"Dumbledore?"

Harry had some awareness that he was sleeping, which was more than he normally had whenever he was dreaming. Was it really a dream, though, or was it a vision? Was it really all that it seemed?

"I wish you would not be so credulous, Harry."

"Voldemort."

"Indeed. I suspect that you are strengthening your mental shields. Only just now, I checked, and I find that they are too much of a bother. Rest assured, if I were closer to you, it would be no trouble at all to go through your recent memories. Perhaps, if you ever do anything to show yourself a worthy adversary, I shall use this as a method of locating you."

The vision of the old Headmaster was replaced with his adversary. It was such a smooth transition that he could not help but wonder if it was a real dream, and he had just grown more imaginative lately. With his luck, however, that seemed unlikely. He would suppose that it was poorly advised to take anything his mortal enemy said seriously, and yet, he found, he could not simply wake up. Snape had suggested that it would be better to hide his strength anyway, but it was not as if he could afford to relax his mental shields now that the enemy knew he was practicing.

"Get out of my head. You're wasting your time here."

"Perhaps I should be grateful you are so considerate of my convenience. As mortal enemies go, you make a gracious host. Perhaps I shall have to keep you alive indefinitely after killing your worthless little friends. After all, you are fated to be my undoing."

Harry kept his silence. Perhaps he had become somewhat wiser in the last year, but he knew he would easily get outwitted by someone born in the mid twenties and it was better to just shut up and in so doing admit as much. If he was to have any hope to defeat the dark wizard before him, he would have to completely disregard how cool he looked in the process.

The enemy seemed like he was still waiting for a response. That was, after all, the only point of going into someone else's mind. There was probably no point in speculating and gesticulating just to try to rattle the enemy. Assuming that he wanted the rest of the prophecy, there was no reason to try to mislead him, not when he had no idea what direction he would take it. Having not even heard the full text himself, he had no way of making it sound believable. There was no way that Voldemort was not going to suspect that he was on guard, at least as soon as he was conscious. Looking back on something he had said earlier, it was probably also foolish to assume he was demonstrating the limits of his ability.

He woke with a start, looking over to the nearest clock and seeing that it had yet to go off. It was only a few minutes away, though, so he supposed he had not lost an entire night of sleep. Getting up, he grabbed a glass of water. While Lady Longbottom clearly had high standards, and those could prove challenging, they apparently extended to her own hospitality.

"Testing the waters," he muttered as soon as he drew his wrist across his mouth, his other hand on his wand, perhaps unconsciously. "He was trying to see if I was any stronger... or if I might know something."

Harry got out of bed, doubting that he could have gone back to sleep if he tried. It was a strange tactic for Voldemort to disguise himself as Dumbledore, but he supposed the rewards might well have been rich if it had worked. More than anything else, he wanted to talk to the man himself. It had not been easy since the Headmaster was left with no choice but to disappear, facing charges for raising an army of child soldiers. They all think he forced us into it, when we were doing it all ourselves. The only thing that was forced on us was Umbridge. She wasn't making anything of us, but that was exactly what the Ministry wanted, and it's what they still want.

As much as it annoyed him to go against Hermione at almost every turn, he was going to have to put his foot down about returning to Hogwarts. It had been the safest place he had ever known, but it had been completely compromised. Her whole argument hinged on the benefit to going there, which would have outweighed the risks had she been right, but there was no way that the current government was not going to replace the entire staff. Oddly enough, right as he was thinking about how to tell her, he found her in the library. It was odd that he found her, though, not that he found her there.

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I saw a man who came back from the dead."

"Did you have another vision?" she asked. "Was he able to get into your head again?"

"I knew he was there. I really have no idea what he can do, though. He could have been acting weak to get me to let my guard down."

"Harry... I was hoping to see you this morning so that I could tell you something... but I may have to keep it from you."

"I'll get stronger," he promised. "I'm even working with Snape. I'm pushing him; the last time I was there I almost managed to not make a fool of myself."

"I know, I just... I can't tell you this now, but I'll tell Ron instead. We have no information to suggest that anyone can get into either of our heads."

He was looking forward to a day of seeing neither of them, he knew. If she went off to find his other friend, that meant they were going to make some decision for him, together, and ask him to trust them. Quite possibly, it would be even more frustrating than when Dumbledore was making them do it, but there was nothing for it. He was just going to have to lead the training exercise for everyone else.

"Who all is here today?" he said as soon as he was outside.

"We're eight in total," Ginny said. "Daphne's in the powder room, but she'll be right out." He could see Blaise, Neville, Hannah, Michael, and Terry and he doubted that the particular combination was entirely coincidental. "If you didn't have anything planned, Terry had an idea."

"Let's do it. I've wanted people to come up with their own exercises. Ron and Hermione are planning something right now." It was closer to the truth that they were hotly debating something, but they were both patient with each other, so they would eventually come to some kind of conclusion.

"I was thinking of a hostage rescue exercise."

"That's good. That's something that we haven't done so far, and I was out of ideas." He liked how he could be honest with Ginny, even if she seemed to like to bring him down a bit. "I'll let you tell everyone what we're doing."

Smiling, if for only a moment, she rounded and faced the group, where she divided off into teams and then explained the premise once Daphne had returned, which, as promised, was only a moment later. Each team would pick someone to go to the other team and act as a hostage. If one or both of the hostages died by stunner, the game would end in a tie, and either team could only win by recovering a hostage without losing its own. In the unlikely event that both hostages escaped, the game would end when they were both brought back to one side or the other.

"Well, I suppose our first decision is simple," Harry said. He had Daphne, Hannah, and Neville.

"Well, I suppose so. If we want to win, we should send Neville-"

"I wouldn't blame you."

"Neither would I, but this is supposed to be a training exercise. Daphne, you've been skipping a few, so you're not skipping this one. Neville, you need experience with this sort of thing, so you're taking point."

"What about me?" Hannah asked.

"I was going to see if you would volunteer for it."

"I'd rather be fighting, if it's all the same to you."

"It's not. You're our hostage." She frowned, but went over to the other team without a second thought. They were all familiar with the more general rules of their exercises, so they did not need to explain anything to her.

"Why ask her if you were-" Neville started.

"I think she might learn something about trusting the rest of us," he said. "If not, it doesn't really matter. While she's over there, she's going to be learning from the other team." Terry came over to join them.

"I shall be in your care."

"You thought up the game," Neville said. "I would have thought... well, it doesn't matter. We've only got a few minutes to make a base somewhere."

They ignored their captive's advice entirely, because the enemy's plan might well have revolved around steering them in one direction or another, or he might have simply been thinking of a place where he could escape, but they already had his wand. In addition to joining Ginny in researching dark magic, he was also somewhat skilled at wandless magic, though it was not as if he could win in a fight against three of them. That, however, was not the plan. It was just enough of an advantage to make him an ideal hostage, or at least one better suited for the task than anyone else on the other team, most likely. They used a binding charm to tie him up.

"That won't hold him forever," Neville whispered as the two of them went out to the edge of the tree line, looking for scouts. Daphne was responsible for hiding and defending the hostage.

"It won't have to. You might be thinking it's almost as good if we get a tie, but we don't have the people to spare to see if the other side is doing the same thing. It's going to come down to the two of us to get Hannah out of there."

"Right. What's the plan?"

They had not prearranged a plan, so they would have to come up with one between themselves, and relay it to their teammate on their way back to her. If Terry escaped, the game was as good as lost, so there was no need to be concerned with his hearing it. Immediately after, they divided again. When he decided that Daphne needed combat experience, he did not have a set amount of spells that she needed to cast against moving targets; combat experience provided nothing so elementary. The only factor he was interested in training was her ability to think on her feet in more than just complex social situations, and for that he was taking her with him rather than Neville. The decision to have him carry another part of the plan by himself had a separate purpose, and one she figured out immediately as the two of them scanned with the human revealing charm.

"Did you think that sending him off on his own would do something for his confidence?"

"He finds ways to put himself down. If I asked him to come with me on the attack, he would think I was watching him. I'm hoping he decides this means that I'm trusting him."

"It may," she said. "I might not be one for these sorts of conflicts, but I would think that another lesson we could all stand to learn is that in the future, we should expect to have simpler or less important tasks, and we should reserve them for those with the least skill."

"Practical," he observed as they moved forward. Somehow the enemy was masking its presence, else taking the long way around. "I don't think that's the most constructive thing to do in practice, though."

"You don't have to use your teacher voice around me," Daphne said. "Make no mistake, I appreciate the professionalism, but-"

"What? You don't need to learn anything?"

She scowled. Either she was annoyed that he would presume she was so full of herself, or she really did think that she was unteachable, but it was supposed to go without saying. A stunner divided them; they both sidestepped it rather than throwing up a shield. In addition to having a rule about not blocking stunners, not putting up a shield had the advantage of making it harder for the enemy to determine the position of the target. There was such a thing as a physical shield, and they were allowed because stunners were meant to be killing curses, but they carried the risk of being exploded.

Evidently, the other team had decided to meet them in the middle. Most likely, if they lost a single combatant, the other would go back and kill the hostage, freeing up another wand and tying the game. For that reason, even that much would be quite the feat- the enemy would almost certainly be staying together, because numbers won almost every time.

"Get around to the other side," Daphne suggested. Perhaps it was a way of holding on to some amount of pride in a cooperative exercise. Several of the others had done the same, and he had no problem with it. Making himself the obvious target would give his teammate the first shot the moment that one of them took the shot at him. Would the enemy be willing to miss, though?

Without any more time to decide, he sprinted across the grass, jumping out of the way as a tree trunk came up from the ground in front of him, spilling out and recovering with a roll. His partner had taken the shot, sure enough, and she was just as accurate as he had thought. With no one on the other team who could use Legilimency, not well anyway, the only way of informing the hostage taker was by running straight back to him or her, but that would mean taking down one or both of the pursuers first. Blaise surprised everyone with a dark curse that was hard to identify, forcing Daphne to dodge, and from a distance Harry missed when he tried to cover for her. It might have been in the interest of a better training exercise that he had decided to fight it out with the two of them, but if he were to guess anything based on the young wizard's personality, his true one, was that fighting would make for a better show.

Blaise had been smart to ignore his cover shot, assuming he made a split second decision that there was no way Harry could have hit him from that range, and that he was not really trying to hit him, but that only meant it was one on one. In some odd circumstance where they both took each other out, it would be down to Neville and the other guard, but that was unlikely. He used a physical shield to block a feigned killing curse and ignored it when the enemy flitted his eyes over to the right, taking the chance to knock him out. Fundamentally, it was a simple exchange; the challenge was in getting to that point. Had he not guessed that his opponent would use a 'look away' trick, he would have been the one lying on the ground. It was not that he had no confidence in Neville at all, he just wanted to show him that someone was looking out for him.

"Well, looks like you're dead, Daphne," he said, looking down at her. Blaise had brought Michael with him, so it seemed Ginny was guarding Hannah. He could assume that she knew any battle for the middle would only take a matter of minutes, outside some unlikely scenario, and at that point the sensible thing to do would be to kill the hostage and try to sneak around herself to get to the enemy base. Her chances of getting there when her teammates had failed were virtually nonexistent, but it was not like she would just give up. "Mobilicorpus."

It was a useful spell that he trotted out on occasion, but the reason he remembered it was that it seemed so odd to him the regular old levitating charm would not work for anything that lived and breathed. That ran the risk of getting into philosophical territory, though, and he had come outside almost entirely because he wanted nothing less than to deal with whatever argument Ron and Hermione were probably having. It had nothing to do with letting them take a turn leading in a sense; he knew it was about him and he might as well give them the time.

He found Ginny and moved the bodies closer to her position. As much as he would have loved to use the Invisibility Cloak, he had wanted to show the others that he could function without it as a way of showing them they could do the same. Instead, he moved the upright Michael progressively closer to where he thought the enemy base had been hidden. The trick would not fool her for more than a second, but if it got her wand off the hostage, that was all he would need. sure enough, the body was hit with a stunner as soon as it was clear that she were killing the bearer of good news. That was, after all, dependent on what someone in her position would consider to be bad news.

"Stupefy." Harry only just rolled out of the way. She was perfectly on target, not fooled at all by the floating body of her teammate. There was no time to think about where the hostage was. "Stupefy."

"Expelliarmus." The quicker jinx knocked her wand out of her hand, but only after the second stunner hit him right on target. He had not expected such a relentless approach, but she must have had confidence that he would not be able to avoid a second time.

By the soreness in his limbs when he woke up, he guessed the game must have gone on for another half hour at least. His benefactor was the same witch who put him down. Had she come back in victory?

"What happened?"

"I saw you coming here on your own, like a knobhead. I was using the same human revealing charm you were using."

"I was hoping I'd fool it."

"You did, but you didn't fool my eyes when I got in position. I had to leave my hostage behind."

"I'm sure you thought to tie her up ahead of time."

"Well, it didn't hold her long. I don't know what she did, but she crossed the field herself and found Neville at some point." She huffed. "If we were allowed to use the Full-Body-Bind..."

"We would have used it too." She frowned. "Is everyone else back up?"

"Daphne's excused herself. I think Hannah's coming back over this way with Neville." He went ahead and assumed that Terry and Blaise had found other things to do. Where Michael went, he had no idea. "There they are now."

The former hostage and former hostage taker rejoined them.

"Harry! Your plan worked and I didn't have to do anything."

"Well, the whole time we were trusting you just in case Ginny was secretly making her way around. We also needed you to be there in case Terry decided to get out with wandless magic." He frowned. "Come to think of it, Hannah, how did you get away?"

"I was being moved. Suffice to say, I was also being underestimated."

It did not quite suffice to say, but he understood what she meant. Rather than burying her under a rock so that no one without magic could get her out, her captor had picked a strategy of moving, probably searching for the other hostage herself, and that meant she had to take her own with her. As soon as she saw an opponent, however, she had to engage with him quickly or Hannah would realize and shout, giving away their position.

"Well, I hope we all learned something," he said after a moment of looking around. "We'll be back at it bright and early tomorrow." As if he had a specific lesson planned for each of them, he walked off without another word, personal experience reminding him that learning was more complicated than just hearing something once in a contrived scenario.