When Harry next woke up, something was wrong.

There were shouts coming through the fabric of the front door, high-pitched and frightened instead of the happy sounds of celebration, and he rolled upright and sent old books and letters slithering down the pile he'd been sleeping on.

Mr. Weasley stuck his head in. "Sirius – there's trouble!"

"What kind of trouble?" Neville asked, yawning halfway through as he stumbled into the kitchen from one of Harry's bedrooms. Dean was just behind him, and as Harry got into the kitchen too he noticed that Sirius was fumbling with his wand and a coat.

"Boys, you need to get outside – quickly!" Mr. Weasley told them in strained tones, squeezing aside a little so they could get past.

Neville went first, yawning again, then Dean followed, and Harry decided that Mr. Weasley wasn't exactly going to be sounding like this if it was just an unexpected late birthday party or something and that it would be a good idea to take it seriously. He stopped only long enough to make sure Hedwig's cage was open, so she could get out, then ducked through the doorway.

Outside it was still night-time, but the magical lanterns had gone and only a few campfires were still burning… and now he could hear better Harry could hear screams, people running away in panic, and what they were running away from was a crowd of wizards marching in step and casting the occasional spell.

There was sort of a sour taste in Harry's mouth as he stared at the scene. The wizards had masked faces, looking like they were all the same, and some of them were drunkenly cheering or shouting in that loud way that sounded like someone wanted to set up a chant but they were the only person who knew what they were actually trying to chant.

One of them blasted a tent out of the way, and the screams got louder. Then Harry saw the other thing the wizards were doing.

There were four people floating high in the air, like reverse puppets, and they didn't look like they were enjoying it. In fact, two of them were small children, and from the way the wizards laughed as they forced their victims to take funny poses it had to be something awful and cruel.

"That's just sick," Ron said softly.

Harry felt like that was a really correct thing to say, but it didn't quite sum up how horrible this was.

How could people be so nasty about something like this? And there were more wizards joining the group, laughing and pointing as the woman was flipped upside down so her nightdress revealed her drawers.

"We're going to help the Ministry," Mr. Weasley shouted, as Hermione and Ginny got out of their tent and as the adult Weasleys appeared with their wands. "Get into the woods and stick together!"

"But we can help-" Neville began, and Sirius caught his shoulder sharply.

"Neville, I know how you feel," he said tightly. "I've felt that way as well. But the best thing for you is to get to safety."

"He's right," George agreed. "Come on, Nev."

Harry followed his friends through the darkness towards the nearby wood, catching the blurs of motion as first Neville and then Hermione dropped into their Animagus forms. It seemed to help them see better, and Harry was sure that nobody wanted to actually get in the way of a big toothy velociraptor.

The light wasn't very good, and Harry thought about providing some bluebell flames – then wondered if that would mean he'd get in trouble for doing magic outside of school.

That seemed like a silly thing to worry about, once he considered it a bit more, but then he realized that maybe just providing a lot of light would give the marchers somewhere else to come and look at and find people to be nasty at.

Thinking about that made Harry look back, and he saw that the crowd of marchers had got larger than ever. There were lots of Ministry wizards, now, but they were having trouble working out what to do and how they could save the Muggles from their plight without accidentally making them fall.

Suddenly, Harry realized something.

"I'm going back to help!" he said, turning and taking off with a flap of his wings.

"You what?" Ron demanded, before Harry was in the air and looking for Sirius.

"Harry – Harry!?" Sirius demanded in a strangled whisper, as Harry landed next to him. "What are you doing here?"

There was a whoosh of red light not far away, and Sirius glanced quickly back at the source before returning his attention to Harry – or most of it, at least, though Harry could quite understand why Sirius was still keeping some of his focus on the riot happening not far away.

"I just realized," Harry explained, the words sort of tumbling out of his mouth as he spread a wing to shield Sirius from any errant spells. "The Muggles – you can't do anything too big because they'll fall – but I can block the spells and then you can can catch them!"

"You-" Sirius started, then stopped and took a deep breath. "Okay. Okay, that – that sounds like it might work, but I don't – we'll need to get some more wizards to help, I can't catch four people myself."

Harry nodded, then winced as a tent got blasted out of the way.

Why couldn't they just walk around the tents or something? Or at least use a spell like the Levitation Charm to move them out of the way?

Then again, maybe causing trouble was the point.

It didn't look like the marchers were about to march through the area where Harry's tent was, so hopefully his things were going to be okay.

"Let's get a bit further back," Sirius added, gesturing to Harry. "Bloody hell, I didn't think they were still-"

"Incarcerous!" someone called, and a figure on the edge of the mob was bound up in magically conjured ropes. That led to drunken jeering, and then cheers as one of the Muggles was dropped six feet before the masked wizards raised them back up in the air again.

It looked like it had been a sort of warning, a look-what-we-could-do, and Harry felt like he wanted to set fire to the wizards who were doing it.

He wasn't going to, but it was sort of tempting to go all Smaug.

For the next several minutes, Harry tried to work out more of the details of what was going on – what the Ministry wizards were doing about everything, as well as anything else it might be good to know – as Sirius tried to find other wizards who could come and help.

It didn't look like anyone was really in charge of the Ministry wizards, it was all people coming out and helping without any real plan going on, and that meant instead of going to whoever was in charge Sirius had to go and ask people one by one. Mr. Weasley was an obvious choice, but the other Weasleys were spread out and hard to find and Sirius just had to pick who he could get. That left them with Sirius himself, Mr. Weasley, a fellow by the name of Sturgis Podmore who Harry vaguely recognized from somewhere or other, and Mr. Diggory who Harry thought was called Amos.

When Harry explained his plan, Mr. Podmore gave him a serious look and then gave Sirius a look. "Do you think this is going to work?"

"Harry's scales bounce just about every spell we've tried," Sirius replied. "It's a lot safer than someone going over on a broom, and he's almost invisible when it's this dark."

Harry twitched a wing a bit, feeling slightly nervous, and Sirius crouched down on one knee.

"You can back out if you want, Harry," he said. "Nobody here would think less of you if you just got to safety."

The young dragon shook his head. "I'm going to do it," he insisted. "Do I need to wait?"

"You should go as soon as-" Sirius began, but Mr. Podmore held up a hand. "Hold on..."

He squinted into the darkness, then nodded. "I think that's Director Bones."

"As soon as you like, Harry," Sirius resumed, and Harry took off without another word.

From overhead it looked like the riot was actually quite small, compared to the campsite, which sort of made sense with how huge the campsite was to hold nearly a hundred thousand people. They were in tents that could hold a lot more people than Muggle tents, but then again the tents were often a lot bigger as well and they weren't all that close together.

Harry glanced over at the nearby wood where his friends were, not seeing anything, then banked around a little and beat his wings hard. Twice, three times, then he spread them out as wide as possible and dropped right over the marchers.

Someone shouted in surprise, and a red jet of light hit Harry's right wing with an ineffectual explosion of sparks. Then he was past, and he pulled up and flipped around to see what was going on.

The two Muggle adults and the girl were floating over to the side, much more gently now, but the boy was being pulled this way and that by a kind of magical tug-of-war and starting to cry.

He looked like he was about six, and Harry dove back down again to regain speed before pulling up directly underneath the young boy. That broke the spells, and the boy fell about a foot before Harry's forelimbs grabbed him around the waist.

Flying as hard as he could manage, Harry got hit by two more spells he didn't recognize before he was into the 'safe' area that wasn't over the rioters. He slowed down, spreading his wings to shed speed and juggling the boy from two limbs to four, and set him down as gently as possible on the grass.

"Are you a superhero?" the boy said. "How can you fly?"

Harry started to wonder how he was going to explain that, especially the whole 'dragon' thing that wouldn't be visible to a Muggle anyway, but then he noticed a series of brilliant flashes of light reflecting off the tents.

While he'd been focused entirely on getting the boy to safety, the Ministry wizards had started properly casting spells now they didn't have to worry about endangering the Muggles. There were so many going on it was a bit hard to tell, and now it was the people who'd been around the marchers who were starting to run away, but none of them were Apparating away.

Maybe that was something the Aurors had done.

The marchers themselves were starting to cast spells as well, and then there was a brilliant green flash over in the wood and a gigantic magical shape ascended into the air.

It was like a skull made of emerald stars, with a snake for a tongue, and as it rose everything went completely silent. The fighting had suddenly stopped, everyone on both sides turning to stare, and Harry couldn't blame them.

Then a staccato wave of cra-cr-crack broke the silence, as dozens of wizards (and witches?) disapparated, most of them the ones wearing the robes and masks at first.

"What happened to the Anti-Disapparition jinx?" someone demanded, loudly enough that Harry could hear them.

There was a reply, which Harry didn't hear, and the same voice spoke up again. "Someone put together a team and find whoever cast the Dark Mark!"

"Harry!" Sirius called. "Over here!"

A jet of red and gold sparks flashed into the air, and after looking for a moment Harry saw that Sirius was the one casting them. The rest of the Muggles were there as well, now safely on the ground, and Harry tapped the boy he'd rescued on the shoulder.

"Let's go and see your mum and dad," he suggested.

That got a nod, and then the boy looked at him more closely.

"Are you Hurry Man, then?" he asked. "Like Superman but being fast?"

"Harry's my name," Harry told him. "What's yours?"

"John," the boy said, as they started to walk. "Do you have a secret name like Superman?"

Everything was all very confusing, and Harry didn't have much more idea what was going on than John did, but it seemed like the best thing he could do to help at the moment was make sure John got to the rest of his family.

That way he could also ask Sirius what on earth had just happened.

As it happened, the Muggle family was the one who owned the fields they'd all been camping on. They'd made an awful lot of money over the last couple of weeks, by the sound of it, so Harry was happy for them in that at least – though they did seem terribly confused about where all the magic and things had suddenly come from.

Harry wondered if that was just the parents being unobservant or whether they'd been having their memories modified, which was a bit of a weird topic by itself to think about, but as the person in their little group with the most understanding of the Muggle world he was quickly involved in trying to reassure all four of them about what was going on.

That meant answering some questions from John's parents, and being introduced to his sister (called Susie, who was about a year younger than John was) and then just talking about things for a few minutes while everything calmed down. Harry was told about a book called The Three Little Wolves And The Big Bad Pig, which they'd clearly both enjoyed quite a lot, and it did give Harry a giggle when Susie said that the Big Bad Pig had to use dynamite to break down the house made of steel.

Clearly the wolves had a much better idea of how to keep people out than the pigs from the original story did, but then again the pig was much better at getting into places than the wolf was. It all seemed to balance out nicely.

When everything was a bit more calmed down, and it seemed like he could, Harry thanked both of them for the book ideas and went over to Sirius.

"I should go and see how the others are," he suggested. "They might not know that the trouble's over now."

Sirius agreed to that readily, and glanced over his shoulder at the ex-riot. "I think Arthur and Charlie went off to the woods, so they might already have found them," he advised.

"What's going to happen to the people who got caught?" Harry asked, halting halfway through raising his wings for takeoff as an idea occurred to him.

"They're going to be in big trouble, I think," Sirius guessed. "Some of Moldy's supporters got out of trouble by claiming they were acting under the Imperius curse, but nobody's going to believe that today."

"What if they really were?" Harry asked. "Didn't you get in trouble for something you didn't do?"

"That was Crouch's fault," Sirius replied darkly. "Fudge had better be more careful, but he's going to want to make an example. This was a great World Cup final until this happened."

He shook his head. "Sorry, I'm – go find your friends, Harry."

Harry gave Sirius a slightly worried look, then raised his wings the rest of the way and jumped into the air. His first downwards wingbeat came at the same moment, launching him higher, and then he powered up into the air in earnest.

Usefully, if in a slightly macabre way, the glowing green skull overhead which someone had called the Dark Mark lit up the wood well enough that Harry could see some of what was going on.

There were lots of confused wizards and witches wandering around the outside, some of them hesitantly raising wands to cast Wand-Lighting Charms and others consulting what looked like maps of the campsite before setting off to try and find their tents.

Then Harry spotted a cluster of shapes near a clearing, not far from directly underneath the Dark Mark, and looked more closely for a moment before realizing that one of them was a dinosaur. That meant it could only really be one group of people, and Harry slipped lower before landing again with a thump.

"...but it wasn't the House-Elf!" Dean was saying, looking at a group of Ministry wizards that seemed to include Percy's boss Mr. Crouch.

"He's right!" agreed Luna Lovegood, who much to Harry's surprise turned out to be there too. "It was someone in an invisibility cloak!"

"Aren't you Xenophilius' daughter?" someone asked. "This isn't another of those Quibbler stories, is it?"

"The Quibbler is a serious investigative paper," Luna said. "Besides, we caught him."

Mr. Crouch looked suddenly very worried, and Luna reached up to just in front of where Fred and George were standing.

She pulled at thin air, and a sudden ripple of silvery fabric flowed away to reveal the sandy-haired head of a wizard about the same age as Sirius.

"What is this nonsense?" Mr. Crouch demanded. "One of you must have cast the Mark, and you've put this boy-"

"Barty!" Mr. Weasley interrupted. "Isn't that your son? I thought he was dead!"

"And he would have gotten away with it, too," Luna said serenely. "If it wasn't for us meddling kids and our Animaguses."

Harry wasn't entirely sure why Dean and Hermione promptly fell over laughing. It was educational, though, because he'd never seen a dromaeosaur laugh before.

Even later, after everyone had tried to explain what had happened and Barty Crouch (both of them) had been taken away by the Aurors, Harry still found it a little hard to get his head around what had happened.

Based on everything that everyone said, it seemed as though the younger Barty had been under an invisibility cloak up in the Top Box. He'd stolen a wand – Harry thought he recognized it as Draco's one, but he might have been wrong – and then cast the Dark Mark later on during the riot.

Harry wasn't entirely clear on whether he'd cast it because he wanted to help the rioters get away, like Director Bones seemed to think, or whether it was for some other reason, but either way he'd had the bad luck to do it practically on top of all of Harry's friends and had been unable to get away from being flattened by Lapcat and Clever Girl and put in armlocks by both the Weasley Twins.

Then there'd been some terribly confusing moments when the Ministry people had shown up, and Mr. Crouch's House-Elf Winky had briefly been accused of being the one to cast the Dark Mark because the wand had landed next to her.

It sounded like Mr. Crouch was in an absolutely tremendous amount of trouble, because he'd helped his son escape from Azkaban, and Sirius seemed quite cheerful about the whole thing.

Harry did worry a bit about what Percy was going to do now, but presumably he'd just stay in much the same job for whoever replaced Mr. Crouch.

If this sort of thing was going to happen every World Cup, though, Harry would gladly stay home for future ones.

Getting the news over the next few days proved to be really quite interesting.

There was a special issue of the Quibbler that just reprinted all their reporting on Mr. Crouch with a big banner headline saying TOLD YOU SO, which wasn't exactly professional but it was very funny indeed. The Daily Prophet went into a bit more of the details, and continued to do so as the various details slowly unfolded.

Harry found out that the name used for Tom Riddle's followers was 'Death Eaters', which was one of those names where he wasn't sure if it was very clever or very silly. It had death in it, and sounded intimidating, but if you actually thought about it then it didn't make much sense for what they were.

If they ate death, wouldn't that mean they'd be reducing the total amount of death in an area? And death didn't sound like the sort of thing you'd want to eat, either, because if anything was going to be dangerous to your health when you ate it it would be death.

Harry sort of pondered that for quite a while, but eventually decided it wasn't especially relevant to the actual news – which was that there'd been two Death Eaters captured during the riot, before the rest had got away thanks to Barty Crouch Jr. breaking the Anti-Disapparition Jinx with the use of the Dark Mark.

(According to the paper that had been a mistake by the Ministry, because that wasn't actually supposed to happen, and 'steps' were being taken to rectify the problem.)

The two Death Eaters who'd actually been captured were a whole scandal by themselves, because one of them was called MacNair and he was the one who executed magical beasts that needed executing. There were 'concerns at the highest level' about whether his previous cases should be reopened, and Minister Fudge was quoted as 'assuring' the paper that 'the legal process would be followed in this matter and in all the others raised'.

Harry thought that was only sensible. Sirius was a good example of what happened when the legal process wasn't followed.

The other one who'd been caught was called Avery, and like MacNair he was one of the ones who'd said that the Imperius Curse had been used on him to make him commit crimes back in the past. That wasn't going to work this time, by the sounds of it, and the trial was scheduled for just before the start of the Hogwarts term.

The various other drunk people who'd been marching alongside the Death Eaters were being investigated as well and were probably going to get into some sort of trouble, but it wasn't nearly as clear.

Then there was the two Barty Crouches, which was just plain confusing and made Harry start to wonder about how plurals worked with more than one Barty Crouch. They were both going to Azkaban as well, in the younger Crouch's case because he was technically supposed to still be there in the first place and in the older Crouch's case because of helping the younger one get out of Azkaban. (There still needed to be a trial about that one, but nobody really thought he was going to be getting out of it.)

It was really kind of a strange feeling, having all this going on. It was like reading the bit in The Sapphire Rose where all the politics stuff happened in the Elene holy city, only it was happening to actual people Harry had seen and met and indeed involving events he'd seen and participated in.

"Do you mind talking about what happened during the war?" Harry asked, one evening.

Sirius looked up from the book he was reading. "That's a very good question."

Harry got up from his chair, pushing himself up with his wings until he overbalanced and dropped onto the floor, and absorbed the impact by thumping down onto both forelegs.

Walking around a bit, he looked at the book Sirius was reading.

"I think he's there," he said, tapping a claw.

"Wow, thanks," Sirius groaned. "I was enjoying the challenge."

He poked the book with the back end of his wand. "Do you think it'd be better if they were moving around?"

"Probably not," Harry judged. "Unless they just did the same few things over and over again."

"Might have to try that," Sirius said, putting away Where's Wally. "Anyway… what sort of thing did you want to know?"

"Mostly what it felt like," Harry said. "Whether it was like what happened at the World Cup. That sort of thing."

"Well… in a way, it was," Sirius replied. "The whole thing that Moldy Voldie was doing was about scaring people. We never knew how many actual supporters he had, because it was hard to tell."

He hissed through his teeth. "That's what Barty Crouch was sort of doing too, in a way," he added. "Now I think about it. He was using the same sort of fear as Voldie, just not in the same way – he wanted to be Minister for Magic, but of course that didn't work out."

"Do you think that's why he sent you straight to Azkaban?" Harry asked.

"Probably," Sirius agreed. "Anyway, this is getting too depressing. Let's talk about something else."

He snapped his fingers. "I know – what about romance?"

"...pardon?" Harry asked, not at all sure what had suddenly happened to the conversation.

"You're a teenager," Sirius said. "Aren't you supposed to be thinking about that sort of thing all the time? Any school work you do is just sort of a distraction from thinking about romance?"

"Not really, no," Harry replied. "I suppose I like thinking about the characters in the books I read having things work out for them, like Carrot and Angua, but it's just when I'm reading the books really."

"...someone in one of your books is called carrot?" Sirius asked, surprised. "Huh. Anyway… you're sure you're not thinking about it the whole time?"

He paused. "You have had The Talk, haven't you?"

"We got it in Year Six in primary school," Harry answered. "I'm not really sure how much it applied to me, though, and they didn't have a special one for dragons. I thought that was just because I was the only dragon at Little Whinging JMI."

Sirius reached up to stroke his stubbly beard. "Maybe it's just me who spent my entire teenage years thinking about that sort of thing, then..."

Harry thought about it and decided that that was exactly the sort of thing Sirius would probably do.

The way Harry expected to wake up on the morning of the Twenty-First of August was much the same way he'd woken up the last few mornings. With a yawn, and a stretch, then lazily pick up his current book – The Bellmaker, the latest Redwall book, in this case – and go down into the Dogwarts kitchen and argue good-naturedly with Kreacher over what there was for breakfast.

After that, it would be eating breakfast and continuing to read about the Southlands until Sirius arrived for his own breakfast, whereupon they'd decide what to do for the rest of the day.

He got as far as picking up The Bellmaker when Sirius knocked on the door.

"Come in?" Harry said, curious, and Sirius promptly did so.

"Remus is in the hospital," he said, sounding dreadfully worried.

Harry frowned at that, then remembered that it had been a full moon last night – or technically it was probably the full full moon right now, but it had been the night closest to when the moon was full which was what seemed to count.

"What happened?" he asked, putting the book back down on his hoard and picking up his wand instead.

"I don't know, I just got told he was there," Sirius replied. "Andy Flooed me only a few minutes ago."

"Can we go and see him?" Harry asked.

"That's why I came to get you," Sirius confirmed, and stood aside to let Harry out before following him downstairs.

"Do you think it was the jinx on the Defence Against the Dark Arts position?" Harry asked, then threw some Floo powder into the fireplace. "Um… the hospital?"

The fire blew up in a plume of green, but it only lasted a moment before dying down.

"It's St. Mungos," Sirius told him. "And I don't know, but maybe. I didn't – I should have reminded Remus."

"St. Mungos," Harry repeated with his second pawful of Floo powder, and this time it worked. He stepped straight through, holding his wings ready, and caught a glimpse of fireplaces swirling past in all directions before exiting through a big stone fireplace in a slightly beige room. He flared his wings to slow his momentum, but in a way he needn't have bothered – the floor was covered with thick mats sporting a cheerful flower vine pattern, and they squished slightly under the pressure of Harry's feet.

It was the first time Harry had seen a landing room for a fireplace that looked like someone could fall through a fireplace and land safely, and he supposed that made sense for a hospital.

Sirius came through as well, and pointed to a door. "Over there, that's the reception."

Harry followed Sirius' directions, and as they went into the reception room a pleasant-looking wizard smiled at them over the desk.

"Visitors or intake?" he asked.

"Visitors," Sirius said, for both of them. "We're here to see Remus Lupin."

"Well, he's certainly popular!" the wizard said smilingly. "He's on the first floor, the Dai Llewellyn ward. I think he's the only one in there at the moment so he should be easy to find. I'll just make you your passes..."

While that was going on, Harry took a quick look around.

It sort of reminded him of Muggle hospitals he'd seen on television, though where most Muggle hospitals were sort of beige and white and green it looked like they'd started with the beige and white and then decided that the place could do with a bit of colour and put flower patterns on everything.

"There you go," the receptionist said, and Harry pulled himself up to counter level to take his. "The stairs are just over there."

"I wonder who else was visiting," Harry mused.

"Could be Dora and Ted," Sirius suggested. "Andy works here but they'd count as visitors."

Harry supposed that was possible, but he wasn't certain.

One of the things that caught Harry's eye was, oddly enough, that all the doorknobs and door handles were made of silver. It seemed to be real silver, as well, rather than just something that looked like silver, because there was a little bit of tarnish on one of them.

Harry wondered if there was a reason for that as they climbed up to the first floor, but when they entered the corridor leading to the Dai Llewellyn ward they could hear raised voices.

"That doesn't sound good," Sirius said, hurrying up a bit, and promptly got scolded by a mediwitch for running in the corridors.

From what Harry could hear, it sounded like there was an argument with Remus on one side and two or three voices on the other side – none of which sounded like Ted or Dora. They were saying something about packs, and then Harry and Sirius rounded the corner and saw what was going on.

Remus was lying in a hospital bed with beige sheets, and he had some quite extravagant wound dressings on his left side and a cast on his right arm. He really looked like he'd been in the wars, with several smaller injuries – mostly scratches – and a bandage around his forehead.

"Merlin, Moony, what happened?" Sirius asked, stopping in the doorway.

"You should see the other guy," Remus replied, then winced. "Well, you can't, but..."

"Exactly!" said a scruffy-looking witch, who sounded like one of the ones who'd been arguing before.

Refocusing on the whole room instead of just Remus, Harry realized there were nearly a dozen other witches and wizards there. A couple of them looked older than Sirius and Remus were, but most of them were quite young – one looked only a year or so out of Hogwarts, but Harry didn't recognize him.

"Who did that?" Sirius asked. "Why haven't they healed you yet?"

He clenched his fist. "If it's because you're a werewolf-"

"No, they can't," Remus interrupted. "And – it sort of is?"

He took a deep breath, then let it out again. "It was Fenrir."

"Fenrir Greyback?" Sirius repeated. "The Fenrir Greyback?"

"Unless you know another one," Remus replied. "He confronted me just before the full moon rose, said I deserved what I was getting for being a tame dog."

"But he's dead now," the young wizard piped up. "And that means Remus is our new alpha!"

"That's not how alphas work," Harry said.

Everyone else – all the people who Harry realized suddenly were all werewolves – turned to look at Harry in surprise.

"In zoos you get an alpha who's in charge because they scare the other wolves," Harry tried to explain. "But in the wild, a pack is just a family, and the alphas are the mother and father of the cubs."

"Are you sure?" a sallow-cheeked witch asked, and Harry shrugged his wings.

"It's what my friend June says, and she's a wolf so she'd know."

"Oh, I see," said a big wizard who seemed to be the oldest person in the room. "So that means Remus is our new father. That makes more sense."

Harry wasn't really sure he followed that.

The Tonkses visited a bit later, shortly after a long argument had reluctantly cooled down, and Andromeda Tonks told Harry and Sirius (and the quietly listening werewolves) that Remus was probably going to take a couple of months to heal but that they were fairly sure he would heal eventually.

It was just that he'd have to heal at the normal slow Muggle speed. Ordinarily they'd be worried about someone getting a bit more werewolf-ish even if they'd been attacked by a werewolf who was in human form, and Fenrir had been in wolf form, but since Remus was already a werewolf it wasn't really possible for him to get more werewolf.

Werewolf was starting to lose meaning as a word, as far as Harry was concerned.

It also turned out that none of the wolves in what Fenrir Greyback had called his pack had actually had a proper education. There were five of them who were witches or wizards, none of whom had gone to Hogwarts because their parents hadn't wanted to risk it, and two Muggles who'd actually been orphaned by Fenrir's attacks and who he'd then effectively kidnapped.

That led Harry to ask how Remus had killed Fenrir, and Remus had explained that they'd fought almost entirely as werewolves. But Fenrir had been animalistic and enraged, just like most werewolves, while Remus had been on a dose of Wolfsbane and as such had been able to actually plan and think.

He'd also snagged his wand and cast a silent Reductor curse, which Fenrir hadn't been expecting.

"And good riddance!" Dora Tonks said firmly. "He's been a bastard for decades."

The sallow-cheeked witch bristled slightly, but the big wizard held out a hand and she quietened down.

Then there was a knock at the door, and Dumbledore peeked around the threshold.

"Good morning, everyone," he said cheerfully. "I do hope I'm not interrupting anything?"

Harry looked at Remus, and so did everyone else.

"Come in, Professor," he said.

Dumbledore duly entered, observed the seating situation in the room – which was that all the unused beds had people sitting on them – and conjured a chair with a single swift wand movement, before sitting down.

"I do hope you are on the mend, Remus," he said. "I would have sent a gift basket, but I decided I should bring it myself."

Putting action to words, he reached into one of the pockets of his robes and drew out a large wicker basket full of fruit and chocolates.

"I had to guess what you would like," he explained. "So if there is something that is not to your liking, please do re-gift it; I won't mind."

He turned a still-cheerful gaze on the werewolves. "And who are your friends?"

"We're the Lupin pack," the youngest of the werewolves said quickly, before anyone else could answer.

Remus muttered something, then shifted in bed slightly to get a little more comfortable.

"Charmed, I'm sure," Dumbledore proclaimed himself. "Though not Transfigured, and I should hope no more than slightly Potioned. In any case, Mr. Lupin, I fear I must ask how long you expect to be indisposed."

"He should be right as rain by the end of the year," Andromeda Tonks told him. "But I expect he won't be out of the bed for a few weeks at least, cursed injuries aren't to be trifled with."

"Alas," Dumbledore said, saddened. "It seems I shall have to interview someone new for the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. We do seem to go through them."

"I think that's a real shame," Harry added, voicing his opinion. "You've been the best Defence teacher we've ever had, except perhaps for the one who was using a fake name."

"Watch it," Dora warned, waving her finger.

"I would remind you not to meddle in the affairs of dragons, miss Tonks," Dumbledore pointed out. "Even the pleasant dragons like Mr. Potter should not be trifled with, as I myself learned just earlier this month."

"Dragon?" asked one of the Muggle werewolves. "What does he mean, dragon?"

"Ah, interesting," Dumbledore added. "I am sure that Harry or Remus will be able to explain everything to you in due time."

He turned his attention to Harry. "And before it slips my mind, Mr. Potter, I wished to inform you that the language project will be going ahead quite as originally planned."

"I'm afraid I don't know what that project is, Professor," Harry admitted.

"Well, then, far be it from me to spoil the surprise," Dumbledore decided.

Harry turned that problem over and over in his mind for the rest of the summer holidays, but wasn't quite able to work out what Dumbledore had meant.

Perhaps it was how distracted he was anyway. Remus being unwell meant that almost every day of the holidays saw a visit to him, and then there was a flurry of getting-ready for the next School Year that had to be done – no need for new robes, but there were new Defence books to be got when the amended supply note went out, and Harry would never miss a chance to stock up on new books of all kinds.

Then there was getting ready for the Spelljammer bit of the dungeons and dragons game, and keeping up with the news as the Death Eaters were imprisoned (in Azkaban, of course) and the drunken marchers ended up with quite stiff fines.

It all added up, and in an odd sort of way Harry was quite relieved when September the First came around and it was time to go and catch the train.

AN:

Does Luna know what she's referencing?

Good question…

As for the Remus thing, well, the DADA curse in this case just decided to knock off an A and curse him to be DAD.