Harry stared after the stranger as she strolled out of the kitchen like she owned the place, completely flummoxed. Ron and even Hermione seemed to be equally speechless. After what seemed like a long time (but was really only long enough for Sirius's mum's portrait to start shouting about intruders, so probably only a couple of seconds), he managed to come up with, "What the hell?"

"What the hell, what, Harry?" Hermione asked, making approximately zero sense.

"So we're— Are we just going to let her...wander around here?" Ron wondered aloud, though Harry wasn't entirely certain how they'd stop her.

"Where did she come from, Harry? How did she get here, I mean? Around the Fidelius?"

He gave a helpless shrug. "I don't know. I was just..." Sitting down here holding a glass of ice-water against my scar, trying not to think. "It was this weird shimmery sort of portal. There was a blonde lady reaching out toward me, and then she stepped aside and Mira came through. I tried to disarm her and she blocked it somehow — scary fast — and the portal vanished while I was distracted."

Hermione huffed. "Yes, but—"

"Who cares where she came from or how she got here, Hermione?" Ron interrupted. "What I want to know is, what are we going to do about it now she's here?"

"Oh, and knowing where she came from and how she got here couldn't possibly inform us of why she's here and whether she poses some sort of threat to us!"

"Er. She did say she's here to warn people about an alien invasion," Harry reminded them. He wasn't entirely certain whether he believed her, but she certainly seemed to believe it.

"Dunno, that part sounded a bit barmy to me."

"I think the important thing was who she intended to warn," Hermione said with a dark frown. "She practically admitted to being a Death Eater, and she called Voldemort Thom. Like she knows him personally."

"Yeah, and who in their right mind would defend Snape killing Dumbledore?!"

Harry frowned. He wanted to agree with Ron, but he and Hermione hadn't been there, either up on the Astronomy Tower or at the last moment, when he'd been chasing the murderer across the grounds. And much as he wanted to refuse to believe that Snape was anything other than a completely evil bastard, he also wanted to believe that Dumbledore had been right to trust him, that the old man had still known what he was doing, that his judgement had still been good.

Honestly, he wasn't sure how much was the girl's argument, and how much was his own longing for some indication that Dumbledore hadn't been completely mad — Because if he was, who's to say whether he knew what he was doing, leaving me to try to find the rest of the horcruxes and destroy them? — but she'd managed to sow a seed of doubt, at least.

"Are you alright, Harry?" Hermione asked, giving him a worried frown. He suspected he might've missed an exchange while he was mulling over that night, yet again.

"Huh? No— Well, just thinking. Do you think she was right about Snape? That it was all an act, him losing it, when we were fighting out on the Grounds?"

"Well...she had a point about him not actually hurting you," Hermione said hesitantly. "You said he was the Half-Blood Prince, didn't you? So he could've easily used that spell you used on Malfoy, or something, and he didn't. But I don't think we have to give him credit for not killing you as well as Dumbledore. He's still an evil git. And she could've been using mind-magic to– to manipulate you, or something. Make you do something stupid that will get you caught by the Death Eaters."

Ron let out an unamused ha. "If she wanted to turn us in to the Death Eaters, she wouldn't have sworn not to use mind-magic to hurt us. She could've just made us walk out the bloody front door and turn ourselves in, or something."

"Don't be ridiculous, Ronald."

"I'm not being ridiculous, Hermione! You're muggleborn, you don't understand—" Hermione glared at him, clearly on the verge of interrupting to tell him off for acting like being muggleborn meant she wasn't really a witch, but he didn't let her get a word in edgewise. (Which Harry thought was fair. Ron might've sounded like a prat saying it like that, but there were loads of things they didn't know because they were raised by muggles, like those fairy tales in the book Dumbledore had left her.) "Mind-mages, like, normal, human mind-mages, can't just do that, go through all your memories without you even noticing, without even keeping eye-contact with you or anything. That's the sort of shite you hear about evil sorcerers doing in stories to scare little kids, okay? The sort of person you never want to be within twenty yards of, because they can basically Imperius you as easy as breathing, and you won't even notice.

"And yeah, she swore not to use mind-magic to hurt us, made out like I was being silly and paranoid, so she probably won't just go possessing us or compel us to do anything dangerous, but that doesn't mean she can't play with our thoughts — make us not notice things, or forget we ever thought of something, or, I dunno, think she's cute and harmless and not bloody terrifying, and manipulate us into doing whatever she wants, anyway!"

"So, what, you think we only think she had a point about Snape because she wanted us to think that? Or, I don't know, made us, somehow?" Hermione said, somewhat sceptically.

"No. No no, no no no," Ron hushed her. "Stop that. Don't even ask yourself that. That's how people go insane dealing with things like her. If we start double and triple and quadruple guessing ourselves, she won't even have to do anything to make us do something stupid."

"Things like her?" Harry repeated. "She is a person, Ron. Like...sort of my half-sister, or something, I guess, right?" He really didn't think she'd been faking her reaction to realising they both had Lily's eyes. Though he also didn't think she'd been faking her reaction to finding out Sirius was...gone, and she'd been more concerned about Lestrange being a bloody crazy person than her own father being dead, which didn't really say anything good about her, in Harry's opinion. But she was still a person. "Not like, I dunno, a fairy or a dementor or something... And she said I'm a mind-reader, too." More importantly, she actually seemed to have some sort of idea why he was having these fucking nightmares. Which theoretically meant she might know how to make them stop, which, if she did, would be worth any amount of confusion and doubt about Snape and Dumbledore and painfully callous dismissals of Sirius's death.

Ron glowered at him. "Seemed pretty clear she could mess with your head as easily as ours, anyway. And people with that much power aren't really people, are they? I mean, if you can just make anyone do or think whatever you want them to, I don't reckon we seem much like real people to her. And honestly, I'd rather be dealing with a Blessed Islander, or even the Fair Folk — at least they can't lie."

Hermione frowned at him. "So we can't trust her, and we have to assume she's dangerous and could be manipulating anything we say or do, but we also can't second-guess ourselves? Honestly, Ronald?"

"I think we can trust her," Harry volunteered. "At least not to turn us over to the Death Eaters. She didn't seem too happy to find out Voldemort's a bloody psycho, I doubt she's going to run off to join him, so..." Especially since she seemed pretty bloody serious about that whole alien invasion thing. Harry did not have the energy to care. He just— It was just one more thing to add to the list of problems he'd have to deal with when it happened, wasn't it. (Assuming she wasn't a complete nutter.)

And he would, he'd have to, but...God, he was tired.

Is it too much to ask for to get a good night's sleep before getting news that on top of fucking Voldemort taking over the fucking Ministry, there's a goddamn alien apocalypse on the horizon?!

(Stupid question, of course it was.)

"Well, I think we should keep an eye on her, anyway," Hermione said bossily. (Probably not more bossily than usual, just, it was really early.) "She said we could go with her to talk to Snape— I don't think it's a good idea to polyjuice ourselves, and we shouldn't all go in case we're caught, but just one of us, with the Invisibility Cloak, maybe?"

Harry nodded (tiredly). "Yeah, I'll go. If– If there's any way she's right about Snape, I want to talk to him, see what he has to say for himself..."

"No," Ron said firmly.

Harry glowered at him. "What do you mean, no?"

"I mean, you're not going. You're— If she's not right about him, if you get caught, it's over. No. I'll go." He cut off Hermione's objection before she could begin, adding, "No, look, you're muggleborn, Hermione. If you're caught, they'll probably ship you off to Azkaban for not turning yourself in to be registered. If I'm caught, they'll probably just make me stay at the school. And, I dunno, maybe check with my mum to see if my spattergoit cleared up, try to trap her into claiming I'm still sick when they know I'm not, so maybe if I don't come back in a couple of hours, send a letter and let her know, but I'm a pureblood, they're not going to kill me. And..."

"And...?" Hermione repeated, before Harry could do so.

"Just had a thought. Harry, mate," he said, with an edge of anxiety to his serious frown. "I know we're angry at Remus right now—" Harry scowled. Angry might be an understatement... "—but he was the best Defence professor we ever had, and Tonks is an auror. Maybe we should write to them, too. See if they have any idea how to deal with Mira, like a spell or something that can stop her messing with our heads, at least without us noticing."

Harry ground his teeth. He still didn't know where he got off, knocking Tonks up and then trying to run off with them — and saying it was what James would've wanted... It made his blood boil. Usually when he felt this angry, it was Voldemort, but he knew this was all him. How that– that complete bastard could waltz in here and—

Hermione nodded, though. "Good idea. I'll write it while you're gone, and then you can add anything I've missed before we send it. Harry?" she added, asking what he thought like it would make a damn bit of difference.

"Fine," he ground out, keeping his furious tirade against Remus to himself with effort. "If he wants to help, that's how he can help."

Ron let out a sigh of relief. "Good. I'm going to go get dressed. If Kreacher comes back before I do, ask him to make my eggs over easy, yeah?"

So, this is a tiny little bonus scene that Mira would have picked up from Harry at some later point, but it fits in the chronology here, so. There will still be a regular update tomorrow afternoon, too.