"Today I would like to say a little about tactics!" Professor Diggle said, smiling at them. "The first thing you need to know, of course, is that there is far more than a little to say about tactics. It's a very complicated topic, and one reason for that is that if you had a set of rules which solved all your problems then your opponent could just know about that and work out what to do instead."

His chalk began writing on the board behind him, drawing a picture of some scissors, a stone, and a sheet of paper. He didn't say anything about them, though, and just kept going. "What is the most important thing to do when there is a dangerous situation?"

Several hands went up.

"Miss Granger?" the Professor asked.

"If you're a normal person, it's not your job to sort out a dangerous situation," Hermione said. "Sometimes it'll be a good idea to help, but you don't have to."

"An excellent answer!" Professor Diggle told her. "And four points to Gryffindor for breaking stereotypes. Yes, sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to not get involved – such as if you are the only person who would be in danger."

He tapped his nose. "If you find yourself in trouble from Muggles, then I find a good trick is to go around a corner and then Apparate away. You will find that Muggles are very easily persuaded that you must have just run away, or rather you will not find that because you won't be there. But it rather neatly solves the problem… anyone else? Ah, Miss Li."

"If you do have to fight, you should usually be trying to stun or immobilize someone?" Su suggested.

"Another good answer," Professor Diggle agreed. "Four points for that too, I think. It is important to remember that the actual tactics we will be talking about in today's lesson are for those situations where you can't avoid a fight, or where you need to fight to keep someone else safe."

Draco was called upon next, and he said that you should try to end the fight as quickly and decisively as possible.

"A little more ruthless, but still a perfectly good answer," Professor Diggle announced. "Four points for not breaking stereotypes. Yes, the longer a fight carries on the more chance there is for something to go wrong. You want to make sure you aren't in a fight, either because you've safely left or because whoever was causing trouble now isn't."

He clapped his hands. "So! Now that we've agreed on why this usually won't matter, let's get on with actual tactics. The first thing to remember is not to make it too complicated – you're in the middle of a fight, so if you spend too long thinking someone who's doing a much simpler thing will be able to get you and you'll be quite sad about it."

The top hat quivered. "Secondly, don't make it too simple – you're in the middle of a fight, and if you do the same thing over and over then eventually someone will notice and be ready for you."

Ron had his hand up, and Professor Diggle pointed. "Mr. Weasley."

"So you kind of want to have, um… at least two options, usually?" Ron suggested. "And pick which to go with right at that moment, or something?"

"That would do, yes," their teacher agreed. "There are other ways, of course."


For the next half hour, they got more into the details of how you would counter spells with other spells – or, for that matter, with things that were not spells. Sometimes that meant the finicky art of spell blocking or spell parrying, where you could sort of just swish your wand across and 'dismantle' the incoming spell so long as you'd recognized what it was (and could do the spell blocking anyway), and sometimes it just meant hiding behind something – there wasn't much that you could do to avoid the Killing Curse except not be hit by it.

(Or, as Draco said, 'be Harry Potter', but Harry wasn't willing to bet on that working twice.)

Then they moved on to the practical side of the lesson, which meant going out into the middle of the classroom and throwing spells at one another.

"The choice of whether or not to say the incantation of a spell is a tactical choice," Professor Diggle told them. "It makes a spell slower, but it is also more powerful and so it is more likely to get through a shield – and harder to block, though of course it also means that the person blocking knows what spell you are casting in the first place."

He smiled. "It would be very boring if all this was simpler, wouldn't it? All right, simple jinxes, protection spells and Disarming Charms only, please!"

Harry had just enough time to process that Professor Diggle hadn't actually told them who was facing who, and then spells started going everywhere.

"Protego!" Dean called, producing a shield that looked almost solid, and a silent Disarming Charm from Padma bounced off to instead disarm Oliver Rivers. Draco then flung a voiced Impediment Jinx at Dean, making the shield visibly crack, and Dean looked nervous before flicking a Singing Jinx back at Draco.

Harry was a bit too busy trying to fend off the effects of an Oppugno Jinx from Neville to pay much more attention, and he flared his wing sharply before firing two Disarming spells at once at Neville – one of them from his wand and the other from his mouth.

Neville managed to parry one of them, but the other one got through and sent his wand flying into the air.

Harry caught sight of Hermione casting something at Ron, and Ron briefly becoming a squirrel to dodge, then half-a-dozen exploding Wizard Crackers landed around Harry's leg.

He didn't know that was a jinx, but he supposed he hadn't read all the books of jinxes.

The explosions distracted Harry for a fraction of a second too long, and Susan from Hufflepuff caught his wand with a Disarming Charm.

Harry supposed that was fair enough, and he'd done better than some.


"So, what does that tell us?" Professor Diggle asked, a few minutes later.

"Fights can be really confusing," Ron said.

"Excellent observation," their teacher told them. "Very confusing indeed, which is why it's good to have some idea of how to react in tricky situations. That gives you more thinking power to do other important things."

He tapped his fingers together. "Mr. Thomas, I believe you were the first to try it… would you be able to explain why your Singing Jinx was a good idea?"

"It's because I had a good shield, so it'd take verbal spells to get through it easily," Dean replied. "And I thought the best way of stopping verbal spells was to make it so that Draco was too busy singing."

"Exactly," Professor Diggle agreed. "And Mr. Malfoy, what did you do in reply?"

"I dispelled it," Draco explained. "Because that is something I can do even if I've been stopped from using verbal spells."

Diggle doffed his hat. "Very good, Mr. Malfoy. You should never be shy about taking a moment to Finite any spells which stop you doing better in a fight, though don't just do it every time!"


During one of his free afternoons – which he had a lot of, now, more than free mornings all things considered – Harry was reading his way steadily through a new fantasy book called A Game Of Thrones.

It was one of those books which had lots of characters and showed all their different points of view, and it was also a book where Harry didn't think many of the people were very pleasant characters at all. It wasn't that it was intentionally really terrible, or anything – instead, it was more like the author had had a history book about medieval history while he was writing it, and had made the people in the book about as horrible as actual historical people.

Reading it gave Harry some things to think about. It made him think more about the people who'd done those historical things (both in Muggle history, like Diocletian during the decline of the Roman Empire, and in magical history like – well, like Salazar Slytherin, really) and why it was that they'd done what they did – not because they were evil, necessarily, but because they thought it was the best choice.

That being said, he still didn't like a lot of the characters very much.

The Starks were much more likeable, and so was Daenerys (though Harry had to admit that he might be biased because of the 'dragon' motif) and Harry wondered how it would all end.

It certainly didn't feel like there was enough of the book left to resolve everything, so it would probably mean waiting for a sequel.


Harry was still vaguely thinking about it that evening, when he went down to visit Hagrid after dinner.

Ollie, Sally and Gary were now all close to fully-grown dragons – Harry wasn't sure quite what counted as fully-grown, as he'd never seen a properly fully-grown one of a Swedish Short Snout, Antipodean Opaleye or Common Welsh Green before, but they didn't seem quite as big as Nora which was presumably some kind of hint – and there was a new batch of dragon eggs being warmed, six this time.

"Are you going to be able to take care of six?" Harry asked Nora, smiling.

He knew Hagrid – and Professor Kettleburn, and come to that probably Dean as well – would be doing some of the work, but Nora had helped with the previous trio of hatchlings and Harry vividly remembered her being rushed off her feet.

Was it being rushed out of your wings for dragons?

"We're going to help!" Gary announced proudly.

Sally didn't look quite so enthusiastic about it, and Harry had to wonder how much of that was because she was remembering how much chaos she and her 'brothers' had caused.

"I think they will like me more," Ollie decided. "I'll give them more food."

"Then very fat young dragons will like you until Hagrid next gives them food," Sally told him confidently.

Harry sniggered, then saw that Nora was looking a bit anxious.

"Is there something you want?" he asked her, and the Norwegian Ridgeback nodded.

Curious now, Harry followed her a little distance away from the hatching area. It was apparently still warm enough that they were going to have the dragons hatch outdoors, though they'd be sleeping indoors so that the strange magic of Hogwarts could take effect.

(Specifically, the strange magic of Empress, though sooner or later they'd have to have one of the other dragons be the one to teach a hatchling how to talk – just to test if it would work that way.)

"I was thinking," Nora informed Harry, then. "You're a dragon, but… you're not the same sort of dragon as I am?"

It sounded like a question, and Harry nodded in confirmation. "That's right," he added. "I don't think anyone really knows what type of dragon I am, and I might be the only one. I'm not like any other dragons that actually exist."

"And I'm… like a normal dragon," Nora continued, sounding as if she was slowly and carefully saying something she'd only been thinking before, just in case it sounded silly. "A Norwegian Ridgeback type of dragon, but I can talk and that's something other dragons can't do… but Ollie, and Sally, and Gary all can."

Harry nodded again.

"So… does that mean I'm the first one of dragons like me?" Nora checked.

That made Harry pause for a moment, chills running down his back.

It was something he'd thought about before – the fact that Nora was the first 'normal' dragon who could think in a more human way and talk to people – but Harry hadn't realized how meaningful a moment it would be when Nora realized it.

"Unless there's something I don't know, then… yes," he confirmed, after a moment.

Nora tilted her head slightly. "And that means I need to be really well behaved, right? All of us need to, because… we're the first time people see dragons who can talk, so we're who they'll think of."

"Right," Harry agreed. "You've been doing great so far, but it's – it's really good that you're thinking about that. You're really smart for someone who's less than five years old, Nora."

Nora gave a happy little smile in reply. "Is there anything else I can do that would make it better?"

That was a tough one, and Harry had to think about it a bit.

"I don't know if you can learn English," he admitted. "I know you understand it, but I'm not sure if you can learn to speak it… but maybe you should try? It's worth giving it a go, anyway."

Nora nodded attentively.

"And… I don't know if Professor Dumbledore is thinking of having you learn at Hogwarts," Harry went on, pondering that. "But it might be a good idea to ask Hagrid to teach you some maths as well, and make sure you learn to write as well as read. That way you can send people letters, and people find it easier to forget you're a big dragon if they're reading a letter, I think."

That made Nora giggle.

It all seemed like a very difficult topic, to Harry. It was a bit like organizing a First Contact, except that at the same time it was… well… nothing like organizing a First Contact.

"I wonder if you can get one of those magic quills that writes things down to translate as it goes," Harry wondered, out loud. "Dragonish is one of those funny magical languages which translates easily…"


Because he'd been curious, once he finished the Game of Thrones book Harry went to pick up a book about medieval history.

The last book he'd read about that sort of thing was the big Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that he'd got Hermione (and subsequently borrowed), and it had occurred to Harry only belatedly that while there were a lot of unpleasant things in that book it also covered over one thousand four hundred years of history.

And it was unpleasant things which were more likely to get into history books, after all. So instead, to make sure Harry wasn't sort of having that 'compression' effect, he started picking some random ten or fifteen year long periods – because on a normal sort of scale fifteen years was a long time – to see how many of that kind of unpleasant thing actually happened.

The result left Harry feeling happier, overall. Oh, some of the things which happened in the Game of Thrones book were relatively trivial and wouldn't have made it into a history book, and other things would be hard to identify because it was only the way the book was written that revealed them, but the way it seemed was that for most of the periods of fifteen years in the history books things went quite well overall.

It didn't go as well as things went in the Lord of the Rings, but it went better than things went in Game of Thrones, which Harry supposed meant that real life was sort of a cross between Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings.

Even the amount of dragons was about the same, on average anyway. Though the history book didn't say anything about that, except for saying that obviously dragon slaying didn't really happen and was just an example of what a chivalric knight should be like, and when he read that bit Harry had to sort of stop and frown.

Did dragon slaying really happen, at least with Muggles? He could see how a wizard could do it, using magic (which was always a help), and Lord Ridley wanted to repeat the feat, but if a Muggle knight tried to slay a real dragon then Harry thought that the result would be about the same as putting the knight in the microwave.

Speaking of which, Harry had a sort of better idea of how chivalry and honour and things like that were meant to work now. It was a lot like trust, because the people who worked for you needed to trust that you'd keep them safe, and you needed to trust that the people who worked for you would come when you needed them, and doing crazy things usually made it harder for people to trust you like that.

Harry also hadn't realized that the Hundred Years War had involved so much legal arguing. He'd thought it was just a war that had lasted a hundred years, but it had been spread over more than a hundred years – a hundred and sixteen, all told – and there'd been thirty five years of it where no fighting was happening.

Maybe 'Eighty Years' War' had already been taken and 'Hundred and Sixteen Years' War' had been too complicated.


"Hey, so, you know how Halloween is next week?" Tyler asked.

"I know that next Thursday is," Harry replied. "Oh – Dominic, Skara, there's going to be a Halloween feast if you didn't already know that. If there's something you want, or that you're allergic to, it's probably best to warn the House-Elves."

"Like garlic and Melody, right?" Skara checked. "Yeah, don't think there's anything."

"I don't remember having to do that," Melody said. "Did someone else handle it?"

"I think it's easier to look up, because vampires have a much better known set of things they can't handle," Dominic guessed. "Actually, how many of us have things we have to eat or can't eat?"

Conal raised his hand. "I know everyone's surprised the first time I have meat. Which is funny, because I look like a mixture of human and horse, but both humans and horses will eat meat."

"...that makes horses a bit more intimidating, actually," Tyler admitted, blinking. "Yikes."

"Theobromine," June told them, then elaborated. "It's the chemical in chocolate and stuff that we have a bit of trouble with, it's in coffee too. It's safe to have some, but we have to watch out for it."

Tanisis nodded. "I know the feeling."

"You were the one who actually looked up what it was," June chuckled.

"Anyway, Halloween is next week," Tyler resumed.

"Do we need to watch out for Theobromine?" Anne asked her brother. "I think we're at least a bit canine-y."

"Hopefully not, because if we do then I'm going to keel over from Death By Chocolate at some point," Tyler said. "Anyway-"

"Anyway," Anne picked up, speaking quickly. "We thought it'd be fun to see what happened if people tried an American-style Halloween thing!"

"Americans have Halloween?" Dominic asked.

"Yes, they do," Tyler told him quickly, trying to regain the speed advantage over his sister. "You dress up, but it doesn't have to be scary."

"I think you don't have to dress up as something scary in this country, either," Harry said, frowning. "It's something about how you can either get a treat or play a trick? But I never did it myself, so I'm not sure."

He paused, thinking about how Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia hadn't actually let Dudley do it either – probably because it would be too close to 'magic' – though they did give him all the sweets left over after giving a token few out to people who came to the door. "Actually, now I think about it, maybe that would have let me realize that most people didn't see me as a dragon a lot sooner…"

"Daddy says it's cultural appropriation for witches to take part in Halloween trick or treating," Luna informed them. "It's copying something Muggles do, you see."

"...somehow I think that's the wrong way around," Matthew mumbled.

"Well, I did it anyway," Luna told him earnestly. "He just wanted to make sure I knew I was appropriating."

"I think we're going to need to ask someone who's actually Muggleborn and who took part in Halloween," Harry said. "Otherwise we're just going to go around in circles guessing things and end up completely wrong. What was the idea, Tyler?"

"Oh, just that as many people as we can persuade dress up as something," Tyler explained. "And just show up at the Halloween Feast without saying anything."

"I've got to admit, it's less likely to need us to issue detentions than I thought," June said, catching Harry's eye.

"Hey!" Anna protested. "We're not that bad."

"We are that bad," Tyler corrected her. "We're just good at alibis."

Anna nodded. "As I was saying, you can't prove nuffink."


Harry actually quite liked the idea, though it took him a bit of thought to work out what sort of costume to wear.

With some surprise, he realized he was now at least theoretically good enough at Transfiguration that a lot of the bits of a costume were things he could make himself, but while that meant his choice was a bit less constrained it still gave him a puzzle – which was whether to try to be a specific character from something, or just dress up in a sort of generic way.

"What do you think, Sirius?" he asked, the next evening.

"About this, specifically, or just generally?" his Dogfather replied. "Because just generally, I think it's hilarious that Draco Malfoy's basically doing the same thing as me but with less panache."

Harry tried not to snigger.

"As for costumes, I think it's up to you, but there's a few things I could say," Sirius went on. "There aren't all that many books that you can just assume most wizards have read, so it's up to you whether you care that most of us won't get a lot of the references you make."

He paused. "You could always dress up as Harry Potter or something. Or that blond tosser Gilderoy, a lot of the school should still remember him at this point."

Harry nodded, thinking about that.

"Or you could go as a sort of generic character," Sirius suggested. "Everyone knows what a knight looks like, and I'm pretty sure I already knew what a Victorian explorer sort of person looked like… there are some things you just absorb."

"The other idea I had was going as someone from the Pern books," Harry said, in a thinking-out-loud sort of way. "I'd just have to paint myself bronze or white, after all. Or maybe red, to be Smaug."

"Is Smaug red?" Sirius asked. "I thought that there was a bit where Bilbo called him Smaug the Golden."

"He's red on the book cover," Harry said, thinking. "Maybe he's reddish gold or something, like Angarak gold."

Sirius held up a hand in surrender. "You've lost me," he admitted. "I've still got more than a dozen books on my to-read pile."

"It's the gold in the Belgariad books, it's what the villains use to pay people and sort of corrupt them," Harry explained.

He paused, struck by a sudden thought. "Actually, maybe it's like alchemy. It's red-gold because of the iron where they mine it, so it's sort of got some rust in it, but maybe the reason it's corrupting is because it's actually magnetic – you always want more because it calls to itself, like the iron's magnetism has been alchemically attached to the gold?"

"You're the alchemy expert, Harry," Sirius told him.

Harry shook off the thought, partly because it was mostly a useful one if what you wanted was to make evil gold (or at least unpleasant gold) and partly because it was sort of a sidetrack. "What about if I dressed as someone like Dumbledore?"

"He might like that, so I think it'd be a funny idea," Sirius said. "But sadly, if what you want is for me to choose for you, I'm also an indecisive sod sometimes. Good luck, Harry."


It would have been nice if Halloween had been on a day like Tuesday, or Friday, when Harry had the afternoon free – let alone Saturday or Sunday when everyone had the afternoon free – to give Harry as long as possible to try out a couple of ideas before finally choosing one, but instead it was on a day when Harry's final lesson was Charms on the last proper period of the day.

Of course, since all the feasts took place quite late in the afternoon – with enough time for people who had Astronomy to go and have that lesson, in this case, but not exactly straight after Charms – Harry was still able to head up to the dorms, go into his tent, and cast a few spells on his old set of robes and his old hat.

Rather than try to predict what Dumbledore would actually be wearing tonight (which could be just about any pattern), Harry elected to Transfigure his robes so they were purple festooned with stars, make himself a pair of half-moon spectacles, give his hat the same treatment as his robes and finish up with a long white beard.

All his actual school robes went underneath, so he was still wearing the uniform, but the effect still looked appropriately Dumbledorish.

"Blimey," Dean said, when he caught sight of Harry. "Are you going to be asking for sweets?"

"I think that comes after the main course anyway," Harry shrugged, adjusting the beard slightly. "Dumbledore does like sweets, though, so maybe I should."

Neville made a 'hmmm' noise. "So, how many more people are doing that?"

"Probably a few," Harry said, wondering how many of the other Differently Shaped people actually would be dressed differently.

He was fairly sure the Twins would be, but apart from that it was anyone's game.


When Harry actually entered the Great Hall, he saw something that made him stop and do a double-take.

Anne and Tyler had indeed – possibly with the help of their glamour – dressed up. In fact, they'd dressed up as Fred and George, flaming red hair included, and while Harry could tell which one of the two was which it wasn't exactly easy.

Several people were giving them wary looks, apparently not quite certain whether the actual Weasley Twins would have come back to Hogwarts and sat at the Slytherin table, though Isaac sitting a few spaces down (who'd coloured his feathers white, except for a red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on each wing) helped to clue people in that it was a dress-up thing.

On the Ravenclaw table, Luna was just dressed as a normal student – and Harry couldn't tell if that was a costume or not – while Tanisis had apparently covered herself in greyish stone-coloured dust and was sitting very still indeed.

In what was either a display of complete cultural misunderstanding or a clever joke, Skara had dressed as Father Christmas, and one of the other Ravenclaw First-Years next to her was a green-clad elf.

Moving over to Hufflepuff, June had opted for one of the same ideas Harry had ended up rejecting – she'd got hold of some khaki and a pith helmet somewhere and come as an explorer – while everyone else on the table who might have known were costume-less, either not wanting to take part or unable to come up with something.

"Goodness," Dumbledore said, mildly, but loudly enough that Harry at least could hear him. "I didn't realize I was still in school. I wonder how I managed to land a teaching job."


Apart from the way some people were dressed, Harry included, the Feast itself was mostly quite normal as far as Halloween Feast went.

That meant that it was an excellent and sort of spookily themed meal, with magically animated bats flying around and drifts of candyfloss cobweb occasionally coming down from the ceiling, and Harry heard someone in First-Year yelp the first time that happened before apologizing sheepishly.

There were also a lot of pumpkins and the room was lit only by candle-light, but neither of those things was actually properly unusual at Hogwarts. And the full moon had been a few days previously, so rather than being the dramatic crescent moon or the ominous full moon or even the somewhat significant half moon there was a rather unthreatening waning gibbous hanging overhead.

"Okay, what's one of these?" Ron asked, examining a plate of what looked a lot like profiteroles, but which instead of a name label had a little flag on top which marked them as Biter Beware.

"Well, it doesn't have one of my flags on it," Harry said, looking the plate over carefully. "Or one of Melody's ones. So I think you should be good to have some."

He took one himself, gave it a sniff, then ate it. It turned out to have a hidden core of sausage meat, seasoned with fennel, and he swallowed it down with a pleased nod.

"Well, all right then," Ron decided, and took one himself. He cut into it with a knife, still a little wary, and upon seeing the gooey cheese inside ate both halves one after another.

"Wow," he said. "That's smoked cheese, that's really nice… let's see what it's like if I don't do that."

The second roll, as it turned out, did not have gooey smoked cheese in it.

"Help," Ron whispered, softly. "It's a whole chilli!"

"Have some cheese or something else creamy, that will help," Hermione advised him.

"I was trying for cheese!" Ron told her, waving his hand and trying to cool his mouth down. "Is there any milk on the table?"

"Careful," Ginny advised. "We don't want to have to get a new Keeper for this weekend."

"Why haven't we learned a spell for this yet?"


Ron eventually got what he needed (largely because one of the profiteroles actually did have the cream filling profiteroles normally had, albeit in this case coloured red for effect) but he was a bit more circumspect for the rest of the meal.

The desserts, at least, were very good. Neville particularly liked a cake which was made with a few white chocolate stars and some icing sugar dusted over a base of extremely dark chocolate – he had three slices – though Harry was more partial to a spiced pumpkin toffee apple cake, partly because of the mixture of flavours.

And nobody was quite sure what to make of one thing, which was like a normal jack-o-lantern except that when you cut it open you got a pastry inside.

"I… think it's an inside out pumpkin pie," Dean eventually said, after some minutes of consideration.

"Who comes up with these?" Ron asked, still a bit red-faced. "And do we need to stop them, before it's too late?"

"It's probably the House-Elves themselves, unless Fred or George or Fred and George left a mirror in the kitchen so they could supply ideas," Ginny noted.

She stopped. "Actually, they would do that in a heartbeat if they thought of it. Did they think of it?"

"I can probably go and check," Harry volunteered.

"Are you allowed to – oh, right, Prefect," Neville realized. "Actually, do you get told all the passwords for the secret doors and stuff? I don't know how that bit works."

"I think you're able to ask for the passwords," Hermione said. "I've never actually had to, all the ones that could be useful I'd either been told already because it was useful or Cedric told us."

That made Harry remember something. "Actually, how is Cedric getting on?"

"I know how Percy is getting on," Ron said. "I think he's something like assistant secretary of international cooperation now the dust's settled, which sounds impressive but the Department of International Magical Co-operation is only a couple of dozen people."

"He's only been out of school for a few years, that is impressive," Hermione reminded him. "Doesn't your family live near Cedric's family?"

"Well, yeah, but last time Mr. Diggory came round over the summer I was busy in the shed," Ron explained. "Gin?"

"You're assuming I paid more attention," Ginny replied.

Ron considered that, then nodded. "Yeah, good point."

"Maybe I'll write him a letter," Harry mused. "Still, I'm not sure if I should."

"Why not?" Dean said.

Harry smiled. "I don't want to badger him."

Hermione groaned.

"Is it that beard?" she demanded. "Or is it Sirius? Or were you always like this and I mostly don't notice?"

Harry shrugged.

"...right, I remember why that's funny now," Neville admitted. "You said he was an Animagus, right?"

That led Harry to remember that Cedric had only really shown the ability off in the Prefects' carriage, and that while it was something he personally had seen it was a lot more abstract for people who hadn't.

"Speaking of people who aren't doing Quidditch any more, are you ready for the first game of the year?" Dean checked.

"Assuming Ron doesn't eat anything else that disagrees with him," Ginny said.

Ron made a rude gesture, then shrugged. "Yeah, I think so, the Chaser team is doing pretty well – they're kind of a support group for Cormac at this point but he is pretty good –and everything seems to be shaking out with the new Beaters. At this point I just hope the Keeper and the Seeker don't screw up."

"Do you think that's likely?" Hermione asked. "You're the ones with the most experience of actual games."

"Yeah, but that just means we don't have an excuse," Ron explained.

He cut himself some inside-out pumpkin pie. "Still, if we do lose I'll just blame it on the Slytherin Keeper or something."


"I'm almost more interested to see what happens next week," Dean said, as they took their seats around the Quidditch pitch that Saturday.

"You mean the Ravenclaw-Hufflepuff game?" Neville checked. "Why's that?"

Dean shrugged. "I'm sort of interested to see if Cedric Diggory shows up."

"He did graduate," Hermione pointed out, delicately. "So I don't think he could."

"Marcus Flint did it in our third year," Dean countered. "Didn't he? I'm sure he was a Sixth Year when we joined..."

"I don't think so," Harry replied, thinking. "Or… well, you're right he was in that year, but I think he managed to get held back a year. So he did sixth year twice."

Dean blinked. "Wow."

He frowned slightly. "How do you do that? I didn't know that was something we did in this country…"

"Hogwarts is an old school," Harry pointed out. "Maybe they didn't know that wasn't something we did?"

"...confused now," Neville admitted.

"Hello, everyone," Luna said, her voice echoing around the stadium.

"Oh, blimey, Luna's the one doing the new commentary..." Neville shook his head. "That's not going to help with my being confused."

"Welcome everyone to the first Quidditch match of the nineteen ninety-six to nineteen ninety-seven school league, between Slytherin and Gryffindor," Luna went on. "These two teams have played several times before, but they've both changed their lineup since so talking about those previous games is useless."

She paused for a few seconds, then spoke a little more quietly – though the magic of her Sonorus charm still carried around the stadium. "Am I supposed to introduce them when they come out onto the pitch? Everyone here knows them about as well as I do, I think."

Professor McGonagall said something, though Harry could only tell that because he was looking at the box where Luna was doing the commentating – the Deputy Headmistress didn't have a Sonorus spell on – and Luna nodded.

"I've been told it would help," she told everyone. "So, please welcome – the Slytherin team and the Gryffindor team!"

Harry laughed, then went back over what Luna had said, and nodded.

"Well, that is introducing them," Hermione admitted, in a considering tone.

Down on the pitch, Madam Hooch did her usual explanation. Both teams paid careful attention – Harry saw that Draco was still the Slytherin Seeker, along with his friends Vincent and Gregory as Beaters, but the rest of the Slytherin team like Isaac came from the lower years – and then the Bludgers and the Snitch were released.

One of the Bludgers went for Madam Hooch while she was still picking the Quaffle up, and Melody was about to hit it with her bat to knock it away when Madam Hooch herself pulled a spare club from the case and batted the Bludger high into the sky.

"Nice," Neville observed.

Then the whistle blew, and both teams rose into the air.


Gryffindor's new Chaser team still had some rough edges, as far as Harry could tell – they didn't have the glass-smooth polish that the girls had had last year, and while passing to Cormac tended to work well passing from Cormac was a bit more problematic.

That put them at a bit of a disadvantage when it came to ball control, as far as Harry could tell – the Slytherin team looked mostly the same as last year, so they'd had more experience – and the first three shots on-goal of the game were all by Slytherin against Ron's defence.

Fortunately for Gryffindor, however, Ron was able to save all three – the third one with a kick which sent it soaring almost a third of the way up the pitch, and which Demelza caught before turning her broom and sprinting up the field.

"Oh, that's convenient," Luna said brightly. "I wonder if maybe Muggles have a game about kicking a ball like that."

"...okay, so I know Luna's reputation," Dean said, glancing over at Tanisis – who'd arrived just as the game was starting, out of breath. "Is she joking, or does she not know?"

"Probably joking, I think," the sphinx replied.

A Bludger came rocketing towards Demelza, who threw the Quaffle into the air with a yelp, and the Bludger just barely missed her as she dove out of the way – then Melody swooped in, too late to cover Demelza but in time to hit the Bludger with a crack that echoed around the arena.

The Bludger hit the Quaffle, pinging it in a different direction entirely, and Dennis scooped up the Quaffle before passing it on to Cormac. The big Seventh-year caught the Quaffle and tucked it under his left arm, signalling with his right, and both Demelza and Dennis fell in behind him – then split, each one aiming for one of the three goal hoops.

"Ooh, this should be interesting!" Luna said. "I wonder if there'll be any Stooging?"

Isaac drifted up a bit, holding onto his broom with all four paws and with his wings twitching, then Cormac tossed the Quaffle to Dennis and broke away. Demelza did as well, which meant they hadn't quite had more than one Chaser going into the goal area, and Isaac rolled and spread his wings to cover both of the nearest two goal hoops to Dennis' flight path.

Dennis threw the Quaffle anyway, aiming for the top hoop instead of the left one, and Isaac blocked it sort of awkwardly before 'staggering' in the air slightly and drifting back down again.

"That looks harder than he was hoping it would be," Neville said, thinking. "And if they can get it aimed at the hoop Isaac isn't covering it'd be really awkward for him to adjust."


Some Quidditch games were so quick that you sort of felt disgruntled, or were a bit longer but still short enough that the Seeker was the one who basically decided the result. Other ones were really long and kind of a slog, and in games like that it was the Chasers and Keepers who did most of the important stuff – in a two or three hour game you could work up such a big lead that even catching the Snitch wouldn't let you recover.

In this particular game, though, by the time an hour and a half had gone past the scores were still almost even – two hundred and twenty to Gryffindor and one hundred and ninety to Slytherin, as the Gryffindor Chasers got better at working together and at stretching Isaac whenever they did get the ball while the relentless Slytherin pressure (and at least twice as many shots on goal) didn't translate into quite as many actual goals.

There'd also been no fewer than three times when one or both Seekers had gone diving after the Snitch, only for a Bludger (or in one case both Bludgers) had either hit them or scored a near-miss, fouling the chase.

"It's rumoured that there are special Snitches which are even harder to catch than the normal ones," Luna said, conversationally, as the Quaffle changed hands twice before Demelza snagged it and made a run for the Slytherin goals. "They're made of platinum, and they're Disillusioned, so you have to bump into them in mid-air."

Professor McGonagall let out a long sigh, which everyone heard because of a Sonorus charm she'd used to correct the record on what Luna had said half an hour before. "Relevance, please, Miss Lovegood. We've had this conversation already."

"It's a Quidditch thing," Luna replied serenely, as Demelza scored a goal. "Gryffindor is now up to two hundred and thirty, forty points ahead of Slytherin – oh, it looks like the Gryffindor Seeker has seen the Snitch!"

Harry glanced up at Ginny, then down her flight path, and saw that – this time at least – she wasn't trying to fake Draco out. He was slightly behind her, and she'd starting moving first, so she didn't actually need to-

Crabbe's Bludger came blurring in from the side and knocked Ginny clean off her broom. There was an audible gasp from the crowd, and several people stood up to get their wands ready, but Luna was already talking.

"Ginny will be fine if she turns into a bird," she reminded them, and a moment later Ginny's falling form was replaced by Perry. The falcon swooped around in a circle to get at the Snitch, but the detour had taken her just too long and Draco snagged the golden sphere out of the air.

"And it looks like that means Slytherin wins!" Luna went on. "On three hundred and forty points, which is quite a good score."


On Sunday, Harry went to Hogsmeade (and then to Dogwarts), and had lunch with Sirius – courtesy of Kreacher, who insisted.

"So, how are you enjoying the part of school you technically don't have to do?" Sirius asked.

"Is it a part of school you don't have to do?" Harry said, surprised. "I know you don't have to stay in Muggle schools after your GCSEs – although my cousin's still at Smeltings, because it's still sort of expected at a school like that – but I thought that everyone who went to Hogwarts did NEWTs."

Sirius shrugged, buttering a fresh-baked roll as he did. "Well, you only need OWLs, so if you don't finish your sixth or seventh year you're still allowed to use a wand once you turn seventeen – unless the reason you don't finish is something bad enough that you get your wand snapped."

Harry nodded, thinking of poor Hagrid.

The worst thing about it was that the big man was innocent – they knew that now – but any kind of proof of that would involve revealing how they knew, and that would mean Empress being revealed and almost inevitably to Riddle realizing that his secrets had been revealed.

"Did you know you didn't have to do NEWTs?" he asked.

"Well, they didn't exactly make it obvious," Sirius admitted. "Actually, if I remember correctly I was specifically told after leaving Hogwarts that nobody had wanted to tell me just in case."

Harry thought about that for a few seconds.

"I think I agree with them, actually," he said.

"That's not surprising, I agree with them," Sirius admitted. "I know what I was like then, and I was a right…"

He trailed off.

"I just realized that there's a pun I could make that would only work if I were a girl," he explained. "There isn't really a male-dog version of bitch."

"In one of the Discworld books there's a joke where it's the other way," Harry contributed. "There's a dragon which everyone thought was a male, and someone called it a bastard, but then someone else pointed out the right word was bitch."

"This conversation went weird places," Sirius summarized. "Anyway, since I'm meant to be theoretically somewhat more responsible now, have you given any more thought to what you're going to be doing after NEWTs?"

"I actually kind of miss the part of the Defence Club where I was teaching, but I'm not sure how to get to teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts. It'd be sort of silly to take over teaching the year after school," Harry said, waving a wing, then decided to have another bite of his ham-and-cheese roll.

Sirius chuckled. "You say that, but Percy Weasley did it for a bit. And Dora was only a couple of years afterwards… I do know what you mean, though, you want at least a few years' gap."

"And to make sure that curse is broken," Harry added. "Do curses work after the person who casts them is gone?"

"Depends how they're done, I think," Sirius said. "Egyptian temple curses tend to last for ages, don't they?"

Harry nodded.

They'd covered those in Runes recently. There was this thing that some ancient wizards had done where they'd sort of anchored a curse to a rune (a hieroglyph in this case, but the Egyptians hadn't been the only ones to do it) and made it so the curse would last a lot longer and be a lot more powerful. It wasn't quite like how Runic artefacts could work almost forever, but it was a lot more reliable than just casting a spell and leaving it to hang around.

"Curses that last like that need to have something to stick to," Harry said, then, thinking about that. "So maybe we already got rid of it by getting rid of the Diadem, so it wouldn't even have applied to Professor Umbridge."

Sirius whistled. "If Dumbledore had waited to let the curse get her, then that might have given something away to Tom Riddle."

"Well, the curse, or jinx, or whatever it's technically called, it got Remus over the summer," Harry pointed out. "But I think if someone makes it to the next year then they're fine."

"Dog master and polite dragon should have some scones," Kreacher told them, putting down a large plate on the table. It had no fewer than six scones, three of them with cream and jam and three of them with the slightly thinner option of butter and jam.

"Is that the last thing to come out?" Sirius asked, looking at the multiple rolls still to be eaten and the slices of cake – slices which they hadn't even started yet. "I hope it is, there's loads already."

"Yes, dog master," Kreacher confirmed.

"Then sit down," Sirius invited. "You're the one who made all of this, you can at least help us finish it."

"Kreacher will remember to starve dog master next time," the House-Elf said, sitting down with bad grace.

"You should enjoy the conversation, anyway," Sirius added. "We're talking about how to finish off Riddle."

The House-Elf paused halfway through violently buttering a roll, and grinned slightly. "Kreacher is listening."

"Well, I think we know where his last Horcrux is – or what might be his last Horcrux," Harry corrected. "The tricky thing though is actually getting in there in the first place, because our best guess is that it's in Gringotts."

Kreacher shook his head sharply. "It shouldn't be in there," he said. "Wizards who are meant to be dead shouldn't be having vaults, and he's not a proper pureblood wizard either."

"I'm not a proper pureblood wizard," Harry said mildly. "I'm a proper halfblood."

"Exactly!" Kreacher agreed firmly. "Proper halfbloods say they are halfbloods. Not proper halfbloods say they are purebloods."

"...I'm not sure I follow that," Sirius admitted. "And I grew up in Grimmauld Place."

"Then you should have listened, dog master," Kreacher told him.

Harry thought that that was probably one of those things where Kreacher believed something so deeply that you shouldn't really try to change his mind. Maybe he'd change his mind anyway, but it would be because of things that happened instead of what you said.

Or something.

"I don't actually think he has a vault," he said instead. "If it's there it'll be in someone elses' vault."

"Oh," Kreacher replied.

He thought about that a bit.

"Kreacher is out of ideas," he declared.


AN:

Harry has seen someone put metal foil in the microwave.

Waste of good food, if nothing else. (The metal foil, that is.)

As for Game of Thrones, yes, Harry, you will certainly need to wait for a sequel.

And Kreacher... is biased, of course. He's trying.