Another chapter that answers multiple reader questions, and the conclusion to year 1. You guys have fun and remember; Dumbledore is not evil, just damaged by a tragic past and a little bit full of himself.

Disclaimer: Did any adult authority ever tell off Harry and co on how enormously dangerous all their adventures were? If not, I do not own Harry Potter. It belongs to JK Rowling, and this story is entirely for fun and free.

xxxx

"You. Are. Not. Immortal."

That statement, delivered in a voice as cold as Hermione's future experiments with cryogenic suspension, was not the best thing to wake up to after the ordeal she'd had, Iris thought. A hard face, full of sharp angles and high cheekbones, with large, heavy-lidded eyes stared down at her, weathered but still beautiful. Silver hair framed it, and the voice issuing forth from it was no longer as crystal clear as it would have been fifty years ago.

"You are a child - nay, an infant who has yet to understand the fragility of life, let alone realize the truth of their own mortality!" Cassiopeia Black hissed angrily, the same obsidian dome of magic her cousin Arcturus had used separating their corner of the Hogwarts infirmary from the rest of the world. "One with delusions of heroism that thinly conceal an utter absence of common sense!" Almost blown up like a puffer-fish by her towering anger, bringing back half-forgotten memories of Aunt Marge to Iris, the old sorceress made a visible attempt at control before continuing. "Did you even consider the risks before drinking that blasted Elixir while under one of the worst curses known to wizard-kind? What possessed you to meddle in something that put you before the wand of anyone who could cast it?"

"Quirrel was possessed, actually." The young witch groaned, her head still feeling as if it was being crushed by a muggle trash compactor. "And what was I supposed to do, shrivel up like a mummy or cut off my own leg?" She returned her grandmother's glare with interest. "And how come you know what I was cursed with? Madam Pomfrey had no idea."

"I've been studying the Dark Arts longer than that half-blood with delusions of conquest has been alive, you insolent brat." She sighed. "And you should have excised the cursed limb and obliterated it with Fiendfyre before applying the Elixir, yes. As long as that curse was on a part of you, tied to you with flesh and blood and bone, it was supposed to be incurable; it's a miracle even the Elixir worked at all." She scowled, the lines carved by time upon her face making an appearance despite her own dose of Elixir having healed all physical defects. To those that didn't know better, Cassiopeia Black now looked like a woman of forty-five with premature white hair... exactly as a witch of her power and age should look if her magic and emotions remained vital. Wizarding life expectancy had caught Iris by surprise in her previous life, since she'd never been taught about it in Hogwarts. Her grandmother was only seventy-seven and with the so-called Black curse removed she no longer appeared as old as Professor Marchbanks who'd probably been born sometime before the Pyramids were built.

"What I do not understand is why your reaction was not only bad, but also lasted so long. Bellatrix was only down for a few minutes according to her description and even Arcturus recovered after an hour and a half." She begun a full check-up of her 'errant' great-niece, not only with spells but also physically taking her pulse, checking her eyes and tongue, and shifting Iris' head to see it from every angle. The future Head Auror turned child bore the invasive treatment stoically, knowing that to interrupt would only make things worse. "No, still can't see it. The traces of the Withering Curse are almost too faint to detect after over a month, and whatever other lingering auras must have once existed are gone. Even the Elixir's magic is entirely spent, while traces of it can be found in Arcturus and I half a year later."

"Really?" That was very good, if true. Iris had a good idea why Dumbledore had confused her with Tom and had been lucky her family had not cast so strong detection magic on her before. Even after Tom's death in the future and Hermione suggesting plastic surgery to remove the scar she'd grown to hate, an echo, a side-effect of all her years being a Horcrux had remained. The Elixir must have erased all traces of it even as it fought to restore her... and failed. Strange as it was, the Black heiress was glad she'd not reverted to an adult. Not due to the trouble it would have caused but because she was beginning to enjoy her second childhood. The elder Black sorceress was still looking for answers though, so Iris had to do something about that... and outright lying was not an option.

"Well, I got into a lot of fights in my time." She said with a carefully careless shrug. "If the Elixir makes you relive all past harm..."

"More fights than Bellatrix or I?" The older woman raised one silver eyebrow questioningly. "We both fought in wars, you know."

"Sure, but I trained students once." Beating a new Auror Corps into shape had been as hard as it had been ultimately futile. "One duel with each per day... about twenty years..." She counted, her eyes widening at the result. She'd never really considered just how much she'd fought in her life, in training or as sport and not just for life and death. "Well, a hundred and fifty thousand duels sure makes for a lot of injuries." Cassiopeia seemed to agree too, if her briefly gaping like a fish was any indication. This whole interrogation disguised as familial worry suddenly became worth it for that image alone.

"Well, that explains everything." The older woman said drily. "Who needs the Black insanity if they're already crazy." Shaking her head, the old sorceress rose to her full height and begun to dismantle the various secrecy enchantments she'd cast. "This is not over young lady. We'll continue the discussion after I fill in Arcturus... and you've had several sessions with a Mind Healer."

"Figures." Iris grumbled again. "Do we have anyone we trust?"

"My grand-nephew has been pestering Arcturus and me about the Tonkses. Andromeda is probably qualified and this might be a good time to reintroduce her to the family." Both of Iris' eyebrows shot up to her hairline at that announcement. Andromeda, Sirius, and Bellatrix under the same roof... this ought to be fun. "Now, listen here you little hellion." Cassiopeia Black admonished her as the obsidian dome vanished and the rest of the infirmary reappeared. "You get some rest. No stress, no heroics, no strong magic, and absolutely no duels. I didn't arrange for you to sit the yearly exams in late August only to have you gad about the castle with your little club, teaching them battle-magic. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am." It was the only answer, really. As the old sorceress walked away, Iris wondered how she'd found out about the Fight Club.

xxxx

"Oh Iris, it was horrible!" Harry whined as he, Neville, Ron, Hermione, Lillian, Pansy, Blaise, and Draco walked into the hidden Fight Club meeting room in unison, causing her to do a double-take. Not only had Iris never whined as a child, but she'd never shown solidarity with the likes of pansy and Draco in the aborted future. Her temporal twin was right; something terrible had happened.

"I didn't know any Weasley could be so..." Draco shuddered without finishing the sentence. The others copied him, even the usually stoic Lillian breaking composure.

"You're lucky, Malfoy." Ron said glumly. "She is not your Grandmother."

"Better you than us, Weasel." The blond ponce made a brave attempt at a sneer, but it fell flat. Pansy made as if to join in with an insult of opportunity, then her face turned crimson and she closed her mouth without saying a word. The pug-faced girl was walking suspiciously gingerly and wincing every so often, her hands holding her backside when she thought nobody was looking.

"It... it was barbaric!" Hermione spoke up, hair frizzing at the magnitude of her indignation. "Positively medieval! Being treated like... like..." She had a shifting pose similar to Pansy's, for some reason finding it hard to stand up as straight as she usually did. Blaize and Lillian were rather subdued, too, far too silent and forlorn to be their normal chatty selves. And Neville... one of her best and bravest future friends now looked as timid as he had right before the Sorting, or even possibly worse.

"Let me guess." Iris looked at all of them critically. "Grandma Cassiopeia cornered you for information and you mouthed off to her."

"Not only her." Neville said in a small voice. "My great-gran Callidora and Ron's great-gran Cedrella joined in too, and started 'lecturing'. Then Hermione and Pansy err... provoked them." The two girls in question stared daggers at the boy. Iris rolled her eyes and rapped them smartly in their backsides with very weak, wandless banishing spells. Their yelping and jumping totally out of proportion to the soft blows confirmed Iris' suspicions of their fate.

"Figures." Iris said lightly trying not to giggle. She really did. The others really had no excuse for the wounded looks or furious glares they sent her way... honestly! "Hmm, in the interest of family loyalty and common sense, I'll say you had it coming."

"WHAT!?"

She rolled her eyes at the over-exaggerated indignant reply, especially Harry's mutinous scowl.

"Seriously, people. Fighting Voldemort over the Philosopher's Stone is a little bit above our year as far as extracurricular activities go, yes?" The Gryffindors had the decency to look guilty, but every other Slytherin present just gaped at her.

"Excuse me, I think I misheard." Lillian said with a false smile. "Did you just put the Dark Lord, fighting, and Philosopher's Stone in the same sentence?"

"Yep." Iris smirked at the too-cute flustered eleven-year-old girl. "Our very own Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, discovered that the Dark Lord had survived their previous encounter. Not only that, but he and these great Gryffindors present also found out about an artifact that provided infinite wealth and life hidden in this very castle and logically assumed that the Dark Lord wanted to steal it." Harry was now glaring at her too, while all the other Gryffindors present looked even more guilty. "Instead of exercising common sense and contacting proper authorities the moment they suspected the Dark Lord was even alive, they decided to take it upon themselves to stop the darkest wizard in Britain."

"Are you pulling our leg, Black?" Draco demanded. "Potter and his friends got punished for messing up some obstacle course the Professors were testing for the Auror training program. They didn't do what insanity you're saying they did! Are you blacks all crazy or something?"

"Don't think much of your mother, do you Draco?" Iris smirked. "As for my claims, it is time I taught you a very useful bit of magic; memory extraction. It's used in witness testimonies and it allows a witch or wizard to externally store - and with the right tools share - their memories and experiences."

"Your grandmother told us you wouldn't be teaching us any more magic this year." Hermione said, having to struggle with herself to utter the words. Iris' oldest future friend had always had a voracious appetite for knowledge; Memory Extraction was the kind of magic she'd do almost anything to learn. Apparently, crossing Cassiopeia Black was one of the few things she wouldn't do, along with killing, or getting expelled.

"Nope. She told me not to teach you any more dueling and battle-magic." Her smile widened. "Memory Extraction is neither and while quite complex, it doesn't require much power."

"Always a Slytherin." Harry mumbled, then spoke up. "Iris, how did you know all this? And if you did... why are you telling everyone?"

"Excuse me, Potter?" Lillian glared at the boy sharply. "I would like to be informed of things that could potentially get me killed!"

"That's precisely the point, Harry." Iris said in a far friendlier manner. "Keeping such information secret is wrong and can hurt a lot of people... but sharing it with people you don't trust is also dangerous."

"And you trust Malfoy?!" Ron interjected incredulously.

"Oh yes." Iris smirked at the blond dandy in question. "His family very publicly renounced the Dark Lord. He won't forgive them, and there's a good chance he'd want revenge if he ever regains his power. Besides, a peaceful wizarding Britain is more profitable for the Purebloods... and more survivable. That is why the House of Black turned against the Dark Lord; he personally destroyed more Pureblood families than any other." And there came the moment Iris had been waiting for since she'd formed this club; sowing ideas directly into the scions of several influential Pureblood families, ideas they'd share with their parents, ideas that would be slowly spread among the Purebloods. That the ideas were the truth was an added bonus. That done, she had one major concern to deal with.

"As for how I knew, Harry..." Iris pouted. "I can understand why you didn't trust me enough to share given my House, but it's high time you learned things you keep to yourself are not necessarily safe."

"What do you mean?" The boy asked suspiciously, probably more than a bit hurt at their recent interaction. After overcoming the shock of first meeting him, Iris had loved Harry like a younger brother. She'd helped him, protected him, taught him. But the prejudices of the wizarding world in general and Hogwarts in particular had forced a wedge between them, a wedge Iris was pushing in a bit deeper every time she chose to treat Harry honestly but harshly. She wished she could save him from all the darkness and horror she'd had to go through, but she was not sure she could. And for that reason she could not afford to give him lies and half-truths, no matter how much better they'd make him feel. That had been one of Dumbledore's biggest mistakes and she refused to repeat it. But with a little bit of luck, she might soon be able to give him a family...

"Powerful wizards can delve into the minds of others, Harry. They can learn to sense emotions, surface thoughts, even look for memories. Someone talented enough doesn't need to use a wand and incantations to do it either." She waited for the Gryffindors to digest the information and the horror to appear on their faces. The Slytherins, of course, already knew. "That is how Professor Snape usually knows when you're lying to him."

"He... he reads minds?!" Ron gasped. "Fred and George were right!"

"At least some Weasleys have a modicum of cunning." Pansy sniffed, and was largely ignored.

"Can you do it?" Harry looked at Iris in question, dreading the answer.

"Not nearly as well as Grandma Cassiopeia, or probably great aunts Cedrella and Callidora either." She shrugged. "Most powerful wizards can. Have you never wondered how the Headmaster seems to know almost everything that's going on in the castle?"

"But that's illegal! It must be!" Hermione cried out. "To look into someone's mind like that is..."

"No more illegal than an adult seeing through the deceptions of a small child." Iris corrected her. "We learn how to cook someone alive or cut them to pieces as eleven-year-olds, Hermione. To use a muggle analogy, we're given not a gun but heavy military ordnance when we turn eleven. No amount of laws would work in a society like that if its members weren't taught to defend themselves, which is why we are taught DADA... or at least we should be."

"So there are ways to stop it?" Harry asked eagerly. His encounter with Voldemort had included Legilimency after all, Riddle having sufficiently high mastery of it to do a surface reading without even line of sight. Now that Harry knew how Riddle had known about him lying, of course he was eager to prevent it from happening again.

"Yes." Iris nodded. "Lillian and I know rudimentary Occlumency - the art of shielding our minds from external penetration."

"Hey, you peeked!" The other girl said and pouted prettily, not really offended. She was too practical to blame her for using any available advantage.

"Could you teach us?" Hermione blurted, speaking at the same time as Lillian.

"You need to master basic meditation first." Iris said to the other children's disappointment. "Fortunately, I do happen to have a few books on the subject." Tapping her wand once, she cancelled the Shrinking Charm on the brown paper cube an inch across she'd retrieved from her pocket. It became a heavy pack of books, eight copies of 'Praxis Obscurae Mentalis', an Occlumency tome she'd found in the Room of Requirement and duplicated. It was not a small book, containing instructions and suggested exercises from the level of a raw initiate, to an accomplished master. It had almost no theory, history, or trivia on the Mind Arts like most manuals, focusing exclusively on mental exercise.

"Do you have any idea how valuable these books are, Black?" Lillian asked, staring at the copies as hungrily as Hermione. "This was written before the Doubling Charm or printing press were invented; I doubt even the Hogwarts library has a copy."

"Consider it a gift, though I suggest you copy as much of it as possible." She smiled a bit at Ron's disgruntled frown when handling the heavy book. "These are magical copies and won't last forever."

"You're serious about us learning to defend ourselves, aren't you?" Harry asked with an inscrutable expression on his face. Inscrutable, that was, for someone who wasn't his temporal twin, had known him for years, and had an improving grasp of Legilimency. Her little brother was very moved by this gesture, only he didn't quite know how to show his feelings after their recent distance and everyone else present. "Thank you, Iris. Really... though I am not sure if I'll have time for this over the summer."

"Oh you will." She said cryptically, and dismantled the secrecy spells on the room now that their last lesson for the year was over.

xxxx

And suddenly, their wardrobes were empty, their trunks were packed, Neville's toad was found lurking in a corner of the toilets; notes were handed out to all students, warning them not to use magic over the holidays ("I always hope they'll forget to give us these," said Fred Weasley sadly); Hagrid was there to take them down to the fleet of boats that sailed across the lake; they were boarding the Hogwarts Express; talking and laughing as the countryside became greener and tidier; eating Bettie Bott's Every Flavor Beans as they sped past Muggle towns; pulling off their wizard robes and putting on jackets and coats; pulling into platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station.

It took quite a while for them all to get off the platform. A wizened old guard was up by the ticket barrier, letting them go through the gate in twos and threes so they didn't attract attention by all bursting out of a solid wall at once and alarming the Muggles.
"You must come and stay this summer," said Ron, "both of you — I'll send you an owl."
"Thanks," said Harry, "I'll need something to look forward to." People jostled them as they moved forward toward the gateway back to the Muggle world. Some of them called:
"Bye, Harry!"
"See you, Potter!"
"Still famous," said Ron, grinning at him.
"Not where I'm going, I promise you," said Harry. He then searched for Iris, but she was nowhere to be found and none of the dreaded Blacks were on the platform. Curious... but not curious enough to distract Harry from a scowling Uncle Vernon waiting for him as soon as he crossed the magical barrier. He was so preoccupied he didn't notice a very slight blur in the air as something almost entirely invisible and completely silent passed over his head.

Said something flew out of the station, took a few seconds to orient itself, and then launched itself forward at a frankly ridiculous acceleration. In less than six minutes, it was flying over a certain London suburb called Little Whinging with nobody the wiser. It took several more minutes to orient itself carefully and then the air seemed to shimmer momentarily before a large, heavy jar fell off out of apparently thin air. Less than a second later, the heavy jar crossed the mile-wide invisible bubble of defensive and revealing enchantments centered around Number 4 Privet Drive. Being entirely nonmagical and not intended as a threat against any living person, the heavy jar did not interact with them at all; it kept falling. Twenty seconds later, it crashed upon the neatly maintained house on Number 4, spilling over 40 pounds of oil and phosphorus that immediately set the small building on fire.

By the time the Dursleys and their errant nephew returned from London, the house had burned to the ground and all spells cast upon it had collapsed.