If it was a controversial move to require the participants in his new arrangement to sign their own death warrants, it was one met with complete silence. Not everyone was there, but that was expected. More than likely, someone would let it slip that Harry Potter was building a real army, and when they did, each supposed member would be able to deny it with a straight face. The first thing they were all learning, after all, was Occlumency.

"I'm glad you're all here," he said after a moment. After a year of leading demonstrations, he was better at talking in front of a group. "The first thing I would like to say is that if you're still doubting it, the rumors are true. I want you all to know exactly what you're getting before you sign up for it. Even now, there's no pressure. No one's going to come after you if you walk away."

No one said anything.

"Brilliant. It looks like we all knew what we were doing already. This might be stating the obvious, but the Ministry wants you to put your lives in their hands. They don't want you to be able to defend yourself. They don't want you informed about what's going on. They might not stop you if you do a runner, so unless you're going to start killing the Death Eaters yourself, that's what I recommend. You might get as far as Iceland and it might be thirty years before you're looked up as someone who had connections with the wrong sorts of people, assuming we all die. I don't think we will, though. All the greats, good and bad, started out in the same position we are now. Voldemort might have some of his old followers out of Azkaban now, but they'll be rusty, shells of their former selves-"

Some indistinguishable sound stopped him in mid sentence and he looked over the group of students.

"Does someone want to deny the reality that he's back? Wouldn't recommend it. It's got nothing to do with me going on about it, though I am getting thoroughly narked about government officials denying his return after he conducted the largest prison break since it's been in use, and we know it wasn't just a handful of Death Eaters with nothing better to do; they were quiet when I was growing up. If they'd been capable of getting their old friends out of the prison, they'd have done it a long time ago."

There was no answer, but there was no telling whether that was because people agreed with him, or they were afraid of him. He really would have preferred the former, but under the circumstances, he would take the latter. First, he would have to make sure they would not get any funny ideas about not signing up and then ratting him out later.

"Your first lesson will be pretending this meeting never happened, and you never heard about it. You'll learn to shield your mind, and at least one of us will learn how to use a Memory Charm." The veiled threat could not have been missed, so he went on assuming that everyone had heard properly. "I can promise you that once we start really learning this, anyone who was worried about getting ganged up on or extorted; that's over. You won't want to show them how much stronger you've become, but you'll always have a way out. We're not going to be able to pack everything in for everyone, so we'll specialize, and from then on we'll always have each other's backs. Any questions?"

"How do we know we've prepared enough?" Neville asked. "What if we're just a worse version of the Death Eaters?"

"We're not going up against them directly," Ron said. "That's the kind of stupid that doesn't even work once out of ten. If it comes to it, we'll kill them in singles or pairs; whenever they were on assignment, they were expected to mobilize like that during the last war. We are not putting ourselves up against something that we can't handle, and any time we have even one of you fight, we'll be with you. If I'm not there, I'm not throwing away units on a battle that they can't win."

"There are going to be casualties, though," someone said. They all looked at Hannah Abbott. "You cannot seriously tell me that there will not be casualties."

"No, we can't," Harry said. "It's fundamentally ridiculous to expect that we're going to be fighting someone and that none of us are die. What we can promise is that we'll do all we can to keep them down. Contrary to what the media says about me, I'm not someone who wants all this. I'd rather be playing Quidditch. I'd rather be studying, really. I'd rather be doing just about anything else other than explaining to all of you, those who've decided to take a stand, that some of you are going to die." He thought of something Ron said earlier. "As long as you're staying, though, as long as you're not scarpering, the deaths are inevitable. What we're doing now is just training ourselves and getting organized so we don't make it easy for them."

Hermione seemed to decide that enough had been said, and she drew everyone's attention to the contract, explaining that she could not go into detail about the exact effect, but it would certainly be lethal. It struck him as a strange decision for a second, but then he decided that if she said something about a heart attack, there would be those who would try to betray the unit by using some specialized spell to protect their hearts. It was better not to give them even a false lead. The faithful deserved at least the knowledge that the faithless would be kept in line by the harshest and least vulnerable measures possible.

If anyone thought the situation was ridiculous, and it was just impossible to believe that they had come to the point where they currently were, he saw no sign of it. He supposed the meeting had been appropriately prefaced. Looking around as the document was signed, he had a head count of twelve, not including himself. It was not as much as he would have liked, but simultaneously it would be easier to keep track of everyone. Apart from Ron and Hermione, there was Ginny, Neville, and Luna; he would have been surprised if any of them had not come- Terry Boot, Michael Corner, Hannah Abbott, Susan Bones, Ernie Macmillan, and two students he did not know, whom he presumed to be the younger Slytherins for whom some of the others had vouched. Strangely, it felt as if he had seen them before, though. As he watched them sign their names, his suspicions were confirmed.

"You were changing your appearance before," he said.

"You caught me," the witch said, turning around. "My name is also not Alice Tolipan; I assume that no such student exists." Hermione looked embarrassed. Perhaps she blamed herself for not checking, since it was her list, but being honest with himself, he did not know terribly many of the students who signed up originally before they started taking lessons.

"I can see that," he said, glancing down at the parchment. "I've heard about you, Daphne, but I haven't heard anything from you personally. What do you intend to accomplish here?"

"Why would you think it would be any different for me?" she asked. "My reasons are the same as they were before. I'm surprised you didn't look into Blaise."

"Why, because he has an Italian name?" Ron asked. His voice was neutral even though the words could be interpreted as a joke. "You were Luca Caruso?"

"I suppose," the wizard in question said. "I could change my appearance, but I felt certain turns of phrases would give me away if I pretended to be from anywhere else."

"Did you two know each other before this?"

They both rolled their eyes.

"Malfoy's gang isn't for us," Blaise started. "He thought supporting the Ministry would advance the Dark Lord's position, and I'm sure you can guess why. Neither of us thought it was a good idea in the long run, for him, or for us. Supporting him, sooner or later, you end up as a stain on the floor."

"We had a thought to at least hear you out, primarily because we wanted to know how you survived the killing curse. Durmstrang students last year told us that from everything they had researched, it was impossible. Any higher level Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher using you as a whipping boy instead of a case study is fundamentally unfit for the job. Call it underhanded, I suppose, but we were no worse than any of the others who just wanted to get ahead on the exam material. We might not have used our real names on the parchment, but for the record, neither of us betrayed you."

He thought about it for a moment. Was it so unbelievable that someone else found his mortal enemy insufferable? What exactly had been going on in Slytherin? Was it pretty much an open secret that Voldemort was back, and everyone was just divided on whether or not that was a good thing?

"I'm not going to ask you to be a spy or anything, but there's a load of holes in the story so far. I won't pretend like I've questioned everyone's motives-"

"Oh, no, question away. I had worried for a moment you were going to keep being stupid," Daphne said. "For the record, I think it's wonderful your girlfriend dumped you."

Harry was somewhere between 'she is not my girlfriend' and 'she did not dump me' for a moment before deciding that the two concepts were not mutually exclusive.

"She showed up to practice, now she doesn't," he said right before the strange witch was about to launch into something else, finding he rather did not care if he ruined some comedic timing in the process. He was also less than concerned about how she found out; he was sure someone had seen them when they were at Madam Puddifoot's, as little as he had desired it. "Anyone who doesn't want to be here doesn't have to be, and anyone who decides to join later will be welcome."

"Well, isn't that ruined by our signing this document?" Terry asked after a moment. "Don't we have to show up for every meeting now? To be honest, I wouldn't mind if it meant we wouldn't have to catch everyone else up-"

"If anyone was under the impression we're handing out daily orders, that's not what's happening," Ron said. "We are well aware that not everyone is going to be able to make it to every practice. Especially when we're doing this over the summer, that's only going to cause people around us to be more suspicious, if we all had to go to the same place at the same time on regular intervals. We need to be able to learn to function without a few people."

No one had mentioned meeting over the summer, but it was obvious that was going to happen; there were only a matter of days left in the term. All that remained was to see where it would be hosted. Everyone looked around, seeming to ask the same question.

"Neville, where did you live again?" Ginny asked, seeming tired of the delay. "It's just you and your grandmother in Treehollow Point, isn't it?"

"I'm sure that she'll find out about it," he said after a moment. "She might not mind, though. I can't imagine why she would."

Everyone seemed content to leave that topic of discussion alone for a minute. Ginny and a few of the others were talking about what meeting times would work for the greatest number and it seemed Macmillan was trying to be seen being useful in coming up with a list of weak areas for them. Harry only watched for a moment as Hermione came up beside him.

"Everyone here has signed it. I think we should try not to think of the others as fake friends."

"Well, maybe that's what most people are," he said after a moment. "Maybe it was only Edgecombe who betrayed us because a few of the others figured it was sink or swim with us. We'll never know. It doesn't matter, either. If they're not here, I'm not worried about them. They're not a priority."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not making myself responsible for their lives. I can't be responsible for everyone in the castle if I don't even have the run of the place. They might be innocent bystanders, but these people are... at least they have the potential to be heroes." Even though his closest friends had only recently given him a pep talk, he still did not quite feel like one himself. Did he want to be one? It seemed like everyone called him a hero, something terrible had only just happened, and that consumed his focus. Getting 'eternal glory' after winning the Triwizard Tournament had felt like a complete joke.

"Harry, we were never responsible for their lives," his friend said. "In the past we went out of our way for them anyway."

"We're not going to start acting like we are responsible for their lives," he clarified. "We have to think about this unit, not someone who isn't doing anything. We're not going to do anything to endanger them deliberately, but if it ever comes up that we have to choose our lives or theirs, we're obligated to choose our own. Everyone on this document is risking their lives for us."

"Did you think I would not go along with that?" she asked after what looked like a moment of thought. "When was I ever not practical?"

"It's not that you weren't practical," he said. "It's just that you might want things to be simpler than they are. You might want things to work out so that we never have to do anything we don't like. You might think there's a perfect solution to everything."

Hermione only listened as he gave his explanation, which he for a moment was concerned she might construe as an attack on her character. Whether or not she saw it that way, though, it seemed she valued his input. How could he tell her that he had no intention of being right about everything? How was he to express there was no obligation to agree with him?

"Don't stop trying to come up with one, though," he said. "It won't be the first mad thing we've ever attempted."

The meeting ended with, of all things, a lesson. Though Harry was probably not going to get through Occlumency faster by teaching it, everyone needed to learn it, and if someone made progress in it, he could at least ask for help, as awkward as it might be. He fully expected that if they taught a range of different elements of defense, the unit would stratify by skill level, and that was fine, but they all needed basic proficiency with certain things and Ron had said it would be a bad idea to have entire operations hinge on individual specialists.

"I've been giving it some thinking," he had said. "What if we really did go to London to rescue Sirius, and Voldemort was really there?"

"We'll never know. It doesn't matter."

"I'm not sure it doesn't," his friend had said after a second of thought. "I really think we all would have died. I was ready to run off with you, but we weren't able to rescue anyone. We didn't even think of how we would do it. There are more Death Eaters than there are of us, and enough of them work at the Ministry. They wouldn't even have to fight us if they didn't feel like it; they could have just locked the door and we'd all be in Azkaban for being in a restricted area."

He had nothing to say in response. Before, he had been so concerned with getting Sirius back he would have said anything. Before, everything in his life just seemed a matter of how heroic he had to be. Then, Umbridge died. It was probably the only good thing she had ever done.

"I feel like you've changed," Ron had said, perhaps thinking something similar.

"Thank Hermione. She's the one who remembered hearing something about McGonagall grading exams, probably to make sure a certain someone wouldn't do them all herself, or worse, outsource to the Slytherins." Her original plan had probably been to lay low and get the work done, since she had come back from Saint Mungo's early, but the good news changed everything. In the days between announcing the reformation of the DA and its realization, he went to her office once, asking only a single question, certain that Voldemort would get nothing from it. He had asked whether or not the enemy still wanted the prophecy, or if he had effectively given up on it, and she said that from her assessment, it was most likely the latter.

When the meeting was over, they all left the Hog's Head and went back to the castle, this time certain no one had spied on them. The Muffling Charm had helped a lot, and they made sure the place was empty when they arrived. Really, the whole year had been a masterclass in mistakes, and he would be content if he never made one again, though he knew that was unrealistic. Had he really become that different? Could someone change in just a matter of days? Was it all external?

"We still need to defend the centaurs," Hermione said when they arrived. "We can't let them suffer for this."

"Shouldn't they be all right?" he asked. "We gave our testimony about it."

"Mate, you might not know this, but it's about as bad as it was with Buckbeak. They're considered beasts, so they're in the same class of magical creature."

"Why?" He was sure he had read as much before, but could not recall the details.

"Apparently, they refused it," his other friend said. "I can see why. If they were considered 'beings', they would have had to share the category with hags and vampires, two creatures that have historically been enemies of theirs and considered disgusting by more than just humans." She sighed. "The truth is, many vampires are absolute monsters, but others are no worse than Professor Lupin; they're harmless hemophiliacs."

"Wait, so the centaurs offend you too?" Ron asked. "It's not just a problem when wizards do it?"

"Of course it's not just a problem when wizards do it. Everyone has to follow the same rules."

It looked like an argument waiting to happen, or one that was overdue, but it seemed neither of them were going to take it any further. They both agreed that the centaurs were entitled to a defense. Even those who did not care for creatures of near-human intelligence would probably see a justifiable self-defense explanation as one that most favored the autonomy of Hogwarts, as the Ministry had chosen Umbridge, and her death being ruled as her fault, the result of her own incompetence and nothing more, would probably go the furthest to see that the school would have its choice of Defense teacher the following year. There was certainly no need to make the castle and the grounds look like a dangerous place that contained the occasional murderer.

The most unfortunate part of their present situation was that they knew where to start in terms of defending magical creatures, but they still had no idea how the actual trial was going to go. There was no way that the one who loosed the killing arrow would not be called to speak in his own defense, and there was no telling what he was going to say. Harry had only just managed to get out of a trial that really should have been an open and shut case earlier that year, and only because he had someone as brilliant as Dumbledore defending him. Something about that thought gave him pause.

"At the time," he started. "-I thought it was just, well, magic. I thought he said some stuff and it just worked. It was pretty clear, everything that he was doing, but... looking back on it, he had the simplest defense for me; he just made a case and it wasn't that he was so clever they couldn't do anything about it; they were so thick they couldn't guess that Ms. Figg was a squib who could never see dementors at all. She was a fake witness and they never did anything to try to poke holes in her testimony."

"What are you saying?" Hermione asked. "Is it that defending the centaurs might actually be easier than we expect?"

"Dumbledore knows how the courts work, Mate," Ron said. "Dad's watched loads of trials, and he says it's always the same. You've got to play to the judge and he knew that. He knew that the Ministry couldn't accept that V- that you were telling the truth, so he got you cleared of all charges."

"That was only part of it. Even if there were enough people who were there who were open to that possibility, it would have been unclear why the dementors were there. There was no proof that Voldemort sent them there; he just suggested that a dark wizard of his caliber could have done it even without Azkaban's permission. We know that didn't ever happen, because Umbridge admitted to the whole thing herself, so of course there wasn't proof of it. I'm betting she told someone that Sirius could be found lurking around in my neighborhood or something and passed it off as a source that couldn't be named."

"You might be right there," he said, thinking about it. "I mean, you only told us what happened after the fact, but it didn't entirely have to do with backing them into a corner."

"It's like Harry says," Hermione continued. "He only had to establish that it was possible that the wraiths were there, not who did it. A witness saying something ridiculous that could never happen might have been discounted entirely. It was because the court wasn't willing to go into the question of who might have done it that the charges were immediately dropped- if for some reason they had been open to considering that a dark wizard had taken command of the dementors, he still would have succeeded and it would have probably been a not guilty instead of a dropped trial." She looked around, and they were indeed alone in the corridor, at least for the moment. "For the record, I would take either for the case of the centaurs."

"Well, if this all works, it might be better than either," Harry said, thinking of a particularly bold strategy, or rather, a simple one that he could take in a bold direction. All he needed for it to work was some knowledge of legal terminology, which he had not thought to study at all.