Thank you to all of my brilliant supporters, with a shout out to H Morgan, Jimmy Adams, Jo Daviz, LegendaryWasabi, Optimum Prime and Jack Schriner. I would really struggle to keep this up without the support you guys give me.

so next week on Thursday it will be the one-year anniversary of posting the first chapter of this fic. which I think is cool.

The next two chapters are already up on pat re on with chapter 28 being the final chapter of the fic

Chapter 26

Harry and Hermione rushed through the castle as they made their way to the headmaster's office. Three different teachers shouted at them to stop running and took points, but neither of them paid any attention as they rushed past. As they ran up to the gargoyle Harry shouted the password at it so that it had already gotten out of the way before the two teens got there, and they barely slowed down enough to not crash as they started up the spiral stairs.

Harry didn't bother knocking on the headmaster's door either, just threw open the doors with a swish of his wand. Dumbledore was sitting behind his desk and started to ask what was going on but Hermione just summoned the headmaster's supply of Floo powder and threw that handful into the fire. The flames instantly turned green and the two teens ran into the fire calling out "Twelve Grimmauld Place."

A few moments later, the two teens came tumbling out of the fire in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place. Sirius was sitting at the table eating his breakfast. He turned and saw the half panicked teens with their wands out looking for danger. "What's happened?"

Harry heard his godfather's question and relaxed a little; if Sirius was asking then nothing had happened yet. He was about to answer when there was a sudden flash of red fire in the corner of the room. Harry turned towards it and was just able to prevent himself from firing off a spell when he saw Dumbledore standing there, Fawkes in one hand and his wand in the other, obviously ready for a fight.

"What's happening?" Dumbledore demanded, ready to join a fight. Harry had to admit, while he and Hermione may have problems with Dumbledore, it couldn't be denied that the headmaster wanted to stop Voldemort. That was one thing they could trust he would do.

Harry put his wand away, causing the two adults to relax a little, but he still went to the front of the house and looked out of the windows to check the street before he said anything. "Bellatrix and Voldemort are trying to collect the Horcruxes. She will come here looking for the locket."

Harry had been talking to Dumbledore, but he hadn't minded if Sirius overheard; he didn't, however, expect what Sirius said next. "Are you telling me that there is a Horcrux, a fragment of Voldemort's soul, in my house?" He sounded extremely pissed off.

"Sirius, my boy, you know what a Horcrux is?" Dumbledore asked, as surprised as Harry and Hermione that Sirius would know of such magic.

Sirius replied with a hint at anger in his voice at his question going unanswered. "Every male in the Black family is warned about those abominations and promises to destroy any of them that he finds. A Dark Lord about 600 years ago made one and he almost wiped out the entire family before we could permanently stop him. Now tell me where this locket is so we can destroy it."

"It's already been destroyed, master." Kreacher popped into the room with the broken locket in his hands. "Young Master Harry was giving Kreacher what he needed to fulfil Master Regulus' last order and destroy the nasty locket." The little elf held out the locket to Sirius.

Sirrus took the locket and examined it, and Harry could see the tension leaving his godfather's body as the man sat down in a comfortable armchair. "Tell me Harry, how do you know about horcruxes?" There wasn't any anger in the question, but it was somehow more demanding because it was basically an order. And not an order from his teacher or headmaster, not from an Auror or the Ministry; this was an order from the man who had accepted the job of Harry's dad.

Dumbledore tried to distract them, but when it became clear that Harry wanted to tell Sirius and that Hermione supported him, Dumbledore took a seat so that he could listen. Fawkes perched himself on the back of the chair that Dumbledore sat in and looked like he wanted to listen as well. It made no difference to Harry, as Dumbledore already knew about their time travel.

Harry and Hermione told their whole story year by year. The first year with a professor posed by Voldemort who tried to kill Harry three times. Second year with the basilisk and being blamed by the whole school. Third year where Sirius broke out of Azkaban to save Harry from Pettigrew and almost being eaten by a dementor. Fourth year the Triwizard Tournament and a Polyjuiced Barty Crouch pretending to be Mad-Eye Moody while he used Unforgivable curses on students, and of course the return of Voldemort.

Fifth year and the shadow war between the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters, along with the inference at Hogwarts by the Ministry, ending with the fight at the Ministry where Sirius was killed by LeStrange but Voldemort was outed as being alive again, and the prophecy. Sixth year and the open war with the Death Eaters, how Dumbledore had told Harry about Voldemort's horcruxes, and how Malfoy had let a band of Death Eaters into the school, leading to Snape's cold-blooded murder of Dumbledore. Lastly, seventh year with the fall of the Ministry, the Muggleborn Registration Act, and the Snatchers. Muggleborn just disappearing and never being heard from again, the Horcrux hunt, how they lost at Christmas in Godric's Hollow to the snake, and finally going back in time to Harry's eleventh birthday.

Harry specifically left out how they had travelled, but Fawkes gave a trill and Dumbledore put it together. "I assume by this point you know that the feather in your wand, Harry, was one that was donated by Fawkes here. As Fawkes is my familiar, I asked Garrick to tell me when the wands were sold, just an idle curiosity at the time when I asked. And as Hagrid was there, he told me about Miss Granger suddenly appearing in a ball of fire when the wand bonded to you, Harry. I take it that this was when you two came back in time." Seeing no point in denying it at this point, both of them nodded.

"Interesting. Ollivander thought that you, Miss Granger, had just been teleported to the wand as the last one to try the wand before Harry. It's a well-known power of the phoenix that they can Apparate through fire, it's why phoenix ash is one of the key ingredients in making Floo powder. But did you know that some muggle thinkers are starting to believe that time and space are in fact just two sides of the same coin? It's not inconceivable, then, that the ability to travel through space could be used to travel in time as well. But if that were the case, I would have expected your seventeen year old bodies to be the ones that came out in this timeline; however, it was only your consciousness, your souls. That's interesting."

"But what does that all mean Professor?" Sirius asked Dumbledore.

"That we still have a lot to learn about time, space, magic, and of course phoenixes." Dumbledore reached up behind him and gave Fawkes a scratch under his chin.

Deciding to get the topic rolling again, Harry continued. "Well, once Hermione and I were back we started making plans to deal with all the problems that we knew were coming. We couldn't do much, though, because despite having been through so much we were both only eleven again. So we focused on trying to find the Horcrux at Hogwarts. I will admit it took us an embarrassingly long time to work out where it was. We couldn't do much that first year because we knew that the diary would be sent to Hogwarts the next year and we didn't want to risk changing that."

Harry turned to Sirius. "Waiting to get our hands on that diary was why I didn't do anything to get you out of Azkaban sooner. I knew you were suffering in there but I left you there. I'm sorry."

Sirius looked at him and Harry couldn't read his expression, he was terrified that Sirius would reject him for leaving him in that hell for over a year. His godfather stood up and walked over to Harry, and he thought the man was going to hit him. He decided that if Sirius was going to hit him, he was going to stand there and take it; maybe if Sirius could get it out of his system, then the rest of the fallout wouldn't be too bad and Sirius wouldn't kick him out. However, Sirius pulled Harry into a hug, pressing Harry's head against his chest and said, "It's okay Harry. I forgive you. You did the right thing." Harry couldn't help but become a little emotional at that and hugged his godfather back with a hug that would make Hermione proud.

There was a bit too much emotion for them to continue the conversation for a while. Kreacher came in with a tray of tea and little cakes. Dumbledore poured himself a cup of tea and Hermione poured one each for Harry and Sirius as well as herself, having spent more than enough time in Grimmauld Place to know how Sirius liked his tea.

It took them a while to get back to their conversation, but when they did Harry and Hermione explained what they had done to prevent Voldemort coming back this time. Sirius was enraged when he heard that LeStrange was possessed, possibly willingly, by a Horcrux. When Harry told him about his assessment of why LeStrange would attack Narcissa Malfoy the way she had while looking for the diary, Sirius agreed with Harry's assessment that 'Bella-Mort' (as he dubbed her) would come here looking for the locket. Sirius, however, quickly came up with a plan that Harry liked: he would put the house under the Fidelius charm. Dumbledore volunteered to be the secret keeper, but Harry instantly vetoed that idea. "No way. I won't let you be the secret keeper."

"Why ever not?" Dumbledore asked, sounding genuinely confused.

"Because neither of us trust you anywhere near enough to put that much faith in you." Hermione answered, indicating herself and Harry.

"I'll be the secret keeper,'' Harry decided.

"I'm afraid that won't work. As strong as a Fidelius charm is, it's also brittle if the secret keeper is too close to the secret. It will degrade the charm; in fact, a secret keeper will degrade all secrets they are too close to. In the case of a house, while it would take a few days of constantly being here, the charm needs twice as long without a secret keeper inside it to repair the damage. As you live here, then you cannot be the secret keeper," Dumbledore explained

"Then I'll do it!" Hermione exclaimed. "Harry can spend more time visiting me than I do him." Dumbledore didn't like that and said as much, but Harry backed Hermione as the secret keeper and Sirius sided with Harry, so in the end the headmaster could do nothing but agree. Dumbledore did agree to cast the charm, which was a plus. Sirius was sure he could work it out but Dumbledore was already proficient with the spell. Apparently the spell needed the secret to be written down on a parchment that was prepared with a potion first, so they couldn't do the spell right then, but Dumbledore agreed to give Hermione the recipe so she could brew it. It would take a few days for Hermione to get the ingredients and brew the potion, so Sirius agreed to move out for the week just in case Bellatrix LeStrange turned up before they were ready. Fawkes was kind enough to give Harry, Hermione, and Dumbledore a quick ride back to the castle.

-ϟϟϟ-

Harry and Hermione didn't know where Sirius spent his week away from Grimmauld Place. He wasn't going to tell them and he had no idea how they would react if they knew. However Sirius found his week sofa-crashing at the Grangers' house quite comfortable. The conversation they had after dinner the first night, however, was never going to be a fun talk. The three of them were relaxing in the living room when Sirius decided to broach the topic. "So I found out what the kids were hiding from us."

That of course got the Grangers attention immediately. "What's going on, then?" Emma half asked and half demanded in a way only a mother could. Sirius proceeded to tell them everything he had learned from Harry and Hermione earlier that day about having their souls sent back from the future.

There was a lot of upset talk from the Grangers as they were told everything that their daughter had been through. Or, at least everything that Sirius had been told about, there was no doubt in any of their minds that there was plenty they hadn't told Sirius about, if for no other reason than they were condensing six and a half years into a conversation that was only a couple of hours long. But after Emma had gotten out a bottle of bourbon (her drink of choice) and poured a not so healthy measure for each of them, they started to calm down. It was a comment from Dan that broke the stiffness however. "Well at least we know how she made friends with Harry so quickly now."

"True. I remember that day." Emma's mood dropped as she spoke. "I was terrified, Hermione and I were sitting in the kitchen. We had just finished having some mother daughter talk before she went off to boarding school when she suddenly just burst into flames and was gone. I was distraught, of course, I thought my little girl had died. I almost didn't answer the phone when it rang but I thought it might have been Dan and I couldn't not tell him. I was so relieved when it was Hermione on the phone saying she had just been teleported across London and that she was completely fine. I rushed out of the house and to her as fast as I could, but by the time I got to Diagon Alley and Harry showed me into a hidden pub the two of them were already the best of friends. I thought at the time that Harry must be the type who made friends easily, because Hermione had always had trouble with that, and also he was going to the same school Hermione was and had been raised in the regular world, so they would understand each other. Getting my baby back and having her find a friend was enough for me to not question how quickly they became best friends."

The three of them spent the rest of the evening talking and trying to decide what they were going to do going forward. By the end of the night, the only thing they could really agree on was that, from the descriptions that the two had given Sirius, things were definitely a lot better this time than they were last time. At least the two of them seemed to know what they were doing.

The next week passed without incident. Not only was Grimmauld Place not attacked, no one else was either. In fact, there were no sightings of LeStrange in the country at all according to Dumbledore, who in his position as Chief Warlock had asked the D.M.L.E. to keep him in the loop. This unnerved Harry and Hermione. Unlike some others, they weren't naive enough to hope that LeStrange had accidentally killed herself. No, it was their belief that LeStrange had to be doing or plotting something.

When Saturday came around, they went to Grimmauld again and Dumbledore cast the Fidelius charm with Hermione as the secret keeper. It was weird, because the secret was worded to hide the property and not that Harry and Sirius lived there, because a Fidelius charm would fail if the secret was no longer true. This meant that Harry was briefly inside a Fidelius that he wasn't told about. He couldn't focus on anything other than the other people in the room with him and the way out, and he was also compelled to get up and leave the property as soon as possible. He also couldn't remember anything about where he was. It was weird, he knew that as soon as he walked out the front door he would know what city he was in, but right now the house he was in could be anywhere, in any country on the planet. In fact, he wasn't entirely sure that the house he was in wasn't located on the moon. Could wizards do that?

A few words from Hermione whispered in Harry's ear were enough, and suddenly Harry knew exactly where he was. He watched as she told Sirius and saw the moment Sirius's memories returned to him. Dumbledore expected Hermione to tell him next, but she refused until Sirius asked her to, proving in Harry's mind that she was the right one for the job.

-ϟϟϟ-

The rest of the term in school was practically incident-free, except for when they found out that Snape was marking down Suzanne Payne's potion work unfairly. Harry took this as a direct attack on her scholarship, so he had Professor McGonagall (as the one in charge of the scholarship) call a meeting between herself, Suzanne, Harry as the funder, Hermione as Suzanne's tutor, Sirius as Harry's guardian, Professor Sprout as Suzanne's Head of House. They were all seated around in the Deputy Head's office, which was the only office in the castle except for Dumbledore's that was big enough for them to all sit comfortably in.

"OK, enough of the mystery Minerva, what's with this meeting?" Professor Sprout asked once they were all sitting comfortably.

Professor McGonagall nodded to Harry so that he would answer. "Because, Professor, we believe that Snape is deliberately tanking Miss Payne's grades in an attempt to tank her scholarship." Suzanne just sat there looking at her feet, too nervous to say anything.

Harry's statement shocked Professor Sprout. "Why would he do that?"

"Because Snape hates Harry and regularly drops his grade, and because Harry is the one paying for Miss Payne's scholarship that animosity seems to have spread to her," Hermione answered the professor.

Harry picked up the thread. "I honestly didn't care much while he was doing it to me. I know that my grades are higher than Snape claims and it's only the outside O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s that matter after school, so his pettiness had no real effect on me. Suzanne, however, needs to maintain an Exceeds Expectations average to continue her scholarship. If he is vindictive enough to give her a dreadful grade, it could destroy an otherwise brilliant average.

Professor Sprout was looking angry now but asked an important question. "Professor Snape has been a teacher here at this school for a long time, and in that time I have seen him produce some very talented potioneers. How are you so sure that your grade, Mr. Potter, and Miss Payne's grades are being lowered? Maybe the two of you are just bad at potions?" She didn't sound like she believed it but she had to ask anyway.

"I'm the reason, professor," Hermione spoke up. "Harry studies his potions with me and we both tutor Suzanne. While Harry doesn't find potions easy, his theory work I would say averages an Exceeds Expectations and his practical skills about the same, maybe an Outstanding on a good day. Yet Snape rarely marks him higher than poor. Suzanne doesn't have the same trouble Harry has with potions, and as Harry and I tutor her we have seen her homework before she hands it in. Plus, before going to Professor McGonagall I tested her brewing as well, looking for where she was going wrong so I could help her." Hermione added the last sentence as an afterthought, not wanting the professors to think she was looking to cause trouble.

Professor Sprout looked angrier than Harry had ever seen her. One of the side effects of dealing with all of the big school problems before they could be blamed on Harry this time was that Harry didn't have the reputation of being a trouble magnet among the teachers that he had last time. This time they both had the reputation of being quiet and quite studious, although after the events around the Triwizard Tournament Harry also had earned the reputation of being dangerous when he needed to be. So Professor Sprout believed Harry and Hermione were at least telling her the truth as they knew it.

They talked for a while about what they were going to do. Harry made a change to the scholarship that no grade given by Snape was to be used in calculating Suzanne's scholarship eligibility unless that mark was verified by either Professor McGonagall or Sprout. Professor McGonagall agreed to that change and Sirius signed off on it as Harry's guardian. The two teachers were also going to test Miss Payne's potions abilities themselves. While neither of them were in the same league as Snape when it came to potions, Suzanne was only a first year and they were more than skilled enough to test a first year themselves. If Suzanne's tests revealed that her marks were being manipulated, however, then the two witches who represented two of the Hogwarts Heads of House as well as the Deputy Head were going to inspect Snape classes. Harry, who was confident that Suzanne's test would lead to the grease spill that the students had as Potions Professor being looked into, offered the two Professors the use of his invisibility cloak so that they could observe how Snape behaves in class when he thinks no one can see him.

-ϟϟϟ-

Over the Easter holidays, Harry reflected back on the last few weeks. Suzanne had aced her potions tests and both Professor McGonagall and professor Sprout had heaped praise on the girl. Both the professors had also pulled Harry and Hermione aside and had told them the results as well as praising them for the work they had done in tutoring the girl. It was only one evening a week, but it was enough that the girl was one of the best students in her year.

The Heads of House did borrow Harry's cloak (Professor Flitwick) had joined them at this point, and their return of it two weeks later coincided with a very unhappy Professor Snape. Harry asked Professor McGonagall what the results of looking into Snape were, but she refused to answer any questions regarding that because it would be unprofessional. However, Harry did notice that she never once referred to Snape as Professor Snape as she normally did when talking to a student. He found out the results were obvious, however, when Snape actually gave Harry an Exceeds Expectations on the next bit of homework Harry handed in.

One night during the holiday, Harry and Hermione decided that they were going to break the rules about curfew that were already pretty lax because of the lack of classes. Once they finished their Prefect rounds, instead of going back to their common room the two of them decided that the Prefects bathroom was a better idea. They spent the evening skinny dipping in a pool that was so full of bubbles that they may as well have been fully clothed most of the time.

When they got out it was past midnight, and they used magic to dry off and get dressed. Harry got out the Marauders' map and had a look to see if anyone was leaking around the castle who could catch him out of bed. The last thing they wanted to end their night was to be dragged to an irate Professor McGonagall who would berate them for being out so late. Filch was out and about as usual, but he wasn't the only one moving on the map. Moving away from the Whomping Willow in the secret passage into the school was Bellatrix LeStrange.

A/N

This is my own limitation on the Fidelius Charm. It explains why they didn't just make James or Lily the secret keeper but also explains why Dumbledore could visit Grimmauld Place while he was the secret keeper in Order of the Phoenix. As to why Harry, Hermione, and Ron were able to stay in Grimmauld, they never shared the secret with anyone so their presence had no effect on the charm. I couldn't fit that last bit in the description and have it flow right.

The author would also like to point out that bourbon is a terrible drink and any of you who drink it should switch to scotch.