Author's Note: Slight change of plans: the final story will be thirty chapters, not thirty-one. No worries, you haven't lost any content, I just joined two too-small chapters. Thanks to all you wonderful people who keep reviewing . . . you're giving me great Christmas presents!!

Incongruously, we managed to make it to breakfast that morning. We were all too keyed up to sleep, and we thought that acting as normal as possible was the best way to deflect any attention. Harry, of course, was in the Hospital Wing, as he had yet to regain consciousness.

I glided through the day, barely paying attention to what my professors said, though I managed to put myself on auto-pilot enough to take notes. At lunch, I sat with Neville, and neither of us spoke. It was impossible to put anything into words.

Finally, after all my classes and dinner, I went to visit Harry in the Hospital Wing. He was, mercifully, awake and eating some dinner that someone had apparently spirited up to him. Fawkes the phoenix was perched on a bedside table.

"How are you feeling?" I asked him when he noticed me.

"All right," he said quietly.

I sat down at his bedside and held out my finger to Fawkes, who regarded it in a friendly manner. "Quite an experience, yeah?" I said, stroking Fawkes' head gently.

He smiled a little. "Indeed."

"Has everyone else been by?"

"Oh, yeah. Ginny's absolutely swamped, so she's in the library. Ron said he had to go see if he could get some sleep. But Hermione just left to get her Charms notes; she's going to get me up to speed on what we did today."

I giggled. "Of course she is."

"What about you, Susan? Are you all right? Ron seems a little . . . dazed."

I frowned in thought. "I feel all right. I don't know what could be wrong with us; you're the one who was possessed."

He shook his head. "It wasn't -- Voldemort possessed me once, just for a few moments. He spoke through me and everything. This was different. When I held up my arm, I could feel something telling me that I was giving him permission, and I didn't back down. I just kept thinking about what Dumbledore said, how I was a true Gryffindor. I told myself to just be brave. That's when he came."

Fawkes chose that moment to sing a note, and I began scratching his head again. Then I stopped and stared at the bird for a moment. "When did Fawkes come?" I asked.

Harry shrugged. "He's been here since I woke up."

I looked the phoenix in the eye. "You sense Godric on him, don't you?"

Fawkes bobbed his head, apparently agreeing, and sang another note, this one higher. I smiled and scratched the feathers right below his beak. "Good bird," I said.

Hermione came in then. "Hello, Susan!" she said brightly, in the tone that only a sleep-deprived overachiever can muster. "Harry and I are going to go over today's Charms lesson."

"Don't let me stop you," I said quickly, though Harry's expression seemed to plead with me to do just that. "I just want to spend a couple more minutes with Fawkes." I knew Fawkes from the future, as he would sometimes visit my flat. There didn't seem to be much of a pattern to his appearances and disappearances, but Mum and I were both quite fond of him, and fed him dandelion leaves when he stopped in.

I sat on the bed nearest Harry's and motioned for the bird to follow me; he did, and I stroked his crimson plumage while half-listening to Hermione. "Fidelius can be used for nearly anything," Hermione began to lecture, "but different secrets require different levels of caution for the Secret-Keeper. A secret like, say, the location of the Order of the Phoenix headquarters, requires that the Secret-Keeper never say or write the address unless he or she intends to divulge the secret to someone else."

Harry was, surprisingly, listening intently. Then again, perhaps not so surprising -- it was the Charm that had protected him the week before his parents' deaths. "But that's a fairly simple secret," Hermione continued. "Apparently, a lot of what Unspeakables in the Department of Mysteries know is protected by Fidelius. Some of those secrets are much more complicated than just the location of something, and so the Secret-Keeper for the Unspeakables must be much more careful. In class, we practiced concealing much harder secrets."

"Like?" prompted Harry.

"Oh, Ron tried to hide the fact that he has red hair. It was really hard to look at him for a minute or so, like there was just blankness where his hair should've been, but it was too hard for him to hold, so we could all see it within a minute or so."

"What did you do?" I asked.

She turned to smile at me. "I hid Professor Flitwick. It worked, too. No one could see or hear him but me. But it's one of those secrets you can break without saying it explicitly -- as soon as I spoke to Flitwick, about half the class could see him again. Then I shook his hand -- he was congratulating me, you see, for managing to hide him -- and the other half of the class cottoned on. I must say, it was fun while it lasted."

Something crashed into my brain, and I sat frozen, one hand on Fawkes' head. The phoenix trilled a few notes, and the world came into focus. This was it. This was how I was going to save Harry. If she could "hide" Flitwick, I could hide him.

"Hermione," I said breathlessly. "Hermione, can I see your notes?"

Both the seventh-years looked at me in confusion. "I -- I brought them up here for Harry to look over," Hermione said.

"I know. Harry, is it all right with you?"

"Sure," he said, much to Hermione's obvious dismay.

"Cheers," I replied. "I'll just be on my way then."

"Wait a sec, Susan," Harry said. "What -- what do we do now?"

I looked at him, and I realized how terrified he was. He'd been fixated for so long on the Horcruxes, and now they were all destroyed.

"Later," I said gently. "We'll worry about it when you come back to Gryffindor Tower, yeah?"

He frowned a little, but he also looked a bit relieved. I left him and Hermione there so I could sit in my dorm and read Hermione's notes for myself.

Harry stayed in the Hospital Wing that night, but with his return the next day, the notion that I could somehow hide him with Fidelius began to dominate my daily thoughts. I didn't have much time to get good at it, so I started going to the Room of Requirement and practicing casting Fidelius.

It was an enormously difficult spell that took a lot of preparation and energy. Oftentimes I'd try and try, not get it right, and be completely unable to continue. Those were the nights I'd slump back to the common room exhausted, and Neville would look at me with concern in his eyes but not ask what the matter was, because he was still walking on eggshells around me.

A week after the solstice, I thought I'd managed to hide a book. It was, appropriately enough, a copy of Hogwarts: A History. When I felt certain that I'd hidden it, I picked it up, left the Room of Requirement, and headed for the common room. It was Friday after my classes were over; dinner was still to come, but I wanted to see how strong my spellwork was.

I spotted Ginny first, so I went and sat by her. The book pressed against my chest, reminding me of its existence. "Hiya, Ginny."

She looked up from an essay she was writing. "Hi, Susan. All right?"

"Yeah. What are you writing?"

"A Care of Magical Creatures essay. It's a long bugger, too." She squinted at me. "Why are you holding your arm like that?"

That had been in Hermione's notes: the human attraction to secrets will often cause attention to be drawn to hidden items. Under normal circumstances, Ginny probably wouldn't have asked about my arm. "No reason."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not at all; thanks for asking, though."

"Right," she said, and she kept looking at my arm suspiciously. I decided to test the limits of the Charm: I carefully took the book in both hands, settled it down on the table before us, and flipped it open.

"Hey! That's a book!" she cried suddenly, and I knew the spell was broken. "How did you do that?"

"Just something I'm practicing," I said evasively. "I didn't mean to interrupt your revising."

I worked my way up from Hogwarts: A History. I hid other objects -- my satchel, a collapsible cauldron, a broomstick -- and I tested my abilities on various members of the Hogwarts community, though I was careful not to tip my hand to Ron, Hermione, or Harry. They would've recognized the spell for what it was, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Typically, people were curious about the "missing" article right away, and they generally managed to break the spell within five minutes. If I was careful, and I merely left the object out on a table (as I did with a Quaffle), it could sit there for hours without being noticed. But the moment I interacted with it in any way -- by, say, moving it, or tossing it up and down -- the illusion would shatter.

It was incredibly frustrating for me to spend so much time and effort hiding something for Dean Thomas or Professor Trelawney to suddenly acknowledge its existence not ten minutes later. I wished fervently that it was as easy to hide a thing's existence as it was to hide its location. But apparently, my acknowledgement of an object was close enough to telling someone else about it to clue them into its presence.

As this applied to my father, I worried that, as his Secret-Keeper, I would give him up with the slightest hint. Touching him on the shoulder, whispering something to him, even looking in his direction: all these things could break this brand of Fidelius.

And now that I realized the greater purpose of hiding Dad with Fidelius, I was deathly afraid of breaking it. If Harry were protected by Fidelius, he could walk right up to Voldemort and conquer him; Voldemort would be completely unable to fight back. Without me around, without my "tells," no one could discover Harry's existence. He would be safe.

He would also be alone, less than a ghost, for the next eighteen years. I couldn't imagine how he would agree to this plan. Unless, of course, I told him who I was -- but even that would be a hard sell.

It was difficult to imagine springing anything on him these days. Since destroying the final Horcrux, Harry had been on edge constantly. It didn't take him long to approach me again to ask about the final battle.

"Susan, I have to talk to you," he whispered.

I looked around, nodded, and drew him into a corner. "What's the matter, Harry?"

"Do you know what's going to happen next?" He was almost wringing his hands in distress.

I nodded slowly. "You're not going to like it."

"What is it??"

"You have to wait," I said softly.

He slammed his right fist against his left palm. "No! People are dying, Susan. The time for waiting is over."

"I know. But you won't be able to find You Know Who, and even if you did, he'd be impossible to fight. He makes camp on Dark territory, places that would swallow you whole for lack of a Dark Mark."

He swallowed, but said, "I'll fight him where I need to fight him."

I laid a hand on his shoulder. "Harry, you're very brave. No one doubts that. But you mustn't be stupid."

"It's not stupid to want him finished!"

"You will. But it will be here. At Hogwarts."

He shuddered violently, shaking off my hand. "No. Not here."

"I'm sorry, but there's no way around it. He will come here with his minions on Walpurgis Night."

"Walpurgis Night?"

"It's a sort of Wizarding-pride night for them. It's on April 30th. They'll come as the sun is setting."

"Not here," he repeated. He looked ill. "Not here."

"Here," I said firmly. "You must accept that. If we're going to get you ready, you must accept it."

"Ready? How can I be ready?"

"I can't tell you yet," I said. "I'll come to you when I can. In the meantime, please, relax and enjoy the weather." And I walked away.

The weather really was absolutely brilliant. Spring had come a tad early this year, and nearly all the students spent their free time outdoors, enjoying the warm sun.

In early April, by which time I'd managed to use Fidelius to hide my school chest from one of the other girls I shared a dorm with, Neville and I stole out before dinner to take a walk by the lake. In many ways, our relationship had regressed to how it had been way back in November, when we were both feeling out our boundaries. I was leery of being hurt by him again, and he seemed to be hampered both by guilt and by his knowledge of my impending departure.

That day, we went back to Greenhouse Four for our first visit to Leonora in months. "How are you, old girl?" Neville asked the stolid tree.

"Did you miss us?" I asked her, and climbed up to sit in the fork where her trunk split.

We sat in silence for a while, me in the fork, Neville on the ground, leaning against Leonora's trunk. Neville spoke up after a while. "You're leaving soon."

"Yes," I said simply.

"What's going to happen?" he asked.

"I can't tell you exactly," I hedged. I didn't want to test the limits of Fidelius by telling anyone ahead of time. "But on the thirtieth, in all likelihood, I'll smash my Time Turner and end up back in my time."

He stood up so we were level with each other. "And there's no two ways about that, right?"

I shook my head. "I definitely can't stay here."

He looked down at the ground and took in a few deep breaths. Then he looked up at me, his eyes shining with tears. "I've given it a lot of thought, and -- take me with you."

I looked at him in shock. He couldn't be serious. "Neville, you can't leave your time."

He shook his head frantically. "I can. I can. I'll say good-bye to Gran, tell her I'll see her in twenty years or so, and just -- go. I don't have anyone else to say good-bye to, Susan. It's just you. You're more important to me than anyone. I love you, and if you can't stay, I'll go with you."

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I answered. "No, I mean -- you really CAN'T. I -- I know you in the future, Neville." He reeled back as if I'd slapped him. "I've met you. I saw you when I was a little girl. You don't come with me."

"You didn't tell me," he whispered. "You never said." He was crying now too.

"I didn't want to say anything," I choked out. "I didn't think it was right. But you've been to my flat -- you came for Mum's thirtieth birthday party. Other times, too."

"Let's change it," he said urgently. "Let's make it different. Let's write the ending where we're together."

I jumped down from the tree and took him in my arms, clutching him fiercely. "I wish we could," I whispered into his ear.

"I'll wait for you, then," he babbled. "I'll just -- I'll wait, Susan."

"Don't," I said sharply. "You can't just put your life on hold for eighteen years. I won't allow it. You have to just fold up these months and put them in a corner of your mind and take them out to look at them once in a while." I was the one who was babbling now, but I couldn't help it. "Think of me from time to time, but Neville, don't waste your youth pining."

"Wouldn't be wasted," he mumbled, but I knew he'd capitulated. The pain I felt at that was sharp, but I knew it was for the best, and that it would fade eventually.

I took him and kissed him then, and we were frantic in our affection. Every time I kissed him now was one closer to the last time we'd touch, and I could hardly bear that thought.

We skipped dinner and stayed in the Greenhouse. He told me again and again that he loved me, and I answered with the same words. We both cried until we couldn't anymore. When I looked back on that evening later, I thought of it as a rehearsal for the farewell we'd be forced to face only weeks later. It wouldn't make the last good-bye any easier, but I found myself beginning to accept the fact that the days were slipping from my fingers like water.