Chapter 8 The Shadow Struggle.

The British expats heard about a group of witches and wizards who had started a guerrilla war in the UK. They had managed to break into Azkaban and free a group of prisoners, most of them muggleborns and a few of their partners who had run afoul of the muggleborn registration act. Two prisoners had been kissed, but 22 had been freed, so the mission had been considered a success. However, it had also drawn the attention of Lord Voldemort, and Harry was worried about the long-term chances of success. The international community might have its reservations about the British Ministry, but the official ICW position remained that there was insufficient evidence that it had been taken over by a dark lord. That meant that the freed prisoners were fugitives from the law. They might be better off than they had been in Azkaban, but still, they had nowhere to go and were essentially on a suicide mission. This also meant that the group had to be extremely cautious about communication, so any news the expats received about them was indirect and out of date.

"Do we need plan a visit to notify the new muggleborns that were detected by the Book of Admissions that they are magical?" Harry asked Hermione. Yearly visits to the UK to talk to the muggleborn who had done their first significant accidental magic that year was on one of their lists, but thanks to the NEWT preparations they hadn't decided how to go about it yet.

"There are no new 11-year-olds, so we could skip that this year. I've been sending them wardstones to make their homes unplottable as they appeared in the Book of Admissions, so it's an option to only write to them to ask how they are."

"There are other things we could do, though. Like setting up a network of unplottable points with notice-me-not wards and privacy spells in out of the way public places near muggle stations, so that we can use them as undetectable apparation points. And if we're going to ask the students to collect memories of muggle lessons, then we need to put up wards to make the schools unplottable." The idea grew in detail as he talked about it, leading him to add, "to make that work, we'd have to revisit at least some of places you visited last year, so that we can include some secondary schools that the now 12-year-olds have picked."

"That's a good idea, but I've already agreed to start my mastery on 1 August," Hermione admitted, "it's going to take years to finish our masteries, during which time we'll have ample opportunities to expand the details needed to make the school a reality. In addition, I wanted to try and work on the 3-dimensional unplottable ward, which is going to take some advanced arithmancy that I was planning to work on in Japan. I felt it would be a better use of time to make the next trip to Britain as multi-functional as possible."

Harry was disappointed that she was going to leave so soon. After graduation they had started sharing a room in Sirius' house, and he had thought they would take the time to make plans for the future while they had the time to enjoy the present, and that they could continue to grow together in the process. It was not really a difference of opinion, more a difference where either of them placed the emphasis. Still, Harry thought it was one of Hermione's less attractive qualities, the way she lived to study. Thanks to Remus and Ilvermorny, Harry had come to appreciate the importance of education, and he had come to co-own Hermione's idea of starting a school, but he was nevertheless very clear that he was studying to live. Wanting to keep his options open for how he was going to spend August, Harry had Hermione tell him in detail what arguments had been most effective to convince parents that their child was magical and to take the civil war seriously.

During July the four of them went for a trip around the world. It wasn't quite at the level of the traditional year of exploration, but nevertheless they all enjoyed it immensely. Because of the ongoing civil war at the time, Sirius and Remus hadn't taken the chance to travel the world after their own graduation, so it was an opportunity for all of them to see the diverse ways that people across the world, both magical and muggle, lived their lives. Not to mention the variety in ecosystems and geological formations that they encountered. Thanks to the speed of magical travel and how rich Sirius was, the main limit had been the need to leave time to process everything they were experiencing. The last 5 days they spent in Canada with Hermione's parents. Because muggles couldn't travel by portkey, they hadn't been able to join them on their trip around the world, so they did the next best thing, regaling them with their stories, illustrated with photographs, while travelling in a rented van around Canada. They finished with a party to celebrate Harry's birthday and say goodbye to Hermione, who left for Japan the next day.

While they had been travelling, the NEWT scores had come in. Harry had passed the 5 NEWTs that he needed to enter Auror training. He was slightly disappointed that he had failed Runes despite the extra work that he had put in, but since he had had only 5 years of classes, when at Ilvermorny it was considered a 7-year course, it wasn't too surprising. His scores were: Ancient Runes D, Charms A, Defence Against the Dark Arts A+, Herbology C+, Potions B, Transfiguration A-. Hermione had also managed to achieve the scores that her mastery trainer had required. In fact, she had gotten 7 As: Ancient Runes A+, Arithmancy A+, Charms A, Defence Against the Dark Arts A-, Herbology A+, Potions A+, Transfiguration A.

Auror training didn't begin until September, so Harry had the month of August off. June Pahdopony, his Defence mistress, had declined starting his training early, because auror training started with an evaluation that she said would be needed to form a training plan. She did agree to discuss his options for passing the requirements of being recognised as a master of Defence Against the Dark Arts. She explained, "There are three components to each mastery, a theoretical exam, a practical exam, and a mastery project. The exams cover defence against a range of attacks from beings and beasts. There are three main approaches to mastery projects: a specialisation in spell development, which requires a significant advance in spell theory, normally by developing a new spell. This is normally only chosen by duellists who do a mastery rather than by aurors. There's a specialisation in strategy, which is training to lead a field campaign, leading a group of aurors to take out either a criminal organisation or an XXXXX creature that has escaped from a reservation. This is a requirement to be promoted to auror captain. And there's the general approach, which requires knowledge of curse-breaking, warding, and aggressive magical beasts, sufficient to deal with complex problems when sending in a team of specialists is not an option. This is both a way for aurors to advance their career if they have no interest in or talent for leadership, but also for a number of other jobs that span more than one specialisation. A mastery project does not have to fall within these three approaches. The only requirement is that an international panel of masters agrees that it demonstrates you have mastered the discipline. However, because outside of the three recognised approaches the terms of reference for what constitutes mastery are not defined, I would advise against attempting it. I did the strategy specialisation myself to obtain my mastery, but I've since also passed the other two tests in order to become a mastery trainer."

Harry had to think about what approach would fit him best. On the one hand, the general approach might be best suited to teaching, but taking on Voldemort and the British Ministry would require strategy. In the end the latter seemed more important; not in the sense of more important for Harry's sense of achievement, but more important to be as competent as his talents would allow him to become. "I'd like to start with the strategy specialisation. Would it be possible to change my mind later on?"

"In the beginning, certainly. Whichever specialisation you choose, a general background in Defence Against the Dark Arts beyond NEWT level will be expected in any case, but I will start incorporating elements from your chosen path right from the start, so even if elements of each specialisation overlap, the way they are used will be different, meaning that if you change your mind late in your training, we'll have to go back and cover the way the same knowledge applies in different situations, so it would delay your mastery. A strategy mastery is required to become an auror captain. Are you undecided whether that's your career goal?"

"No, I'm going to go back to the UK. On the one hand I'll be teaching others to defend themselves, but I'm also planning on making the lives of the Death Eaters more difficult, so I might change my mind and switch to the general approach."

"Ah. That comes dangerously close to saying you're planning to form a militia, which I would have to report to the ICW. If anyone asks, will you agree to say your goal is to become a trainer of aurors? That would allow me to teach you what you wish to learn, focussing on the strategy specialisation, but adding as many details from the general approach as we can fit in, without me risking ending up in prison."

"OK."

In the end Harry went to Britain out of a need to do something. Anything. He did actually also end up with a list of things to do that he had a feeling would hopefully end up helping, but at a minimum would provide contingencies. He wasn't trying to fool himself, though. He went because he couldn't sit still. He was glad Hermione had mentioned the recently opened Eurostar train journey from Paris to London, as it was easy enough to get a portkey to Paris and then switch to muggle transport. There were 9 newly detected muggleborns that year, 5 of whom had older siblings. On the one hand Hermione had had a point that visiting the 4 others, spread across the country as they were, could be seen as an inefficient use of his time, but conversely it meant that he could take his time about it. Time that he used to ward points they could use as apparation points near stations. He visited some of the places that he owned in the UK, adding wards and taking photos in case he needed a visual reminder so he could apparate there in future. They were preparing for a decades-long struggle, and he thought they might need some out of the way hiding places, or somewhere to grow things if the underground cultivation didn't work out, or even places where the graduates from their school could build a village.

The parents might not all believe him about magic, but the children were much easier to convince; they could feel they were different, and they only needed to be persuaded to

name the difference magic. When discussing security the situation was reversed: the parents readily agreed not to go talking about magic with anyone, while Harry could tell that the children didn't understand the risks of being discovered by the British magical society. He hoped that Hermione's approach to keep the secret would work. First, she had written a magical contract with a penalty of a tongue-tying hex. Second, she had compiled a list of contact details of the other magical children, so that they would have others in the same situation to talk to. Lastly, she had attempted to turn keeping the secret into a very serious game, with a reward for keeping the secret in the form of schooling by adult wizards, and a penalty of losing their magic if they were discovered. It tried to account for children's thoughtlessness without completely suppressing their own responsibilities, but Harry could only pray that it would be failsafe, for a single mistake could collapse their whole plan. In addition, the parents, being muggles, couldn't be tied down with a magical contract. The only alternative was the imperius curse, and though Harry had briefly considered that if they were to go that route, they would only be enforcing something that the ICW demanded anyway, and that most countries' legislation was less single-minded about the imperius than British law, and, in addition, that they were desperate enough to go that far, but in the end the number of people they would need to curse with a plan that extended over decades had made it unpracticable.

Harry had also visited the schools of the 4 children to add unplottable wards, plus some of the schools that the children Hermione had visited the previous year, picking the 10 schools that required the smallest detours in his travels across the country.

At the end of August, Harry went to visit Hermione. He left on Thursday afternoon, arriving on Friday morning in Tokyo, flooing to Hermione's room, buying groceries, and having a short sleep until Hermione finished. On Saturday they had a look around the all-magical village, which was smaller than Hogsmeade, but Hermione had read all the reasons behind the different ways wards were laid out to use the contours of the landscape, making the layout of the village come to life in Harry's eyes, so despite the small size of the village it proved to be a nice outing.

Waking up on Sunday morning, Harry remembered something that he had wondered about. "While I was in the UK, I had these strange nightmares, and I'd wake up with my scar hurting. And now I wonder whether it had anything to do with my proximity to Voldemort, because it stopped once I got back to the USA. Have you ever read anything about curse scars doing that?"

"A curse wouldn't be able to do that." Hermione thought for a while until she continued, "a ritual might be able to do it, though. Did Professor Dumbledore ever say anything about your scar?"

"Not that I remember. And even if he had, he wasn't there when it happened. No-one was there, so though people called it a curse-scar, they might have jumped to a false conclusion."

Hermione could think of a ritual that Voldemort might have started on that hallowe'en, …, but there was no reason to worry Harry until she'd had time to check, so she said, "I'll read up on rituals that might do something like that, ok?"

That day they went to visit Kyoto, the old capital. There had never been witch-hunts in Japan, which meant there was no lingering conflict between muggleborns and purebloods. Japan did have a relatively recent period during which the country had been closed to foreigners. In the present day there was no hostility towards foreigners, and Hermione had yet to plumb the details of how that affected social interactions, but she had noticed that foreigners did tend to crowd together, if only because most of them were more conversant in English than in Japanese. Then again, that didn't require any exclusion by the Japanese; in Ilvermorny the British had also tended to have more contact with other foreigners, despite the fact that they shared a language with the locals, though the difference did seem to be more pronounced in Japan. Maybe she just needed to give it some more time.

Auror training was demanding, but great. Because Harry had grown up in muggle society, and had spent half of the following years in Britain, he had a lot to catch up on how things got done in the MACUSA. There were procedures and associated paperwork for a wide array of eventualities that aurors had to be prepared for. The other trainees complained about the bureaucracy this involved, but Harry, who looked at every procedure with the question of whether he would do the same or something different when he got the chance, found it easy to stay engaged. He discussed his ideas with Sirius and Remus, who had both grown up in the British magical society and therefore had a different outlook to both Harry and the Americans. When he hit upon something that he would like to do different from the existing British law, he also discussed it by mirror with Hermione. He would have preferred to discuss more of the details with Hermione as well, but she was buried in her own pile of work, and had argued they should trust each other to make decisions on their respective expertises. Harry had acquiesced, even though he felt it was not a matter of whether they trusted each other, but that having multiple viewpoints brought to the table would enrich the result. He therefore reached out to some of the British expats who had shown an interest in the idea of a secret British magical enclave.

Auror training also included advanced classes in magic. In potions and the wanded subjects, Harry had no trouble keeping up with the accelerated pace they were expected to be able to deal with, but in Herbology he was assigned a tutor to make sure that his poor NEWT score would not lead him to overlook an important investigative detail. When he indicated he intended to retake his Runes NEWT, they were happy to also assign him a Runes tutor. Although his duelling skills were better than average, and the auror trainers saw no need for him to get additional training in that, Harry felt that adequate would not be good enough, and continued his training with Sirius and Remus.

When Hermione came to visit at the end of September she was distracted. At least, she was distracted from enjoying the outings that Harry had planned, or, in other words, Harry failed to distract her while she focussed instead on some problem she was working on. Aiming to establish any connection at all, Harry interrogated her, trying to find out what had her so preoccupied, but her answers were vague; that she was trying to do something for which there was no established theory. When he tried to get her to relax with an exhortation that she still had four years ahead of her, that didn't help at all. Only when he mentioned that she was taking on too much, and that maybe she should reach out to others to share the load, did she become more animated. She admitted she was talking to a sixth-year Runes prodigy, one of the Brits who had left Hogwarts halfway through the previous year, about warding schemes, including a three-dimensional unplottable ward.

Autumn flew by, filled with auror training, more mastery training, herbology and runes training, and additional duelling training. Even the discussions Harry had with various friends felt like training, training in how to galvanise a country into recognition of basic human rights for all sentient beings, whether those discussions centred around their options of convincing more British magicals to emigrate, about possible further incursions like the attack on Azkaban, or how to convince the ICW to intervene in Britain, or, alternatively, whether it was futile to try and get an organisation, that was infamous for its willingness to overlook almost anything that didn't break the Statute of Secrecy as a domestic issue, to champion those who were being persecuted in Britain. The only thing that didn't feel like more training was quidditch training. Although even there he would try to make the time count, doing such things as flying upside down for as long as he could manage to increase his strength and trying to keep a mental picture of what was happening around him in a 360° view. He alternated between using a supersensory charm, to train dealing with the sensory overload that gave him and to get a feel for how well the team was coordinated and to learn the habitual responses of all the players, and trying to keep the same sense of the whole team without the charm, since he wouldn't be allowed to use it during matches.

He spent a weekend every month with Hermione, alternating between the USA and Japan. They mostly talked about their plans for a school, though they also kept each other up to date about their masteries and Harry's auror training. Hermione continued not to be entirely present. When they were in Japan, most days she would nip to the laboratory to keep some experiment going, despite the limited time they had to spend together; and when they were in the USA she would bury herself in some book, or in her own thoughts, and in both countries she was liable to break off in the middle of doing something else and scribble some hasty notes, indicating that at least some part of her had been absent from whatever they had been doing together.

They had agreed to spend the Christmas holidays at the Grangers, as it was easier for the six of them (Sirius, Remus, Dobby, Winky, Hermione and Harry) to take portkeys to Canada than for the Grangers to take an airplane to the USA. They brought a magical tent, because the Grangers didn't have the space for four human guests. They erected the tent in the guest room, so that they wouldn't have to wade through the snow to get to the main house, not to mention that Sirius was unsure whether the warming charms were powerful enough. They had a great time, though Harry was worried about Hermione. She was only 4 months into her mastery, yet she looked exhausted, stayed only the 8 days from Christmas Eve until New Year's day, and only spent time with the others when they dragged her away from her books. It was worse than 3rd year.

Over the following months, Harry's frustration with Hermione grew. He didn't mean to keep harping on it, but when they had had their one rational discussion about it, Hermione had admitted she was overextending herself; yet she hadn't changed. In April Harry decided he had had enough. He had gone through considerable trouble to get Golden Week off, which was a major holiday in Japan, even though it was a normal week in auror training, and he had had to add to his already full schedule, and beg for a number of favours, in order to get the planned training done ahead of time, only for Hermione to be even more mentally absent than he had come to resign himself to. Insulted, Harry had broken up with Hermione. On the one hand Hermione had apologised, but on the other hand she had spent the rest of Harry's visit almost entirely in the lab, as if to show that she had in fact been making an effort to spend time with Harry.

After 6 months of induction, the auror trainees started to do active duty, initially for one day a week. They were assigned an experienced auror partner and sent out to take on the easiest cases, like shoplifting, disorderly drunks and the like. On the one hand it was good to get to do some real work, but they were also learning of the downsides of law enforcement, whether that was because of the boring paperwork, the frustration of being unable to find the perpetrator, or the realisation that the vast majority of law breaking was criminally petty, getting far too familiar with the minority of society that was filled with Dudley Dursleys.

Over the following weeks Harry and Hermione talked about their new situation by mirror. They reconfirmed their commitment to start a school in Britain. That they would both keep adding details to their list of planned and achieved tasks to get there. That Hermione did not want to take an extra year to do her two masteries, but was still aiming to finish before 1 September 2002, when they were hoping to open the school.

In June, the USA Mugwump came to interview first Sirius and then Harry, since both of them were heavily involved with the exodus of magicals from Britain; an exodus that had slowed, but not stopped after the two waves of mostly muggleborns 2 years before and mostly half-bloods 1.5 years before. The British Mugwump had demanded that the ICW start an investigation into the poisoning of all British witches into infertility. Harry pointed out that just because no British witch was known to have escaped, that did not constitute proof that the act had been committed by someone living outside Britain. He refused to publicly condemn the act. When the Mugwump attempted to pressurise him that he was an auror trainee, and the act had been illegal, so he should have no hesitation to show his disapproval, Harry pointed out that he had been warning for years that the British Ministry was being taken over by Tom Riddle and his Death Eaters, and that he viewed the illegal act as a natural consequence of the unwillingness of the ICW to intervene in the takeover by a Dark Lord. Therefore, although he conceded that the poisoning was illegal and he would not publicly be expressing approval of it, he thought that it was less reprehensible than excluding all nomaj-borns from Hogwarts, so that, as long as the British Ministry persisted in the latter, and the ICW failed to address this injustice, Harry didn't feel that such a bloodless form of resistance against a dark wizard warranted his personal condemnation.

Harry was glad that Remus had mirror called him directly after the Mugwump had talked to Sirius. The Mugwump had apparently been much more aggressive in pressuring Sirius with veiled threats about the legal status of the British expats in the USA. While Remus had been warning Harry about the Mugwump's visit, Sirius had gone to the MACUSA to complain about the aggressive stance, unsupported by any evidence as it had been, and apparently Sirius' contact had agreed that they were innocent until proven guilty and had warned the Mugwump to be more conciliatory in his investigation. Acutely aware that his occlumency was not all that great, Harry had tried very hard to focus on the issue at hand and his personal stance on the matter, and not allow any thoughts of a certain ex-girlfriend to creep in. Nevertheless, the Mugwump had raised the suspicion himself that Hermione might have been the source of the poisoning. Harry pointed out that she was only 9 months into a double mastery that focussed on the arithmancy of potion ingredient interactions. That Hermione was known to have a much better mind for theory than practical applications, and therefore, that, while he was the first to admit that Hermione Granger was brilliant, she was much more likely to obtain her mastery based on several ground-breaking papers in arithmancy and potions journals rather than she was to develop some new poison.

Only once the Mugwump had left did he allow himself to admit that Hermione's frantic work pace over the previous months were consistent with her trying to come up with a new potion while at the same time doing enough other work to give the impression that she was working full time on two masteries, and finishing the former at a time when she wouldn't yet have progressed to being a prime suspect.

A week later Harry went to Ilvermorny to sit his NEWT exam of Ancient Runes and resit his Herbology exam. He had gotten a few days off to allow him to revise for the exams. During breaks he talked to the younger British students, trying to gage their stance on the recent infertility poisoning, and on the terrorist cell of disenfranchised magicals in Britain. After the breakout in Azkaban there had been a few attacks on prominent pureblood heads of house, who, depending on whether you believed the Daily Prophet or the rumour mill, had been either upstanding citizens or Death Eaters who had bought their way out of Azkaban in 1981. He also sought out Lilian Viridian, the Runes prodigy who Hermione was working with. She agreed to help Sirius run another warding workshop over summer, during which they would teach expats how to ward their own homes, and carve surplus wards for those who couldn't participate in the workshop. Some of those surplus wards would be diverted to the underage muggleborns in Britain. Although the need for protective wards was real enough, they had also agreed that there was a secondary motive of keeping everybody alert. They suspected that at some point either the terrorist cell operating in Britain would be found and killed, or the USA border controls would be lulled into a sense of security, or some other mishap would result in Voldemort trying to attack the British expatriates, and they wanted to be as prepared as possible when that time came.