Author's Note: This is a direct sequel to the previous prompt.

(You've always known who I am)

Harry woke in the room of requirement. Hermione, Ginny, Ron, Neville, and Luna stood arrayed before him.

He couldn't move.

The light was bright enough that it took him a moment to adapt, and once he had done so he realized he'd not just been paralyzed but also tied up. A quick glance down toward his hands showed that his robes were missing, along with everything in his pockets - including the vast majority of his protective ritual focii. It also meant the ritual circles imprinted on his skin were clearly visible through the thin fabric of his undershirt.

Harry lifted his chin, and in so doing found his head and neck unrestrained despite his apparent status as prisoner. Before he could open his mouth to speak, Hermione took a sharp step forward from the line facing him.

"Who are you, and what have you done with Harry Potter?"

It was so unexpected Harry actually laughed, though it came out a choked and unconvincing sound.

"Hermione, it's me, really. Don't you have a spell you can use to verify? You've always been good at magic. We're only in sixth year, but surely—"

"STOP IT! Stop it. I don't know how you know so much about us, but I'm not going to fall for your trickery."

The others nodded in agreement.

Harry scowled at them. "This isn't funny. Hermione, cast an identification spell or something, and let's get back to—" he cut off, suddenly realizing that he was neither in his train compartment nor any ordinary first-day location in the castle. "What happened? Why aren't we on the train? Why aren't we at the feast? Why aren't we in the common room?"

Harry strained at the bands holding him without success. Even if he weren't petrified from the shoulders down, he'd spent his summer developing his strength magically, not physically, and couldn't have broken free.

He resolved that if he ever got out of this - when he got out - he'd add some form of escape ritual to his repertoire. Preferably another tattoo, and somewhere any captors wouldn't easily discover. He wished there weren't a war going on. Black market contacts were so much more accommodating when not terrified for their lives. Or, rather, when Harry was the only one causing said terror. Much more effective.

"Who are you," Hermione repeated, leveling her wand at Harry, "and what have you done with Harry Potter." Her voice sounded cold and flat.

Harry finally realized just how much not a joke this was. His friends' expressions varied between concern, fear, and anger. He'd never seen Ron look so sickened; terrified and disgusted and betrayed all at once.

"I'm Harry," he answered. "Not that an impostor would say different. But honestly, why don't you get some veritaserum or something? Guys, come on. Stop wasting everyone's time here." Harry found his temper slipping, anger rising within him despite his best attempts to hold it back.

"You know how hard it is to find veritaserum, or you'd never have dared suggest it." Hermione's voice rose to a near-shriek. "It's not the sort of thing we can just ask Professor Snape for; it's a highly restricted substance! You just want an excuse to run off to the teachers with your lies! I won't let that happen."

"Hermione, calm down! It's me, Harry. Why are you even questioning this?"

"You called me a Mudblood, Harry! You went after Draco Malfoy when he'd done nothing but walk by, and attacked him on the train in front of everyone! You acted like you hadn't even read our letters and were making up replies on the spot. You've been gone three months and now all of a sudden you know Arithmancy better than I do? I've been studying it for three years! The Harry Potter I know could never have—"

"Oh, is that it? You're jealous, because I learned in three months what took you three years? Well guess what, Hermione! Not everyone needs years of teachers and assignments to learn something. Sometimes, all it takes is an application of willpower and determination to get results! If you weren't so busy fawning over teachers and trying to be so good, I'm sure you could be even farther along than I am!"

Hermione burst into tears, but refused to look away. "You are not Harry," she said defiantly, brushing angrily at her eyes. "Harry would never say that. No matter how angry he was, he'd never treat his friends like this."

Ron and Ginny stepped forward, flanking Hermione protectively.

"She's right, mate, you're being a real git."

"Ron? You too? I swear, when this all gets sorted, the two of you are going to feel really stupid."

"The five of us." Neville stepped up too, Luna at his side.

Harry scowled, his anger reaching a tipping point. He concentrated on charging one of the runic circles tattooed on his arm. Building up energy inside your body rather than through a wand was an unpleasant sensation, but they'd given him no choice.

Before the spell reached half full, Hermione snapped, "Harry, no."

Curse Hermione and her ability to sense magic at a distance. No one else noticed, but of course Hermione had learned to do it. Her wand was pointed right at him. She could stun him faster than he could finish. Reluctantly, he relaxed his focus and allowed the gathered power to dissipate.

"We're onto you," said Ron. "Sooner or later, you'll have to drop the illusion, or your polyjuice will wear off, or we'll find the right countercharm. We will find out what you did to Harry."

"I'm so glad you're loyal to me, " Harry said through gritted teeth, "but when it extends to tying me up and threatening me, I don't find myself appreciating the sentiment nearly as much as I ordinarily would! Will none of you stop this madness and just untie me already? You can't expect our absence to go unnoticed for much longer."

"Collin Creevey is doing a magnificent job of pretending to be you," Hermione said defiantly. "A much better job of pretending to be Harry, that is, than you are."

"Alright! Alright. I give up. What do you want from me? How can I. . . prove," Harry almost choked on the word, "that I am who I am."

"Who's Aragog?" Hermione asked at once.

"Hagrid's ridiculous spider."

"What was I wearing when we first met?" Luna asked in her dreamy voice.

"A pair of ridiculous glasses from your father's ridiculous magazine," Harry snarled.

"When did we first meet?" Ginny asked softly.

"When I asked for directions on the ridiculous platform my first year."

Ron crossed his arms. "What happened to Peter Pettigrew?" His voice came out a low growl.

"I let him go, and he went running straight back to Voldemort, the miserable ungrateful rat traitor. Oh, speaking of ungrateful, how about you ungrateful lot let me go? We are wasting time here when I could be preparing to fight Voldemort, and instead you insist on this pointless trivia game?

"Oh, and by the way, you should probably have considered it already. But if I had captured and interrogated and replaced myself, don't you think I'd have taken every single memory from this vulnerable little head? You know how rubbish I am at Occlumency. I couldn't even keep out one person I knew was targeting me, much less anyone subtle enough to pull off something like this. Either way, you think I'm an idiot. If I'm Harry, I can't even convince you of the fact, and if I'm an impostor, I'm doing an absolutely rubbish job of it. I'm not sure which possibility is more insulting!

"If I were strong enough to overpower myself, do you really think I'd have been weak enough to be dragged in by you lot? And how about that surprise stunner of yours, Hermione? Do you think an impostor would have been idiot enough to let the five people closest to me through every layer of his protective enchantments? What kind of an idiot do you think I am?"

Harry was shouting by the end of it, but he'd had enough.

"You're not making this any easier, mate," Ron said, but he sounded subdued. Harry wondered if perhaps he'd finally gotten through to him, until he continued. "You don't sound like Harry at all."

"You know why that is?" Harry asked in a deadly voice, turning his full glare upon Ron. "Because I've got one year to live before I have to face Voldemort, and one of us is going to die. Because the only person who's ever been a father to me died because I couldn't protect him. I've had five months to think it over, and this is what I've decided. I'm not going to stand by and let Voldemort or anyone else hurt the people I care about ever again. I will do whatever it takes - whatever it takes - to stop him for good. And I'm sorry that we weren't able to go to your house and play Quidditch. But on the whole, I don't think Quidditch is going to save me this time next year when my protections are gone and I'm on my own."

"But you won't be on your own," said Hermione through her tears. "That's why we're all here! Because we're your friends. Or Harry's friends. Oh, this is so confusing."

"There's absolutely nothing confusing about it," Harry said coldly. "I grew up. I had to. I realized I couldn't keep relying on others to do for me what in the end I'll have to do myself. I'm sorry if that means I'm a different person now than I was when we left school, but I refuse to apologize for doing my best to stay alive. And if any of you expect to call yourselves my friends again, then you'll grow up and stop wasting time on this idiocy!"

"The Harry I knew would never go after an opponent who couldn't protect himself," said Neville. "The Harry I knew wasn't the sort to cast an Unforgivable Curse at a fellow student on the train! I don't know if you're an impostor, or telling the truth, but either way you're not the Harry I knew."

"Yeah, that was pretty stupid," said Ron. "Trying to Imperius Draco in front of everyone?"

"You can't honestly tell me he didn't deserve everything I gave him and more," Harry growled.

"I'm not saying he deserves less, but it's not your job to punish him. Apart from being an idiot and a bully, what has he ever done to hurt any of us? He's just an arrogant braggart who doesn't know any better, who grew up in a stupid pureblood family with stupid pureblood prejudices. For someone who claims to have grown up, you're acting very childish about this, Harry."

"I never thought I'd see the day when Hermione Granger defended Draco Malfoy. Maybe it really is the end of the world."

Before anyone could reply, Harry closed his eyes and sighed.

"Look. I get it. You don't agree with my choices, and you haven't had the time to come to terms with them as I have. But you have to face it. This is me, not anyone else. You may not like it, but I'm done being anything for anyone else. My goal, my only goal, is to grow strong enough fast enough to survive past my seventeenth birthday. Once that's done, once Voldemort is gone, we can go right back to being friends, happy, and nice, and noble. I'll gladly play Quidditch and talk about girls, and do all the stupid normal things people have time for when they don't have a dark lord trying to kill them! But right now, can we please just put this whole ridiculous affair aside and get back to what's important?"

A long silence followed his pronouncement. Ron and Hermione looked at each other. Neville and Luna looked at each other. Ron and Ginny looked at each other. No one looked at Harry.

"Alright. Alright, you win. You. . . might be Harry. And if you are, then you're right. This is stupid. And if you're an impostor, you'll make a mistake sooner or later, and get what's coming to you."

"So will you let me go? Also, where's my wand?"

Hermione reached into her pocket and pulled out Harry's wand. She hesitated, looking into his eyes for a long moment as though searching for something. Whether she found it or not, she gave the wand a flick and Harry felt his body relax from its petrified state. The bonds holding him released in the same moment, melting away as things in the Room of Requirement did when no longer needed.

He held out his hand for the wand, and again she hesitated. This time, he stared into her eyes, and she blushed and glanced away.

"I'm not saying I trust you," she mumbled, and shoved the wand into his hand.

Harry gave it a casual twirl, sparks trailing from it in its happiness to be reunited with its master. The tension eased, both from himself and the others in the room.

"I told you, it's just me," he said. "Accio robes." His robes flew toward him, and he slipped them over his head, patting the pockets to be sure his pages of ritual circles were still there. He pulled each one out, recharging and activating the spells. They hadn't drained much and would still last several hours each, so he determined that he'd been detained for only an hour or two.

"Why are you so suspicious of me?" he asked as he continued the ritual activations. It would be a time-consuming process.

"Because you're not like this, Harry! You're an incredible student of defence, but you're not obsessed. And you've never shown the slightest interest in arithmancy until now. You act different. You treat us differently."

"So it's a contrast? You think I'm an impostor because your past experience doesn't match with the present? Have you considered that everything changed? I can't afford to just be an incredible student, Hermione. I have to be obsessed. I have less than a year before Voldemort can come after me, and he's had decades to prepare. If I'm anything less than obsessed, I won't survive a minute."

"But you're a good person, Harry, and what you tried to do to Draco on the train — that was too far. And if you're really Harry, you would know better. You even tried to get me to join in hurting one of our fellow students! Can't you see how wrong that is?"

Harry turned his wand over in his hands. Everyone was nodding agreement. He looked down, then closed his eyes.

"Not that I'm arguing Malfoy deserved everything he got, mind," Ron said from beside Hermione. "But. . . you did get a bit scary there. And if you really were planning to, y'know, curse him for real, I couldn't really support that. Even for Malfoy."

"I see. Thank you for explaining."

"Harry," Luna said suddenly. "You know we're only doing any of this because we're your friends, right?"

"I know." He didn't open his eyes, focusing on keeping his breathing steady and holding his temper in check. They could fix this. Everything would be fine. He needed to be calm.

"I do hope you are who you say you are," Luna continued. "If it turns out we gave Harry's wand to an impostor, imagine how embarrassing that could be."

"You don't need to worry about that," Harry said softly. Nonverbal magic was fast, but he'd only practiced one spell, and there were five of them.

Expelliarmus. Expelliarmus. Expelliarmus. Expelliarmus. Expelliarmus.

His eyes snapped open just in time for his trained reflexes to catch the incoming wands.

Hermione gasped. Ron lunged forward, looking ready to wrestle his wand back by force. The Room began reforming restraints around Harry before he could take a step.

Sorry, Hermione.

"Imperio."

The room stopped shifting, stilled, and became a perfect blank white cube with a single door.

Ron stumbled at the sudden change, and Harry sidestepped his attempt to reclaim his wand.

"Harry what are you—"

"Imperio."

Neville and Ginny tried to run for the door.

Harry was faster.

"Imperio, imperio."

Luna just looked sad. "I hope you know what you're doing," she said, when the others stood passively under his command and he turned his wand on her.

"I do."

She didn't resist, so he didn't need the imperius to hold her. Which was good. Four people at once, especially these ones, strained the limits of his ability.

Starting with Luna, focusing on exactly what he needed changed, he cast a single spell.

"Obliviate."

The memory charm could be used to alter, as well as remove, and he only needed to shift things a very little. Just enough that his new personality would seem natural, as though he'd always been driven and focused, and only increased after hearing the Prophecy rather than changing himself completely.

Neville. "Obliviate," Harry said, then released him from the imperius once the adjusted memories were firmly in place.

Yes, it was possible he could have made peace with them naturally, but he didn't want peace. He needed their trust, needed it unbreakable. If he couldn't trust them with who he was, if they didn't trust him in turn, how would he ever protect them?

Ron. "Obliviate." Pause. Release.

If he survived his next birthday, he could explain everything. Until then, he didn't have time to rely on the sentiment and emotion of others.

Ginny. "Obliviate." Pause. Release.

There was no reason to feel guilty about doing what he had to. Some things were simply necessary.

Hermione. "Obliviate."

Harry hesitated a long moment, then put his wand away.

"Come along, everyone!" Hermione said brightly, breaking the others out of the post-obliviate daze. "Now that we've had our reunion, let's see if the feast is still going on!"

Harry smiled at her. "That's a wonderful idea, Hermione. Lead the way."

Some things were simply necessary.