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When Harry got home to Number Four, Privet Drive, he saw there was an extra car parked outside.

Unlike Uncle Vernon's car, which was big and expensive – and, for that matter, changed every year – this was a smaller, older looking and slightly battered red one with prominent L plates stuck to the front and back.

It didn't exactly take a NEWT in Muggle Studies to work out that that was Dudley's car to learn to drive in – or maybe it did, Harry wasn't familiar with the curriculum – and he circled once before flaring his wings and coming down to land on the pavement just in front of the lawn.

He carefully furled his wings, making sure they weren't going to scratch either car as he walked up the little alleyway that was left between them, and went to ring the doorbell.


It was sort of funny to think about how this was his last time at Privet Drive, because in a lot of ways it was the same as all the others had been.

Harry went upstairs and set up in the attic, just like he had every previous time, and he even had homework (though he hadn't last year, which if anything was more like the odd one out than this year was). And Aunt Petunia presented Harry with a list of chores, just like before, ranging from cooking to gardening to clearing out Dudley's second bedroom (or hoard room, if you thought like a dragon).

Though Harry didn't ask many questions, he still picked up quite a lot of what had happened over the time he'd been away – and what his aunt, uncle and cousin thought about what had happened – just from conversations over the dinner table. He learned that Uncle Vernon didn't especially like the result of the latest election and that he was 'damn sure' that Dudley would be voting the right way when the next one came around, and that Dudley didn't think much of the car he'd got to learn to drive in (which Aunt Petunia reminded him he had to say was their car, and that he was only a name driver, to make sure the insurance wasn't too bad).

"That sort of thing matter for you, does it?" Uncle Vernon asked, then, glancing at Harry with a snort. "Clunker broomsticks to learn on, or something? Ratty old magic carpets?"

"Broomsticks, yes," Harry agreed. "But it's more like bicycle riding, because we learn it much younger than you can have driving lessons. Magic Carpets aren't legal any more."

"Waste of time anyway," Uncle Vernon said, then got himself some more mashed potato.


A few days later, after the dreary weather of the first part of July had gone away and been replaced with brilliant sunlight, Harry was going down his list of chores – sweeping up the various broken things in Dudley's second bedroom – when Dudley coughed slightly behind him.

"Um… you got a minute?" he asked. "I wanted to talk."

"Sure," Harry agreed, sitting down – taking care not to rip the sheets of the bed, like always – and Dudley sat next to him with a slightly alarming gloink from the bedsprings.

"I was thinking about, you know," Dudley explained, waving his hand. "I know in a few weeks you're off to that Sirius bloke's house, and I don't even know if you'll be back after your last school year."

"Probably not, actually," Harry told him. "Wizards say you're old enough to be an adult when you're seventeen."

"Wow," Dudley said. "Lucky you. Can you buy drinks and stuff when you're seventeen too, then?"

"I've never tried," Harry answered – he was pretty sure Butterbeer didn't count.

Dudley sniggered.

"Anyway, I was just thinking… it is going to be weird when you're gone for good," he explained.

"Maybe I'll visit," Harry said, thinking about that. "Or maybe not, it depends what Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia think."

It was the same sort of thing he'd been thinking about himself, about how weird it was going to be when something that had been 'normal' for so long suddenly wasn't normal any more. And when something that hadn't been normal suddenly was, of course.

"Do your lot have careers meetings and stuff?" Dudley asked suddenly. "One of mine said that I needed to get better marks to go to university, but Dad said he'd hire me whether or not I went to university first, so I'm not sure…"

"I think better marks help," Harry said, shrugging a bit – he'd got his own exam results not long after getting back to Privet Drive, and everything seemed to be going pretty well as far as he was concerned. "University's supposed to be an important experience, right?"

His cousin nodded. "Yeah… what about you? Are you going to go to, um, magic university or whatever?"

"There doesn't seem to be one," Harry said. "I've got a few ideas about jobs, but I'm not sure how much they'd mean to you."

"Yeah, probably," Dudley agreed.

It was a sort of companionable moment. Harry didn't think he'd ever be close with his cousin, just because of the eleven months a year they weren't in contact, but it was nice to be able to talk.

After a minute or so, Dudley brightened. "Oh, yeah, I just realized, because you've been away for so long you haven't seen any of these new video games and stuff. Want to watch me play one of them?"

"Sure," Harry agreed. "I'll finish clearing up like Aunt Petunia asked, first."

"That's okay, it'll take a while to get going," Dudley told him, and went over to the desk with his computer – then looked at the TV connected to several consoles and a multi input switcher thing. "Um… I've got Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot… Dungeon Keeper is about ruling over an evil dungeon… there's this one where you fight Dracula, I think, but it's still only in Japanese…"

Harry had a listen to what each one was like – one of the ones Dudley mentioned was an army-command game where you fought a kind of weird version of World War Two as or against the USSR – but eventually decided that Crash Bandicoot sounded the most interesting.

Tomb Raider was in second place, but Dudley seemed a bit too interested in how hot the girl in the game was and not enough in the actual raiding of the tombs.

The actual game was sort of interesting, because it looked really good – Harry wasn't an expert, but he'd seen the games Dudley had played before, and this one had a sort of vibrancy to it that none of the ones before had had. Dudley controlled a weird orange looking creature running around in the jungle, sometimes helped by a funny tribal mask thing and eating vast amounts of fruit, and it seemed like the goal was to get through the levels as fast as possible while breaking boxes on the way. So it was a bit like a racing game, he supposed.

Dudley was clearly quite good at it.


A few days later, Harry frowned over an Alchemy problem, then paged forwards through his textbook to check.

It looked like the correct answer was that to neutralize the dangerous properties of a powerful magical poisonyou had to use electrum, because it was an alloy of silver – which was known to resist dark magic – and gold, which unlike silver didn't tarnish. That meant you could avoid the poison resistance of the combination wearing off under later treatment, though Harry did note that if he was going to be working with such a dangerous material he'd also want to include activated charcoal because that was something that soaked up the effects of poisons.

That was the final point he needed, and Harry checked the time – it was about one in the afternoon – before putting all his notes around his parchment and writing out the whole of his answer.

The strange thing about the problems they'd been set over the summer, in Alchemy at least, was that Professor Dumbledore had been quite clear that there was often no single answer. Instead what he was hoping for was a well reasoned approach, and Harry's notes made him fairly sure he'd at least got that.

Assembling it all together into a sort of suggested things-to-do, along with Harry's predictions about what would happen, took most of another hour – but when it was done, Harry leaned back with a sigh.

His Alchemy homework for the summer was out of the way, joining his Charms and Transfiguration homework as finished. The only bits left now were some of his Defence work, and a few fiddly bits of Rune work like deciphering some example schemes – ones which Professor Babbling had given to them as a kind of work booklet.

Harry felt like he'd done enough for the day, though, or at least for the afternoon, and looked out at the light shining through the attic window.

If he'd been someone else, he might have thought that it was far too nice a day to spend cooped up inside.

Instead, Harry was a dragon, and as far as he was concerned one of the nicest ways to spend a day was curled up on your hoard reading through a book. But the hot sun outside was still tempting, and he didn't have any new books to read at the moment, and he'd done a lot of homework today…

Going through the door of his tent and locking it behind him, Harry opened the window and slipped out. It was a bit harder than it had been back when he'd first moved up here, but the attic window opened far enough for him to still get through – even if he did have to put his backpack through separately.

It was lucky that Muggles didn't notice him, because Harry imagined he made quite a sight clinging on to the roof tiles – wings spread and occasionally flaring slightly for balance – as he pushed the attic window closed again, then turned and launched himself into the air.


While Harry had originally intended to just go straight to London and see what there was in the Barbican Library, or maybe just check to see what there was at the local library in Little Whinging – or find a book shop, even – he decided on a whim to try something a bit in-between, and climbed to what he thought was more than a mile before looking around for a town that caught his fancy.

If it was sometimes impressive what the Little Whinging library had, then it stood to reason that other village or town libraries would sometimes have impressive things there as well. And it wasn't like Harry was in any danger of getting lost, because he was fairly sure that he'd be able to find a map which said where Little Whinging was relative to whatever town it was he'd picked.

Besides, he wanted to stretch his wings a bit, and going exploring sounded like a lovely way to do that.

He ended up going mostly south and west, towards the sun, and wondered about how many wizards there were likely to be in Surrey.

There were, what, forty witches and wizards a year at Hogwarts, usually – or human ones anyway – and wizards did tend to live a long time… but lots of them lived in small mostly-magical villages like Ottery St. Catchpole and Godric's Hollow, so after thinking it over a bit Harry decided it wasn't likely there were more than a few magical people in the whole of the county. And he was one of them, so meeting another one was very improbable.

That wasn't how it worked, but Harry was sticking to it anyway, and it whiled away a bit of the time before he reached his target town.

Circling over it a bit, and thinking that if any wizards did live in wherever-this-was they'd probably be a bit confused, Harry eventually noticed a building which said it was a library. It was at the northern end of town, right on the edge, but the town was one of those ones which had almost merged with another nearby one so there was just a splash of green space a few hundred yards wide between the library and the next town to the north.

Harry dropped closer, then flared his wings and landed neatly in the car park. There were only a couple of other cars there, and he smiled at the sort of lazy-afternoon feeling before heading for the doors.


The first thing Harry realized, once he'd checked that his Surrey library card would work here and found the bits of the library he was interested in, was that there'd been some very interesting books that had come out in the last few weeks.

There was a new Redwall book, The Long Patrol, which was all about the hare rangers which patrolled the countryside on the lookout for danger. And there was a new Anne McCaffrey book as well, not one about the dragons of Pern but the start of a new series which seemed to be about a unicorn girl.

Those would have been enough by themselves, two new books he was almost certain he'd enjoy, but then there was also another book set in Belgarion's world – Polgara the Sorceress – and just by looking through right at the start Harry could see that it was going to be giving a whole new look at the events of a story he'd been reading about for years.

The fourth new book which caught Harry's eye was slightly different, as it wasn't by an author he'd heard of before, but it looked a lot like Redwall. In fact, in some ways it looked almost exactly like Redwall, except that it was weasels as the protagonists and it was done in a much more irreverent style which Harry liked the sound of a lot.

Those four, plus a couple of others which were older books but ones Harry hadn't run into before (something to do with princes and amber), kept him occupied for more than an hour. It might have been longer, but at about four Harry noticed the time and realized that he'd have to head back home if he was going to do the cooking today.

Getting the books taken out took just a few minutes, and he left into the car park – now even emptier, and Harry supposed quite a lot of people were at the beach or something.

He was about to take off, wings already unfurling, when a high, cold voice sounded.

"You shouldn't try to get away, Mr. Potter."


Harry turned around to see who'd spoken, and saw a tall man in wizard's robes who seemed to be missing a nose.

"Are you all right?" he asked, trying to remember if he'd met this person before.

He didn't think so, because the missing nose thing seemed like it would have been a good clue.

"Silence," the man said, pointing a wand, and other figures began to appear from behind the small building next to the library – Harry thought it was a church. There were half a dozen, at first, all wearing robes and masks like the ones at the World Cup, then more and more began to appear in a series of crack sounds.

"I've put up an Anti-Disapparition ward, my lord," said one of the first figures. "Potter is not old enough to be allowed to Apparate, but he has done the lessons."

"Good," said the noseless man – Voldemort, Harry decided – then twitched his wand towards the masked figure. "Crucio."

The torture curse only flashed out for a moment, but it ripped an anguished shout of pain from the man it struck. He collapsed to his knees, catching himself before he fell further, and remained trembling for several more seconds as Voldemort's wand flicked right back towards Harry again.

"Amycus, Amycus, Amycus," Voldemort said, silkily. "I thought you had a better memory. There is no such thing as a ward; what you have put up is an Anti-Disapparition Jinx."

"Yes, my lord," Amycus replied, whimpering slightly as he slowly stood back up again.

Harry tried to work out what the best thing to do was. He didn't have his wand out, and it'd be obvious if he tried to get it out, while shouting a spell and casting it with his breath took a moment and he didn't think Voldemort was going to give him that moment if it looked like Harry was going to be an actual threat.

The other Death Eaters were filing into positions now, though, lining up in two rows of dark robes with expressionless masks hiding their identities. Some were shorter and some were taller, but they all looked much the same, and they all had their wands out as well.

Spread either side of Voldemort they formed a kind of ominous, faceless wall.

Harry wanted to leave, but couldn't just fly off and rely on his scales, because wizards did manage to cast spells on dragons – and there were spells Harry could think of which could bring down a flying dragon if they were cast right, so he wasn't going to rely on Voldemort having forgotten about them…

"So this is Harry Potter," Voldemort said. "The boy who they called my downfall… well, not so much a boy, any more. Not even human, any more."

"You used to be a boy once as well, Tom," Harry said, and a few of the Death Eaters muttered something. "I think I prefer where I've ended up."

He started blinking more quickly behind his glasses, just in case an Imperius curse was going to happen, but apart from that he thought the best thing to do was just stay alert – keep on watch for if Voldemort diverted his attention like that again.

His wings flexed slightly with nerves and tension, and Voldemort's wand seemed to be aimed straight between his eyes – which it probably was.

"Careful, Potter," Voldemort went on. "You wouldn't want my wand to slip."

He spread his other hand, indicating the Death Eaters to either side. "Behold, my loyal servants. My servants who spent fifteen years not hunting for me, not trying to find me… servants who had no faith in me."

Harry felt his hackles trying to raise, because Voldemort's tone sounded like it was barely containing some dark, vicious rage.

"I'm… sorry, my lord," one of them said, nervously. Harry couldn't quite disentangle who was here by their scents – and he hadn't met most of them anyway, by the sound of things. "We thought you were…"

"You thought I was dead," Voldemort said, and now he was pleasant, even mirthful. "You thought Lord Voldemort was dead. You thought Lord Voldemort could die."

Voldemort shook his head, though his eyes remained fixed on Harry throughout. "No, my friends, I suppose I should not mock. I admit it, our young celebrity here has caused me so much trouble… so much pain…"

The wand drifted back and forth slightly, like a dancing cobra waiting to attack.

"And so much fear, for my loyal followers," the dark wizard went on. "Only fear could explain why they did not look for me. Why you all seemed to have abandoned me… but it all ends here. And your fear of Harry Potter will end here as well."

A slight smile, now. "As will Harry Potter himself."

Harry tried to cast something, but Voldemort was faster. Quick as a flash, he cast his spell. "Avada Kedavra!"

A jet of green light flashed out, bounced off Harry's forehead, and blew Voldemort off his feet.

"Stupefy!" Harry roared, and exhaled a spray of red light. Two or three of the spells hit Death Eaters – Amycus was one of them – and the silent wall of intimidation turned into a chaotic mess as the Death Eaters started to process what had happened.

"Impedimenta!" someone shouted, pointing their wand at Harry, and the spell splashed off his scales. He replied with another Stunning spell, then a Body-Bind, looking back and forth to try and notice when someone was about to raise a wand and trying to hit them first.

He was still in a fight with more than a dozen adult wizards, and was trying to think of everything at once.

One of the ones he hadn't even aimed at yet spun around, looking like he was trying to Apparate but wasn't, then ducked behind one of the few cars left in the car park.

"Someone take down the jinx!" one of the Death Eaters said.

"How?" another asked.

He had a Shield Charm up, so instead of casting a spell Harry just breathed fire on him. That seemed to work, and then the first one who'd spoken pointed their wand down.

"Morsmordre!"

There was an explosion of green light which dazzled Harry, something made of green smoke and stars erupting from the tarmac of the car park. His ears twitched, sending his glasses clattering to the floor, and he fired out another Stunning spell just on general principle before turning and taking off.

There were several loud crack sounds, more than he thought there should be with how many Death Eaters there'd been, coming in volleys of half a dozen at a time. Then someone shouted something about stunners, and Harry dodged to the side a bit before looking back to see what had happened.

People were coming out of the library and out of the nearby building to see what was going on, and there were lots of wizards now – many of them wearing the sort of colourful versions of business suits common with people who worked at the Ministry of Magic. There were several others who were dressed properly, enough like Muggles that Harry couldn't have picked them out of a crowd, and he also saw both old Mad-Eye Moody – unmistakeable with his one leg and strange blue eye – and Professor Dumbledore himself.

The Dark Mark vanished in a puff of green smoke within a second or so, courtesy of Dumbledore, and one of the ones wearing Death Eater robes swiped a wand at an arriving Ministry wizard. "Conterro!"

A piece of tarmac lifted off the ground and turned into a shield, one which took the blow with a flash of sparks and purple flame, and Dumbledore followed up on that casual bit of silent Transfiguration by Stunning the man who he'd just blocked. Other jets of light flashed back and forth, mostly red Stunners from the Ministry wizards and stranger curses from the Death Eaters, though Harry heard someone casting the Exploding Charm as well.

The exchange of magic carried on for several more seconds, with one of the Death Eaters managing to hold off Dumbledore – admittedly without being able to cast any spells at Dumbledore, as spell parrying and blocking consumed all his attention – until Moody blew up the ground at his feet with a bolt of white lightning, sending the Death Eater sprawling.

Dumbledore flicked his wand one final time, Stunning the wizard he'd been duelling, then looked up and gave Harry a jaunty little wave.

"If you would be so kind as to come down and join us, Harry?" he requested.

Harry realized he'd been hovering without noticing, and slowly dropped to the ground.

"Excellent," Dumbledore said. "I would like to hear all you can tell me about what happened today, Harry, though I believe our first step will be to ensure that nobody in the fine town of Godalming is too distressed about what has just happened. The Obliviators will be arriving soon, and may be quite busy."

"There's an open field over there," Harry told him, waving behind him. "Does that help?"

"I believe it does," Dumbledore agreed, then raised his wand. "Expecto Patronum."

The white phoenix formed, banking around to face Dumbledore, and he cleared his throat.

"Madam Bones," he began. "I am sorry that I had to borrow so many of your Aurors, and I would dearly like your advice and assistance in dealing with the situation with which we find ourselves. I would also suggest you bring along as many people skilled in memory modification as you can find, for, alas, they will be needed."

He paused, but the phoenix didn't set off.

"Oh, yes," he added, after a few seconds. "And I believe that you may have picked up the use of a great deal of magic around Mr. Harry Potter, including some spells he cast himself. I can assure you that based on the current situation he was quite justified and there is no need to send his guardians an owl; they would not appreciate it."

The Patronus finally set off, vanishing in a flash of light, and Dumbledore steepled his fingers together.

"Why don't we start at the beginning, Harry?" he invited. "Or not precisely the beginning, but the beginning of what is important. This is quite a long way from your Aunt and Uncle's house, though I see that we are outside a library, so I assume you came here to borrow some books?"


While Dumbledore was the one asking Harry about what had happened, Harry asked some questions anyway to make sure he understood the last few minutes – trying to get some context about the bits he hadn't followed.

There was also a quite large-scale Obliviation going on, making sure that anyone who had seen the magical fighting going on wouldn't remember it and fixing the damaged cars and tarmac, and that was both interesting to watch and unfortunately distracting.

What Harry did find out though was that – as he'd guessed – the Dark Mark spell was the one which activated the Taboo, and that was what had broken the Anti-Disapparition Jinx and let the rioters at the World Cup escape. That had been changed, however, which meant that when one of them – Mr. Nott, in fact – had tried to break the jinx and run away from Harry he'd just alerted all the Ministry wizards to their exact location.

"But… why were you all ready to turn up?" Harry asked. "Is that normal for Aurors?"

"Not normally," Dumbledore replied. "But I had something of a warning. You see, someone I know has the Dark Mark on his arm much like Peter Pettigrew, and as Tom did whatever he was doing to come back it became darker – much, in fact, as it did during your first year at Hogwarts. I did not know if he was yet back or not, but I thought it was worth some of my friends being ready to step in if there was any sort of clue."

"Albus," Mr. Moody called, stumping over. "The Obliviators are done. Nothing major, just changed us to workers dealing with a burst water main."

"Excellent," Dumbledore pronounced. "But please tell Madam Bones much the same thing, I am simply here in my capacity as Harry's headmaster and as the Supreme Mugwump; I am sure you understand."

Moody snorted, then gave Harry an appraising look followed by a nod.

"Could have done better," he assessed. "But good work. Lacked vigilance though."


Most of the wizards left after that, heading back to the Ministry – in many cases with prisoners, since all the captured Death Eaters couldn't really argue they hadn't been proper Death Eaters considering the circumstances – and Dumbledore took Harry over to sit on a bench behind Godalming library.

"Now we come to the difficult bit, alas," the old wizard said. "Or one of the difficult bits, since there may be more than one. What do you think that might be, Harry?"

"Well… if Tom came back once, he could come back again," Harry answered. "So we need to find his last Horcrux."

"Quite correct," Dumbledore agreed. "Fortunately, I believe there may be a solution there, if you are willing to take part in some work for Gringotts in August; it may even help your future career, which would be no bad thing."

Harry nodded in understanding.

After a few seconds of silence, Dumbledore peered at Harry over the tops of his half-moon spectacles.

"You seem troubled, Harry," he said. "Of course, I am still not as well versed as I should be in the expressions on the face of a dragon, so perhaps I am incorrect in my assumption, but I feel I should check."

"What I don't know is why that Killing Curse bounced off me again, Professor," Harry admitted. "It was really lucky, because otherwise I wouldn't be here any more, but…"

He shrugged his wings, helplessly.

"I believe that that was the protection you received from the way your mother sacrificed herself for you," Dumbledore told him. "It kept you safe from Voldemort because there was an exchange, almost alchemical in nature, and when Tom tries to violate the terms of the exchange it does not go well for him. You might also notice that you were not attacked at home; I believe this is because he could not find you at home."

"That means it's going to wear off in a couple of weeks, doesn't it?" Harry said.

"The part which keeps you safe at home is," Dumbledore told him. "I do not, however, know about the other part, and I believe that you would agree with me quite firmly that it would be best not to test it."


After talking things over with Dumbledore a bit more, Harry went home. His books had survived the experience, which was fortunate – having to buy copies of such new books and then give them to the library would be sad, even if he'd still be able to make duplicates of them before they were due back – and he closed the window and put his backpack away before getting out his end of the mirror pair leading to Sirius.

"Sirius?" he asked.

Apparently Sirius had been sitting waiting, because the mirror changed from a reflection to a connection almost before Harry had finished the words.

"Harry!" his Dogfather said. "Dumbledore told me about what happened. Are you all right?"

"Yes," Harry said, then paused, then corrected himself. "I didn't get hit by any spells that actually did anything, but… I'm not sure I've really fully thought it through yet."

Sirius looked relieved, and he nodded slightly. "I know what you mean," he said. "Back in… well, back in the war, we all thought we were invincible at first, and… I know what you mean."

Harry nodded.

It was a weird kind of feeling, sort of being worried afterwards because you hadn't been worried at the time.

"If you need to talk about any of it, I'll be here to be spoken to," Sirius told him. "If you need to talk to someone who's less of a prat, I can get Remus as well."

Harry nodded again. "Thanks, I… might want to do that, once it sinks in a bit more."

Sirius hummed in reply, then grinned.

"Now that that's out of the way… I only heard some of the details, but I really want to know more! Did you really manage to scare off about a dozen Death Eaters?"

Harry frowned, then, thinking about it.

"Well… there was Tom Riddle, first, and he sort of ambushed me as I was coming out of a library," he explained. "He had his wand pointed at me so I couldn't just fly off, and there were a lot of his followers as well, arriving by Apparating in."

Harry tilted his head slightly. "I wonder how they all knew to turn up."

"I know that much," Sirius told him. "It's something we found out since the war – all the Death Eaters who have the Dark Mark tattoo can be called to arrive at one place by Moldy Voldy himself, and they can Apparate to wherever it was they felt the summoning from – it doesn't mean they get called there, just that they know where to go."

Harry nodded, thinking about that. "So… the ones who were there at first were probably the ones who had already arrived, and then he called them when he saw me coming out of the library?"

"That or he only just got there when you left the library," Sirius mused. "But I think it's funnier to imagine Moldy Voldy just sitting there in a bush for an hour with half a dozen Death Eaters, telling any Muggles that go past that it's performance art."

"In some places, that might work," Harry said.

He was thinking specifically of central London.


Sirius didn't seem comfortable with what Harry said about when he'd not thought it was safe to either fly away or stay, and when Harry reached the bit about the Killing Curse being cast at him again – only for it to promptly bounce off and blast Voldemort off his feet – he sounded like he didn't know how to react for several seconds before finally giving up and starting to laugh.

"Is Dog Master reading one of those silly books about the small French village again?" Kreacher asked, then noticed the mirror. "Hello, Polite Dragon."

"You're going to love this, Kreacher," Sirius said, his voice trembling slightly as he tried not to laugh again. "Voldemort came back, and went after Harry, and cast a Killing Curse – and it bounced off his forehead and killed Voldemort again!"

Kreacher looked at Sirius, then at Harry through the mirror, then nodded.

"Polite dragon needs to hurry up getting rid of nasty horcruxes," he said. "But Kreacher approves."

The House-Elf stuck around for a bit longer as Harry gave the details about what happened afterwards. Sirius found the bit with the Taboo spell funny all over again – especially because it was related to what had happened two years ago at the World Cup – and said Harry must have completely freaked all the Death Eaters out and left them panicking, but after the Ministry wizards arrived it was on to things which Dumbledore had been able to give in greater detail.

"There's going to be a lot more inmates in Azkaban, once those trials are over," Sirius summarized. "Though there probably are some Death Eaters still out there. I can think of a couple who we all suspected but who said they'd been Imperiused, like Lucius Malfoy."

He frowned. "Actually, I wonder why he wasn't there…"

"Maybe he was just busy," Harry suggested. "If he is a proper Death Eater, I mean. It's not like he could leave a visit to someone's house because of urgent problems, and then five minutes later it's in the news that Voldemort just summoned all his Death Eaters back."

"Good point, it'd be a lot easier if they were all that thick," Sirius admitted.


After all that, Harry was down to help with the cooking a bit later than he'd planned.

Aunt Petunia regarded the delay with a bit of a sniff, and Harry apologized but said that he'd lost track of time. It seemed the politest way to explain things without actually getting her involved in the magic that she never liked very much, and Harry hurried through the prep work a bit to get back on schedule before producing a shepherd's pie with a light sprinkling of cheese on the top – just enough to make it go brown in the oven.

The cooking was actually quite relaxing. It let Harry sort of get his thoughts in order a bit, after the day he'd had, and the result was worth it as well.


A copy of the Daily Prophet arrived next morning.

The owl who delivered it didn't wait around for payment, like Harry had seen before, but that had probably been handled by whoever arranged for him to get a copy. If Harry had to guess, that would be either Sirius or Neville, though it could have been Dumbledore.

The headline, which announced in large letters MAN CLAIMING TO BE DARK LORD DEFEATED, seemed to be slightly unclear to Harry (and barely fit on the front page above the fold), and there was a photograph as well. It was one of the most boring photos Harry had ever seen in a magical source, because it was a photograph of Tom and all the magical properties of a Wizarding photograph couldn't overcome the simple fact that Tom wasn't moving.

According to the article, the previous day a man claiming to be He Who Must Not Be Named had turned up, managed to convince a surprising number of He Who Must Not Be Named's followers that he was You Know Who, and led them to attack Harry in a 'Muggle village'.

Harry supposed that the difference between village and town was a bit vague.

There was a little sidebar about Harry in case anyone hadn't heard of him – as hard as Harry thought that would have to be – who was described as Harry Potter, Gryffindor, Sixteen, accompanied by one of the other photos in the article.

It looked to Harry like it was one of the ones Colin Creevey had taken in the past, with Harry's ears pinging up as Colin got his attention and his glasses jumping into the air before he managed to catch them. He even thought he recognized when it had been taken, some time last April when Colin had been trying not to go mad from exam stress.

"Good for Colin," Harry murmured, deciding that he didn't mind the photo being used because it was quite a good photo and Colin had probably been paid for it.

The rest of the article said that there'd been a quick Ministry response to the situation, that there'd been an 'altercation' which the self-proclaimed returned You Know Who had not survived, and then it went into the details of the scandal resulting from all the people who'd claimed Imperius but turned out to be incorrect.

Minister Fudge was reported as calling for justice to be done, and as criticizing the imperfect investigatory standards of the Bagnold administration for not having successfully distinguished between those controlled by the Imperius Curse and those who were genuinely espousing Death Eater beliefs. He made sure to point out that Mr. Crouch Senior himself had a Death Eater for a son, and said that while he was sure Mr. Crouch would not have consciously soft-pedalled the investigation it was possible that he had not been as dilligent as he could have been.

Harry inspected that reported statement carefully, tilting his head to the side a little, then nodded to himself.

If you thought about it the right way, it was quite clever. It was making the point that it was the people who'd been in charge before Mr. Fudge who were responsible for the problem, which sort of pointed out that Mr. Fudge himself hadn't actually made any mistakes (without actually boasting about it).

Almost all of the rest of the paper was talking about the events themselves, giving background on You Know Who or the past accusations about the now-captured Death Eaters, or in three or four cases talking about rumours on who was going to be the next Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts.

There was also one editorial where the author – Elphias Doge – said that the fact the supposed Dark Lord had died in a confrontation with Harry Potter was good evidence that it was He Who Must Not Be Named, which gave Harry a startled giggle.


Once he'd finished reading the paper, and had breakfast, Harry looked at his pile of remaining homework (it wasn't a very big pile), then decided that maybe he'd do some in the afternoon. He'd fought Voldemort for his latest set of library books, and quite frankly he felt like he deserved to read them.

The Acorna one he'd already started the previous evening, and it was one of those ones where there was a first-contact going on – albeit the actual first-contact person was Acorna, and she was only a baby when she arrived in human space so it wasn't quite at the point of first contact yet. That made it a bit different from a lot of Anne McCaffrey books, or at least it meant it was probably a separate universe like the Talents stuff was (where it had been the Mrdini who humans first talked to, or possibly the Hivers) instead of fitting in with all her other science fiction books if you squinted.

Even Pern fitted in there if you squinted.

But that wasn't the one Harry felt like for now, and he quickly scanned the blurbs of the others while he tried to decide what to go for.

The Amber book seemed like it was going to be a long and confusing read, so Harry decided to leave it for now. The Polgara one – that was one of those ones that was going to be fascinating, like an inside look at history (except the history of the Belgariad world, which really needed some sort of name), but Harry ended up trying to choose between The Long Patrol and Thunder Oak.

Just as he was about to pick – probably Thunder Oak, because it seemed funnier – there was a faint sound outside his tent.

Harry put the books down and looked through the tent door, and saw Nutkin carefully scrambling up over the lip of the open attic window before jumping down to the floor. A blur of movement, and he was Ron dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and just getting up from a crouch.

And promptly banging his head.

"Ow," he said, ruefully. "This place looked a lot bigger from down there."

"It's nice to see you, Ron," Harry said, withdrawing through the tent door so that Ron had space to get through. "I'm kind of surprised, though."

"Yeah, I only thought of it fifteen minutes ago," Ron admitted. "Percy was reading the paper and I thought it'd be great if I could go and check out how you were, then I remembered – oh, yeah, I can now."

He shook his head. "It took a while to actually find you, though. I knew you lived somewhere called Little Whinging, and I thought it was something to do with a hedge, but Muggle towns are big aren't they?"

Harry unfolded a wing and shrugged with it a bit. "Well, kind of? I see them from overhead a lot and they look smaller that way."

"I wasn't far off climbing a tree and trying to find out that way," Ron said, snorting. "I asked someone in the street, though, and they told me where to go. Then I just went into a nearby alleyway and went Nutkin and, well, here I am."

He put his hands on the table. "So what actually happened? Was it really, well, You Know Who I mean?"

After a momentary pause while Harry reparsed Ron's last sentence with less capital letters, he nodded. "Yes, I think so."

"And you beat him?" Ron pressed. "Again? How?"

"He cast the Killing Curse at me," Harry said. "It worked about as well as last time."


Even though he'd talked to Dumbledore about it, and then to Sirius, talking to Ron about the same thing felt different. It might have been that Ron was right there, in person, or it might have been just that (unlike Dumbledore and Sirius) Harry didn't feel like he was talking to an experienced person who'd fought Dark Wizards before.

Then when Dean showed up an hour or two later – having got the news a much more roundabout way, Apparating into Diagon Alley so he could buy some supplies in London and spotting a Daily Prophet – Harry explained the whole thing over again, this time with Ron volunteering details he'd mentioned the first time or asking questions when hearing it a second time revealed something.

Somehow, that turned into doing some of their Defence homework.


Occasional bits of news update arrived in editions of the Daily Prophet, usually involving some significant event or other during the trials going on.

Harry had wondered if he'd be needed as a witness, but it seemed as though it wasn't necessary – quite apart from anything else, all the people who'd been arrested had been arrested right there with a recently dead Voldemort.

There was one peculiar bit with how Miss Carrow was missing a finger, and whether that was some kind of Death Eater badge of honour given that Pettigrew had also been missing a finger, but after spending two or three days on it the Prophet reporters seemed to more or less assume it was nothing important.

The other thing that caught Harry's eye was that Rita Skeeter had written a scathing column about how unusual someone would have to be to become a Death Eater… as if she was recommending it.

Deciding that it was quite likely she'd end up with a lot of confused letters, Harry put down that particular Daily Prophet and moved on to the very last bit of his homework for the summer.


The August Quibbler arrived early, coming out in late July instead of on the first of August, and while Harry had sort of guessed it was going to be a good one he was still impressed with the result.

The front cover had a quite good depiction of Harry himself on the front, wearing a tall tower of hats reading things like 'Common sense', 'Historical inevitability' and 'Basic pattern recognition', with the hat tower wobbling back and forth before toppling towards a resigned-looking Voldemort and squashing him flat.

The headline simply read Dragon Solves Riddle, which was funny enough, and a box advertised an extra-size runic puzzle plus the TRUTH about You Can Probably Guess Who (on pages five to one hundred and fourteen). Pages two and three – counting the outside cover as one – were the contents page, and page four included an analysis of Dolores Umbridge.

Harry hadn't thought about her much since his fifth year, and was slightly surprised to hear that she'd been seconded to the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, in the auditing section of the Beast Division. Though since apparently – on advice from Newt Scamander – all the functions relating to 'creatures of disputed sapience' had been shifted out of the Beast division proper into the Feral sub-department attached to the Being division, that mostly just meant she was keeping track of animals like hippogriffs and bowtruckles and so on.

Thinking about it, Harry wondered if maybe it was just a job where she didn't have to interact with people who didn't like her. Though the Quibbler claimed that it was because she was the only one who knew that Kelpies were not only intelligent but wanted to overthrow the Muggle government, and that she was going to try and make sure that either happened or didn't happen depending on what would be worse.

After that, the bits about Voldemort – Tom Riddle – were a bit less focused, probably because there were so many theories and possibilities, and Harry started taking a few notes just to make sure he was keeping track of all the different things the Quibbler suggested.

There was one bit which said that the new Voldemort wasn't actually Tom Marvolo Riddle, but that he was instead a Hungarian cartographer during the period of the second world war and had been lying low for decades before emerging and impersonating the (still-dead) English Dark Lord – the proof being that he'd not actually been very good at magic. Then a few pages later there was something completely different, where it said that the groundsman of the old Riddle House in Little Hangleton had recently died under suspicious circumstances and that this had to be connected.

To what, it wasn't clear, and even the Lovegoods (or whoever else contributed) didn't seem clear either. The unfortunately deceased Mr. Bryce was claimed to have died for knowing too much; for knowing too little; for knowing exactly the wrong thing. He was claimed to have been a Muggle, a Squib, and a wizard who had been educated at Castelobruxo in central Brazil.

Not content with that, the Quibbler then moved into asking why the attack on Harry had happened then and like that. One article suggested that it was just the first time Harry had gone outside, which was pretty close to correct if you defined "outside" loosely enough, and another said that it was because Mr. Fudge was facing re-election in only three years and so it had all been intended to help his re-election campaign.

Harry wasn't sure if he believed any of it, though the idea that Voldemort was secretly a dragon and trying to get rid of Harry to reduce competition seemed even less believable than usual. And the idea that Voldemort wanted to kill everyone Muggle-born so nobody in the Wizarding World could know about dentists and the Rotfang conspiracy was… classically Quibbler.

The puzzle pages, on the other paw, were excellent as usual.


On the morning of Harry's birthday, a little after eight and with the sun already having been up for several hours, Dudley knocked on the attic hatch and asked Harry to come down to the dining room before breakfast.

Slightly confused, Harry did so, and when he got there he found that there was a large chocolate cake waiting on the table – along with his aunt (with an unreadable expression), his uncle (looking quietly disapproving) and his cousin (who seemed more nervous than anything).

"Look, um…" Dudley began, as Harry took in the room. "I had this idea, right, and…"

He shrugged a bit. "I thought it'd be nice to do it properly once. So... happy birthday."

Harry smiled, touched.

"It's because you're leaving, as well," Aunt Petunia said. "You are leaving, I trust?"

"That's right," Harry confirmed. "Sirius said he's expecting me today, so I'll probably go over there in time for lunch."

Dudley was already cutting slices of cake, and handed Harry the first one along with a fork.

"Thanks, Dudley," Harry added. "And thank you, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia."

He thought about the events of the last couple of weeks, in particular, but also all his time at Privet Drive. "I'm grateful for offering me a place in your home for the last sixteen years. Your kindness has saved my life."

That seemed to make Aunt Petunia a bit uncomfortable, and even Uncle Vernon didn't do more than grumble a bit before accepting a slice of cake of his own from Dudley.

It was a very nice cake.

Dudley had three or four slices, and then it went in the fridge so he'd probably end up having the rest over the next few days, but it was hard to be mad about that. His cousin was still Dudley, after all.

Then, once that was all said and done, and once Harry had packed everything up in his tent and put that in his bag, he left through the front door and said goodbye to the first home he'd ever known.

Circling it twice as he gained height, Harry smiled a melancholy sort of smile before heading north and east – to Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

It looked like it would rain, but if he was quick he'd make it before the clouds arrived.


AN:

Yep.

"Blood of the enemy" doesn't have to mean Harry's blood, it can mean, say, someone who thrice defied Voldemort. But at the same time, this Voldemort never ran into the blood-protection so didn't know about it.