Wizards were all insane. It was the only explanation for why they hadn't cancelled the quidditch match. Mathilda and I huddled together under a cloak spelled to be waterproof because we'd already lost her umbrella off the back of the stands in the fierce wind. At least the driving rain of the thunderstorm wasn't as freezing as it could be in Scotland in November. But it was so thick that it was hard to make out what was going on except when literal bolts of lightning struck nearby and illuminated the match like a camera flash.
I actually noticed Colin Creevey, perfectly-adapted to wizarding madness despite his muggle upbringing, trying to time his photographs to the lightning strikes.
If it wouldn't have broken Oliver's heart to hear I hadn't watched the match, I'd have stayed inside. If I didn't have close relationships with at least five of the players on the field, I'd have gone back in when we lost the umbrella. If my girlfriend wasn't such a fan, I'd have dragged us away when the lightning started.
I am a wizard, so I guess I was as insane as the rest of them.
Most of the match was little more than sense-impression under the misery of the small hurricane we were stuck in. Lee Jordan, the Weasley twins' roommate and co-conspirator, was doing his best to call the match, but even his amplified voice would often be drowned out by the wind and thunder. Periodically I'd see one of the twins or the Slytherin beaters fly close to our side of the stands to intercept a bludger, or, at least, where they thought one was. Above, when I risked looking up and getting water in my eyes, I could sometimes see flashes of red or platinum hair as Ginny and Draco tried to find the snitch in the maelstrom.
"Isn't this intense!?" Mathilda yelled and clutched her arms harder around my chest, clearly thrilled. Okay, maybe it wasn't all bad.
"That's one word for it! Who's winning?" I shouted back. I couldn't see the scoreboard from where I was.
"I think it's close!" she answered. "It will probably come down to the snitch." Like it didn't always.
"Ronald! Put your cloak back on! If you get sick, mother will yell at me!" I heard Percy screaming at his youngest brother, where the boy was just letting himself get soaked at the front of the Gryffindor stands while he cheered on the team. Seamus was right there with him, hooting like a madman every time he thought he saw a good play. Even Hermione and Neville seemed swept up in their friends' enthusiasm, though they held tightly to the umbrella they were sharing.
"It's fine," Penny chided him, loudly, from where they were sitting next to Mathilda on our right. "Nothing a little pepper-up potion won't fix!"
"Olly owes me for this!" Alexis complained from her seat beside me to the left, grimly huddled under her own cloak. At least one of the witches in my life was sane.
"And Ginny Weasley has seen the snitch!" Lee announced. I could barely make out the tiny redhead trying to make her secondhand broom climb against the storm. The Weasleys had used some of their prize money over the summer to at least get her a decent used Comet rather than the ancient school broom she'd been using the previous year. But it wasn't anything like the rocketship that Draco rode, and even though he was half the field away he was quickly catching up, white-blond hair a visible smear in the rain.
Of course, moments before we were finally going to get to go inside, that was when the dementors decided to show up.
They were far enough away that the feeling of despair was muted, but the black shapes were unmistakable even against the stormclouds if you expected them to be there, perfect black against the mere darkness. And the seekers were so focused on a tiny golden ball that they didn't seem to have noticed. "Dementors!" I yelled, already unwrapping my arm from Mathilda and fishing out my unicorn horn focus. My scream of, "Expecto patronum!" was quickly matched by my friends.
While Alexis, Penny, and Percy's patronuses spread into the air to protect the crowd, Mathilda's and my matched pair shot upwards toward Ginny and Draco. Word had gotten around about Mathilda's patronus later in the week and Penny, after effusively congratulating her for both mastering the spell and upgrading our relationship, demanded that we rename the silvery dogs Mickey and Minnie. She settled for calling Mathilda's Mini, and that name had stuck (the non-muggleborn weren't very familiar with Disney). Mouse and Mini, however, weren't quite fast enough, and Draco was already seizing up upon getting too close to the happiness-consuming monsters. It was hard to make out at the distance and in the rain, but I suspected it was exactly the tremors of someone remembering being put under the cruciatus curse.
My godmother had a lot to answer for.
The Malfoy heir lost his grip on his broom and fell, the expensive Nimbus shooting off on a long arc caught in the wind. I could faintly hear Ginny shout, "Draco!" and wheel her own broom around. Using the exact same maneuver she'd used to win her match against him the last year, she turned a fall into a powered dive, catching up to her falling rival and attempting to grab and pull him aboard her own broom as our patronuses flew past them and scattered the pursuing dementors.
The smaller girl on the cheaper broom might not have been enough, but a barrage of well-timed levitation charms from Hermione's crew and Colin managed to do a passable imitation of a shotgun, a couple of them hitting even the fast-moving pair and latching onto their clothing to slow them to a drift well before hitting the ground.
I absently noted a few other corporeal patronuses covering the rest of the stadium, probably Oliver's, Remus', and Dumbledore's, and the amplified voice of the headmaster was yelling at the dementors to leave seeming angrier than I'd ever heard him.
But why had they come?
I let my patronus end as I frantically looked around, not at all surprised when I found a pair of red eyes surrounded by dark fur crouched atop the Gryffindor stands. Who knew how long he'd been lurking behind empty seats waiting for me to be distracted. Seeing that he was primed to pounce and with only my Apologies focus ready to hand, I imagined a better future and unleashed the spell I'd been drilling all week, "Excorio!"
While we hadn't had time to do a full set of experiments in the week since we'd gotten the charm working, we had cast it on each other a few times (because we were still kind of dumb teenagers who didn't have a lot of respect for experimental safety protocols). It didn't do anything to most of us, but I felt twinges of guilt under it. We theorized it was that my soul was still slightly damaged from Justin's death. Our assumption was that against an actual dark wizard with a shredded soul, like mass-murderer Sirius Black, it should be an almost-incapacitating torment of emotions.
That wasn't what actually happened. My blast of silvery static nailed the big, black dog, but he reacted more like the diadem had than like I had: I could hear a wail that reminded me of Voldemort's wraith, the red lights in the dog's eyes went out, and shadows seemed to flicker around him.
Unfortunately, unlike a diadem, a living being could move. I only managed to hold him under for a moment, particularly because I was so surprised at the reaction, and the dog dodged under a seat and wriggled between the bleachers to escape into the substructure below. Everyone else around me was paying so much attention to the spectacle above that they'd barely noticed my personal fight right next to them. With only the Apologies focus to hand, I didn't have anything I could really do to try to catch the fleeing animagus.
By the time I let everyone know what was going on, he was long gone.
A couple of hours later, finally dry and warm, I was in Dumbledore's office to brief him. Mathilda grudgingly allowed that it was Order business and stayed back in the tower, but I figured if I was on a no-more-secrets kick I'd have to clue her in on the horcrux situation eventually. At the rate she was devouring Arcanos books to plan her campaign, she'd probably make the lich phylactery connection pretty soon anyway.
Remus had also been invited to the meeting, Dumbledore realizing it would be foolish to exclude his first-in-a-long-time competent and trustworthy defense against the dark arts professor from knowing about the main dark arts we were currently trying to defend against. Plus, if anyone had a right to know what was going on with Sirius Black, it was his former friend.
Against the cluttered backdrop of old headmaster portraits and magical bric a brac, I explained to both men what had happened at the match. After I finished, Dumbledore sat back, thinking. We gave him the time and he eventually said, "We have supposed that Tom has split his soul multiple times to make these items. As far as I am aware, there is absolutely no precedent. But, from what I know of him, he would have been looking to use his murder of the Potters to create another, the triumph over prophecy being a moment of great significance."
"Prophecy?" both Remus and I asked, almost simultaneously.
"Ah, yes. I will get to that," Dumbledore looked guilty. I'd been figuring there was something else he'd been keeping from me, based on what Voldemort had said to me back in the Chamber of Secrets. "But, and, again, this is pure educated guess, what if Tom, already prepared to make another horcrux with the death of young Harry Potter, lost control of the ritual when Lily Potter's defensive magic triggered and gravely wounded him? He could have unknowingly left a shard of his soul behind, waiting for something to latch onto."
"They found Sirius' motorbike at the cottage, as if he'd been there…" Remus explained.
"Yes," the headmaster continued, "We may never know exactly what happened that night unless Tom's wraith can be convinced to tell the story and it can somehow be trusted, but I've long supposed that Sirius Black was nearby, entered the house, and for some reason then left to track down and murder Peter Pettigrew without even taking his enchanted vehicle."
"You think he's basically possessed, like Quirrell was? Or, I guess, like Lockhart was." I asked.
"Perhaps. There are few records of horcruxes at all, and far fewer for living horcruxes. Those dark wizards that only made one would never place them in a host so easily destroyed. It is possible that the soul shard was maddened by the pain of its creation and drove Black to his current unhinged state, so unlike the charismatic, controlled spy he had been."
"Well, also, twelve years of dementors," I added. "So basically, we need to exorcise or kill him regardless?"
"Indeed," Dumbledore agreed. "I also now have worries about what would happen should Cornelius' kiss-on-sight order be fulfilled. Would the dementor safely dispose of the devoured shard of Tom's soul… or does some part of the consumed soul forever become trapped in the creature, rendering it impossible to pass on and, thus, permanently an anchor?"
Fortunately, my crew was quickly becoming the foremost authority on soul magic in the country. I told him, "I'll add figuring that out to our research, I guess."
Remus, obviously processing a lot of feelings about the situation, instead piped up with, "You mentioned a prophecy?"
"Shortly before the birth of young Harry Potter, a prophecy was delivered that seemed to indicate that he was destined to defeat Lord Voldemort, and Tom unfortunately learned some of the details. That prophecy, more than the harms James and Lily had done him in the war, was why he sought them out so fervently. The fidelius was our last attempt to protect them as he grew ever closer, but they, obviously, trusted the wrong secret keeper. I suspect, given the results of his attack, the Potter child could not have been the actual subject of the prophecy."
I remembered Voldemort laughing at his own folly and said, "You think it's me, now? Something about birth or rebirth?"
"The identifying passage was that the parents had thrice defied him and that the child would be born as the seventh-month died," Dumbledore nodded.
"And my mother was apparently as defiant a Death Eater as she was a student, and if you're really generous you can assume I was 'reborn' at the end of July two years ago," I worked out. "Prophecy is useless."
"Unfortunately, yes. In this case it receives its power almost entirely from the fact that Tom believes it. But, regardless, it still seems to me that events will conspire to have you be the hand that finally defeats him. Thus, I have tried to keep you as safe as I can while not eliminating opportunities you have to face him." The old man shrugged, apologetically.
"Still seems pretty thin," I told him. "With a war on, there had to be plenty of people that had 'defied' him three times, and if you can extend it to me losing my childhood and being 'reborn' at the end of July, who knows how many would qualify?" Hell, if it was being tricky with the Latin roots, the end of September might qualify too. Maybe babies born two months premature? Seventh-month, indeed; nonsense!
"Well, yes. There was another candidate at the time even when we were taking things very literally who was also placed in hiding. But, and this must not leave the room because this is part that he does not know, another confirmation was that he would mark him as his equal."
I rubbed the side of my chest that still bore discolored marks from Voldemort's creepy wraith fingers when he'd first gotten grabby and tried to possess me. "Fair enough. You could have just told me this before, you know?" The old man gave the helpless shrug of a veteran information hoarder and I just rolled my eyes. I could barely blame him. I also enjoyed looking cooler when I knew something someone else didn't know. "Out of curiosity, who was the other potential? Wait… Potter would have been a third-year now, right? Neville?" After all, his parents were aurors and we'd celebrated his birthday in late July on our trip the past summer.
Dumbledore nodded, "Fortunately, the rather well-known apparent death of Lord Voldemort at the hands of Severus Snape seems to have kept the Longbottoms from any further reprisals. When I still had a spy in his camp, I learned he had told his inner circle about the two possibilities and suspected they might attempt to finish the job."
"Right, so Neville is totally safe, since Voldemort has moved on and decided I'm the one he needs to kill now…" I said, then realized, "Except the shard that's been in Azkaban since the eighties might not know the main wraith figured that out!"
Both other men groaned and Dumbledore fished out the newspaper with the vacation picture that Black had seen before finally deciding to escape. I poked my finger down to where Neville was also in the photograph, his recognizable auror parents right behind him.
"He's at Hogwarts."