Defense classes were cancelled on Tuesday. Madam Pomfrey wasn't going to let me out of bed to go substitute teach, even if I had managed to wake up before lunch showed up. And Remus was in no condition to do so after getting the short version of what had happened. He came into the infirmary after Mathilda and I finished our meal to get the full story.

The fact that poor, broken Sirius Black had still gone out a true Gryffindor at least made some difference to his mood.

I promised him the full memory to view if he could borrow Dumbledore's pensieve, and he was heading out, only to remember something and stop at the last second. "You still haven't found a place to live once you graduate, have you?"

I shrugged, "Lots of interruptions. Hard to find a big enough place for four people on our budget."

"With You-Know-Who back," he began, then suggested, "you can't really stay anywhere without strong wards. Why don't you rent my place? I can keep the rent to what you can afford."

"But it's your house," I argued.

"I'm here most of the year," he disagreed, "and I can stay with Dora in her flat if I want to get out of the castle during the summer."

"Congrats on that, by the way," I told him. "Noticed her patronus changed."

He smiled, "Yeah. It's going well. Better than I deserve, but I'm trying to deserve her." He chuckled a bit and said, "Plus, she told me what she let you use the place for on Ms. Grimblehawk's birthday. Not sure I could live there after that." He winked to show he was kidding, but Mathilda gasped anyway and I laughed.

I glanced at her to check and she nodded. "I'll check with Penny and Percy, but I think that would be perfect. Thanks, man. We'll try not to trash the place," I grinned.

After he left, there wasn't much to do the rest of the afternoon other than talk and read a bit. I needed a little help maneuvering items with my left hand numbed and wrapped in a huge mitten of bandages. Before dinner, Pomfrey was changing them and Dumbledore chose that moment to show up and observe. "It's not looking bad," the mediwitch said, after unwrapping and cleaning it. I must have scoffed, looking at the blackened hand and she said, "Truly. The spell didn't actually dig all the way through. This would already be healed if it wasn't curse damage. I'm optimistic that time and potions will repair most of it."

"Can we remove the ring?" the headmaster asked, glancing at where the gaudy trinket was still mounted on my middle finger.

"Not yet," she shook her head. "The dark magics were either single-use or seem to have been removed by Mr. Dresden's charm, but the remaining enchantments on it would make it resist resizing or cutting to get off safely. I don't think they're harmful. It would be worse to try to pull it off with his injuries."

Was that hunger in Dumbledore's eyes as he looked at the ring? He covered it with, "Very well. Inform me when it's safe. I need to research the item as soon as possible, though it has been neutralized. I'm glad the injuries aren't more serious, Harry." With that, he took his leave.

"Suspicious," Mathilda whispered, and I nodded.

Pomfrey re-wrapped my hand, fully concealing the ring, and asked if I wanted to try going to dinner in the great hall. Anything to get out of the boring bed, I nodded, and Mathilda promised she'd help with anything I needed two hands for.

Honestly, other than my hand, which was comfortably numb underneath the salved bandages, I wasn't doing that badly in the injury department. I'd been much more banged up in most of my previous fights with Death Eaters. Altogether, I'd really only taken a half-hearted torture curse for a moment, and the killing curse, it turned out, was a painless way to go.

I wasn't planning to make a habit of getting hit by it, but as post-battle hangovers went, it wasn't bad.

The rumor mill was going crazy and we were mobbed at dinner. The morning newspaper wasn't really set up to make it to print on auror investigations that happened in the early AM, but I suspected I would be dodging Rita Skeeter for a long while. Dumbledore had apparently mentioned a little bit about what had happened to the breakfast crowd, mostly just to say that the dementors would be removed from the school and that the rumors of my and Mathilda's attack by the creatures had been exaggerated.

It turned out that Moody hadn't been fooled by our body doubles for even a minute, and had detransfigured them back to the comatose muggles that they'd been originally. They still hadn't been able to track down where we had been kidnapped to in time, but managed to return the poor pair back to the long-term care ward in Glasgow they'd been taken from by the Death Eaters.

We spent most of dinner and then a huge amount of time in the common room after dinner retelling the story. While we weren't officially claiming that Voldemort was back, we weren't going to keep it quiet from our friends and allies either. The muggleborn, especially, needed as much warning as they could get.

I was fully ready to take a real shower (with my bandaged hand safely bagged so it wouldn't get wet, of course) and then collapse when I finally got back to my room, only to be surprised by my own voice saying, "Well that's unexpected."

On my nightstand, the small enchanted portrait of me was looking up from his work at the enchanting table where Filch had painted me. He looked as surprised as I was. It took me a moment and then I said, "But I was only dead for a few seconds!"

"Guess it counted," he boggled. "How?"

"How much do you remember?" I asked.

"It's fuzzy after you got hit by the flashbang," he admitted.

"Another Voldemort ritual. He's back. Hit me with the killing curse, but then Mathilda got me with the soulfire charm. We got away after that," I summed up.

"Huh," he nodded, taking it in. "I'm glad you're not dead. Not sure what it means for me. I don't think I can go back to sleep. Wonder if I'll get more memories in the meantime. Or even the next time you die."

"We'll put Bob on it. But I need a shower," I promised my own portrait. As weird things went that had happened to me, having my own artificial intelligence barely even rated.

That wasn't the only thing I consulted with Bob about over the next couple of days. I owed the skull so much pornography for the information he'd given me about what was going on.

The bandages finally came off for good on Friday evening. "See: not so bad," Madam Pomfrey explained, carefully debriding the blackened skin off to reveal some fairly gnarly scar tissue. I tentatively flexed my fingers, and they seemed to mostly work. The feeling in my hand wasn't great, but that could just be the potions having a lingering effect. "I think you'll get back most of your mobility and feeling. The scarring should also fade," she promised. "You just need to give it time. Unfortunately, magic healing doesn't work well on curse wounds. A warning, though. That hand may be hard to heal magically going forward. Try not to seriously injure it again."

"Thanks, doc," I told her. She grinned, apparently amused that wizards from the muggle world thought of her as a doctor.

I stopped by the Gryffindor common room for a bit before heading over to the headmaster's office. He was eager to talk to me after I was cleared medically, and I knew why.

"Lemon drop?" he offered as I took the seat across from his desk.

"Thanks," I told him, taking one of the candies. I absently made a mental note to get him an assortment of muggle candy for the next Christmas. Before he could spend time getting around to the topic I told him, "I gave the ring to Hermione."

His eyes widened. All he could get out was, "Why?"

"You already gave Ron the cloak," I shrugged. "And she's the only one I trust with it that doesn't have a loved one that died. She'll use it for something good. Probably spend her time summoning up great thinkers of history for advice. Not like we'd use it."

Bob had no trouble at all identifying the stone in the ring as one of the Deathly Hallows. It was only that it was wrapped most of the time that had kept my willpower strong enough to not use the device that could summon the shades of the dead. Bob was also very clear that the stories of most users committing suicide to join their loved ones within a few years of obtaining it weren't exaggerations.

I continued, in the face of the headmaster's shocked face, "It was all I could do not to instantly call up my parents. Check to see if my ex was actually dead. Sir, how long do you think you'd last if you could talk to all the people you must have lost?"

His eyes starting to water, he said, plaintively, "I've sought it for so long."

"If you have questions for someone, run them through Hermione. But if you want to talk to someone… well, sir, Voldemort's back. We need you now. You know where it is when this is all over, if you can't wait any longer."

He let out a shuddering breath and thought about it, finally nodding, "I can wait a while longer. If you can resist, so can I." He took nearly a minute to pull himself back together. "But beyond its primary use… with the cloak and the stone together…"

I pulled my mother's amulet from out of my shirt and ran my thumb over the symbol of the Deathly Hallows. "You should give the wand to one of the kids too. I'm not sure if it should go to Seamus or Neville. Seamus would suck with it, but it would probably hold up to his power better than a normal wand. Neville has power issues, and it might amplify him up to a normal wizard's level of strength."

"When did you figure it out?" he asked, laying his wand, the third Deathly Hallow, on the table.

"The deathstick. The elder wand. The wand of destiny. I'd suspected for a long time. Was pretty certain after my research this week. You got it from Grindelwald, who got it from Gregorovitch. It's not that hard to figure out if you know where it is now." Honestly, Bob had been a huge help. I had an unfair research advantage.

"It's not unbeatable," he explained. "But it certainly is able to channel immense amounts of power. Why do you think it should go to one of the boys?"

"Maybe Neville isn't the chosen one, but you were treating him like he was when you gave Ron the cloak. A kid who wants nothing more than to be seen, and you gave him perfect invisibility. He won't abuse it. The same reason I gave Hermione the ring: she'll use it, but won't be consumed by it. And might as well complete the set. We don't need a Master of Death, but we may need the kids you've been grooming to fight Voldemort since they were 11 to have weapons he doesn't know about."

"You've given up hope of winning against him?" Dumbledore sighed, sadly.

"He already killed me," I reminded him.

That drew a shocked breath, and he got out, "And either must die at the hand of the other… oh no, the prophecy is finished."

He hadn't exactly told me that part, but it checked out. "Honestly, I figured he'd be extra careful to take me out first and with overwhelming force the next time we run into each other," I explained. "But if I also don't have the prophecy going for me anymore, maybe it'll be Neville that does him in after all. He won't expect it, after all of this, but he'll have to chuckle at the irony if it happens."

With another long consideration, Dumbledore nodded, "This is honestly ideal. I'd always worried that the subject of the prophecy might lose. The prophecy protected Tom as much as it did the 'chosen one.' Now he's vulnerable to anyone, and you didn't even stay dead."

"And he's got a lot of enemies. Fewer friends than he thinks, too," I thought out loud. I wondered if he'd tried to call his minions yet, and whether Malfoy and my godmother had answered. "And he's down to probably two horcruxes."

Dumbledore nodded along, but corrected, "Possibly three, as he didn't mean to make the one that attached itself to Sirius Black. We'll have to work hard to figure out what those are, and quickly. I only fear that, knowing that he's lost four and that we know about them, he'll move quickly to secure the rest."

"He doesn't know where the one that Sirius' brother stole is," I remembered. "It was supposed to be in a cave or something underneath where they did the ritual. And the ring was probably the next easiest one to get to. He might not have that easy of a time recovering the others."

"I'll mobilize the Order," he agreed. "And this might be an ideal first case for you and Alastor, once you start your private aurors business this summer."

I joked in narration, "It all started with a dame…"