Chapter three! This one was really fun to write, and the longest one yet. I hope you guys enjoy-I think it turned out really well!
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Supernatural
Chapter 3- The Return-Again? [2013]
Either Sam Winchester was the bravest man in the world, or he was an idiot, because come fifth year he was still sitting at the High Table.
The other Professor Winchester was back, too, which set off hissing whispers up and down the House tables. Sam had reacted so strangely when they'd asked what happened, and he was gone all year, yet Dean was there eating his dinner and looking no worse for the wear. Most people had thought he was dead - these were the people who were now staring in shock up at the staff table.
Harry was almost ready to give up on the enigma that was the Winchesters, because it seemed like every time they started to make sense a new fold was uncovered that put them back at square one. Even Hermione couldn't make sense of them, and she kept talking about how she was missing a part of the puzzle. Harry thought that, in terms of a puzzle, they were probably missing at least half of it.
That wasn't the only staffing change, though. An older woman sat in Hagrid's place, the half-giant nowhere to be seen. He didn't arrive throughout the whole feast, and the woman turned out to be his 'temporary replacement', Dumbledore continuing with the theme of not providing explanations for missing teaching staff.
The strangest incident of the year came during a Care of Magical Creatures lesson. Sam had come down to speak to Grubbly-Plank, and stopped dead when he saw the unicorns. When Grubbly-Plank encouraged him to go closer, the one he approached watched him carefully and then practically sprinted to the other side of the herd.
Sam watched it go with a peculiar expression, then turned around and walked back to the castle without speaking to the Professor.
"What on Earth could make a unicorn want to literally run away?" Hermione hissed, watching their Professor go. "What does he do?"
The most rampant rumors going around all concerned Dean, though several theories about the unicorn and Sam were added. Not one person in the student body knew what had happened to the shorter Winchester, and some said that even Dumbledore didn't know. Most of them involved him being kidnapped by some mysterious organization. One naïve first year spoke up and said maybe he'd died and come back, but that was quickly shot down. You couldn't bring people back from the dead, they said, and definitely not after a year.
When Dean mentioned that particular incident to Sam [he'd overheard the group talking in the library and quickly broken it up] they shared a look and both broke out into quiet laughter.
The most popular theory, however, had been thought up by one of the Ravenclaw prefects, who said that Dean had been off doing some dangerous Auror mission in America and had been grievously injured, putting him in a coma for most of the year, and he'd woken up over the summer. Most Muggle-borns rolled their eyes, knowing that if you were in a coma for a year you wouldn't just wake up out of the blue, but for the wizard-raised majority it was good enough.
[No one in the school knew that Sam and Dean knew about every single one of the rumors about them and spent some of their free nights laughing about them and picking apart the details "Oh come on, who thought of this one? That's ridiculous." "I don't know, Dean –snort-" "Shut up, Sam."]
Halfway through the year, Umbridge arrived.
Apparently, the Minister had originally tried to have her replace the Winchesters, but had failed at that. Instead, he'd created a new position called the 'Hogwarts High Inquisitor' and had Umbridge hired to that one. She spent a week observing all the teachers, and whatever happened during her observation of the Winchesters was enough that she stormed out halfway through the lesson. The seventh-years who had been in the class told everyone that they couldn't say - the Winchesters had asked them not to.
Three weeks later, the Winchesters were gone [again] and Umbridge was in their place. Sure, the Winchester's lessons were weird, and barely ever had to do with spells, but at least they had actually taught. The entire school loathed Umbridge, and a pair of ambitious Hufflepuffs drafted a petition to have her removed and the brothers reinstated, since they had apparently been fired and not left willingly.
The petition failed, but it gave everyone a little bit more happiness to find out later that the Winchesters had somehow managed to rig their office so they only they could enter it. When all magic failed and the teachers eventually resorted to breaking the door down, the entire room was covered in ancient symbols and runes that had been drawn on the wall in chalk. Written under a particularly large array were the words ADIOS, BITCH, along with a rather unflattering drawing.
The chalk refused to come off, and Filch spent hours scrubbing the walls before the office looked suitable. Umbridge had shrieked and yelled and tried all she could to get the Winchesters prosecuted, but they had already gone back to America and, since they weren't actually British citizens [much less British magical citizens] there was nothing to be done.
After the incident occurred, Fred and George purportedly set up a memorial to the Winchesters in honor of an awesome prank. No one ever found it.
[Years later, after everything was said and done, a first year would stumble across it in an abandoned classroom and send it to the brothers, who got a huge kick out of it. They kept it in a storeroom and send the twins a letter thanking them].
When Harry dreamed about Mr. Weasley getting bitten, no one knew what to make of it. They retreated to the Grimmauld place, and Harry steamed about the fact that, even though he'd been living with Sirius since before he'd turned fourteen [the trial had gone well and Pettigrew was now in Azkaban] he had to spend the break here. Sirius liked it even less. He got frustrated enough to corner Dumbledore and ask him about the vision, which resulted in demanding answers, which led up to a huge shouting match that resulted in the entire Order and the Weasleys plus Harry finding out that Dumbledore thought there might be a shard of Voldemort in Harry's scar.
After knowing this, Harry locked himself in his room and refused to come out. When he finally spoke to someone through the door, it was because Sirius had come up to tell him that the Winchesters were there with something that could get rid of it.
He came out on the conditions that he would be just with his godfather and the Winchesters, who met them in an unused drawing room that Sirius had to use Scourgify on because of all the dust.
It was rather surreal. The brothers used all sorts of weird runes and rituals and divining methods, while Sirius told him about how, after Harry had started his self-imposed exile, Molly Weasley had literally thrown Dumbledore out and refused to grant him access again, going so far as changing the Floo password and forbidding anyone from giving him the new one. No one disagreed with her, partly because Mrs. Weasley could be rather terrifying and partly because everyone agreed with her.
You didn't mess around with soul magic like that.
The Winchesters eventually agreed that there was definitely something in Harry's scar, and told him that it would take a couple days to find the method for removal, which they needed complete privacy for, and probably shouldn't do it in the house. After some debate, Mr. Weasley obtained them a portkey to America.
Harry didn't get to enjoy his small vacation, and besides, it was freezing there.
While he was absolutely sure that no one had enchanted him, whatever the Winchesters had done removed any memories he had of the preceding twelve hours. Sam told him they'd called in a contact to come remove it, who had warned them in advance that it might mess with his mind, and showed him a written agreement to the procedure in what was definitely Harry's handwriting.
The brothers hadn't seen what happened [they'd been forced to leave the room] but they had told Harry he probably didn't want to remember what happened, as it had sounded fairly painful.
They didn't tell him anything about the contact they had called in.
[It would probably be a bad idea to tell anyone, much less Harry, that the soul shard had been removed by the fourth horseman, who in exchange had made them promise to track the rest of them down and bring them to him. It appeared that Death was just as bothered by Voldemort as they were, though less by the destruction he'd caused and more of the fact that he'd escaped Death. The Winchesters were just wondering where they were supposed to find the rest of them]
Hermione had given him a tearful hug when she'd seen Harry again, which turned into a giant dog pile as the rest of his friends tried to do the same. Then Mrs. Weasley had practically pulled them all off him and nearly suffocated Harry before insisting that he have something to eat.
She'd made treacle tart for dessert, and the entire night Harry felt warm and slightly tingly from happiness.
That happiness,, unfortunately, did not carry over to his return to Hogwarts.
The only thing standing in Umbridge's way of having her way with the school was the fact that Dumbledore was still Headmaster. And once he had left, Umbridge wasted no time in establishing herself as Headmistress.
Harry probably should have guessed that the DA would eventually be discovered. Sirius had even told them that they'd been overheard. Despite all this, they kept meeting.
[Meanwhile, in a dark, underground crypt, a flutter of wings was heard and Dean was left alone, the angel tablet vanished with his friend. Above ground, Sam and Meg faced Crowley, Meg armed with a stolen angel blade and Sam with Ruby's knife. Sam and Dean would make their getaway in the Impala as one of their most unlikely allies fell on her own blade. They spent the ride silent, trying to decide whether they felt guilty over her death or not.]
Harry's interview with the Quibbler went well, and the fact that Umbridge immediately banning it only made it more popular was well received. The detentions he got for it were not, but the fact that more and more people were starting to believe him about what had happened during the third task helped a little. The reformation of Dumbledore's Army doubly so. It was even more dangerous meeting in a castle that Umbridge now controlled, but that made it feel even better-and the participants had been progressing well on patronuses, so it would have been a shame to just stop.
[In a cave on the seaside, Sam and Dean argued about which one of them would go in with Dumbledore, who had taken only a week to find them. Neither of them trusted him as much as they once did, but there was no way around it. When Dean came out half-carrying the man and with a silver, ridiculously large locket in one hand, a little bit of that trust was restored.
It was probably a good thing that Dumbledore had been unconscious when Death came for the second soul shard.]
When the Weasley twins set off their new fireworks, it was the most entertainment anyone had had since Dumbledore escaped. The sight of Umbridge running around frantically, covered in soot, was funny to anyone with a sense of humor. The dictatorial air, though, was still present in the fact that they restrained their laughs to common rooms and other private places where it was impossible to be overheard.
[The third soul shard gave them the most trouble. Finding out that the third shard had been in a Gringotts vault was perhaps the worst surprise ever, but it turned out that when you gave the Goblins proof that you knew Death himself and a little persuasion, it was surprisingly easy to have something removed from another person's vault. Particularly if that person was a convicted criminal.]
Fred and George's escape from Hogwarts was the only event which outranked their previous pranks. The fireworks this time were even grander and harder to get rid of, and the swamp now filling the fifth-floor corridor was a touch of genius. It made Umbridge furious, and consequently Harry's broom [the only one remaining in her possession] was put under extra guard.
[When Sam and Dean looked back over the map that they'd used the tracking spell on, the next burned circle (which indicated another soul shard) was smack dab in the middle of nowhere. When they arrived, Cas appeared out of nowhere next to them, and frantically gestured at the shack. A rush of what felt like pressurized air nearly knocked the brothers off their feet, and when they recovered Castiel had vanished again. Whatever he'd done, it had removed the protections surrounding the ring that was hidden there, which Death seemed inordinately pleased to be given back. When he took it, however, her merely removed a small grey ghost thing which he crushed before giving the ring back to the Winchesters. "It's yours now," he said, and the brothers promptly locked it up and stowed it somewhere safe.]
Dumbledore's Army had progressed from Patronuses to more high-level spells by now, spells that some were still learning or that none of them knew yet, which meant Harry was learning right alongside them Cho had refused to attend the new lessons, since it was her friend who had turned them in originally. No one except those who knew her well missed her, since the majority blamed her for bringing Marietta in the first place.
[The fifth soul shard was, apparently in Hogwarts.]
Over the next few weeks, whispers started about how someone had been sneaking around the castle at night that Filch couldn't catch, and supposedly it wasn't a student at all, but the Winchesters. No one knew why they had come back, or what they were doing, but it became a popular source of discussion.
One day, when the DA met, they didn't enter their usual room but instead a room full of piles of different objects stacked in what could have been a maze. As more and more people arrived, they all stopped for a minute just inside the door, before seeing the rest of the club. When all thirty members had gathered, they were a small group heaped together like just one more pile in this room.
When the Winchesters came around a corner holding a black box and a duffle bag apiece, it was hard to say who was more surprised.
Sam and Dean, when they learned about what the group was doing there, had different reactions to the news of an illegal club. Dean laughed and congratulated them, while Sam looked more conflicted, as if he wasn't sure whether he should praise them for learning stuff on their own or chastise them for breaking the rules and risking expulsion. When asked what was in the box, they only said that they'd gotten what they came for.
[Death took this one for good, like the cup and the locket, and Sam was starting to wonder if they were inadvertently destroying pieces of magical history. The crown thing they'd found at Hogwarts had been a beautiful silver with a large blue gem surrounded by the wings of some sort of bird, and the cup they'd given him had definitely had a badger on it. Sam had taken a battered copy of 'Hogwarts, a History from the Room of Requirement, and when he read that section on the founders he decided it was probably a good thing that they hadn't shown any of the students what they'd found.]
When McGonagall was attacked, the whole school turned into a more somber version of itself. Umbridge cheered it as a victory, but even the Slytherins knew that McGonagall was a good teacher and well liked by pretty much everyone. Very few of them disliked her simply because she was the head of Gryffindor house. Even Snape wasn't judged because he was Head of Slytherin, he was judged because of his horrible teaching methods.
[Though Death had assured them that there was one more left, the map showed no more soul shards. Dean and Sam concluded that whatever that last one was, Voldemort had to be keeping it close to him, and must have had wards up around wherever he was hiding. Which meant, time to join the Order of the Phoenix]
It was mid-exam season when Harry got the letter.
It was written on fancy paper and contained nothing but a short, succinct message;
Department of Mysteries
Come for your godfathers life
It also contained a scrawled plea from Sirius to come quickly.
Harry, like the Gryffindor idiot he was, immediately tried to head off to the Ministry. Giving up attempts to convince him otherwise, Neville, Luna, Ron, Ginny, and Hermione came with him, Luna suggesting that thestrals were rather fast since they couldn't Floo.
It was disastrous.
Not only was it a trap, but Sirius wasn't even there.
And Harry had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
When the Order showed up, Harry nearly collapsed from relief. He thought that this battle could possibly end in a victory, when Bellatrix hit Sirius with a Stunning spell that sent him falling towards the arch.
NO!
And in that instant it was like time had frozen. No one moved, all spells appeared stuck in the air where they were, everything was silent.
Except for Harry, and the gaunt man dressed in black who had appeared between his godfather and the veil.
He stared at Harry, eyes burning, and though he didn't speak, a single word echoed through the dark room. Choose.
Not him, Harry pleaded mentally, somehow knowing that he wouldn't be able to speak. Not Sirius, please.
The man nodded once.
Time exploded into motion once more. Spells flew, someone screamed, and as Bellatrix Lestrange crumpled where she stood Sirius reacted as if he'd been pushed and was suddenly falling the other way, off of the pedestal and onto the ground. He sat up, disoriented, and Harry had no time to process what had happened before he was thrown back into the chaos of battle.
When he was chased into the Atrium of the Ministry by a furious Rodolphus, he got in a lucky shot and knocked the man unconscious.
It wasn't fast enough to stop him from calling Voldemort.
The only thing that saved Harry from a Killing Curse in the back was Dumbledore's timely arrival. The battle exploded, no longer a free-for-all but a duel, one with no rules or guidelines and just unbridled magic roiling in the air between the two.
Harry didn't know who would have won, if Voldemort had not Disapparated and Lestrange hurled himself through the Floo at the moment that Fudge and several other Ministry officials emerged from the fireplaces lined up along each edge of the huge room.
"He's back," said Fudge, sounding panicked. "Dear Merlin, he really is back."
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