Travelling from one country to another was somehow – at the same time – both more difficult than Harry had expected it to be for wizards, and considerably easier than he'd expected it to be in every single other way.

It meant that he and Sirius had to go to the Ministry of Magic that morning to fill out a form – one which only involved Sirius because he was coming along as well, not because Harry needed an adult to help him because Harry was an adult now – which the Department of International Magical Co-Operation asked for to send to the French DIMC (or whatever the French abbreviation was). Then once the form was sorted out they had to sort out how they were getting to France, and Sirius said he'd be Apparating.

That turned out to mean filling out another quick form for an International Apparition, and Harry was considering just flying by himself until he was told that he'd have to fill out four forms for that one – a form for a magical flight over international borders, one for importing a restricted species (since dragons qualified, and Harry looked enough like a dragon to count), and then two forms to confirm that Harry was indeed invisible to Muggles in France before they'd let him fly over the coastline.

"Sorry," the witch told him. "You know what it's like dealing with the French."

Harry didn't know, because he'd never left the country before, and said so. The witch seemed to be sort of amused by that, admitting he'd said that already, and waved her hand. "Well… anyway, it might be easier to Apparate. Or take a Portkey?"

"Portkeys don't work on me," Harry told her. "But it sounds like Apparating is a good idea. Do I need any special coordinates?"

"Well, you don't have a permit to fly over France, so you'll need to turn up pretty much at wherever it is you're going," the witch said. "Do you have the address?"

Harry had to rummage around a bit for his copy of the invitation, and read it out. "It says it's Le Bec et la Baie du Mont, near Le Haut Chemin?"

"That second bit's the name of a road," she informed him. "Or it should be. But that sounds like it's a good enough address, so you should be able to Apparate there easily enough just relying on that. You just need to sort out the permission, and once that's done you should be able to enjoy a nice journey."

"Hasn't someone else come through here asking for the same place?" Harry asked.

"I think a few came through yesterday, but Weasley handled them," she said. "He's off work starting today, going the same place you are."

Harry nodded his understanding, then filled out the form and joined Sirius.

"I think it might be a good idea to take the Invisibility Cloak," he said, thinking about it as they went up in the lift towards the lobby.

"Does it actually still fit?" Sirius said, a little surprised.

"It did last time I checked, but I'll see if it still does," Harry replied.

Sirius hummed. "Actually, if you're thinking of flying while wearing it… I don't think we ever tested if you could expand it and have it still work. A normal cloak wouldn't, but we never did realize back at school that that was no ordinary cloak."

Their permission to Apparate to France didn't have to be used straight away – the start time of the wedding was one in the afternoon, and Wizards had never believed in arriving hours early – and Harry and Sirius went home to Grimmauld Place to get hold of the Cloak and see.

It turned out that it did fit, though it sort of had to strain a bit around the wings, and when Harry flapped his wings and took off – as far as was possible in the living room, anyway – it slipped and didn't stay on.

"Let's give this a go, then," Sirius added. "Engorgio."

It grew much more slowly than it should have done with an Enlargement Charm, but it did grow, and when it was done Harry found that there was enough material to wrap around himself much more securely.

Then the Enlargement Charm promptly broke again, and the cloak shrank back to its original size.

"...yeah, that was weird," Sirius decided. "But if you need to fly while wearing the cloak you'd just have to do it on a broomstick."

Harry thought it was worth packing his Nimbus Two Thousand And One as well as the Cloak, both of which went in the little bag Hermione had got him (along with all the other things he thought he might need, like a notebook, a French phrasebook and the passport he'd got during the Ministry visit) and then it was time for a quick lunch before the two of them went outside.

"Ready?" Sirius asked. "You don't normally Apparate onto the ground, do you?"

"I've done it, it was on the exam," Harry replied. "And I know to appear on the ground, so I should be fine."

"Good enough for me," Sirius said. "Just let me go first?"

Harry was happy enough to oblige.

There wasn't anything especially unusual about Apparating across a national border.

Harry hadn't been sure if there would be, though he supposed it made sense there wouldn't be. Or that if there was something unusual it would only apply if you didn't have permission, and since he'd gone through the process of getting permission there wasn't anything to worry about.

He shook his head slightly, dismissing the train of thought, and Ron called out. "Hey, Harry! Over here!"

There was a young girl sitting at a nearby table, who was vaguely familiar to Harry – it took him a moment, but he realized that that was Fleur's younger sister who he'd last seen at the bottom of the Black Lake.

"I thought he had to be one of yours," she said, with an accent that was about eighty percent French and twenty percent the same sort of West Country that the Weasleys spoke. "I think not that there are any dragon relatives on our side of the family. Fleur keeps telling me to watch out in Beauxbatons though."

"What you want to do there is look up," Harry told her.

"That's what she keeps saying," Gabrielle sighed. "I do not think I understand."

"It's the Apparition point," Ron explained. "If you Apparate here with the place name, you pretty much just turn up there, so Gabrielle and I are keeping a lookout to see who turns up and which side of the family they're from."

Harry had run into the idea of Apparition Points before, but somehow had managed to avoid the explanation. Maybe it was just that everyone who'd grown up with Apparition just knew it and nobody really needed to know it for it to work.

Which described a lot of things, really.

Le Bec Et La Baie Du Mont was a bit of a mouthful, but the actual place turned out to be a large, grassy field with a forested area at the northern end and a hedge to the south. The forest went right up to the edge of a steep cliff, though steps led down the cliffside and to a small beach marked out by flags.

"It's invisible to Muggles," Ginny said – she was the only Weasley who hadn't passed her Apparition test yet, so she'd arrived with their parents. "The flagged bit of the beach is, anyway, and I think the field and forest up at the top is as well."

Harry supposed that if they were Muggles, or even normal witches or wizards, they might be feeling a bit of vertigo right now – Ginny was sitting with her legs dangling over the edge of the cliff, and Harry's centre of gravity was pretty close to the edge as well. But since Harry had wings, and Ginny could have them as well if she wanted, it just wasn't really an issue.

"Are any of the guests Muggles?" Harry asked, then. "I know Ron only invited Hermione, Neville, Dean and I, but I didn't see the full guest list."

"There's a couple of cousins, I think," Ginny replied, thinking. "Maybe one or two of the relatives on the French side? But it's mostly wizards."

She looked down at the surf breaking gently on the beach. "Actually, I should ask if we can go swimming… I'm not sure how far out into the sea the Muggle-Repelling Charms go, but I've got a swimsuit."

"I'm more interested in seeing how a wedding looks," Harry admitted. "I feel like I can go swimming any time, but I've never seen a magical wedding before."

He paused. "Or, come to think of it, attended a non magical wedding. I've seen them on the telly though. And read books."

"What are you expecting, then?" Ginny asked, sounding amused.

"Well, based on the books I've read…" Harry trailed off. "You know that thing where they ask anyone who objects to object, or shut up about it? That usually seems to happen… that or some other dramatic event happens at the wedding."

Ginny shook her head. "I don't think that's a normal wedding, otherwise everyone would elope."

"I don't think it's normal either," Harry assured her. "I just assume they don't write about the boring ones."

He laughed. "Can you imagine what it'd be like if a book with hundreds of characters over three decades went into any detail on all the weddings that must happen in it? The book would be eight feet high and mostly wedding."

"You laugh, but I know girls who'd like that," Ginny told him. "Including at least one roommate at Hogwarts…"

There were lots of people at the wedding who Harry hadn't met before, and so he spent quite a bit of his time saying hello and talking to them about what it was like at Hogwarts and what it was like being a dragon – and about how Hogwarts handled non human students. That particular subject led to a teacher from Beauxbatons who knew Fleur well buttonholing Harry and having something that was halfway between a conversation and an interrogation with him for at least fifteen minutes, asking what sort of problems there'd been with having a vampire in the school or whether he thought that there were any problems still to solve for four-legged beings.

Harry had been worried that he'd have trouble understanding what people were saying, since he was a Parselmouth (or Dragon-mouth) but not a Francomouth – but, fortunately, everyone seemed to know English quite well enough.

Though it did leave Harry feeling vaguely guilty about that, and wondering if he should have thought to pick up a Translation Toffee.

"There is one thing I am wondering," the teacher said – he'd introduced himself as Monsieur Papineau. "While of course you are near the end of your time at Hogwarts, do you think there will be any issues in the future?"

"Well…" Harry began, thinking about it, and found that an example sprang to mind almost immediately. "We're not sure if it's actually going to happen yet, but a lot of the dragons which have been raised around Hogwarts over the last six years have turned out very intelligent. In another five or six years the oldest of them – that's Nora – might end up attending Hogwarts as well, and I think if that happens then there's going to need to be a lot of Expansion Charms just about everywhere in the entire castle."

Monsieur Papineau nodded. "Ah, I see, of course. That would be quite a surprise!"

He frowned. "But, ah, surely you do not mean that there are dragons of the normal size? I was thinking from what you said that they would be of the same sort of size as yourself."

"No, Nora's a perfectly normal Norwegian Ridgeback," Harry clarified. "Except that she speaks a recognizable language that I've been teaching Rubeus Hagrid, the Headmaster, and Bill's brother Charlie – and a few others, when they get the time – and she's learning to read and write as well."

"Ah," the French teacher said. "I suppose it is a pity then that she is learning to read and write English."

He spread his hands, and Harry had to laugh.

Of course, the focus of the whole day was Bill and Fleur, who were the ones actually getting married, but Harry found that quite a lot of people were coming over to talk to Ron one way or another. More than were coming over to have a word with Harry himself, actually, and by turning an ear in that direction Harry discovered that it was more or less all to do with the Ratatoskr and Ron's achievements with that.

Amazing as it seemed, to Harry at least, it seemed that it was genuinely true that no wizard had ever actually been to space before in any significant way. It was partly to do with how broomsticks had a maximum speed (and facing upwards it wasn't all that high), so it was easy to get bored on the way up and decide not to, and partly to do with how there wasn't a great deal to do up there even if you spent the hour or two on a broomstick that it would take – even if the broomstick didn't conk out trying to go so high.

The practical upshot of all that was that Ron found himself surrounded by people interested to hear what it had been like, and shake his hand, and tell him how impressed they were and asking what he was going to do next. Ron first looked surprised, then gratified, then overwhelmed, and Harry intervened at about the point where Ron's expression was taking on a familiar one Harry himself remembered from way back in First-Year – the point when you realized that, really, everyone was asking the same questions and so you were managing to be overwhelmed by the attention and bored by the lack of variety at the same time.

The bit where the oaths were actually said – which was the actual wedding, after all –happened with a great deal of ceremony, and a lot of clapping and cheering, and Harry did his best to be excited or happy or whichever one it was you were supposed to be at someone else's wedding.

It was about Bill and Fleur, though, really, so all he really had to do was not ruin the day, and Harry liked Bill. He liked both of them, for that matter, though he hadn't talked to Fleur all that much… and they both seemed happy, so that was that.

Then there was the reception, which mostly meant eating a lot of food and dancing to a band (Variety Magical, in this case) and doing all the things which happened in an open-air celebration… one with beach access, as well, though everyone was frequently reminded not to do magic on the beach in case they'd strayed outside the bit which Muggles couldn't see.

Somehow, in a way that Harry couldn't quite fully follow, he found himself sitting with Neville and Hermione on the edge of the cliff – looking out to the east along the beaches, towards where many of the Normandy landings had happened in nineteen forty-four.

"Did they do much about D-Day at your school?" Hermione asked. "It was in a book I read, but I don't think they did much about it."

"I can't think of anything except what was in books," Harry replied, frowning. "Someone came to visit who'd been at Dunkirk, but that's a long way to the east I think."

"I think so too," Hermione agreed.

Neville sighed. "It's easier for me to forget about it," he admitted, shading his eyes. "We learn about Grindelwald, but not much about what Muggles were doing at the same time. But…"

He waved his hand. "That's all from that, right?"

It wasn't necessary for Neville to specify what he meant. All three of the Gryffindors could see the waves breaking over structures in the surf some miles away.

"The book I read said that they towed a whole harbour over from Britain," Hermione said. "It was called the Mulberry, or that was the code name and it sort of stuck. Actually there were two, but the other one got destroyed in a storm."

Neville snorted. "That's one of those things that sounds like magic, right there," he chuckled. "We didn't have a harbour, so we just floated one over the English Channel."

He sobered. "It's a pity how much of this stuff people never hear about."

"I think it's… sort of a different problem," Harry replied, standing up on his hind legs and then flopping backwards with his wings open. "It's… there's just so much history. Everywhere has it, and there's thousands of years of it everywhere. It's impossible to cover everything, so you just… have to try and pick some bits, and try and be accurate about them."

He stretched, feeling the sun on his wings. "I wonder if wizards would consider an outdoor wedding in the middle of winter, so long as it wasn't actually going to be a blizzard?" he asked. "Warming Charms, after all."

"Maybe," Hermione laughed.

"Enjoying yourselves?" Dean asked, coming over to join them. "Ron's got into talking Runes with someone from Beauxbatons, but it's all Linear B to me."

Hermione looked interested, half getting up, then her expression turned sheepish over her original reaction.

All in all, Harry could rate the wedding as an interesting experience, and he'd definitely consider going to another one.

Though, that said, it was a little hard to work out what wedding he might be going to next. Nobody he knew had caught the bouquet – it had been one of Fleur's friends – and he wasn't entirely clear how that was supposed to work anyway. Was it like Divination, where it gave a prediction (in this case about who would be the next person there to get married), or was it that anyone who wanted to catch it probably had their own ideas about wanting to get married and it gave them a bit of a prod to speed it up?

Was it just that it was a better justification than not wanting to dispose of the bouquet yourself?

Harry chuckled over that as they arrived back at Grimmauld Place, then turned to Sirius as a thought struck him.

"Sirius?" he asked. "I know I spend most of the year at Hogwarts, so I might not have noticed, but are you romantically interested in anyone?"

Sirius blinked, then smirked. "I'm pretty sure you're not my type, Harry."

Harry groaned.

"I didn't mean it like that…" he protested. "I meant… well, I meant what I asked. I don't know what you were like for that just after leaving Hogwarts, not really, because I've never asked before and I don't think you've mentioned it. But I think I'd have noticed you bringing a girlfriend home… or a boyfriend… and I don't think that's happened."

He tilted his head, suddenly spotting an opportunity to get his own back. "Unless it's Remus?"

"...no, not Remus," Sirius replied. "My interests are entirely of the female persuasion. But… I don't know."

He sat down in one of the armchairs. "I wasn't ready to settle down before… well, before Azkaban… and since then – it just hasn't seemed right, somehow."

"If you don't want to, then you don't want to," Harry said, summarizing how it seemed to him. "But if you ever feel you do want to, you shouldn't base your decision on how I feel about it."

Sirius laughed. "Careful saying things like that, Harry. You wouldn't want me to get into a romantic relationship with Dolores Umbridge, would you?"

Harry couldn't control a violent all-over flinch, one which nearly knocked over a small table nearby, but Sirius looked a bit ill himself.

"I should not have brought that up," he muttered to himself. "I've seen pictures of her, and she might be kind of good looking if she approached it the right way, but her essential… her… is just…"

"Let's change the subject before bed," Harry pleaded. "I don't want to dream about that…"

Harry could have gone back to school straight away, after the wedding, or at least gone back the next morning.

The idea of spending his holiday (or most of it) with Sirius was sort of interesting, though, and so he decided more-or-less at the last minute that he'd stay at least until the end of Easter. He could still do a lot of his homework at Grimmauld Place (and there was a lot of homework, because the NEWTs were on the way and getting closer every day) and there was something sort of liberating about being able to get up late, go to bed late, or just sit in companionable quiet in the living room with Sirius while he tried to make sure he'd got a silent Charm just right and Sirius read through a book Harry had pointed him towards.

It meant going shopping in London was easy enough, as well, and Harry had somewhat to his surprise discovered that he'd managed to entirely miss the sequel to Northern Lights. That second book – The Subtle Knife – involved someone from the real world, or something quite similar to it, and a knife that could cut through the boundaries between worlds, and it sort of made a lot of sense out of some of the things that turned up in the first book which had been a bit odd originally.

Harry was particularly surprised to find out about Stanislaus Grumman.

Apart from that, it was a chance to catch up on books which had been somehow ignored over the last few months (or, indeed, years), simply because they hadn't turned up in the libraries Harry frequented. He found The Masterharper of Pern to be a fascinating read, because it looked at a lot of the recent history of Pern, and a Tom Holt book in which one of the main characters was a dragon was quite pleasant simply because it didn't take Saint George's side of the whole thing.

Plus, it was sort of funny when they mused about having a ringer for the rematch between Saint George and The Dragon… and that the only feasible ringer would be someone hiding in the stands armed with a rocket launcher.

Then Harry had one of those wonderful-yet-annoying vertigo feelings when he found that the book he'd been reading in some confusion (The Court of a Thousand Suns) was actually book three out of a series of eight.

There wasn't much you could really do about that except go to book one and see if it made more sense when you got back to book three.

The day after Easter Monday found Harry lying on his giant-pet-bed of a bed, turning the pages of one of the books from the Black library.

That immediately deserved clarification. It wasn't the Black Library publishing company who did a magazine called Inferno! (which was full of short stories in the Warhammer settings) but the Black library meaning the library owned by Sirius Black and inherited from his parents.

Some of the books in there were pretty horrible – Harry had made sure to double-check with Sirius every time they went in there, and on one occasion a book had done its best to bite off Sirius' fingers – but this one was all right. It was mostly about old ritual magic, and the way that runes were involved with some of what happened.

His tail flicked absently as he turned the page, stifling a yawn, then Harry picked up a bookmark and put it into the pages.

Getting up, he pushed both Dolphins of Pern and The Dam Busters, then went into his bathroom to have a nice shower before bed.

It might not be as good as the bath in the Prefects' Bathroom, but it was still kind of fun to have a hidden bathroom like that.

He tarried long enough to pick up a different book, this one called Murderous Maths, and charmed it Impervious before taking it into the shower.

Sometimes, as a wizard, you had to do things just because you could. And reading in the shower was one of those things, in Harry's opinion.

The next morning, in Dogwarts, Harry discovered something.

"You actually built it?" he asked.

"Well, Fred and George said that they had to do it," Sirius replied. "Or all the experiments they did on Percy would have been pointless except for letting them get on Percy's nerves."

Harry chuckled, then looked again at the inside of what he'd originally vaguely assumed had been a utility room until Sirius had opened it for him.

Now that he thought of it, there was an extra window on Dogwarts which didn't fit with any of the rooms he'd known about before, and it was about the same shape as the window on the other end of this room.

"Are you going to give it a go?" Sirius asked. "I'd do it but I'm a dog, so I'd go splat. Your friend Upstart would be fine, though, and so would Perry. And… hmm."

"Padfoot?" Harry asked, seeing Sirius' mind wandering.

"Oh, I was just thinking about how cats land on their feet," Sirius explained. "I wondered how Lapcat would do."

"I don't think you'd get Neville into this to begin with," Harry said, trying to measure the dimensions by eye. "So I suppose I'd sit on that tray there?"

"That's right," Sirius agreed. "You sit on there, or, not really sit but lie down in that way quadrupeds do, you know the one."

Harry did know the one, and nodded his understanding.

"And then, you trigger the catch here," Sirius went on. "The window's hinged so it folds out of the way. Someone like Dean or Ginny would have to use their wand or get someone else to help, I think, but you've got a prehensile tail so you'll be fine."

Feeling a little apprehensive, but not enough to overcome his curiosity, Harry carefully got onto the tray just as Sirius directed.

Looking back, he moved his tail carefully – it was a little hard to get the aim just right, but the years he'd been using his tail to point his wand helped – and rested it on the catch.

Then he looked towards the window, swallowed slightly, and pushed.

It was sort of interesting, being fired out of a house at what must have been more than a hundred miles an hour.

Harry did feel a bit guilty that he startled someone into dropping their shopping bag, though.

Harry entered the new term – the last one which was a proper term, really – refreshed and ready for the last two-month sprint to the NEWT exams.

As it turned out, however, that feeling lasted about two days. Harry felt all right as far as Alchemy, but during Tuesday evening he started to feel a bit off… it was hard to put his claw on it, and he did his best during his teaching session with Empress, but what followed was an almost sleepless night and Harry woke up on Wednesday in a definite bad mood.

"You all right, mate?" Ron asked, in the middle of Charms – they were trying to do a silent Banishing charm, aiming to send small objects like pencils or rulers going around corners as part of the banishment, but Harry's kept going straight and hitting things. "You seem a bit out of sorts today."

Harry shrugged, and took a deep breath. "I'm fine, I think," he replied. "Just tired."

"Sure?" Ron checked. "It's just… you were growling a bit."

That was something Harry hadn't realized, and he tried taking another deep breath before slowly letting it out. That helped, a little, but ten minutes with the infuriating Banishing Charm and his calm was starting to leak away again.

As, indeed, was smoke – little coils of it oozing out and up towards the ceiling, something which embarrassed Harry deeply when he noticed.

He just wasn't sure why he was so annoyed at the moment.

Transfiguration went no better, though fortunately it was a theory lesson – they were focusing on the theoretical derivation and empirical proofs of the Laws of Transfiguration – because Harry didn't think he'd have done very well doing an actual Transfiguration. Then afterwards, because it was still before dinner (Neville was in Herbology, in fact), Harry and Hermione and Ron were gathered around a table in the Common Room, with Dean leaning back on the next chair over and messing around with Harry's Game Boy.

Harry thought it was a game about the 1998 World Cup, or at least the Muggle one. There was a Wizarding one as well but England wasn't doing any good at it.

"It's been kind of tricky putting those runes on," Ron said. "You know, the new ones."

"I know," Harry agreed. "There's a lot of them."

"Yeah, but finding where to put them was harder," Ron explained. "They need to be a circle, but I want them to be evenly spaced, and there's not a lot of the Ratatoskr that's got the space for them without it running into a thruster nozzle or something… and I don't know if I should put a ring around the inside or the outside or both."

"It should be fine with just one ring," Harry told him. "So long as it's a complete ring."

Hermione was paging through an advanced rune book – another of the ones from the Black library. "Well, according to this you don't necessarily need a complete ring, you just need the components of it to be symmetrical."

Harry's tail flicked slightly, as Dean did something or other on the Game Boy which made it make a beeping noise.

"Hey, that's neat," he said. "You know they actually got the Offside Rule right for once?"

"Mate, I did a qualification on it and I'm not sure what the Offside Rule is," Ron replied. "At least it's not cricket, that's mind-boggling that is."

Harry chuckled slightly, then looked back down at the mix of parchment scraps and lined paper from Hermione that he'd taken his notes on.

"There's something else here I'm not seeing," he frowned. "I think it's…"

Dean's game made another beep, and Harry scowled.

"Can you stop making that noise?" he snapped, looking up at Dean.

Dean looked shocked, and after a moment Harry realized he was almost snarling.

"You seriously don't seem all right, Harry," Ron told him. "Something's got to be up."

"I'm fine," Harry insisted, scratching his side. "I'm just…"

Then he went silent, partly because he recognized this sort of situation – when someone insisted they were fine in a book when their friends didn't, it was usually because they really weren't fine, and the realization was enough to make Harry think again about how he really felt – and partly because the itch had jogged his memory.

"I think I might need to go talk to Madam Pomfrey," he decided. "Sorry, Dean. I should have realized what's going on."

"Mate, if you need to go talk to Madam Pomfrey, it's not your fault," Dean said, then chuckled. "Besides… I have three younger sisters. If I blamed people when they were sometimes irritable I'd have had a lot more feuds than I do."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" Hermione asked.

"...sorry, are you saying I should blame girls when it's their time of the month?" Dean replied.

"Give me a minute to think of an answer," Hermione requested.

When Harry spoke to Madam Pomfrey, he did his best to explain all the details about his moulting, and how it happened every couple of years but not on any really strict timetable.

Really, now Harry actually came to do it, it might have been the first time he'd ever talked to someone about it. Back at primary school they'd been talked to about some medical things but never moulting, so he'd just assumed that it was something that young dragons figured out for themselves, and Harry had figured it out for himself and felt he'd largely done okay (with a bit of trial and error, at least).

Then in secondary school, all of them so far had been during school holidays, so apart from letting people know he'd be in his room for a couple of days he'd just quietly gotten on with it.

Madam Pomfrey certainly seemed to know what was going on, though, and in fact she handled it with such efficiency that Harry felt sort of embarrassed for not asking before. She taught him a spell which neutralized itching and which didn't have to be cast on the site of the itching, so Harry could cast it on himself on one of the few bits which magic worked on just fine without worrying about whether the spell could get through his hide (as some things didn't) and asked him what his lessons were for the next few days before telling him that she'd make sure the teachers knew why he hadn't turned up if he didn't turn up.

Then she recommended pumice, and told him to have a long hot soak in a bath after dinner and to go to bed early.

Thursday, for Harry, was extremely surreal.

He wasn't quite sure, because there might have been some other times back in a previous year or something, but it was pretty much the first time he'd ever actually not gone to a lesson at Hogwarts when there was a lesson happening at Hogwarts that he was supposed to attend.

Well, except for Defence Against the Dark Arts in Fifth Year, but then again nobody had attended that one by the end of the year so it really didn't count.

He sort of felt vaguely guilty about it, especially because he was the Head Boy, though he supposed that it would also be setting a bad example for the Head Boy to blatantly ignore it when he was genuinely feeling unwell, go into a lesson, and have a shouting match with someone.

Because it seemed like a good idea, Harry took some notes about what was going on. He may not have been doing Care of Magical Creatures any more, but he was still a dragon and that was something which was going to keep going as far into the future as he expected to live (which admittedly was an open question, Harry had no idea how long the Black-Backed Bookwyrm lived and he expected he'd never get an answer) and unless this happened by coincidence to be his very last moult it would be useful next time.

Taking notes wasn't the only thing Harry did, though, because there weren't really enough notes to take to occupy an entire day. He tried doing some homework as well, but gave that up as a bad idea after he got too irritated at trying to copy out Akkadian runic, then picked up one of his favourite books and re-read through it.

That was a much better choice, and it got him through to mid-afternoon before Neville peered in through the door of his tent.

"You okay, Harry?" he asked. "I thought I'd check in."

"I'm not too bad," Harry said, briefly grimacing as he realized the anti-itching spell had mostly worn off. He hadn't noticed while he was going through his omnibus copy of The Tamuli, but now that he'd come out of that peculiar focused state that came with reading it was coming right to his attention again.

"That bad, huh?" Neville asked.

Harry had to admit that was a pretty funny response, and he sniggered before picking up his wand and pointing it carefully just behind his teeth.

"Subsisto purio carent," he incanted, and sighed a little as the spell took effect. "I always forget how annoying it is when this happens…"

"Well, you could think of it this way," Neville suggested. "It's like you're getting your puberty in little bursts of a few days every year or two, instead of having a constant low-grade thing going on all the time."

That made Harry's ears go flat, and his glasses nearly slid off before he caught them.

"Ouch," he said, faintly.

"I think your itches are probably worse," Neville said, considering. "I mean, at a given time, at least."

Harry nodded.

"Going to get an early night?" Neville added. "Grandmother told me that if you don't have to fix something with a potion it's usually better to sleep through it, because that's when the healing happens. Is it like that for you?"

"A bit," Harry replied, shrugging his wings. "It's always been hard to get to sleep though, because of the itches… if that means it's over quicker this time though then that's definitely good. But I'm going to need to expand a set of robes to fit and then go on a shopping trip…"

"Oh, right, yeah, you grow when that happens," Neville realized. "All at once… sorry, I came in here to help take your mind off it and it's not helping. Is the anti itching spell helping, at least?"

Harry nodded.

"Tell you what," Neville added. "Got a good board game? We can have a game of something that we both mostly ignore while listening to the radio."

Taking Neville's advice, partly because it was the same as Madam Pomfrey's, Harry recast the anti-itching spell and went to bed not long after dinner – just staying up long enough to let Empress know what was wrong.

She assured him that she'd go back and look at the earlier books to see if she followed more of what was going on, now, and then Harry drank some hot cocoa and crawled onto his hoard to go to sleep.

Then he stopped, crawled back off his hoard, put a spare bedsheet over it, crawled onto his hoard again and dragged some blankets over the top.

Harry had some slightly strange dreams, overnight, which involved a rocket ship landing outside and a squirrel getting out before asking the locals to take him to their leader, only the locals were rodents as well and their leader was a heron.

He certainly didn't remember eating any cheese before bed.

When he woke up, though, the itching hadn't resumed. Instead he felt the welcome release of pressure that came from his hide shedding away, and pushed the blankets off (along with about half his old dragonhide) and yawned before beginning the slightly tedious process of removing the rest.

It was kind of fiddly, but it had to be done, and by the time Harry was done he mostly felt relieved that the chore was over for the next year or two – and stretched, feeling much more flexible, then decided to go and have breakfast and work out if he felt well enough to go to the morning's Transfiguration class.

Checking his clock to see if it was breakfast yet, Harry discovered one of the disadvantages of spending the night in his tent – which was that he'd actually slept all through the night and the morning, and had missed Transfiguration on account of being asleep. It was now lunch, and Harry blinked a few times before deciding that… well, if he'd gone to bed around half past eight, and not woken up for fifteen hours, that meant he'd probably really needed the sleep.

Harry ate a great deal of lunch, not because he was particularly noticeably hungry but just because once he started it seemed quite difficult to stop, and then went to Madam Pomfrey again to be checked over just in case there was something about his moult which was unusual and that he should know about.

The medical witch checked him over with several spells, including two that Harry had seen Charlie use before and four that she'd used when Harry had first gone to her for advice, and one of them made her stop and cast it again.

"Mr. Potter," she said. "Are you aware that you are now three stone heavier than you were two days ago?"

"I am?" Harry said, slightly startled. "I know I had to enlarge my robes because they don't quite fit now – I'm going to get some more made up over the weekend – but I didn't think it was that much."

"You also appear to be three feet longer than when I measured you on Wednesday," she told him. "Though about a foot and a half of that is tail. Mr. Potter, when your body has a growth spurt it does not mess around."

"For as long as I've been living in it, my body hasn't seemed to mess around about anything," Harry admitted. "It's very enthusiastic indeed about digestion and it considers things like being Stunned to be somehow rude."

Madam Pomfrey fixed him with a look, and Harry's ears went down. "Sorry."

"I get enough of that sort of thing from the Headmaster, Mr. Potter," Madam Pomfrey told him, casting another spell. "You may be clumsy for the next few days. Are your scales still tender?"

"A little," Harry said. "They should be firm by the end of the day, though."

"In that case, I recommend you go out and do some flying on Saturday, to get used to your new weight and limbs," she advised. "Only if your scales have firmed up, though, since you are usually so durable I would not want to see you being hurt by assuming that when it was not the case."

Harry agreed whole-heartedly with the sentiment. He liked being able to crash when the thing most likely to be hurt was – in a sense – the entire planet.

Most of the afternoon and evening ended up being taken up by catching up on what he'd missed in Runes and Transfiguration – Hermione was only too happy to go through it all with Harry after her Potions finished, which helped fill in a lot of the gaps.

Of course, it was revision, so in a way Harry would have hoped that there wouldn't be all that much that was genuinely new to him anyway. It just would have been very annoying if the exam questions that year for Runes had happened to be about the finer points of Ogham forfeda, their kennings over time, and their effect on a runic sequence mostly composed of normal Ogham runes.

Even after he'd caught up, though – both with the lessons he'd missed, over the evening, and with homework over the next couple of days – Harry still felt worried about his NEWTs.

It wasn't because of any particular reason, not really, but a sort of constant low-grade anxiety which seemed to be pervading the whole year. It wasn't that the lessons had become less interesting, or even really more challenging as such, but there was this added feeling of weight to them which was similar to the run-up to the OWLs only in a different sort of way.

"It's like there's a sword of… um, what was it… Damocles, right," Ron said, snapping his fingers. "Like there's a sword of Damocles and we're all waiting to see when it'll fall."

"I'm not exactly an expert on Greek myths," Harry said – considering himself, at best, a journeyman on them, and that only because he'd spoken to people of the same species as the subjects of about half of them and knew how much of them was likely nonsense – "but I thought the whole point of the Sword of Damocles was that you didn't know if it was going to fall."

"Maybe that's the Muggle version, then," Ron said. "The version I always remember is that it's whether or not you're paying attention and you can cast a Levitation Charm on it before it lands on you and you go splat."

Hermione looked troubled. "The worst thing about that is that I've got no idea whether that's the original version, or whether the original is the Muggle one."

"I'd say the worst thing is more… something else," Dean suggested, flicking through his Divination book.

Everyone else gave him a variety of confused looks.

"It's pretty clear we've all gone completely mad," Dean explained. "Ron's planning on going up in a home made space rocket to fly to the moon, testing several bits of completely new runic research, and yet he's more worried about exams which happen afterwards. And none of the rest of us have noticed that, and even though I noticed it I agree with him."

Harry sniggered, shifting on his sofa.

He'd finally reached the point where sitting on an overstuffed armchair didn't quite work, because he'd just squash it flat and stretch it sideways until it turned into an exploded armchair, and while he could have just expanded the armchair there were plenty of sofas and he'd dragged one over to go near their usual table instead.

It meant he could sit on it in that way which one of the Fourth-Years called a 'loaf', and since Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail had been doing it anyway for years it wasn't like anyone could complain.

"Any particular reason you agree with him?" Neville asked.

"Well, if that rocket does blow up, it'll affect Ron's grades," Dean told him, very matter-of-factly. "And Hermione's and Harry's, because they were all involved with it. But the closest relevant subject for me is Divination, and I've just given the vague prophecy of doom so I'm covered."

"Don't you think you should at least try giving a vague prophecy of, um… non doom?" Ron asked, sounding slightly worried.

"Oh, yeah, one of those is easy," Dean agreed, rummaging in a pocket and pulling out a deck of cards. "Let's see…"

He pulled one from the deck and flipped it over, putting it on the table.

"Knight of wands," he announced. "Pursuit of an idea and invention. And…"

The second card landed on the table as well.

"The moon," Hermione said. "What's that one, again? It's been years since I did Divination and it's the only subject I've not tried to memorize."

"Well, call me silly," Harry began.

"You're silly," Neville informed him gravely.

"Thank you," Harry said, trying not to giggle. "But I suspect that the moon refers to the moon."

Dean considered. "Actually, that makes more sense than the meaning I had to learn, at least in context. And the third one is…"

He put it down.

They all stared.

"What does 'Mystical Tutor' mean?" Ron asked eventually.

"It means I got my cards mixed up," Dean said, taking it back. "Whoops…"

In one of their weekly meetings, and after Harry and Hermione had discussed who of the Sixth-Year Prefects was in the running for Head Boy and Head Girl – it wasn't just Prefects who could become Head Boy and Head Girl, but they were definitely carefully considered – Dumbledore looked between them before tapping his nose.

"Would I be right in thinking that the two of you are a little stressed?" he asked. "I find that it is quite common during the period of one's NEWTs, but even with that in mind I think that you could be justified in feeling particularly exercised."

"Well… a bit?" Harry said, not wanting to complain much. "Like you say, though, I'm doing NEWTs, and that's something everyone has to deal with."

"But not many people have to deal with being Head Boy, as well," Dumbledore told him. "And, even among NEWT students, you – and, indeed, your friends such as Mr. Weasley – are achieving great things."

He smiled. "But I have decided to give you a little advice, Harry – you in particular, though Hermione can of course listen in – and I hope that you at least consider it."

"Consider what, Professor?" Hermione asked, after a few seconds.

"Well, even if you consider my advice to be useless, that will count as considering it and I will pronounce myself satisfied," Dumbledore told her.

"...hold on," Harry requested, holding up a paw. "Are you going to say 'myself satisfied' very clearly?"

"Well spotted," Dumbledore complimented him. "You see, my advice, Harry, is firstly that I have always found that there is only a certain amount of seriousness that any life can have. It is best not to waste it, and the best way to avoid wasting it is to treat as few things seriously as possible."

Harry nodded a little dubiously. "I suppose that makes a bit of sense, but some people must have more seriousness than others?"

"Oh, undoubtedly," Dumbledore agreed.

He turned his attention to Hermione, though Harry was definitely still listening. "And the second thing I will tell you is that there is a certain point beyond which someone who might previously have been thought of as mad is instead thought of as eccentric – and it is no bad thing to be thought of as eccentric, in fact I would say that it is quite an advantage. Why, if you make a mistake half the time people will assume you meant to do it and search for the secret meaning behind it, and they will find it for you even if you did not have one. It saves a great deal of time, you see."

Harry wasn't sure by now whether this was one of those times Dumbledore was being unserious or not.

He supposed that if Dumbledore was being unserious, then the natural result was that Harry would try to find the hidden meaning behind it, and find one there even if there wasn't meant to be.

"That's clever," he decided.

"It is?" Dumbledore asked, interested. "I shall have to hear how some time. But aside from that, the whole of the trick is simply to pay attention to everything worth paying attention to."

"...hold on, there's a problem there," Hermione said. "How do you tell what's worth paying attention to before actually, um, paying attention to it? That's the only way you can make a judgement."

"Ah," Dumbledore smiled. "I can see you decided my words were important."

Harry frowned.

"Sometimes, Professor, I think that you're ten steps ahead of everyone else," he said. "And sometimes, I'm sort of… somehow reminded of a thing I read in a book, where someone said that the best swordsman in the world should fear the worst, because he's got no idea what that person will do."

"I believe, Harry, that I will take that as a compliment," Dumbledore decided, as Hermione looked mildly scandalized.

"It wasn't meant as a compliment or an insult, Professor," Harry answered. "I think you're a puzzle which it might take decades to unravel, and I'm showing my working."

"There, you see?" Dumbledore asked. "You're getting the hang of it."

"...so it's all just a joke?" Hermione asked, sounding offended, but then frowned in thought. "...wait, no, hold on… that's not fair. It's not all just a joke, but a lot of it is a joke."

"I find it brings a little delight into every life," Dumbledore told her. "Though, of course, if any advice does not actually help then feel free to discard it. I remember I was once told to make sense, and I found it the purest sort of boredom so I ignored it forthwith."

He stood, and Harry and Hermione did the same. "Life is too short for sadness, and yet long enough that laughter should fill as much of it as possible."

Harry had a lot to think about, after that meeting.

Much of it was even about the meeting, though there was also a bit of a rush to get the Ratatoskr ready for the third flight. It meant more work in Alchemy, making a second batch of molten silver, though that had needed to be balanced with his research project about transistors.

As for that, that had been going in quite a promising way. It appeared that attaching small samples of different materials to the legs of a transistor could affect which way properties flowed in a way that was a little different to how the properties would move in the same transmutation without the transistor, though Harry still wanted to try doing something that wouldn't work at all without the transistor.

But once the silver had been done, they'd cast a Protean charm which connected the silver to the whole of the Ratatoskr – a spell which was even more self-referential than Protean charms normally were, because the silver representing the Ratatoskr was inside the Ratatoskr, so logically that meant there was a much smaller silver globe inside the larger silver globe.

It was all very mind stretching, really.

But even while that was going on, Harry kept thinking about what Dumbledore had said.

It seemed to him as though Dumbledore was someone who'd lived a long time – and, more importantly, had lived a lot, doing remarkable things from his time at Hogwarts as a pupil right through to today – and that the way Dumbledore had dealt with that was simply to be, more than anything else, relaxed.

It was strange how much that seemed to help.

"Okay, the orbit looks good," Hermione said, looking at the big silver globe and its projection of the Ratatoskr. "Do you have the same thing, Ron?"

Ron's paws hit the typewriter. I HAVE A CIRCLE ORBIT YES.

"I make that about four hundred miles up," Hermione went on, and went to look at her checklist. "Okay… I think we decided the next step was to test the Apparition sequence. I'd like you to aim another hundred miles up, and we'll see what that does."

Ron nodded, sealing his helmet in place, and scooted over a little from the engine and thruster controls to the onboard silver globe itself.

Harry found himself holding his breath. A lot of this was his idea, or his work was involved with it at least, and he really wanted it to work… both because that would mean he'd got it right, and because of what that would mean more generally.

The squirrel-Ron on the mirror took a deep breath as well, then took the silver globe in both paws.

Then there was a faint crack, relayed through the mirror and accompanied by a flash from the FAST runes, and the Ratatoskr jumped on the larger silver globe display.

"Bloody hell, it worked," Neville said. "Where did he end up?"

"It looks like about a hundred miles up, like we were planning," Hermione replied, sounding very pleased. She flicked her wand a couple of times, rotating the silver simulacrum so they could see the orbital path prediction – which was now no longer a circle – and contemplated it before nodding. "And it looks like it preserves momentum, or… well, mostly, at least."

"That sounds like something which would be a bit strange in a book," Harry said, then deepened his voice slightly. "The Apparition spell mostly preserves momentum, sort of, if you're a bit vague."

"Well, that's magic sometimes," Hermione said, half to herself. "We know it doesn't completely preserve momentum because otherwise going from Hogwarts to London someone might fall over."

"That means it's not safe to Apparate halfway around the planet, right?" Dean said. "Unless you're really careful about it, you might end up appearing somewhere where your orbital speed is straight down."

Ron winced. (He wasn't the only one.)

"...all right," Hermione said, eventually. "Ron, your orbit's a bit elliptical now. Do you want to try straightening it out yourself as a test?"

Their friend gave a thumbs-up, which led Harry to wonder if squirrels had thumbs, and scooted back over to the controls before turning the Ratatoskr a bit and igniting the main engine.

"You know, we could probably make one of these you can control from the ground," Dean realized. "Protean charms on the controls."

"Now I'm really annoyed, I should have thought of that months ago," Hermione confessed. "And we're at the bit where the tests require a wizard on board."

Neville held up his hand. "Or, at the very least, a rodent."

"Early Muggle space missions had animals on board, to check if it was safe," Harry said. "So did early Muggle hot air balloon flights. I don't know if they ever tried it with early Muggle aircraft. Or trains."

It took Ron a few tries to get the angle just right, not least because it was hard to see which way the Ratatoskr was actually facing relative to the ground using the silver globe and that led to Ron having to keep track of the controls, the view out of the window and the orbit path all at once, but after about fifteen minutes of fiddling he was in a stable orbit again.

That made it a good time to try out the EVA, now that they'd fixed the issue of opening the door, and Hermione got out the checklist they'd made last time just to make sure nothing had got lost in between that flight and this one.

"Well, that's another first, then," Neville said quietly, as Ron – still as Nutkin, as he hadn't quite got the queasiness sorted out – opened the outer airlock door and air hissed out into space. "We've had first wizard in space, first wizard in orbit, all that, and now we've got first wizard to make a space walk."

He glanced at his Muggle-raised friends. "That is the right term for it, right? Or is it that Eviea thing you were talking about?"

"It's E-V-A," Hermione enunciated. "That's the formal term for it. Extra-Vehicular-Activity, it means going outside the space ship. Space walk is the colloquial term, so that's fine."

"...that's a very long way of saying yes," Neville said.

"It's Hermione," Dean reminded him.

"That's a normal way of saying yes," Neville corrected himself.

The spacewalk was undoubtedly a glorious, transcendent experience, but it was slightly marred by the fact that the only mirror they had on Ron was the one which was angled to look at his face.

Hermione made a note about that.

Apart from that, though, the spacewalk went fine. Ron stayed attached by a little tether, just in case, but the airlock doors clearly both worked (as made clear by the fact all the air in the capsule hadn't left) and could be opened from the inside and the outside even without any gravity.

Once he was inside again, Ron typed out some more notes – apparently it was a little bit chilly and so he'd added a Warming Charm – then asked what they were going to do now.

"Well, it's only about half past one," Hermione said. "So… I think there's enough time to go to the moon."

"It is so weird to me that it's the sort of thing that takes an hour or two," Harry said, aloud, as Ron fiddled with his own silver globe. "Real moon missions take months to plan and days to get there, and in books travelling in space is usually so quick that it's not even worth counting how long it takes to get to the moon… or if it is, it's because of having to land, rather than anything else."

LOOKS LIKE I NEED TO GO HALFWY AROUND, Ron typed.

"I agree," Hermione said, looking at her own one. "But there's no need to wait until you're below the moon. In fact, you should be able to start the burn now."

"HERE GOES," the typewriter relayed.

Then the projection of Ron's course jumped, and Hermione began reading out course corrections as she adjusted the display. "Change course, roll right fifteen degrees and then up five… there. And the turnover… all right, now we just need to wait for an hour and a quarter."

They considered that.

"I've got a scrabble set up in Gryffindor tower," Dean suggested. "If someone volunteers, they can show the letters Ron's got to him on the mirror?"

Harry decided, over the course of the next two and a half hours, that the reason why space travel was never shown as taking this particular amount of time (which was to say, about as long as a relatively short airliner flight) was that it was an amount of time where you didn't feel comfortable leaving your seat to have a nap but you still had very little to do while you were in it. And because the engines were going the whole time you couldn't mess around in zero gravity, either.

Of course, he was guessing for some of that. Ron might have had a different opinion. But they had played a lot of scrabble, both before and after the turnover.

Now, though, the Ratatoskr was getting very close indeed to the moon. The silver globe's focus had shifted and shrunk to the point it was only showing the moon and the space quite close to it, and the predicted path wobbled around as Ron clicked the engine down to a lower setting. Then he tilted the ship slightly, focused both on his own silver globe and on Hermione's steady stream of commentary, and finally the thread of light which represented his course formed a single loop around the moon.

"Engines stop," Hermione said.

Ron nodded, and the hum of the rocket died away.

"Okay, let's work this out," Hermione went on, picking up a piece of paper. "Ron's in orbit at about fifty miles up, which is about eighty kilometres…"

"Do we want to aim for anywhere in particular?" Dean asked.

"Well, I thought before that maybe we should go near where one of the Apollo landings went," Hermione said. "But that seemed a bit risky to me, the Ratatoskr's engine is more powerful than those ones and it'd be dreadful to knock one of the Apollo landing stages over."

"Bad manners, if nothing else," Harry said.

"Still, that left us most of the moon," Hermione went on. "And I thought landing on the north of the Mare Imbrium would work nicely, because that's quite flat and we don't want to bump into any boulders."

The typewriter rattled.

BUMPING INTO BOULDERS ONLY GOOD IN CREA CREO CREA THAT IRISH GAME, Ron informed them, over the course of a minute or so.

"Exactly," Hermione agreed. "So… you'll need to turn so that your engine is pointing along your direction of travel, and fire for a bit more than a minute – I'll give you more instructions once your burn starts."

WHEN?

"In about three minutes," Hermione told him. "I'll count you down."

"She's got a good feel for this," Neville said. "Wonder if that's a thing about having feathers?"

Dean shrugged. "I can do flying with wings okay. Broomsticks are different."

As Ron rotated the Ratatoskr into position for the descent burn, Harry spent a minute or two just watching the view out of the capsule window.

It was sort of eerie, to see grey and black mountains – not silvery at all, not like how the moon looked from Earth – gliding past in a stately sort of way. And to think about what it meant, which was that Ron was up there and far, far closer to another world than he was to anyone else – and that he was hundreds of times further from anyone else than any human had ever been from another human, because humans had always gone to the moon in twos and threes before – made Harry have to sit down and take a few deep breaths as a sudden feeling of vertigo hit him.

(He hadn't known dragons could get vertigo. It seemed unfair somehow.)

"We really are literally watching history happen," he said, out loud. "Not just wizarding history, I mean… world history, if any of it was anything we could tell Muggles."

"And that's one of the two reasons why I'm planning on doing an interview," Luna said, making Harry start.

He hadn't even noticed she was there.

"Oh, sorry," she added. "I'm afraid sometimes I forget I'm doing that."

"Doing what?" Neville said.

"Oh, being unremarkable," Luna explained. "It's not really my preference, but I find that when I do try people find it harder to notice me."

She shrugged. "Of course, it could simply be that I'm so very easy to notice normally that it's just a relative thing."

Harry decided the best response to that was to smile, then tilted his head slightly as he looked at the mirror.

There was something about what was going on…

He waited as the Ratatoskr dropped towards the moon, taking almost five minutes to drop the last fifty miles (which was, after all, slow for space, and for that matter slow for magic, even if it was absolutely blisteringly fast by any other Muggle standard), and then – just after the engine had gone off, cleared his throat.

"Ron?" he said. "Can you just grab your wand? I want to try something."

Ron picked his wand up from where it had been resting – in a little metal clip by the console – and Harry fiddled with his watch until he'd found the stopwatch mode.

"I'm about to throw some red sparks," he explained. "When you see me do that, can you light your wand?"

Ron nodded, and Harry started the stopwatch.

When it hit exactly five seconds, he twitched his own wand (in his tail, because he was holding up the leg with his watch on it and he needed the other three to stay standing) and sent up a jet of red sparks. Ron's own wand lit up, and Harry nodded.

The time on his stopwatch hadn't gone past six seconds.

"I think the mirrors are faster than light communication," he said. "So that's nice."

Hermione looked like she would have dropped something, if she'd been handling anything.

"Faster than light," she repeated. "I never thought about that – you realize that that's – Muggles think that's…"

She shook her head. "I think that might have already been worth the trip, and Ron hasn't even opened the door yet."

Before Ron actually opened the door, they remembered that he could change back from being Nutkin without qualms since he was no longer in zero gravity – which made things easier.

"Okay, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to take my wand out with me," Ron said, with an air of consideration. "What do any of you think?"

"I think it'll probably be better to have it than not to have it," Neville voiced. "It's because, well, there's four possibilities. If your wand is fine outside, then you're okay taking it, and if no problem comes up outside where you need your wand, you're okay whether or not you take it. But if you need your wand and you don't have it, that's way worse than just finding out that your wand is a bit damaged by going outside."

"...yeah, that is a good point," Ron admitted. "Hermione?"

"I agree with Neville," she said. "Unless anyone else can think of anything?"

"You should take the mirror from inside the capsule as well," Luna advised. "That way Colin can get some photographs of the moon, instead of photos of your face."

Ron looked a bit offended. "My face isn't that bad, is it?"

"You've got to admit, those books about space travel would have been a lot less interesting if the only thing in them had been photos of Neil Armstrong's face," Harry voiced.

That resulted in some deep consideration for Ron, until he shrugged and picked up the other mirror. That meant he had his wand in a pocket, until he put the mirror right back down again and took his wand out to Transfigure some cord to hang the mirror around his neck and onto his front.

Dean took the time to make a hood for the mirror on their end, as well, so they could see better without glare, and by the time he was done Ron was ready as well.

"Here we go," he said, and opened the inner airlock door.

The surface of the moon, Harry decided after much contemplation, was eerie.

Ron had stepped down onto the surface, and there'd been almost complete silence from the mirror on his chest. The one in his helmet had picked it up as he'd said "It's taken a long time, but I'm finally here," and there was the sound of his breathing, but the crunch of his armoured boots contacting the lunar regolith had been transmitted faintly up through his suit and that was the only way they heard it.

It was a sort of desolate, volcanic landscape, with plenty of soft dust away from the immediate area that Ratatoskr's engines had blasted, but the dust didn't form drifts – you needed air for a drift – and there were rocks ranging in size from boulders to tiny pebbles (but, again, not pebbles like they were on Earth, because they weren't rounded by wind or water – neither of which existed on the moon either).

And the black sky overhead, once the mirror looked up a little and their eyes had adjusted, like the night sky on Earth but with so many more stars – far too many to see the familiar constellations, because they were drowned out by sheer volume – and when Ron turned, there was the Earth itself, hanging in the sky huge and blue and green and white.

It shone. It was bright enough that it cast second shadows, though that wasn't quite right – instead it was that the shadows from sunlight were very obvious, but inside them there was usually an area of deep black shadow, deeper than you got on Earth because the sky didn't scatter the light. And the areas which were in shadow but still visible were visible because of the earthshine, or perhaps because of the strange glitter that the moon itself seemed to have when Ron looked in the right direction.

Against that whole otherworldly background, the Ratatoskr – something they'd seen only about three hours ago take off just in front of them – was sort of weird, a familiar thing Harry himself had worked on and carved runes into suddenly transposed into a completely alien background.

He wondered if the people who'd worked on the Apollo spaceships felt like that about seeing their moon landers on the moon.

Colin seemed to be very impressed, taking several photographs, then asked Ron if he could leave the mirror propped against a rock for a bit so they could get some pictures of Ron walking.

By luck or judgement, Ron left it somewhere that the Ratatoskr was in the background, along with the Earth, and at least one of the photographs – Harry was sure – looked like the sort of thing you got on the cover of science fiction magazines from the nineteen-fifties. A figure in a gleaming metal suit, a faint shimmering bubble of air around his head (Ron had prudently cast a Bubble-Head Charm before even opening the outer airlock door) and framed by the Earth to one side and a sleek, stubby rocket ship to the other.

All told, Ron walked on the surface of the moon for perhaps half an hour. He picked up several moon rocks, simply because he could, and carefully scooped up some of the dust as well into a bag he Transfigured out of another rock. Some of the dust simply oozed out, so fine that it fit through the gaps in the bag's thread, and Ron had to re-Transfigure it to get one which didn't leak.

Eventually, though, and after Colin had run out of film (and then Harry had Summoned his own camera from his room, and that had run out of film as well, and more and more Hogwarts students had shown up as word spread that this hadn't just been another rocket flight but something even more), Ron got back into the Ratatoskr and checked in to see if there was anything he needed to do before taking off again.

"I'll tell you one thing you need to do on the flight back, Weasley," Draco drawled. "I suspect you're going to be meeting the Minister for Magic by the time you land. Just letting you know so you can get the panic out of the way."

"Blimey," Ron said, swallowing. "That's going to be weird. All right… you know it smells like fireworks in here now? I think it's all the dust."

"Might be best if you kept your helmet on," Hermione advised him.

"Right," Ron agreed. "Okay, I'm switching to Nutkin in a minute so I can handle liftoff."

He paused. "Oh, hold on a moment… so right now, I'm about a quarter of a million miles away, and the moon takes twenty-eight days to go around, right? So that's about thirty thousand miles a day?"

"Sixty thousand," Hermione corrected.

"Right," Ron said. "So… a bit less than a mile a second. Good."

He shrank down to squirrel form – Nutkin still had his helmet on – and turned the controls to about two thirds power. Against the one-sixth gravity of the moon the Ratatoskr seemed to leap spacewards on the silver globe, rising away from the moon with startling speed, and before a minute had passed Hermione read out that he was more than ten miles up.

Then Ron shifted from the engine to the silver globe.

"Wait, Ron, what are you-" Hermione began, but then the runes lit up and there was a crack-

-and the Ratatoskr was in orbit around the Earth. Close enough that Harry could recognize Europe through the window, but far enough away that… well, far enough away that he could recognize Europe instead of seeing just a bit of France.

"Ronald!" Hermione said sharply. "What did you just do?"

"Saved about two hours of Scrabble," Dean said, very quietly.

"It's funny, really," Ron said, that evening.

He turned one of the Ratatoskr mirrors over in his hands – the one which he'd carried on the moon itself – then put it down. "I sort of… I'm not really sure I can put it into words, but when I was younger I always really wanted to do something that would make me stand out from my brothers."

"You've certainly done that," Neville said.

"Yeah, but… I don't think I really imagined what it would mean," Ron explained. "At first, I think I just… imagined that since they made it look easy, it'd be easy for me as well – and at the same time, I think I sort of assumed that I could be famous and renowned as a kind of…"

He waved his hand. "… attribute, I suppose. Famous, and everyone thinks I'm cool, but that's just a passive fact rather than something that's actively going on. Merlin, I spoke to the Minister of Magic, and…"

Ron paused. "Admittedly, it sounded like he didn't really have much of an idea what I'd done, at least in the details, but he sounded impressed anyway. And Percy said that I might be talking to someone from MACUSA in a few weeks."

"And there was the bit with Professor Snape," Neville pointed out. "That was the weirdest bit of all, to me."

"Yeah," Ron nodded, vaguely. "Professor Snape asking me if I'd be all right if he experimented on some Potions ingredients I'd recovered..."

"I know the feeling," Harry said. "Or I know a sort of similar feeling, because back when I first joined the magical world everyone wanted to talk to me about the whole Riddle thing and I didn't think it was very impressive."

He shrugged his wings. "It was so unremarkable I didn't remember it, after all."

"Wasn't that because you were literally one year old?" Ginny checked, leaning over Ron's chair.

"Oi!" Ron complained.

"I'm sure that didn't have much to do with it," Harry replied, with a lazy flick of his tail. "After all, if I was a strong enough wizard to have beaten the Dark Lord deliberately then I should hope I'd have been smart enough by then to remember something if it was important."

Ron's lips moved for a moment, then he sniggered.

"Prat," he informed Harry, shaking his head. "But yeah, today was a bit overwhelming…"

"Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to stop," Ginny told her brother, seriously. "Congratulations, Ron, you're now the first wizard to walk on the surface of the moon. You're going to be in history books, and I mean world history ones."

That left Ron looking a bit pale.

"You know what I think we should do?" Harry asked, after a few seconds.

He waited, until Dean took the plunge. "No, Harry. What do you think we should do?"

"Charms," Harry replied. "We've got it first thing on Monday and Professor Flitwick said we'd be doing opposed charms, but he didn't say which. I'm guessing the Fire-Making and Extinguishing Charms might be coming up, but that's just a guess."

"What about the Drought Charm?" Neville said. "I think that one goes with the Water-Making Charm – it's a bit of a misnomer, it's more of a Drying Charm than a Drought Charm."

"Yeah, that's a good point," Harry agreed. "And… the Momentum-Cancelling Charm, that one might have several opposites. It's sort of an opposite of the Summoning and Banishing Charms, but also the Ascension Charm and pretty much any charm which involves moving things."

The conversation took off from there, and Harry felt a sort of tension ease a bit. It seemed as though Ron's nerves had appreciated the change in topic, and once he'd had time to process everything then he'd be a bit better with what was going on.

The next flight would probably have to wait until after their exams, though.

"All right," Professor Aberforth said, at the start of Tuesday's lesson a week or so later. "In case some of you haven't worked it out, I'm not going to be here much longer."

Harry had been sort of expecting it, but it was still sad to hear.

"That's because of the jinx, right?" Justin said.

"That's right," Aberforth agreed. "It's my last week, and I'm getting out two weeks before the exams. Seems to work."

He folded his arms. "So, since this is our last lesson together… any questions?"

Hermione put her hand up first.

"What do you think the most important thing to remember about Defence Against the Dark Arts is, Professor?" she said.

Aberforth chuckled. "Well, that's not a small question, is it?"

He steepled his fingers. "I think the most important thing to remember is that the ultimate goal of Defence Against the Dark Arts is to keep people safe. That means you can do it just as well as far as your safety is concerned by not getting into danger in the first place… but that doesn't mean you should automatically not do something because it might be dangerous. Instead, you should just think things through."

Hermione nodded, and she wasn't the only one.

The next hand to go up was from Justin Finch-Fletchley, and he asked what spell Aberforth thought they should revise the most.

Aberforth answered with a list of a dozen spells, two or three jinxes and hexes with the rest being charms. Then he called on Blaise, and the Slytherin boy lowered his hand with a smirk.

"I'm sure everyone's been wondering it, Professor," he said. "Where did your reputation for charms on a goat come from?"

There was a ripple of nervous laughter, because just about everyone had wondered that at least once, and Aberforth grumbled.

"I didn't say I'd answer them," he pointed out. "But, well… I'd like you all to picture the scene."

"Do we have to?" Su Li asked.

"I'm having a meeting with a lady, of whom I'm quite fond," Aberforth said, ignoring the comment except for a quelling look. "And, though I don't wish to brag, things are going quite well."

He had a slightly faraway look in his eyes. "Then, all of a sudden, we hear sounds coming up the stairs. And… well, not to put too strong a point on it, it would be embarrassing to the lady to be found with me. Even then, I'll add."

He chuckled. "And I panicked, and – well, I'd owned goats for decades, even then. If there's anything I could transfigure someone into in an emergency, that's what it'd be."

Piercing blue eyes swept the room. "I'll let you fill in the image of what Madam Bagnold saw. But the lesson there is to have a contingency plan before you need it."

While everyone was still absorbing that, he smiled slightly. "Next question?"

The last couple of weeks before the exams seemed to rush by – Harry assumed it was a lot like sliding down a river where the current was just a little too strong to fight, pulled through narrow streams between boulders and whirled into eddies which carried you back to where you'd already been for just a moment before tugging you onwards again. And ahead you could hear the roaring of a waterfall, which you knew you were going to plunge over and fall to the bottom unless you remembered the right charm to stop yourself and land gently.

Of course, Harry could have been being overly dramatic. But the fact that he, who'd been a dragon for over a dozen years now, still defaulted to imagery about falling probably said something inherent in the human and near-human psyche.

Or something.

And despite how Harry knew intellectually that everything was probably fine – he'd written up his Alchemy project, and he'd definitely been involved enough in the Ratatoskr that his write-up of what went into that would probably count for both Runes and Alchemy – he still felt like there weren't enough hours in the day to get everything done to be as ready for exams as possible.

All the others were the same, so Harry knew it wasn't just him. Everyone who was still doing Astronomy was staring at star charts and trying to memorize orbital distance calculations and the ways you determined stellar distances – enough that Harry had a pretty good idea about what a Cephid Variable Star was just from overhearing things – while Harry's copies of Practical Defensive Magic And Its Use Against The Dark Arts got borrowed so many times by people from all over the school that he just got hold of four extra sets in Flourish and Blotts while making a whirlwind trip to get hold of a new Runic dictionary.

The Sixth-Year Prefects had taken over more of the patrolling work, and Harry had also taken it on himself to have the Map in his line of sight during his late-night study sessions as he tried to make sure he'd at least covered all the obvious possible gaps in his knowledge. It would be one thing to get stuck on a question about what a good spell would be to use in a given situation – Harry was fairly sure he'd be able to come up with something when the answer was open to interpretation – but if a fundamental part of an exam question was about how two Charms interacted then not knowing that might mean messing up the whole question.

And there was still that nagging worry about his Runes project, because Harry felt he was so close to getting it. He worked through each possible interpretation of the runes he planned to inscribe, checking for negative meanings, and each time he found one he had to sigh and go through the whole thing again, but he was so far along that it felt like stopping there would just be terrible.

Then, on the Saturday before the first NEWT exam, well after ten in the evening, Harry finished his interactions grid for the latest sequence.

It didn't look like there was anything negative in there at all.

Frowning, because he didn't want to miss anything, Harry went back over it – comparing it to each of the sticking points he'd found in the past, to see if he'd missed an interaction – then, with mounting excitement, nudged Hermione.

"Got a moment?" he asked. "I think this is right, at last."

She took his notes, reading over them, and after a minute or so she frowned. "What about this one here? Are you sure that's right?"

"I'm using a metaphor," Harry explained. "I want to double the light and harvest half of it at the same time. I'm expecting that this bit here will mean it's got a decaying effect."

"Oh, I see," Hermione realized. "That – I think that should work, yes. So it'll be like it's a bigger telescope, not just one that's amplifying light, or rather it'll act like it is…"

"If this is right, I'm going to be making it and then testing it over the weekend," Harry told her. "Maybe even tonight, because I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep until I've finished it."

Ron yawned. "Easy for you to say, you don't have a midnight Astronomy revision session tonight. We can't have one after tonight because of when the NEWT exams are, so this one and the one next Saturday are the last ones…"

"Better you than me, mate," Neville said. "I'm just glad we won't be doing anything that blooms in moonlight on the exam, because that's way too fiddly."

That jogged Harry's memory, and he frowned for a long moment before it came to mind. "Oh, Remus said that Professor Snape wanted to try some kind of experiment with some of the moon dust that you brought back, Ron, seeing if he can modify the formula for Wolfsbane so it's more potent or just doesn't wear off at all."

"Oh, that's what he wanted some for," Ron realized. "Yeah, he asked me for some, and I didn't see a reason to argue, really. He paid for it at about the same rate as dragon scale goes for, you know, high end but not super high end potions ingredients, because getting more is sort of fiddly for now but it's something I could do three times a day after our exams."

"Can you imagine?" Dean asked. "Lycanthropy just… being so much less of a problem. Even more than it is now compared to how it was even ten years ago, that would be brilliant."

"You didn't know about magic ten years ago, Dean," Neville pointed out, looking up from Mathematricks, Or, The Powers Of Three.

"But five years ago there was already a Warg at Hogwarts, and six years ago Harry had already had that law passed," Dean said. "Besides, ten is a nice round number."

"I didn't get that law passed," Harry protested, as Hermione handed back his notes. "I was just… there."

"In two years they'll be saying you wrote it, mate, accept it," Dean told him.

Wondering whether that was true, Harry went upstairs and got his telescope from back when he'd had Astronomy as a subject.

It was a bit battered, but not too bad, and a quick Reparo charm fixed most of the issues with it. He measured around the brass ring at the side which pointed up towards the stars, cross-checked that with the number and layout of his runes, and then started calculating and laying out his fixed points.

It went much more smoothly than he'd been expecting, which might have been because of all the practice doing just the same thing on the Ratatoskr, and Harry was already getting started on the actual etching (with a very carefully controlled claw, following the fixed points he'd laid out) by the time Ron made his excuses and went off to get in a bit of stargazing in the few hours of relative darkness that Hogwarts got in summer.

The experience was sort of relaxing, a bit like meditation, and it helped Harry out by giving him something to do which wasn't monotonous or boring but which nevertheless let part of his mind wander.

It wasn't much longer at all until Harry would be leaving Hogwarts – in fact, in less than two weeks the only thing really keeping him there would be that the term wouldn't have ended yet, since he'd have done all his exams by then – and there'd be a sort of long period of uncertainty for a month or so until Harry got back his results and knew what he'd be able to do with the rest of his life.

But, really, Harry thought he already knew what at least some of the rest of his life would involve, because there wasn't really any way the Ratatoskr wouldn't fly again unless Ron built a much bigger one to replace it.

That thought, and speculation, carried him through the rest of the process. At the end of it Harry had a telescope with a runed band around the top, each rune marked out in Early Babylonian because it was halfway between the images of Sumerian and the purely stylized Assyrian, and he shifted it over to the window before opening it onto the warm summery night air and pointing it in a random direction.

Unfortunately, it was cloudy.

"...I'll… just go and test this upstairs," Harry muttered, and Parvati stifled a giggle.

At least most of the people who weren't doing OWL or – especially – NEWT revision were already in bed, since it had gone past midnight an hour or so ago.

It was still embarrassing, though.

AN:

I'd certainly quite like being able to read in the shower.

And, for that matter, being able to travel by teleporting.

Magic is convenient, isn't it?

Aside from that, well, Ron's sort of accidentally made history… and Harry's a bit bigger now.

And it's time for NEWTs.

ALSO: In case anyone has missed it, the round trip of signal-response for Harry and Ron's experiment with the mirrors was less than one second. Harry's stopwatch said five when he sent the signal, and hadn't reached six when the response arrived.