So I re-imaged my computer and lost half a chapter of this because the stupid folder didn't transfer over the way it was supposed to, and then I got distracted by every fanfic in creation that wasn't HP. So none of the plot bunnies in my head were in any way related to this story, making it very difficult to write.

Thanks to everyone who followed, favorited, and/or reviewed. To those who are curious, yes, Amelia and Sirius will become professors, no, you haven't guessed both correctly.

Reminder: I don't own HP, so anything you recognize probably belongs to JKR. (Unless it's a mistake, then unfortunately it might be mine.)

When Amelia stumbled out of the fireplace into her living room, a bearlike black dog was watching her from the doorway.

"It was the quickest way to get here," she said with a shrug, brushing soot from her clothes. "For all that Apparation is cleaner, you can't Apparate at Hogwarts. And it is a long flight."

The dog looked at her curiously.

"I, er, stopped at my mother's before continuing to Hogwarts," she admitted.

"And?" Sirius asked, a dog no longer.

"Well, Kingsley is Minister of Magic now," Amelia said nonchalantly.

Sirius' eyebrows shot up to his messy hair. "Huh," he said.

"I know. A competent Minister. What's the world coming to? It was a surprise to me, too."

"What did Minerva say?"

"She is stressed. The castle took a beating in the battle, which was two and a half months ago. She's also trying to fill three teaching positions and that isn't going well. She's glad to see us, though. She said she will contact Kingsley and meet us at the gate in an hour." Amelia paused. "Oh, and my mother invited us over for dinner. Will and his family are coming. She said this dinner has been planned for a few days, but I wouldn't put it past her to have lied and arranged it right after I left."

A grin crossed Sirius' face. "So, that's what a 'normal' family does, is it?"

"Ah, er, well, I wouldn't exactly call my family 'normal' – you haven't seen them when they all get together. I have an uncle who lives across the Channel and you can't take anything he says seriously," Amelia said with a laugh. "But I reckon that is the case with most families." A grimace. "Ones that get along, anyway. But regardless, I told her we would probably be dealing with the Ministry all day. So she rescheduled it for tomorrow. I'm almost afraid of what she's going to prepare for tomorrow."

Sirius shrugged. "Dinner sounds good."

Amelia laughed. "Of course it does. I should have known. Who are you, man or dog, to turn down food?"

Sirius grinned unapologetically.

Amelia shook her head. "If you're going to come back from the dead, I need to find you something better to wear."

"What's wrong with this?"

"Sweatpants never look good," she said firmly. "But that is beside the point. You were infamous and you were dead. Do you doubt the Prophet will run your miraculous return? I would rather not appear on the front page next to your prison photo. If I am to share the front page with you, I would much prefer you look decent, at the very least."

"I hadn't thought about that."

"You're a guy," Amelia said, exasperated. "Magic or Muggle, guys generally don't think about things like that. Now come on, I need to alter you a set of robes."

Amelia led the way up the stairs to ransack her wardrobe. She handed him a mirror and a comb before going digging through her closet. Sirius looked vaguely amused as she considered and discarded robes in half a dozen different colors. Finally settling on a charcoal gray, Amelia jabbed it a few times with her wand.

"Try this on," she said, brandishing the robe at him. Sirius pulled it on over the T-shirt and sweatpants and Amelia made a few more adjustments with her wand. "It's not Madame Malkin, and it won't hold up overly well, or for long, but it will do for now," she concluded.

"I suppose this was all really necessary?" he asked, feeling put-upon.

Amelia gave him a look and he raised his hands in surrender. "Yes," she replied succinctly, attacking his sleeves again with her wand. "There. Now you look presentable. And we should probably head out if we want to be on time."

"You know," Sirius began, "if we just came in under the Whomping Willow, we wouldn't need Minerva to open the gate for us."

Amelia gave him another look. "Owls are not designed to traverse small tunnels. And I would prefer not to have to crawl." Then she remembered. "And someone died in the Shrieking Shack. Severus," she explained at his unspoken question.

It was a measure of control and of change that Sirius' sneer died unformed. And of confusion. Without the long standing enmity between them, Sirius didn't really know how to respond to mention of Snape. "Er, how do you know that?" he asked awkwardly.

"I saw it in Harry's eyes in the Pensieve," she replied quietly.

"In Sni – uh, Snape's – memories? When we saw Harry there at the end?"

"Yes." Amelia nodded. "That is also how I knew of the deaths of Tonks, Remus, and Fred Weasley."

"You and your Legilimancy." But it didn't carry the humor it usually did; it was too somber. "We should go," Sirius said, somewhat abruptly.

"Transform," Amelia informed him. "I will not cause someone in Hogsmeade a heart attack by having them catch sight of a supposedly dead murderous fugitive."

Sirius snorted, but bounded down to the living room as a dog without complaint. Amelia took a few moments to fix her own appearance before following him down.

Shortly thereafter, a woman and a dog made their way down the rocky hillside outside the wizarding village of Hogsmeade. The woman spoke quietly and at length to the dog as they trekked to the Hogwarts gate, speaking under the cover of a spell she could not remember learning.

For the life of her, Amelia could not determine exactly when she had learned "Muffliato," although she was reasonably confident she had not known the spell prior to her brief appearance at the Battle of the Department of Mysteries. Logic implied she had learned of it while behind the Veil, but she had no memory of someone using it, and Padfoot indicated that he also had not known the spell. So where had she acquired her competency of the anti-eavesdropping spell?

"But, really," Amelia said after further explaining her conversations with her mum and Minerva. "How do you know we didn't forget something? For all we know – who knows what could have happened? We were behind the Veil, Sirius! There is no useful precedent for that! I don't think – no, I'm fairly sure – we don't remember everything we experienced!"

Padfoot flicked an ear at her and looked otherwise unimpressed.

"I'm serious!" she exclaimed.

Padfoot grinned at her.

Amelia rolled her eyes. "Yes, I know, you're Sirius. But really – " She broke off, trying to find the right words. "Do you know how Wormtail died?"

The dog stopped suddenly and stared at her.

"That's my point! How can we know that? Remus mentioned Wormtail's hesitation caused his death, but I know more than he told us! You knew about his silver hand, but I didn't! And I do! Just as I shouldn't know that it strangled him when he hesitated to kill Harry, but I know. And you know too!"

Padfoot looked at her with wide eyes that did little to deny her declaration.

"We shouldn't know that," she said emphatically. "There is no reason we should know that. But we do. I'm telling you, we learned things in there that we don't realize and don't remember."

Padfoot nodded solemnly. Amelia was quiet the rest of the walk, although she did give a friendly wave to the handful of residents who noticed her. She wasn't the type to be recognized, but she was ruefully aware that would change soon enough.

Minerva was waiting for them at the gate. "You're quiet," she noted as she led them up to the castle.

Amelia shrugged. "We were discussing some of the more unusual aspects of the Veil. Without some point of reference or a second voice in the conversation, we pursued the idea to the end of its leash."

Padfoot barked.

"Normally I wouldn't know how much use you would be in a discussion on complicated, hypothetical, and philosophical topics, but you have made a few useful comments in the past," Amelia remarked.

Padfoot bared his teeth at her.

Amelia swatted the top of his head with the hilt of her wand. She laughed at the disgruntled expression on his face.

Minerva laughed as well, shaking her head. "You're right. You have both changed."

Padfoot yipped and ran around them.

Kingsley met them in Minerva's office with Percy Weasley. "You know Percy, I believe. I thought someone at least peripherally aware of the previous situation would be best to assist with this."

Although he had almost certainly been forewarned, Percy still looked startled when Sirius changed back to human. Percy had not been a part of that year with the Order.

"I hear congratulations are in order," Sirius said to Kingsley.

"Someone had to take over after last year's fiasco," Kingsley replied.

"They couldn't have picked a better candidate," Amelia remarked.

"I appreciate that, Amelia. I'm not so sure I appreciate the complications of restoring the Ministry or the magical community. Although it helps that Harry is supporting the newly reformed Ministry," Kingsley noted. Percy's ears went red.

Sirius snickered. Amelia nodded. Minerva looked at the two of them, confused.

Amelia absently shook her head. "Just another one of those things connected with out little, er, sojourn."

"Care to explain that particular trip?" Kingsley inquired. "We thought you were dead."

"I believe I said that they were basically dead, but for now," the portrait of Dumbledore pointed out.

"Tch, that's not much different, Albus, or very informative," Minerva scolded.

"It's what happened though," Amelia interrupted. "We were the next thing to dead – well, Sirius was. I was the loophole."

Everyone looked at her expectantly.

"I arrived at the Department of Mysteries as a Disillusioned owl, just in time to see Sirius fall. I dove after him and tried to Apparate us out. I was still in Animagus form and we were falling through the Veil, so it didn't work. We began reliving old memories and it took a bit of doing to realize what was happening. We heard you," she indicated the portrait, "and Harry when you were in the Pensieve. We, er, hypothesized that the memories were some sort of maze that we had to try to find our way out of. Then came the battle, which thinned the Veil, and Harry's extended look into Severus' memories, and then when he sort of died, we met some departed friends who allowed us to witness the final confrontation and find our way home. We woke up in my living room earlier today."

"That's the less complicated version," Sirius added. "The really less complicated version."

There was a long moment of silence, then Kingsley said, "Blimey," and nodded distractedly. That broke him out of his surprise and he shook his head. "All right. I have most of the paperwork with us. Percy can Floo back to get whatever else we need. After we get all this sorted out, expect to end up in the Daily Prophet. In fact, I might arrange an interview for later this evening to simplify matters. And, yes, we will take care to point out that even Cornelius Fudge did admit that Sirius was innocent at the end of his term of office."

The paperwork was a hassle. Percy had to Floo back and forth to the Ministry several times.

Amelia's paperwork was easier because, not only had she been less dead, she had left everything to her family and her stuff was mostly untouched. There was the minor point that she had some Muggle forms to fill out, since she had been living as a Muggle for the most part, but still relatively straightforward. Sirius on the other hand . . .

"I'll take my Gringotts vault back, sure. But I don't care, I don't want that house!"

"Besides," Amelia added more calmly, "Harry has been using it. I have a guest room. Sirius can stay with me."

Sirius looked surprised at that, but, really, "Where else were you going to stay?" He gave a nod and a shrug at that.

Then there were the three Animagi to be retroactively registered, two posthumously. Again, though, Sirius was the problem. It was illegal to be an unregistered Animagus, especially for as long as he had.

It took some fancy legal hand waving, involving him having been a minor at the time and the time he had already wrongly served in Azkaban, to clear that up sufficiently.

The whole process went on long enough to warrant Minerva having the kitchen send up dinner, which gave everyone a much needed break, as there were headaches all around. Kingsley and Percy returned to the Ministry to file the mess of papers and find a reporter.

"Not Skeeter?" she asked innocently.

Both made reflexive motions toward their wands and Amelia snorted. "Yeah, well, if she tries to give you too much trouble, Hermione found some dirt on her. The Marauders aren't the only unregistered Animagi."

Kingsley looked intrigued. "Really?"

"A beetle," Sirius added with an indignant glance at Amelia for daring to compare that wretched reporter to his beloved Marauders. "With those stupid jeweled glasses around her eyes."

The Minister's smile was positively Slytherin in nature. "I'll be sure to keep that in mind."

After a short wait, the Ministry officials returned with a young brown-haired woman named Audrey Tarrow who clutched her camera slightly apprehensively. She took pictures, asked questions, took notes, and tried to understand and not to stare. She didn't quite succeed at either.

"Don't worry," Amelia reassured her. "It wouldn't make any sense to me either except I had to live through it all."

Audrey eventually relaxed somewhat and was more-or-less comfortable around the resurrectees, even the notorious one. It helped that Amelia kept cracking jokes at Sirius, who then had felt the need to crack a few back.

"This will probably run in tomorrow's edition," Audrey told them. "If I hurry, I can get it in before the deadline, and I can pretty much guarantee they will want to run it."

"Just – give it a few days before you go out in public?" Kingsley suggested. "Let the news sink in a bit."

Sirius chuckled.

"I imagine my mother has invited everyone I ever met to dinner tomorrow by this point, so that will be fine," Amelia agreed. "This is me inviting you, all of you, by the way, so don't be shy. I need someone there who won't ask me to explain it again."

Sirius snickered and Minerva had a suspicious bout of coughing.

Kingsley merely smiled. "I might stop in if I get a chance."

"The more the merrier. At least that's what my mother always seems to think in regard to 'little get-togethers'," Amelia added.

Kingsley chuckled. "Well, it's late and I have to finish the dozen other things I put off to do your resurrection paperwork."

"Thank you again," Amelia told her.

"Thanks for putting up with me," Sirius added.

Kingsley snorted and departed.

"We should probably go as well. Will we see you tomorrow?" Amelia asked the headmistress.

"Most likely."

"Excellent!"