The NEWTs were saved until the very last week of the semester. They had to basically be graded immediately, so the graduates could move into their Ministry jobs, and that was why it took so long for the OWL grades to come in, even though those tests were finished earlier. It would probably have made more sense to just have NEWTs at the beginning of June, rather than the end, but to suggest that would have made my prefect friends stab me at the thought of losing even a moment of study time.

June was tense, is what I'm saying.

No assurances that Penny and Percy were already guaranteed their jobs as long as they didn't completely fail the tests would get through. Alexis didn't want to hear that just being able to speak a second language probably more than qualified her for the International Magical Cooperation department. There were times I couldn't avoid getting pulled into group study, but when everyone was reviewing separately, Oliver, Mathilda, and I played a lot of fanciful wizarding card games.

Since most of the quidditch team was taking OWLs and were pretty serious about it, Oliver didn't even have them to hang out with.

The lower-years uncompressed first, their exams out of the way. This was good, because reports of Death Eater attacks had been growing, and Hermione, in particular, might have lost it if she'd still been stressed about exams as the danger grew. The old playbook of going after muggleborn was back in force. They hadn't gone after any "blood traitor" targets yet, that anyone had heard about, since the aurors were much more likely to show up in those circumstances.

But suddenly, after the summer solstice, when OWLs were just finishing up, the attacks suddenly stopped.

With no spy in their ranks, Dumbledore didn't have a clue what had happened, and was worried that they were planning something huge. Neither Draco nor Theo had received any information from their fathers. But as the days passed and Voldemort didn't show up with an army in tow and empowered by some massive seasonal ritual, it got weird. Should people hope that something had put a spoke in the Death Eaters' wheel, or wait for the other shoe to drop?

NEWTs were at least a distraction from the waiting. I felt like I impressed the proctors with my arithmancy, runes, and defense, and didn't do too badly in my other subjects. Getting to drop my biggest annoyances after OWLs had freed up my attention. Unfortunately, while I knew the charms and transfiguration theory back and forth, they really were biased towards wand users and didn't like it when I had to use ritual circles for the more esoteric effects rather than a simple swish of a focus.

Not like it actually mattered in any appreciable sense for my career path, but I wasn't going to actively blow my scores. If nothing else, my grandmother would be sarcastic about it.

And then it was all done. There hadn't been any attacks for over a week, so Dumbledore didn't even mind me taking the train back (though there were going to be way more aurors on board and waiting at the station than ever before). Nothing but to take one jaunt away from the castle and into adult life.

It was even harder for my peers that had been at the school for all seven years. For most graduates, the time at Hogwarts made up the majority of their life that they could even remember. Suddenly, it was over, and you were just in the world. Wizards didn't even have a real equivalent to college, to ease into adulthood. One day, you have teachers and prefects assigning demerits and hustling you off to bed by curfew packed in with roommates, the next you're going out to get a job and living more or less on your own.

For some of them, they'd never even be back at the school again, except maybe to see a quidditch match.

That wouldn't be me. Unless Voldemort managed to kill me over the summer, I was planning to continue to assist Remus with planning his classes and sub for his post-full-moon days. And I'd seen several of my other professors in classes I did well in eyeing me with the consideration of someone who might also want to take a day off from time to time.

Maybe my NEWT scores would have some use in getting dragooned into a side hustle as a substitute teacher.

So, as much as it had worried me throughout the year thinking about last train rides and last times seeing the people I'd come to think of as friends, in reality it was just a transition from peer to teacher. I'd be at the school often enough that Moody would probably be mad about it taking away from my investigation work.

But still, watching the rolling British countryside as we traveled south, friends jostling in between compartments while my girlfriend nestled in my arms and new pet cat sprawled across our laps, I realized it was an ending. While I still had any number of people watching my back—and in the same killing curse crosshairs—there was no longer an institution in between me and danger. I don't mean simply Hogwarts, but the entire concept of childhood. Attacks on children inspire action.

Attacks on an adult, well, that's illegal but not the same kind of tragedy.

What I wanted in my adult life was a simple little job trying to figure out if there were wizard philanderers and other types that would pay for a little private investigation, while I figured out what it was like to live as part of a pair of couples sharing a house and figuring out how to buy groceries and pay bills. What I was likely getting was years of constantly looking behind me for dark wizards that I'd pissed off too many times. And I still didn't believe that the sidhe plots were finished with the Unseelie Accords getting renewed.

But as the four of us bid farewell to our friends and bundled ourselves through the Platform 9 ¾ floo and into the house we were renting from Remus, it would keep for a few days. We had bedrooms to decorate, a kitchen to allocate, and a long road ahead of us making sure that Percy and Mathilda could operate the entertainment center.

Maybe suddenly being a full-on grown up wasn't that bad, if you had friends to share it with.

End of Year 3

Thanks for sticking with me through another year, everyone!

First, the bad news: my chapter buffer isn't full enough that I'm confident in starting to post year 4 immediately this time. I was only about a week ahead of posting a couple of times toward the end, and I'd rather have a delay before starting year 4 than risk getting into a position where I have to have a break in the middle. So the two appendices will post over the next week, and then there will be a hiatus. I'll post the preview chapter here when year 4 is ready to start posting, so you can just follow this story if you want to be alerted when year 4 begins. I'm hoping it won't be a very long wait, but I also managed to nearly blow my 30-chapter buffer from NaNoWriMo; it's been a stressful year, y'all.

On to the good news: I have multiple side projects I've been working on (often to get past writer's block on this story), each with several chapters in the can. Since year 4 of this story concludes the series, I'll need a new project to start posting after year 4 anyway. So I plan to start posting the first sections of those stories while I work on my buffer for year 4 of Born in Fiendfyre. If you're interested, follow my profile and follow and review those stories if you like them enough to nominate them as my next major project. I can't promise I'll be inspired to finish the one that gets the most follows, but my muse is not immune to bribery through upvotes.

In the meantime, please review this story to let me know what you liked, what you want to see in year 4, and any open questions or plot threads you noticed that you want to make sure I resolve in the finale. I've been bad lately about replying to reviews, and am more likely to reply if there's a question that's easy to answer, but I do read all of them and appreciate the feedback!