There were three thoughts that consoled him about the situation.

His first thought was that it would be the last time. He was able to look at the Number Four, Privet Drive with near fondness at this thought, with the idea that he'd never see the Dursleys again after this. No, Harry, would not miss Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia or his cousin, Dudley. Not one bit.

Second, for the very first time he was not coming alone. Ron and Hermione stood at his back as he rang the doorbell to the Dursley house and waited tentatively for the expected response.

Third, and maybe most importantly was that Harry would be safe. For the next two months Lord Voldemort could not touch Harry. Harry would be in the low-ceilinged heavily becharmed upstairs room of Privet Drive busy planning his attack on Voldemort's five remaining Horcruxes. He would be safely balanced between the fearful hatred of the Dursleys and the blood-battered bones of war.

Safety wasn't something that was likely to happen again until one or both were dead.

Aunt Petunia's eyes narrowed as she answered the ring, looking badly frightened at the trio standing on her doorsteps. She shooed them in like flea-bitten dogs, making them stand on a corner of an old dish rag while peering out the door window to check and see if anyone had seen her unlucky chance.

"Bloody hell." Ron scuffed his feet against the dish rag and teetered on the edge. "The old hag."

Hermione snorted in a superior sort of way. "The old witch!" She had said it loud enough for Harry's aunt to hear.

Aunt Petunia bristled and approached them as if they were circus animals. She eyed Hermione but didn't object to Hermione's use of the 'w' word, probably because of Hermione's foreboding glare. "When my husband comes home," she started haughtily, "we will discuss your stay here and all implications this brings. In the meantime, I expect you to stay in Harry's room, all of you." And she stalked off, muttering under her breath.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione struggled up the narrow stairwell with Harry's school trunk which was bulging with all three friend's possessions. "Enough of this!" Hermione huffed, and slapped her wand against the oak, making the trunk feather light.

"It's not as if the Dursleys aren't aware of magic," Hermione defended. "And the Ministry of Magic wouldn't dare put you on trial for such a silly trifle at a time like this!" Harry, being slightly more acquainted with Scrimgeour, wasn't nearly so certain, but didn't say anything to the contrary.

The room was just as Harry remembered from the summer before. It smelled strongly of bleach and orange smelling spray. Harry suspected that Aunt Petunia had sanitised everything at his departure last July.

"It's not so bad," Hermione said unconvincingly, settling herself on a rug and digging through the trunk for her books. "So what's first?"

Harry didn't answer. He felt very strange, indeed. He had never thought to have his two best friends in the house he'd grown up in. His two worlds had just merged, and he felt the same surrealism as when dementors had glided down Magnolia, Mrs. Figg had turned out to be a Squib, and Aunt Petunia had known what Azkaban was. He looked at Ron curiously, wanting to see his response to his "other life."

Ron had a very strange expression on his face and was looking from the single bed to his two friends. "Erm. So we'll all sleep here?"

Hermione looked up and also got a strange expression on her face. Harry was a bit embarrassed at this and thought he knew what it was about. She waved her wand at the floor and white down blankets appeared out of thin air with two feather mattresses. "Not much room for working, is there?" She moved the trunk into the corner, making herself perfectly at home, piling the books on all three mattresses in what looked like a jumbled heap.

Harry blinked. He had never shared a dorm with Hermione and had had no clue how she lived. Her homework and life had always been in such order, he had just always assumed her room had taken after that. Certainly, there appeared to be a certain order to Hermione's stacks, but he was darned if he could figure it out. There were so many books and so little room, that it was quite hopeless. The stacks grew mountainous and he now understood why the trunk had been so very heavy.

Ron looked surprised at the clutter as well, and together they inched backwards to make room for extra heaps of books. Hermione wasn't paying much attention to the two boys, just rummaged some more, stopping every now and then to fondle a particularly old and lethal looking volume tenderly and tuck it carefully onto the fluffy down mattress.

"Not like that!" Hermione squawked as Harry reached out to peruse one particular volume-- The Avada Kedavra: Deathly Portents from the Unforgivable Man by Hawling Wulff-- "Madame Pince is going to kill me if she..." Hermione cut herself off and blushed an un-Hermioneish scarlet as she busied herself some more with stacking the books on the mattresses.

"Um...Hermione?" Ron croaked cautiously. "Madame Pince does know you've got them, doesn't she?"

Hermione buried herself a bit deeper into Harry's magical trunk. "I've got permission, and that's all you need to know." There was a clatter and a gasp. "Harry! Oh, Harry!" Hermione's head withdrew from the gaping maw of the trunk, quite white. She was tugging something out of the trunk, wide-eyed. Harry's stomach dropped and he looked out the window. He knew what it would be.

"Blimey!" Ron's mouth dropped as he stared at Dumbledore's Pensieve with those strange, beautifully ancient runes around the rim. "Blimey Harry, where'd you get it?"

Hermione was watching Harry curiously. "Dumbledore gave this to you?" She ran her finger around the runes, likely reading them.

Harry shook his head. "No. Madam Pomfrey did. She said he'd asked that I have it if he...well...you know, but she didn't know why." Harry shrugged his shoulders and looked at the Pensieve warily, he'd had one too many bad experiences with the thing to be overly excited about the inheritance. "She also gave me..." Hermione let out an awed gasp from the cavernous trunk and retrieved Gryffindor's ruby sword with reverence. "That." Harry finished unnecessarily.

"Wow." Ron looked agog at this impressive inheritance.

"I guess with the funeral, and Bill's wedding I just forgot to mention it." Harry felt a swoop of the mixed rage and sadness as he remembered how Dumbledore had died. He remembered something else, just then, that had been nagging the corners of his mind. "Madam Pomfrey seemed to have been quite close to Dumbledore. She knew an awful lot about him."

"Well, they worked together for nearly fifty years, didn't they?" Ron said reasonably.

"Yes. But still." Harry didn't voice it but he thought it was quite possible Dumbledore had been in love with Madam Pomfrey, and judging by her pale, drawn face when doling out per Dumbledore's requests there was a good chance it had been mutual.

"What did she say to you?" Hermione held the sword in one hand, looking over at him in interest.

"It was just before the funeral. She was so...sad. She didn't cry at all, just said that Dumbledore had loved me very much. Like a grandson." Harry's felt a numbness inside him, and pushed the sensation away. "That I'd been on the will since my parents died, and she didn't know much, but that they...the sword and the Pensieve were probably very important to defeating Voldemort."

Harry didn't say it but there had been something for Snape as well. Madam Pomfrey had let it slip in her grief, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve which draped past her wrist and nearly covered her hand.

Hermione didn't seem to be paying any attention to them, anymore. She had leaned the glittering, red ruby sword against a teetering pile of books. Her mouth was in a severe line, and her brow was furrowed. She was staring intently at the Pensieve as if she had just figured out a great mystery. She now looked anxiously from Harry to the relic, as if she very much wanted to say something but wasn't sure it was her place.

"Everything okay, Hermione?"

"Yes. Yes." Her voice was breathless as if the matter her mind was fixed upon were requiring life-breath. "It's just. Well. Harry didyouthinkmaybe." She stopped and took a deep breath.

"You were there, Harry. When your...your...that Halloween night. It's in your mind. Your memory." She closed her eyes and Harry understood then with a feeling as if he'd been punched in the stomach. "I think it's why he wanted it to be yours. To find out what really happened," she finished quietly.

Ron was now looking shrewdly at the Pensieve. "But Hermione, we don't know how to get the memory. We'd have to sift through alot of..."

"There's a book...just..." Hermione's eyes flew open and she looked at Harry with sisterly concern. "Harry?"

Ron looked over at him, very worried. "Hey mate, if you can't, don't. No one would want to see that."

Harry spoke through the hole in his heart, that leaked the blood down his whole body and left a tingling, terrible sensation in all of him. "No. No. I think you're right. We just need to get the memory, and it probably won't be terribly clear. When I was going through Dumbledore's memories the clarity depended on the person whose memories we were looking at. It's a...an immature view, probably."

"Oh, Harry." Hermione spoke to her piles of books gravely. "I've got a book on memory sifting. I almost didn't take it, but then I thought it might help on thinking about what Dumbledore showed you." She dove in, straight to the pile nearest Ron, tumbling a batch of them into his lap. "Whoops. Sorry." She had a thin book clutched to herself, which she flipped open eagerly. "Here it is. Concentrate on the memory you want and use the incantation biolobot." She shoved the book in Harry's direction, and started stacking the books away from the mattresses, which she scrunched together, the Pensieve in the middle of the mattress heap.

Harry took a deep breath and placed the tip of his wand to his forehead as he'd seen Dumbledore do so many times. He wished his heart would slow down, but he was so very excited, and anxious. He didn't think Hermione and Ron could ever understand his excitement of seeing his parents, even if it was only to watch them die. They'd never really lost anyone, not like him.

He'd never gotten to know his Mum and Dad properly and he'd always longed to really hear them, really know them. He used to dream about this when he was little. His chance was now. He was more then ready. "Biolobot." He whispered shakily. A long silver dollop of memory came out as he drew his wand out toward the Pensieve. He swallowed again. Grief always made him swallow more then normal.

"Wait, Harry." Ron was watching him very worriedly. "I, well... Remember the mirror of Erised?"

Harry was a little annoyed at this interruption but nodded. Ron was his best friend, his first friend, he had been with him through everything.

"Well..." Ron hedged. He looked a bit uneasy about what he was about to say. "Dumbledore said that it wasn't good to dwell on the past and forget the future. I mean...of course we've got to do it. But...just be careful. That's all."

Hermione looked impressed at Ron's little speech. "Maybe he let you look at the mirror to prepare you for this, Harry. So you'd know the dangers."

Ron looked at Harry. "And we're not letting you do it alone. You knew that, of course."

Harry smiled. "Yeah. Yeah." They were right, and even if he didn't want to hear it, he wasn't going to ignore his friends. He stooped over the wide basin, and leaned down beside it. "Ready?" He touched the clear swirling quicksilver in the old sieve. Hermione and Ron, who were watching him for instructions on what to do, touched it gingerly as well. "Ready," he said mostly to himself, and felt himself falling down, Ron and Hermione with him.