Chapter 17

"For Merlin's sake, Tonks! What the hell are you doing?! In a real life scenario you would have just gotten you and your team killed! Go home and don't come back until you've got your damn head out of your arse!" Moody growled as he pulled her none too sharply from unconsciousness.

She could feel the angry or even mocking stares of her training squad on her back as she walked away but she just couldn't bring herself to care. They had disliked her from the beginning just because she was younger and better than they were. It wasn't exactly difficult in her opinion; half the aurors were idiots.

And now they were all taking an inordinate amount of joy in seeing her fail. She muttered scathing obscenities under her breath as she yanked her jacket from the back of her chair and stalked towards the elevators. It had been like this ever since Harry had shown her that damn memory. She at first had been steadfast in her belief that he was as bad or maybe worse than the monsters she had encountered in the course of her job. Her every moment, both awake and asleep, was consumed by that memory. He had said it was one of his favourites. How could someone's favourite memories be of slaughtering dozens of people?

Harry had been her best friend. The little boy who would giggle when she shifted forms and pull pranks or play games with her. He used to have green eyes that shone with innocence and kindness, known in various circles for being so incredibly sweet. And now he was a cold blooded killer whose purple eyes showed nothing at all. It was then that she realised that the Harry she had known really had died that day all those years ago. The question was whether she really wanted to put so much effort into creating an attachment to this… this caricature of the boy she had adored almost as much as her own mother.

But then she had done what he told her to and watched the memory of the world cup again in one of the auror pensieves, and suddenly her entire belief system was sent spinning by a single question. He was right – he had killed eight death eaters who had murdered, raped and tortured for decades, and while she and the other aurors fired stunner after stunner at the attackers fifteen innocent people had died. One of them couldn't have been older than nine or ten. But still her mind had not changed. There was a seed of doubt, yes, but to her he was still a murderer.

Sirius had come around soon after, both to explain himself and to talk about Harry. Finding out that not one but two of the most important people in her life were cold blooded killers was a shock the likes of which she never could have imagined. Sirius had been the prankster, the fun cousin who enjoyed making a fool out of himself and others – not a part of the most skilled hitwizard squads in recent times who were whispered about throughout the magical world. That had been far easier to accept though. Sirius had orders directly from the ICW, the highest authority in the magical world. His targets were some of the worst witches and wizards to ever live, and now that she knew who he was he was no longer oath bound to secrecy around her.

He had told her about some of the people he had been sent after in sometimes excruciating detail. She had thought she knew what monsters were; she didn't. He had caught and often killed cannibals, child murderers and psychopaths the likes of which made Voldemort look sane. The descriptions of some of the crimes made her retch. She couldn't fathom one human being doing that to another.

She had assumed that Harry just killed whoever he was paid to kill, regardless of who they were or what they had done, but Sirius said that was far from true. In fact there had been several occasions where they had been sent after someone only to find them and every one of their guards dead. They had no evidence it was actually Harry but there was also no evidence of more than one person, and he was one of the only people who could do it alone. Even his paid targets were researched before he actually carried out the contract and it was very rare for him to kill a 'good' man. Often, when they thought he had, the victim ended up being far from the man he had been thought to be. They had found out about several previously unknown criminal organisations just by digging into the lives of the people he was suspected of killing.

He had said that before mercenaries had been quite willing to do whatever it was they were paid to do including killing children, but ever since Harry had emerged none would dare do such a thing, especially not after Harry had showed many of them the consequences first hand. That was another reason the ICW didn't want him dead or captured; he was controlling the mercenaries with an iron fist, effectively doing their job for them and far better than they would themselves.

She was still not sure how she felt about it all though. Harry was still a murderer, that was an unquestionable fact, but somehow he was still moral. A murderer and a good man; two things that she had been told all her life were polar opposites. It was like trying to rewire her brain. One part of her mind told her that he was the worst of the worst, a man who had spilled the blood of hundreds, but the other told her that there were far worse men in the world. She didn't know which side was winning.

Throughout all of this though Sirius was not how she had always known him. He was more rigid and mechanical; a robot compared to his normally exuberant self. That was understandable, she thought. Harry had killed his friend and showed no remorse for doing so.

Sirius was a mess, even if he was hiding it well. Sofia could tell, of course, but she knew not to ask when he had simply said it was 'work stuff'. Technically it was true, but he still hated lying to her. He had spent much of the past two weeks locked away in his office wrestling with himself as his thoughts ran in constant circles. It had been over a year but he suddenly had the urge to visit Slaven's widow, despite knowing he couldn't. No one knew what they worked as, not even their own families. His 'cover' was being Lord Black, Slaven's had been in experimental charms and as far as his widow knew that was how he had died. Lord Sirius Black couldn't just visit her out of the blue.

He wasn't even sure how he felt if he was honest with himself. He had dealt with the loss months ago and started to move forwards, but now he had been dragged back into the pit kicking and screaming. There was anger at Harry for killing him. Anger at himself for being fooled by Fischer, for being too stubborn to leave while they could, for being bested by a single teenager. There was grief at the loss of his friend. Bitterness that this was all happening to him. Fear of Harry, fear of the ambush going the other way and him killing his own godson. That thought even brought relief.

But there was also acceptance, understanding even. Had he been in Harry's position, with his power and his skill, he would have done exactly the same thing. They had attacked him and to him at that moment they were nothing more than threats to be eliminated. There had been no emotion involved for either side; Harry hadn't killed his friend out of some sadistic glee at causing someone else grief. It had simply been a case of either he killed them or they killed him. But that didn't make it any easier to accept.

And then there was the simple fact of who Harry was, disregarding Slaven entirely. A Nightshade – Head of the most powerful family in Britain that had been extinct for centuries, a single man who could turn the entire Wizarding World on its head if he wanted to. It made him wonder why he hadn't.

The man credited with over three hundred kills, and that wasn't even including the people he was just suspected of. Three hundred kills and he was barely eighteen. He had worked it out, and Harry would have been thirteen when he first emerged. Sirius had been pranking Snivellus and learning how to transfigure teapots into tortoises when he was thirteen; Harry had been killing people. His godson had been a killer when he was barely a teenager, and that thought brought just as much pain as Slaven's death.

He knew what it was to take another person's life, the way it rips little pieces of your very self away until you are nothing like what the universe had once intended. The way your innocence is shattered like brittle iron and your empathy slowly fades, sometimes until it is not there at all. He had accepted that for himself long ago when he fought the death eaters and he had accepted it again when he took his job. He had retained himself through all of that though. He was still the same dumb teenager from Hogwarts, only now there was an added side to him and the goofiness had become tinged with seriousness. But Harry? He had retained a somewhat loose set of morals yes, but had he retained even a sliver of the Harry he had been before he got sent to those deplorable muggles?

Sirius couldn't imagine men whispering in fear in the back of dimly lit bars about the Harry he had known. He never would have believed that criminals would one day pray that Harry didn't come for them. But they did. He was the most feared, respected and possibly even skilled wizard to be currently roaming the Earth, at least of those who were free. Clearly he was better than Dirlewanger, Sirius wasn't sure if Harry was better than Grindelwald. Certainly he would be now, but in his prime? Sirius couldn't honestly say having never seen Grindelwald duel. He doubted it – Grindelwald was one of the most powerful men in recent history – but he would pay to see Harry duel the man who defeated him. Hatred was one of the most powerful emotions when casting and he knew that Harry had more hate than almost anyone. Albus Dumbledore wouldn't know what hit him.

He just didn't understand why. He supposed those filthy muggles could have twisted him into what he was, but in the memories of the homeless muggles he was happy. Seemingly a normal child, or as normal a child as he could be given what had happened to him. What causes a child to decide that they want to be a killer for a living, especially when they are already rich?

After their failed ambush Sirius had looked through everything they knew about him with a fine tooth comb in an attempt to catch the bastard, and now that he knew it was Harry he had looked through them again. Every target, every client, his methods, his talents. He remembered most of it but he still read every word of every single shred of intelligence they had almost religiously. It hadn't been hard to find out exactly when and where he had cut his way through the trafficking ring, and it fit perfectly with the previously unexplained drop in contracts he took. Before they had thought that he had been injured or maybe something had spooked him when in actuality he had adopted a little girl. About five months ago he had started taking just as many contracts as he had before, coinciding precisely with when Anaïs would have started Beauxbatons. He had been more gradual about it so it was harder to spot of course, but it was obvious for Sirius now that he knew what he was looking for. When he heard that Harry had completed a contract to hunt down a rogue ridgeback in Norway just a few days ago he was sure he had given himself away, but luckily the other members of his squad had put it off to him reacting to the man who had killed his friend. He was hardly going to correct them.

But what now? That was yet another thing that sent his mind spinning. Harry hadn't contacted either of them in two weeks. Was he just giving them time before he wrote to them? Or was he expecting them to come back on their own? Did he even want to?

Yes, he did, he told himself. Harry was still his godson. He may oppose what he was, fear it even, but he was still his godson. Had he not killed Slaven Sirius would likely have no particular feeling at all towards the Ferryman. Hell, he might even like him given all the evil bastards he had killed. He knew that had he been Harry he would have done the same thing so the blistering hatred he had once felt was slowly beginning to fade, to what he wasn't sure. It would never fade completely, that was impossible, but it would hopefully become detachment one day so that the man who killed Slaven and Harry were two separate entities. But that would take a long time, and Harry wasn't going to just wait around for it to happen.

~Scene Change~

It was now early February as snow swirled and danced through the Welsh countryside before it settled softly peacefully on the grass. Harry didn't feel at all peaceful as he ran his hands through his hair in a mixture of boredom and frustration. There were no contracts available, at least none that interested him, and that just left horcruxes. He had no leads, no clues and no ideas as to where the other horcruxes could be hidden, but he still searched in seemingly random places simply because he had very little else to do. He supposed he should find a hobby of some sort but he had no idea what he enjoyed doing apart from fighting. That probably wasn't particularly healthy, he thought. He liked flying but that got boring after a while, especially when he was doing it alone. He even had a momentary wish that he had announced that the Nightshade family was back just so he would have families to predict, attack and defend against. Even the Wizengamot duties would be preferable to this.

Just then he felt the wards shift to allow a single portkey entry and he felt a sliver of excitement before he felt only a single visitor, and then it became slight disappointment. Maybe one of them wasn't going to come back. He had been expecting them to come together like they almost always had before, but no. He wondered which one it was. Sirius would undoubtedly accept his profession more quickly and with less judgement, but he had also killed his friend and almost killed him. Nymphadora might still think he was a psychopathic monster. Honestly he was slightly hurt that it had taken this long, but then he had taken just as long to contact Nymphadora again.

With a flick of his hand the papers and reports on his desk slid into a pile and dropped softly into the bottom drawer of his desk just as the door swung open and a house elf led Sirius in. Huh. He had expected Nymphadora to come back first given that he hadn't done anything to her personally. Sirius was clearly trying quite admirably to hide something behind a blank veneer but Harry knew he could break through it if he really wanted to. He supposed he would allow him to hide; Sirius had allowed him to do the same thing for weeks before he finally decided to emerge.

They both sat in slightly awkward silence for a few moments. Neither particularly wanted to talk about the revelations of their last meeting, and it was Sirius who eventually broke the silence.

"I still remember the day you died. Well, we thought you did anyway. I punched Potter in the face," he said with a ghost of a smile, "broke his nose as well. It was the day after I found out Sofia was pregnant, and I think that actually made it harder. Going from extreme happiness to extreme despair was… jarring. The time where I would have been happy that I was going to become a father was spent drunk or depressed, normally both. Sofia was the only thing that kept me afloat really, that and knowing I was having a child. I was terrified of having a son to tell the truth. I was desperate for it not to be a son. It wasn't that I had any preference at all; it was simply that if I had a son I knew I would always be comparing him to you. I never would have got over your death if that happened, not really. I'm sure I would eventually have stopped seeing you in him but it would have been toxic up to that point. But I got lucky and we had a daughter, the best thing to ever happen to me. We named her after you, you know?"

Harry was lost, completely and utterly lost. He hadn't been expecting this at all. He had been expecting anger, resentment, maybe even a little fear. He had prepared himself to deal with all those things, not for an open, vulnerable monologue. Was he expected to say something in reply? What would he even say? Luckily for him he wasn't, and Sirius just kept on going after a small pause.

"Harriet being born is my happiest memory. It's funny, that both of our favourite memories are first seeing our daughters. Poetic in a strange sort of way. Even from her very first breaths she was different from you, another thing that I'm thankful for. It helped me to dissociate the two of you. She's a lot like Dora was when she was younger actually, loud and excitable. From her reaction to seeing you when you picked her up from school I get the feeling that Anaïs is a lot like that as well, at least when she's with you and not me or Dora."

It was a pretty pointless exercise for him to try and stop the smile coming onto his face when Sirius said her name, so he didn't bother trying. He knew he needed to be more open and seeing as Sirius was opening himself more than Harry would have ever expected he figured he would try too, but not to the same point. He wasn't ready for that yet.

"She is. She's the sweetest little girl in the world. I don't know how she's still like that after what happened, but she is."

Sirius actually looked surprised that Harry had spoken at all and he wasn't sure if it was surprise at him letting him in a little more or whether Sirius had just forgotten he was there.

"People have an amazing ability to recover, kids especially." Sirius said sagely.

Harry felt like scoffing at that. He had been a kid and Merlin knew that he hadn't recovered; he had simply piled all the little broken pieces of himself up until they vaguely resembled him, and by the time Anaïs came into his life and he decided he needed to rebuild himself he had forgotten what he had once looked like. But he liked the new him, so he supposed it was ultimately a good thing in the end.

The next hour or so was, in a word, surreal for Harry. Sirius spoke about his daughter with such profound delight that he started talking about Anaïs more and more until it was almost a normal conversation. Harry knew what Sirius was doing, that as soon as he had spoken at the mention of Anaïs that Sirius had latched onto the subject in the hope that he would continue talk, but he didn't really care. He was finally getting to talk about her.

All the little things she did in the hopes of irritating him in some small way that he actually adored because it was just so innocently childish. The voice she used when something exciting had happened at school, as if there just wasn't enough air in her lungs to get her story out fast enough. The sly smirk she got when she was planning something. The little huff she did when she was annoyed. Hell, even the glare she gave him when she was angry at him. He wanted to talk about all of those things and more so that everyone knew just how special she was. Even being able to call her his daughter gave him a sense of pride the likes of which nothing else would ever come close to and he found that he loved letting go and talking about her.

When Sirius finally got up to leave he paused with his hand on the doorknob, and when he spoke he didn't even turn around.

"I don't hate you. I don't even think I can hate you for killing him," Sirius said with a dark chuckle, "I probably would have done the same thing were I in your position. I understand doing it, but that doesn't mean that I'm okay with it either. I'm always going to despise the man that killed Slaven. I just can't despise you."

With that he left, and Harry sat staring motionlessly after him.

~Scene Change~

It had taken even longer than she had hoped but she was finally ready to see him again. There had been no sudden change of heart; it was more that with each day and each thought another little piece of her argument was chipped away.

Moody had killed people with the killing curse, she had always known that, but she had never known what was truly required to cast that spell until Sirius told her. Moody had desperately wanted to kill every one of those people and by all accounts Harry had never once used that curse. Did that make her own mentor as bad as he was?

She had asked her parents one night after dinner as well – she still had no idea how she had managed to coax the conversation onto that topic. She had expected them both to have the view that in almost all circumstances killing people was in no way good, but it turned out theirs were quite different. She wasn't far off with her father who was of the opinion that it was only justified in self-defence, but her mother was a different story entirely. She supposed she should have expected it given her Black family upbringing but her mother was far more… grey. She had said that death was inevitable and that there would always be evil men, and that sometimes the only way to stop such people was to hit hard enough that they never got back up. Another chip had fallen away.

The final strike that had broken through her increasingly fragile beliefs had been Sirius again. He had gone to see Harry a couple of weeks before and had been trying to persuade her to go herself, but he only succeeded the day before by showing her what had actually happened. She had never seen Sirius act so open before, and then Harry had started speaking. That had been what settled her troubled thoughts. No monster could speak about someone with such obvious love and affection in their voice. Not one of the witches and wizards she had been forced to babysit before trial would be able to speak with that level of pride about anything but their favourite crime, and yet Harry was speaking about a little girl he rescued from a life of misery. He really wasn't like them at all.

Yes, he was nothing like the Harry she had known would have grown up to be. But then she was far from the person she would have been had he not been sent away, had he not died. Thinking in what-if's was no way to think at all; it was tantamount to living in a fantasy.

But she wondered if she had taken too long. Sirius had gone weeks ago, and yet it was Sirius' friend that Harry had killed and Sirius himself that had almost followed. She had been so much closer to him when they were children too; they had been virtually attached at the hip. When she had first visited that little cabin in the mountains she had tried so hard to get behind his barriers, had been desperate to spend as much time with him as possible, and now after he opened up more than he had before she had left him hanging for over a month. To Harry's clearly socially stilted mind that would feel like a rejection. All the progress she had made would likely be lost now and she would have to start again, that was if he let her. Would he even tolerate another perceived abandonment?

She sighed slightly before activating the portkey and beginning the still unfamiliar walk up the gravel path towards the house. At least he hadn't removed her from the wards. She was again met at the door by a house elf and led through the corridors towards Harry's office as she tried in vain to keep her nerves under control. When finally she entered the office he was exactly as she had feared but still expected.

His mask was firmly back in place but not as flawless as she knew he could make it, as if he wanted her to know that she had lost the ground she had gained. It was almost like he was taunting her.

"Harry?"

"Yes Nymphadora?"

The smile on his face and the inflection of his voice were both utterly pleasant and had they come from anyone but Harry she would have thought them real. But this was Harry, and he did not do conventionally pleasant. That was one thing she was sure of.

She opened her mouth to ask if he was okay, only to snap her mouth closed as she mentally chastised herself. The whole time the friendly smile remained fixed unmoving on his face.

"Err," she coughed awkwardly, "sorry for taking so long."

"Oh it's no problem. Few people would voluntarily venture into the monster's den at all." He answered in the same conversational tone, as if they were simply talking about the weather.

She cringed and she thought she saw a spark of spiteful enjoyment dance in his eyes for a split second.

"I don't think you're a monster, at least not anymore. Some people are too far gone to be rehabilitated and could cause too much damage if kept alive, I know. It just took me a while to figure it out." She said, hoping for the mask to drop and Harry to come back out. He didn't.

"Well, congratulations on your enlightenment. Now, if you'll excuse me I've got some work to do. It's quite difficult being a mass murderer – lots of planning."

She took the dismissal and quickly rose from her seat and turned towards the door as she tried to conceal the hurt she felt. Just as she was about to reach for the door handle she could have sworn she heard a near inaudible sigh.

"Nymphadora, you will be at Hogwarts for the second task in a few days time, correct?"

She turned and nodded, trying her best not to look too hopeful.

"In that case I look forward to hearing about it." He said as the slightly timid smile flashed like lightning across his face.

He had allowed it to, nothing was shown on his face unless he wanted it to be, and it was that that caused the hope in her chest to blossom. She hadn't ruined it. She sent him a final bright smile before she pulled the door open and followed the same elf back towards the door. Absently she wondered if Harry had just told it to wait outside having never planned for their conversation to be a long one.

She didn't really care either way. He had invited her back! Well, pretty much. Harry would never just come out and say it but he had as good as done so. All the crawling hours she had spent agonising over whether she had left it too late had been for nothing. She really hadn't ruined it.

~Scene Change~

The following months were fairly enjoyable for Harry. Sirius and Nymphadora came around more often now and he felt much more comfortable now he wasn't having to hide parts of himself. They hadn't actually talked about his profession again but he had hardly expected them to. There had been a few times where the still quite one-sided conversation had naturally transitioned onto it but the topic had always been swiftly changed after a few seconds of charged silence. It seemed to Harry that they were trying to bury the knowledge deep inside their minds and ignore it, hoping they buried it deep enough that it wouldn't rear its head. That suited him quite well for the moment, but he doubted it would last forever.

But when they did talk about other things it was… nice. Sirius had started talking to him about quidditch a few times, the mention of which brought a flash across Nymphadora's face each time. He supposed she was remembering the world cup. He was by no means a fanatic like Sirius seemed to be but he did enjoy watching it and had taken Anaïs to a few games before. Nymphadora had looked surprised when he had replied to Sirius' questions about who he thought would win the league, at least the British one. He guessed it was even more proof that he was actually human who did things that other people also did. He wondered if she would react that way if she saw him eating something as well.

Going by her face she clearly had little interest in quidditch and yet the next time Sirius mentioned it she knew plenty, from top scorers to which keeper had made the most saves. Clearly she had done her homework. That actually softened him slightly truth be told, that she was willing to put that much effort in. He knew that people's beliefs didn't just change and he was still more comfortable in the moments when it was just him and Sirius, but he knew that she was trying and chances were that she would eventually do something that would prove that she had changed. He was sure she had or was in the process of doing so, but there was always the lingering whispering fear of exposing himself.

Anaïs had come home for Easter even though she didn't actually have to and despite most of her friends staying at Beauxbatons. Harry honestly wasn't sure if he had stopped smiling for days. He had taken to her an Easter egg hunt in a muggle neighbourhood and used a bit of magic to make sure everyone thought they were one of the neighbours. She had loved it and had only had to look at him for him to cave; he had ended up taking her to five. He really was soft sometimes.

She had met Sirius and Nymphadora again as well. The night before he had told her that he had let them in a little more so she could be herself around them, something she had taken to heart despite him knowing that she didn't particularly like them or even know them yet. She had quickly picked up on the subtle stiffness between him and Nymphadora and so had spent most of the time chattering enthusiastically with Sirius about his daughter. Harry was sure that she had been gearing up to ask if she could meet Harriet before Sirius mentioned she had only just turned nine. She had quickly changed her mind after that, something for which Harry was thankful. Letting them meet each other would have been possible but would have had the potential to cause problems, and he seriously doubted his ability to say no to her.

Throughout all of this though Harry had not been idle as far as Riddle was concerned. He had eliminated several of the most savage werewolf packs both in Britain and other parts of Europe, knowing that when Riddle came back he would be looking for disposable foot soldiers. He had killed all the Acromantula that inhabited the Forbidden Forest, turned a group of giants to ash with Fiendfyre and assassinated a few of Riddle's lower level backers. The likes of the Bulstrodes, Selwyns and Carrows weren't a problem; he still had debts to call in. It was just a shame that the Malfoys, Parkinsons, Carrows and Lestranges didn't owe him.

But he would wait until Voldemort came back for that. None of them had searched for their master after his defeat and all but the Lestranges had claimed they were under the imperius – maybe one or more of them would decide to run instead of return to service. They would be killed for their betrayal obviously, but it would mean that he would have less powerful families out for his blood.

Despite this though he knew what he had done was relatively pointless. With the way the wizarding world was set up across the world Riddle would have no trouble attracting soldiers for his army. There would always be men who lusted for violence and didn't care who they hurt in the process. There would always be werewolves and other dark creatures fed up with the way they were discriminated against and angry enough to fight back. There would always be men that thought themselves superior to the masses. What he had done was throw a bucket of water out of a sinking ship.

He knew Riddle would be back soon, he was absolutely sure of it. The rumours of a 'dark spirit' in Albania that had since disappeared, the slight darkening of the Dark Mark on the arms of Death Eaters, the disappearance of the Riddle house caretaker. Harry was sure he had seen and known where the Riddle house was but he just couldn't remember. Clearly the Fidelius charm had been cast over it, but if Voldemort was still without a body then who would have cast the spell?

Rebirth rituals were intrinsically connected with methods of attempted immortality and as such were almost as taboo as they were. Few of even the darkest of dark arts books and tomes would speak of them much less give instructions, but Riddle would not have made horcruxes without knowing exactly how to regain his body afterwards. Luckily, the Nightshade library had several such books and he had looked through them as soon as he had returned from the Chamber of Secrets and studied them ever since.

He had expected there to be very few methods of regaining one's body but he had found almost a dozen, all of which shared a common thread; they could not be performed at just any time. There were some that could be but the results were said to be inferior and there was no way that Tom Riddle would settle for that. Either that or they required the original body, and no one knew what had happened to Riddle's.

Most needed to be performed at Samhain, otherwise known as Halloween, when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead was thinner. That day had long since passed and Riddle was certainly not going to wait, so Harry dismissed them and concentrated on the few that were performed on the summer solstice.

For the days leading up to the solstice he was taut and tense, completely unable to sit still or relax. The rituals could be performed anywhere; there was no way for him to know if a ritual was being prepared. Riddle could do it in his back garden if he wanted to and Harry would be none the wiser. When the day came and went without anything of note happening he allowed himself to relax. He even stunned a drunken wizard in Knockturn Alley and checked his dark mark to find it no darker than it was a month ago. Maybe Riddle really was waiting for Halloween in some strange desire to regain his body on the same day that he lost it.

That illusion came crashing down when Nymphadora came running into his house at nearly midnight after the third task, three days after the solstice had occurred. A house elf had had to shake him awake and when he walked bleary eyed into his office a few minutes later he was grouchily wondering what the hell could have happened that would necessitate waking him up. Had someone died? Even if they had he couldn't see why it couldn't wait till morning. As it turned out, the opposite had happened.

"Voldemort's back. He used Jack Potter somehow. He came back from the third task with curse injuries all over him screaming that Voldemort had used him in a ritual." She said with deep fear evident in her voice.

Harry's tiredness evaporated instantly and his mind whirred into life, trying to work out how Riddle had regained his body. The solstice was only a few days ago; had he got impatient and decided to just do it now? Would it even work now? But if that was the case why not just do it before? And what possible use did Potter have? None of the rituals he knew of would need him. Unless of course Riddle had just wanted to kill him and somehow Potter had escaped, something he thought unlikely.

With some effort Harry quietened his rapidly spinning thoughts. There were too many variables, too many unknowns. He needed to know.

"I need you to get me a copy of that memory."

"How the hell am I supposed to do that?"

"I don't care how you do it. You're an auror; use that. Just say you know an expert that might be able to help."

"Dumbledore won't like that."

"What the old man likes and doesn't like is of no interest to me. Get me that memory, even if you have to hit Potter with a body bind and pull it from his mind by force. I need to know exactly what happened."

Going by the look on Harry's face he would do exactly that if she didn't get the memory first. She wasn't going to do that, obviously, but she would get it. If anyone was going to know exactly how Voldemort did it it would be Harry. Dumbledore was an exceptionally gifted wizard, yes, but he was an expert in transfiguration, battle magic and alchemy; a light wizard without access to a library the size of Harry's, filled with every kind of magic under the sun. Voldemort would not use the magic that Dumbledore was a master of; he would use the same magic that Harry did. Harry would have a better chance of working it out, especially given that he would likely go to his portraits for help. Even if he couldn't Dumbledore would still be looking as well.

But those were just some of her motivations from the part of her that wanted to protect and do what was best for the rest of the wizarding world. On a more personal level she was hoping that maybe, just maybe, this would finally prove to him that she really was on his side.

AN: This one's pretty short because this just felt like the natural place to end it. From now on updates will probably be about once every 2 weeks give or take but will be longer than this one. This one just took a while because of holidays and stuff. Harry was a little childish because, well, he grew up way too fast so he's going to have moments where he acts like a child.

Again, big thanks to Tal Strauss for helping and checking this one over!