Between the cloak and the map, it was easy enough for Harry and Hermione to find an empty room near the infirmary to hide and wait for their personal timelines to unloop. They caught each other up on what they'd seen, and then Hermione cast a cushioning charm on the floor and took a power nap: she hadn't gotten a couple of hours of sleep while trying to meditate the way Harry had, the first time through, and their bodies were convinced it was closer to three in the morning than midnight.
Once Harry spotted Dumbledore leave the infirmary and his and Hermione's names vanish, he woke her to head out. "I guess The Ancient One is her name," Harry showed Hermione the map. "Our names kept flickering back and forth while we were in two places."
"It's probably not her actual name," Hermione figured. "It's based off of the wards, so it knows whatever name they know. I wonder how it decides, and what it would do if someone was in disguise." Her sleepy brain filed that supposition away for later consideration.
They came walking into the infirmary maybe thirty seconds after their friends had seen them vanish, to muted cheering from the beds. "I take it you were successful?" the Ancient One asked.
"Thank you for the loan of this relic, ma'am," Harry said, handing the Eye back to her. She nodded and put it back under her robes. "I needed it and astral projection to get the Mindless Ones to leave. I… may have disintegrated a couple? Hopefully that won't make them mad."
"I expect the Dread Dormammu has little consideration for the individual beings in his service," she said. "But I look forward to checking the site and hearing all about it in the morning. You should probably rest. Time travel is strenuous."
Harry glanced down at the map and saw that Albus Dumbledore and Cornelius Fudge were in the headmaster's office. "One more thing to take care of. Hermione, do you want to come?"
"No, I'll stay and catch everyone up," she demurred, not ready to face the Minister and headmaster at the moment. She handed him the container with Pettigrew inside. The petrification had worn off, and he scrabbled in futility at the stone of the makeshift cage. At some point, Hermione had added a silencing charm to the cage so he hadn't been able to overhear them talking about their adventures in time.
"Okay. I'll see you in the morning," Harry told everyone. As soon as he was out in the hallway, he scoped out which course through the castle seemed to avoid prefects, teachers, and Filch and let his cloak cover him as he made the ascent.
Between the cloak and the map, he realized he probably could get away with a lot.
"Excuse me," Harry told the gargoyle guarding the headmaster's office, "but I have something that the headmaster and the Minister will want to see. It's important."
A few moments later, the gargoyle stepped aside and he was able to take the stairs up to the office. Inside, he'd seemingly interrupted an argument. Cornelius Fudge was slightly red faced, while Dumbledore was looking deliberately calm. "How can we help you, Harry?" the headmaster asked. "You should be abed."
"We found him, sir… sirs," Harry said, gesturing to the rat in the cage. "And we have a professor and nine students that heard him confess to framing Sirius. Professor Snape may have seen him, too, but he was running up so I don't know if he heard it."
"Aha, I take it this is our other illegal animagus?" Dumbledore twinkled.
"Or you've just brought me a rat," Fudge huffed.
"I can do the animagus reversion spell if you want proof, sir," Harry shrugged, setting the cage on the floor. He made sure the office door was closed and that there wasn't anything immediately obvious for the rat to crawl under.
"Can you, indeed?" the headmaster asked.
"We all learned it," Harry nodded. Taking that as permission, he flicked his wand to undo the transfiguration creating the cage door. As the rat made a break for some kind of hiding spot, he swiftly incanted, "Morphic Truth of Fylgja!"
Squealing in pain at the unexpected forced transformation, the gray rat swiftly sprawled into Peter Pettigrew. Dumbledore swished his own wand to bind the man in glowing teal chains, trussing him up so he couldn't stand, as well as conjuring a gag for his mouth. "An excellent demonstration of the spell, my boy. Twenty points to Gryffindor for you and your classmates' hard work on a difficult but surprisingly-useful spell."
"Thank you, sir," Harry said. "As you can see, that's Peter Pettigrew. Since he's still alive, that means that he had to willingly give my family up to Voldemort." Fudge twitched at the name. "And you should be able to interrogate him to get him to explain how he framed Sirius for the rest of it."
The Minister frowned at the spectacle on the floor, thinking through his options, and finally said, "As we've discussed before, young man, Sirius Black will have to turn himself in for another trial with this new information."
Harry shook his head, "We can discuss that after Pettigrew is tried and sent to prison. I doubt Sirius wants to risk coming into public right now until he's sure you've gotten the Dark Dimension to call off the Mindless Ones."
"He's still an escaped prisoner and an unregistered animagus."
"And the last heir of the Black family lands. How long until the statute is up on those being claimed by other families?" Harry asked, enjoying watching the Minister realize that he knew. The girls had found some other things about Vanir law while trying to free Buckbeak. "I think we could get some people to speak on the idea that the Ministry shouldn't be imprisoning an entire family line on poor evidence, as a way to redistribute their property."
"Now, now, Harry," Dumbledore chimed in, "I'm sure we all just made an honest mistake, given Peter's conspiratorial framing of the heir of the Black line. And certainly Cornelius would prefer to rectify such a miscarriage before any other landholders got the wrong idea about how politics was being done these days."
"Fine," Fudge admitted, realizing he was beaten for the moment. "But we're wringing an excellent tale from that one and seeing justice done in a full and open althing, so no one will claim anything below board has happened. Yes?"
"As long as Sirius Black can walk free and the man that betrayed my parents suffers a little of what he has, I'm happy," Harry shrugged, nodding in grim satisfaction as Pettigrew twitched at the realization that Harry would never have been as easy to persuade as he'd hoped.
"Excellent," the headmaster twinkled, "I shall work up a more permanent and secure method of transporting the prisoner so he cannot simply turn into a rat and escape. And young minds should be getting to bed."
"Thank you, headmaster. Minister," Harry said. He granted one last wary glance to Pettigrew, worried that he still might escape, but figured it was out of his hands unless he wanted to, himself, drag the guy all the way to… wherever the Ministry actually was. He let himself out, and headed back to the dorms to get some sleep. Only Seamus and Neville were fit enough to leave the infirmary cots, so in their dorm it was a quiet few hours before dawn.
On Mondays, Harry's first period was optional flying time, so he was able to go check his friends in the infirmary first thing, then get breakfast, and plan to go show the Ancient One the pond. Lupin wasn't in either the infirmary or at breakfast, which worried Harry slightly, especially when he heard the first-years at the table talking about how they had their second period free now, since defense was cancelled.
He found Lupin on the map, and saw that he was in his office, rather than just sleeping it off in his bedroom. When he poked his head in, he saw that the professor was carefully packing up what little adornment he'd managed to put into the space over the past months. "Oh, hey," Lupin told him. "I was going to come find you."
"You're leaving? Right now?" Harry asked, shutting the door behind him.
"Yeah. The scary bald lady is going to give me a ride back to Asia. I'd been thinking about bumming around there anyway."
"But you have like three more months of classes?" Harry boggled.
"Eh. I'd kind of already taught you everything I could think of. I was really scraping for more subjects. It'll give you an extra couple of hours a week for homework." Seeing that Harry was about to argue, Lupin explained, "It's not safe for me here. Maybe not anywhere. I could have killed someone last night. Not sure how I didn't."
"You've gotta be safer here than back on Earth, though?" Harry suggested.
"No. It's something about the moon. I'm on edge the whole time I'm here. It's different from Earth's moon, somehow. Really explains the origin of the word 'lunatic,' you know?"
"Yeah… we kind of guessed you were a werewolf."
"That's what Dumbledore wanted. It's why he had me go by 'Remus Lupin' while I was here. Figured if they noticed there was a problem, people would feel safer thinking I was only a danger one night a month than any time I got mad."
"What's your real name? If I can ask?"
"Bruce. Bruce Banner," he admitted. "Using the wrong name wasn't that weird, if that's what you're thinking. It was during the war, so a lot of Midgardborn got an alias, just in case Death Eaters tried to go after them on Earth. I bet your mother's name wasn't really Lily Jones."
"Lily Evans," Harry nodded. "We found that out a few years ago. Aunt Pepper tracked down my mom's sister. She sends us passive-aggressive Christmas cards and obviously wants nothing to do with me." He thought about it for a second and admitted, "Except the one we got this year was really nice. I bet she figured out that I'm rich, or something."
"Yeah. What's it like, being famous instead of infamous?" Lupin… Banner, gave a self-deprecating smile.
"I don't like it. But I guess I'd like people coming after me all the time even less. How'd you…"
"Get big and green? It was stupid. I thought I'd worked out how to combine some of the old Captain America research with gamma radiation so it would keep me alive long enough to basically burn out the part of my brain the… the other guy lives in. Wound up just super charging him. Dumbest thing I've ever done."
"But it also worked on the spiky one?" Harry remembered.
Banner shrugged, "Guess so. My family's descended from berserkers, according to Dumbledore. That guy seemed like a real gung-ho military type, so maybe he is too. It would be an interesting thing to work out if, you know, it wouldn't mean turning a bunch of American soldiers into rage monsters."
"That sucks. So… um, you're basically going to be doing all escape and evasion stuff back on Earth?"
"Yeah. Help what people I can. See if I can figure out another solution for making sure I don't have any more incidents."
"Well," Harry sighed, pulling out a pen and writing a couple of pieces of information on a scrap of paper. "That's my email address and phone number if you need help. Or are just in the neighborhood."
Banner took it, looked it over, and put it in with his stuff. "Thanks. I doubt it will ever be safe, but I'm glad to have it. It's a celebrity phone number." He gave a wan smile. "Don't really expect any contact, though. Last guy I was in touch with, the government intercepted our emails and went after both of us."
Harry chuckled, "We met a crazy guy over Christmas telling us the same thing. I'll ask Tony about working out some better encrypted chat that SHIELD can't even get into."
"You won't know that they can, until they do," Banner shrugged. "But it's so weird that you can just get Tony Stark to make you stuff."
"It's a little weird for me too," Harry agreed. "I better go find the 'scary bald lady' and show her the pond so she can take you home. See you around."
"You too," Banner gave him a wave as he let himself out of the office.
Harry still had plenty of time to meet the Ancient One and have Hagrid lead them out to the pond (he left a student in charge of his upper-year morning class). He explained everything that happened as they went, and she wound up using the Eye to scry back to the night before and add her own observations to his story. "The site is still turbulent, but I think with your godfather gone, they shall not attempt to return until it settles," she finally decided. "Were it not for the government's foolish agreements with the Dread Dormammu, they would not be able to come and go as easily as they do."
"I just hope they figure out how to call them off of Sirius," Harry agreed. "I've been talking to Aunt Pepper. We can hire lawyers."
"Truly a beast more terrifying than those of the deepest dimensions," the Ancient One smirked. "Oh, and that was an excellent astral projection for one so young. We shall attempt to further refine your technique at 'summer camp' this year."
"Sounds good to me, ma'am," Harry agreed. "I'm still not sure I could do it if I didn't have to, you know?"
Harry managed to get to Flitwick's class just in time, and found that most of his housemates were also there—heavily bandaged, but there. Ron told him, "Pomfrey probably isn't going to clear Ginny to fly in time for the last quidditch match, so Wood says you're up."
"Great," Harry sighed. "Just when I thought I was already done with stressful things this year."
"Sure you were, Harry," Padma said, sliding into the seat next to him. He had clearly forgotten both that this was a class with the Ravenclaws and that it was now Padma's turn.
Ron hadn't forgotten that a new dating cycle was dawning. He had happily sat next to Hermione, and Lavender (off the rotation that month) was trying desperately to hide her jealousy. Neville and Parvati had paired off, and mostly seemed nervous that they both often relied on other members of the study group to help them in Flitwick's class. Dean, who was paired with Luna that cycle so didn't have to share classes with his date, just looked smug at Harry across his broken arm.
He basically only saw Padma in classes that week: Wood had somehow captured every bit of free time Harry had to get him back up to the older boy's exacting quidditch standards before the match. Harry was really remembering why he had gone to alternate in the first place. "Are you going to class?" he checked, one day, when Wood was drilling him solo during one of Harry's free periods.
Wood waved him off, "It'll keep. I'm graduatin' anyway. Now, aboot yer dive…"
The other problem of the week was the not-so-subtle attempts to injure him. Malfoy blew up a cauldron as he was passing in chemistry. Crabbe and Goyle tried to knock him down the stairs leaving history. And in the hallways, it seemed like there was always someone in green attempting to trip him when he was somewhere precarious. The rest of his year-mates started walking around him like a team of bodyguards as they moved between classes. This was especially amusing since most of them were still healing from their own injuries achieved in the fight with the Hulk.
"Why have the Slytherins been trying to kill me all week?" he finally asked of his teammates, as they were suiting up in the locker rooms on Sunday morning.
"They've been trying to kill all of us," one of the twins noted.
The other explained, "We're out of alternates, with Ron and Ginny injured."
The first picked up, "They injure one of us, and we're down a member."
"You especially. If you're out, we'd have to field someone untested, and Malfoy controls the game," the other finished.
"And we just have to win?" he checked.
"Pretty much, since then we'd be undefeated," Wood agreed. "But Slytherin's been doin' weel on points, so if ye can wait 'til we're up fifty, t'will be a blowout."
"Don't catch the snitch until we're up fifty, got it," Harry nodded. He was honestly feeling a little pressured to put on a good showing to impress the rest of his house. His adventure that year hadn't really been as glorious as fighting a giant snake. He hadn't even gotten that close to the Hulk, and didn't have any trophies from the Mindless Ones he'd disintegrated.
That was the classic problem with disintegration.
"Ready to lose the house cup for your team, Potter?" Draco asked as soon as they were both flying above the stadium.
"And just when I thought I wasn't going to have to have one of our little talks this year," Harry sighed.
"You've been letting Weaslette do this for you all year. You must be pretty rusty. Like an old door. Might as well just concede now," the nattering continued, no matter how Harry tried to float away from the other boy.
"I don't get it," he finally tried. "You keep coming after me and you keep losing. That's got to be costing you cool points with your house?"
"What's a 'cool point?'"
"Oh, right, you wouldn't know anything about being cool," Harry nodded.
"Stupid mudblood slang," Draco rolled his eyes.
"Wait, maybe it's like game matchmaking. You're so far below me that you don't really lose anything for me beating you, but if you actually got lucky and beat me, your Elo score would go way up. Is that what we're doing?"
"Shut it, Potter," the blond boy snarled, realizing that, yes, that might actually be very close to the truth, even though he didn't know what an Elo was.
"I thought you wanted to chat. Ooh, that looked like a bad hit." Below them, the match was pretty brutal. The Slytherin team had doubled down on mass to go with their faster brooms, and was trying to basically wrecking ball their way through the Gryffindor team. But the girls were more agile, and kept dodging. One of the Slytherin chasers had just collided with their own beater. "How much are we up? I'm supposed to wait until it's a blowout to win."
"I'll show you a blowout!" Draco announced, trying to use the distraction of everyone focused on the scrum beneath to charge Harry and knock him off his broom. To the boy's credit, he was fast.
"Ow, damnit!" Harry said as the slightly-bigger boy collided with him. To Draco's chagrin, Harry managed to hang onto his broom. "What the hell is even wrong with you?" Harry asked, righting his broom and actually warily paying attention to the other boy.
"Nothing," Draco snarled, unable to come up with a way to twist that feed line onto Harry.
"Right," Harry rolled his eyes. "You're daddy's perfect, special little boy, yeah? I'm going to tell you something, Draco," he said, deliberately using the other boy's first name. "You're not special. I've run into dozens of kids like you. Some of them, unlike you, are at least interesting."
"Like you're so interesting!" Draco fired back. "Take away the fame you got for not dying with your parents, and what are you?"
Harry honestly gave it a thought. As much as he reflexively discounted Draco's insults, the boy was coming close to something Harry had asked himself. Even in his friend group, he wasn't the smartest, the best fighter, or best at magic. Back on Earth, he got by on his fame and his aunt's relationship to one of the richest men in the world more than he was comfortable with.
What was he?
He finally came up with, "Overachiever, protector, thrill-seeker, leader." He gave Draco a little nod, "Thanks for the pep talk. Is that the snitch?" And then he dove towards the ground.
"Get back here!" Draco shouted and dove after.
Both of them rocketed through the other players, Draco inadvertently helping Harry with his actual plan: disrupting his own team trying to intercept Angelina before she could make a goal. The bell rang across the stadium signaling them getting the points, and Harry glanced up to the scoreboard to see that they were, indeed, 50 points up. It was a shame he hadn't actually seen the snitch. "My mistake," he yelled, narrowly pulling up before eating turf, as Draco twisted up behind him.
"You're a maniac and a liar!" the other boy shouted after him, as they gained more height.
"Maybe," Harry grinned, actually spotting something glint behind Draco. "Hey. Is that the snitch?"
"You won't fool me again, Potter!" Draco yelled as Harry launched himself past, only then turning to follow his path and seeing the glint himself. "No!"
By the time Draco caught up, it was over. Harry had the tiny little golden ball in his hand. "Think about it, Draco," Harry smiled, letting his broom drift back as the other boy made a half-hearted swipe as if to grab the snitch from his hands. "And maybe figure out what you could do to be more interesting."
Leaving the nearly-apoplectic boy in the air, Harry descended toward the screaming crowd, swarming to congratulate him and the rest of the team. "T'was almost a Wronski Feint!" Wood yelled in excitement. "Ye're showin' that tae Ginny!"
"Sure," Harry said. "Of course there's a name for it."
"Usually with that move you're just trying to take out the other seeker," Angelina explained. "Not use him to save my butt."
"You had it. It was just extra insurance," Harry shrugged. "And trying to make Malfoy look like an idiot."
"Done and done," the twins announced in unison.
From above, Dumbledore amplified his voice and announced, "Another marvelous year of quidditch here at Hogwarts. And with an undefeated streak and, I believe, an unrivaled record of points, it's my pleasure to award this year's quidditch cup to Gryffindor!"
Sure, Harry was pleased to have come up with some things he had free and clear of the fame and wealth he'd gotten through no effort on his part. But with the crowd going wild and the promise of a rollicking party to boot, Harry had to admit: sometimes being a celebrity could be pretty cool, too.