."

"Er… hey, Cedric." There was an awkward silence while Moody clumped off and Harry stupidly stared, trying to think of something to say. "So… are you in the Order now, then?"

"Yes." They started to move across the room. "After I returned your Firebolt, Lupin tracked me down and said I should consider talking to Dumbledore." He paused.

Harry waited while Cedric got a butterbeer of his own. He continued to wait while Cedric worked the cork free, little by little, and took a long, slow sip.

Finally, he lowered the bottle from his lips and looked, not at Harry, but at a point somewhere across the room. "You don't know what it was like, seeing you just disappear off the pitch like that," he said quietly. He sighed shakily and set the butterbeer back on the table. "The things I'd been reading in the Prophet and hearing from my parents just didn't make sense. Everyone was saying you were brainwashed or confused, but that didn't explain how you'd got a Portkey. And… I saw your godfather, right after you disappeared. He was in shock. Seeing him react like that, I just couldn't believe…"

Harry nodded. "All that stuff the Prophet's been saying about Sirius—it's rubbish. The Ministry just wants to get me away from him because they think he and Dumbledore have been brainwashing me to believe Voldemort's back."

Cedric flinched slightly, but not nearly as much as Harry would have expected. "I couldn't really doubt it, after hearing it from you. I might have had some doubts before—of course I didn't want to believe You-Know-Who was back—but I also think you would be the last person to lie about it. If you say he's back, he's back."

"Thanks. For… believing me, and everything." Harry had a sinking feeling in his stomach. "Listen, I have to finish packing—but it was nice talking to you."

Cedric opened his mouth as if to protest, but at that moment Tonks came up to him and started chattering. He gave a slight wave, and Harry was allowed to escape.

Suddenly, Harry wanted nothing more than to be alone. So he made his way upstairs, cursing himself all the while. After all that had happened last year his rivalry with Cedric now seemed so stupid and childish, and now Harry could barely look at him without feeling a complete berk. Yet here Cedric was, still on his side in spite of it all…

Suddenly, Harry heard a voice. He stopped and stood as still as he could manage, listening. It came again, so muffled he could barely hear it, and it seemed to be coming from the drawing room.

"Hello?" Harry said. There was no answer, but another voice spoke in response to the first. He crept up to the drawing room, and as he approached the first voice resolved itself into Sirius's, though he still couldn't quite make out the second.

"Riddikulus! Riddikulus, damn it! Riddikulus!"

Harry peered inside, and was shocked to see his own mirror image lying on the floor. Boggart-Harry (for his identical twin couldn't possibly have been anything else) was sprawled on the floor, face contorted in pain, blood seeping from open wounds all over its body. As Harry watched it raised a hand toward Sirius and spoke in a shaky voice that was barely more than a whisper.

"H-help me, Sirius."

"Riddikulus!"

"P-please, help me."

"RIDDIKULUS!"

"Sirius, get out of here!" shouted Harry, stepping into the room, unable to take his eyes off his replica. "Let someone else—"

Crack.

Where duplicate-Harry had been there was now the robed and hooded figure of a dementor which bore down on him, removing a scabbed, rotting hand from inside of its robes…

Sirius's head whipped around to where Harry was standing, and his eyes widened in horror at the sight of Harry facing down a dementor. For a second he seemed frozen in place… Harry could hear his parents screaming as Voldemort murdered them… he needed a Patronus, but he didn't have his wand… his wand was upstairs… no, it was lost…

Sirius, though, seemed to have shaken himself free of his horrified trance and was running toward Harry. "It's me, you want, damn it!" he shouted. "Come after me!"

For a moment, the boggart seemed confused. Its hooded face turned toward Sirius, then back to Harry, and with another loud crack! it turned into Harry again.

When his parents' voices stopped screaming in his head, the real Harry lowered his hands from his ears. In the dementor's place there stood an identical version of himself that was wearing a tattered grey cloak, the hood drawn up so far over his head that it nearly covered his face. At first dementor-boggart-Harry looked at Sirius and started toward him, but then it seemed to change its mind and went back to Harry.

Harry watched numbly as his identical twin looked at him with an expression of hungry anticipation on what he could see of its hooded face. It pulled an empty hand from its cloak and reached out, looking as though it expected him to run screaming in fear at the sight of his own fingers. Then, as it started walking towards him (it looked, he thought, much like Draco Malfoy would if Polyjuiced into his body), it tripped over the hem of its cloak and went sprawling on the floor.

Harry couldn't help it. He burst out laughing, and the boggart vanished in a puff of smoke.

"Sweet Merlin above." Sirius crossed the room and sank down against the wall; Harry sat next to him. "What was that?"

"Remus told us about it third year," said Harry, still trying to suppress his giggles. "The boggart tried to scare both of us at once, and ended up mixing up your worst fear and mine." At that his control vanished and he burst out laughing once again. "I—don't make a—very—scary dementor—do I?"

"No, you don't," said Sirius, and Harry was relieved to see that there was a ghost of a smile on his face. It faded, however, as Sirius looked at the place where the boggart had been.

"I hate this," he said. "So many times now you've nearly died when I was right there. I ought to do better."

"There wasn't much you could have done when Voldemort—"

"I should have taken Dumbledore's warnings more seriously," Sirius continued as though he hadn't heard at all. "I should have paid more attention to those dreams you were having. I should have—"

"Sirius—"

"I should have listened when you told me about the Dursleys."

"You couldn't have done anything then, and besides, Dumbledore said—"

"Bollocks to what Dumbledore said! This is your life, Harry! There's no point keeping you hidden from Voldemort if you'll just end up getting killed by your own relatives!"

"It wasn't that bad…"

"Not that bad? Harry, when Remus brought you back he told me that you had blisters all over your hands and burns all over your neck, and it looked as if you hadn't been fed properly for weeks!" He sank against the wall, burying his face in his hands.

"Remus told you?" Though it was true he hadn't asked his former Defense professor not to tell Sirius, he thought it went without saying that he would have liked to keep this private.

"Yes, he bloody well did! And a good thing, too, otherwise I never would have found out. Seeing as Dumbledore never saw fit to inform me that you were being treated like a house-elf by those so-called guardians of yours…" Sirius lowered his hands from his face and leaned back against the wall. "Harry, why didn't you tell me?"

"There was nothing you could have done," Harry said softly. "Threatening the Dursleys again would just make things worse, and if you'd tried to take me away the Ministry would have locked you up again."

"Well, they might have tried." Sirius's mouth was set in a firm line. "I promise you, though, I won't let it happen again. I'll even spirit you away to America if I have to."

Harry goggled at him. "America? You can't be serious."

"Of course I'm serious. Do you really think I'd leave you to the Dursleys?"

"No, it's just… America? What made you decide on that, of all places?"

Sirius hung his head. "It's the only other country where I speak the language."

For a second they only looked at each other, Sirius with an eyebrow raised as if daring Harry to comment. Then, at the same time, they both burst out laughing.

"Language barrier—my—arse," Harry gasped. "Why not—move to—Australia, then?"

"It's—upside-down," Sirius gasped out in between laughs. "Do you—want to be—walking around—upside-down?" They both broke down completely again.

"What is going on in here?" Mrs. Weasley had come to the door. She raised an eyebrow at the sight of Harry and Sirius, sitting against the wall lost in fits of laughter. "Harry, dear, everyone downstairs wants to know where you are. And there's a boggart in here I want to get rid of…"

"It's been taken care of, Molly." Sirius pushed himself to his feet. "So how about it, Harry?" he asked, brushing dust off his robes. "You ready to go back down?"

"I guess so." In truth, he wasn't at all eager to rejoin the party, but their discussion after facing the boggart had left him feeling a lot better. Harry got up, dusted himself off, and followed Sirius back downstairs.

A/N: Yep, it's a Sunday update. That's what happens when I get almost no sleep between Friday and Saturday.

I know that this is a short chapter, but the next one will be quite a bit longer. I've lost some momentum in the writing process due to losing a file and not wanting to write everything all over again, but that's what the buffer is for, right?

Boggarts: I admit I was slightly disappointed that laughter was introduced as the means of defeating a boggart in PoA, but never mentioned again in any of the later books. I also had quite a bit of fun playing with the idea of a boggart mixing up two different people's worst fears.

Title of next chapter: "Lessons in Defense"