"Don't tell me no one thought of this before," Blaise said as soon as they got to the graveyard. "And don't tell me that you just won't tell me; I already said that and it wouldn't be funny any-"

"It's not that no one thought of it," Susan said, checking her corners as she looked around a grave. They were on the far edge of the property, outside of anything that could have been a trap, and yet, there were graves around them. "It's that everyone thought of it. From the moment that Voldemort returned, he allowed the Ministry to think that he had not; he must have decided it was more beneficial than not to stay hidden, at least while getting his forces back together. That much was obvious from the beginning. Going back here for evidence was a dangerous prospect because there was sure to be someone here who could report back to the master to have us surrounded."

"I found no trace of warding on the ground," Luna said after a moment.

"That was what we expected," Harry said. "If we can't apparate out, we can't get in the same way. We would know immediately if they placed that sort of trap. The simplest thing to do would be to have someone or something waiting here for us."

"With them stretched thin, that's not as likely," Susan continued. "Satisfied?"

"I can't find anything with a sweep of Legilimency," the Dragon Marshal said. "I'm nowhere near Hermione's level, though."

"It seems like there's no need," Blaise said. "All the diagnostics show that no one's been here for weeks. At least one week," he corrected.

"That fits. Susan, they don't use DNA to identify people, but-"

"There are magical ways of doing basically the same thing," she confirmed. "I would imagine, though, that they've cleaned up everything of value here."

"They can't have," Harry said as he walked. "Even if they could get the cauldron out of here, and they probably did, there's one thing that they couldn't have eliminated."

"What's that?" Luna asked as they reached the point where he had been tied up. It was still a painful memory, bound tightly to a gravestone so that he could neither move nor speak.

"Any evidence that Tom Riddle Senior ever existed," he said. "He was a muggle, and that means that going around and getting rid of it would be a Secrecy issue. I can't see Voldemort asking anyone to do that either, because he's tried to distance himself from his father for decades now. I also can't see him doing it himself; he would think it was too menial of a task. There's also the fact that he might need one of these bones again for his own purposes."

Sure enough, a few of them were missing, but the rest were there. If the Death Eaters intended to make a trap of the place, the best way of going about it was to at least leave something of value, since it was probably not the end of the world for them if they lost one of the bones, making it worth the risk if they could catch him coming to look for them. It was, after all, their number one mission for a while, and he could only guess what they would try next.

"Why didn't they burn them on the way out?" Blaise asked as he levitated a bone and they covered the grave again. "If they weren't going to guard this place-"

"It's like we said, they couldn't have gone through the muggle world and eliminated everything, so this was going to be plenty. They only guarded this place because it's the most obvious place to look. There was a time I regretted never researching ways that not-really-dead dark wizards might try to come back to life, but even if I did, I could never eliminate all traces that the old Tom Riddle ever existed. I'm sure that Quirrell, or maybe even someone who came before that, had already rescued at least one of the bones. There have been people playing this game a lot longer than I ever have and they would have recognized the value before I had ever heard about magic."

"That's certainly possible. What are we going to do with this, though?"

"We're going to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. It's a risk, but they're the only ones who can help us now," Susan said. "I just hope there's enough of the old guard still there. My aunt might have been replaced, but if enough of the people who respected her are still there, we won't have to fight our way out."

"I would not so soon rule out the possibility of having to fight," Luna said. "The Tripodal Lamproon never lets go of anything, even if it's trying to flee."

Harry was sure the reference would have made sense if he knew more about obscure magical cryptids, but everyone seemed to take her as an authority on the subject anyway and he was content to do the same; it was certainly simpler than sorting out what she meant. The four of them apparated to London, then settled for going in the street entrance. It was decided that it was probably better to go unannounced, because a lower ranking employee could more easily justify using his or her own discretion in that context. The place was just like he had remembered it, and just like he had seen it in his dreams.

"Harry Potter?" a desk clerk asked as soon as he arrived. "I hope you know that it's only because you have Miss Bones with you that I haven't arrested you on the spot. You had better have a damn good reason for coming here."

"I can prove that Voldemort has returned."

"What are you saying?" It seemed like a crowd was gathering; any chance of escape they had was cut off.

"In Azkaban, after Crouch's son escaped, there were identity checks put in place. There were probity probes, dark detectors, and some other kind of sensor that was used to verify identity. Don't ask me how I know. It's not a good look for either of us. I'm betting that there was, at the time of the mass break out, a signature or evidence of someone that you couldn't identify there."

"There were some false leads that we ruled out, but say there was, for the sake of argument, one person there who didn't have an alibi and wasn't already on a watch list. What would that prove?"

"We have a way for you to identify that person," he said. "You read my story, as I would expect, but you didn't believe it. That's fine. I'm not offended. You'll remember, though, that I claimed that Voldemort is currently made out of three people- myself, his father, and Peter Pettigrew. That's another little mystery that I can help you explain, if I can get you to open the evidence locker."

They were familiar enough of the procedure to where they knew what he was asking, but it still seemed bizarre, and it took several pointless questions and memos sent out to block other parties from getting involved to actually get the evidence out of the storage. A part of Wormtail's missing finger was put into a potion along with his own blood, and a chip of bone, and the result was a small blob of flesh, but sure enough, the records compared favorably to the unknown identity found in Azkaban. The entire department looked grim, but a few of them were at a loss.

"How is this possible?" one asked. "How can someone come back from the dead?"

"It's up for debate as to whether or not he was really dead, because his soul hadn't gone on to its eternal reward. I'm certain there aren't good things in store when it does. I might have said enough in my original account to explain the use of the Pair Dadeni, but let's go over Horcruces now. There's no advantage to making the information public." He took a long breath. Voldemort may already realize that I know about them, but we don't want him to realize what I've been doing."

The wizard at the desk looked around.

"Well, in that case, we should really hand-pick those allowed to hear this. You may not be aware, but we don't have the same hiring standards for everyone, and not everyone has the same clearance."

"Of course," he said. In reality, he had already prepared for everything he said to get out. He had no intention of revealing that he already had some of them in a secure location, but it was not too much trouble if Voldemort heard that he was looking for them; looking was the obvious thing to do and he could even think to set a trap that would only divert resources away from him. "So, this is the group?" he looked around at the three wizards he did not recognize.

"I went with my gut," the old guard officer admitted. "These are two people I personally trust. I've never found anything against them."

"Have you looked?" he asked, shaking his head. "Look, I know that one way or another, I'm taking your word for it. I'll get right into it. I don't expect people to believe every single detail of my daring escape just because I've managed to verify one of them, but I think it's time to start taking it more seriously. I'm sure that some people thought that it was convenient for me at the time, or I was just attracting attention to myself, but I think that's passed. Every word of what I've said is true. I didn't tone it down at all for credibility. The reason I didn't have this before is because I was certain that Voldemort had someone guarding the bones we would have needed, and I didn't really have the time to look for any other traces of his father, and I honestly thought he would start ramping up his attacks more and sooner or later people would admit that even if he hadn't come back, someone else was causing just as many problems, but we managed to kill some of his followers, so in the last few months there's been less that he's been able to do."

"Which ones have you killed?" the older wizard asked, curious now.

Hours passed and multiple times, Harry thought he was going to die of boredom. He was sure that his friends were being questioned separately and giving all the same answers; there was no point in holding them there if they were not answering questions, and the Ministry had to hold them in case they were just being distracted from something. When they finally released him, they said they had no ability to promise a commendation and a clean record, not until the official position on the enemy's return had changed, and to that end, they were going to join in swearing that they had seen conclusive evidence. As soon as they were able, they notified the rest of the DA of what had happened.

"Wasn't that a bit risky?" Michael asked as soon as he warped to check on everyone in the hospital wing.

"Not really. If it hadn't gone well, I would have just used the Time Turner. It may not be able to do everything we could ever want, but it's perfect for this kind of thing."

"If you're here to ask how everyone is... well, there's been some steady improvement, but it's going to take some time. I'm surprised Ron didn't tell you."

"Where is he?"

"You don't know? He must have authorized himself, then; I suppose he can do that. He ran off to make sure that the Horcruces are all still in place. I asked him what possessed him to-"

"Might be closer than you-" There was no time to make a snappy comment. He woke Hermione up and asked her where they had been hidden.

"What?" she asked, groggy. "We agreed we wouldn't tell you."

"Something's made Ron think they're not safe where they are." Ordinarily, as long as they had no reason to think that Voldemort might find them, and there was nothing they wanted to do with them, then they could afford to leave them where they were. Going there could only draw attention to them, if anything.

"In that case, apparate to Facilidad General-"

"In Northern Mexico; you mentioned it by accident." He ran out without another word. It was unlikely that his other friend could help him find the target with Legilimency, even if she could stay awake for a matter of hours; there was too much out there for which she would need a higher sense of awareness. He had not guessed that she would keep the Horcruces internationally, but there were certain corners of the world that provided specific advantages; where he was going, where he found himself shortly- it was one of the hardest places to find anything magical; there were mixed signals, there were layers of concealment, and there were countless other things hidden there as well; it was easier to find something than not find something, and yet, it would never be what you wanted.

Apparating out of the way of a band of skeletons in suits, he found the appropriate warehouse, reminding him of the room of hidden things in Hogwarts, though it was certainly not mostly the secrets of students; if anything the entire collection seemed dangerous in some way. A plant with eyes screamed at him and an old chupacabra barked back, straining against its cage, knocking over a red paper lantern. He found the chest quickly, and then there was a voice in his head.

"Harry, come back- Michael never said that to you. He never said that Ron ran off over here. It was Voldemort, Harry- he must have been experimenting with ways to reach you and keep you from recognizing it. I... I know I'm speaking to you right now, but please, come back!"

Sinking to the floor, he found himself at a loss. Was he dreaming again? Had his earlier dream really ended? Or had the dreams had some other purpose? Once he was paying enough attention to the dream, had the plan been to invade his mind then? So far, it seemed like they had been nothing more than a pointless experiment to see if he could keep a timeline in order.

Making himself get up, he opened the chest to see that everything was still in there, and he closed it again. He had been right about at least one thing. Those Horcruces would not do anything as long as they were left alone, but the one inside him was causing all kinds of problems. If he got a choice about which one or two he could have destroyed while escaping the notice of his enemy, then he really should have destroyed the unintentionally created one first; it had been far more effective than any other, and he still was not sure whether or not Voldemort realized it existed, or if he just saw it as a strange convenience that there was a mental link between the two of them, even while having researched soul magic as extensively as one could- perhaps there were competing theories out there, other remotely possible explanations, there was one obvious answer that was going to be on his mind.

Harry apparated out of there, acting on somewhere between instinct and an abundance of caution. He was miles away from the base, probably ineffectually casting diagnostics in an attempt to gauge whether or not it was under siege. Whenever the Death Eaters, or their master, used some kind of ridiculous puzzle like the one he was facing so far, it had been a distraction- there was obviously some correct answer to the whole thing, but it would take him a while to sort it out, especially if they started by making it hard to tell up from down. They had gotten to him, and nearly gained the prophecy in the process, by tricking him into action when he should have trusted in the Order and basic facts, scaring him into getting things in motion before it was too late. The best possible way to move on from that, in a way that was likely to genuinely trick him, was to get him to slow down and waste time thinking about something that was simply not important.

Everyone in the DA knew from experience that creating a good distraction was not simply having something go 'bang' in the background and then assuming the enemy would have absolutely no choice but to go off and see what it was out of pure curiosity. The victim of such a trick had to have a genuine reason to go after the false lead; in almost all cases it had to be something that he expected to happen in order to have a reaction planned out. If there was a knock on the door, for example, and the guards were protecting something important, they would not have to be specifically told that the infiltrators might employ tricks to get past them. Unless they specifically expected someone to come visit, they would respond to the knock with killing curses and a change of venue, grabbing the thing they were protecting and getting to the apparation point to shift to a secure location before the threat's nature could be ascertained.

"Breathe," he muttered, as if he needed it. He had faced dark wizards before, though if anything they were worse in the shadows; Voldemort and at least some of his Inner Circle had always taken that approach. "They're hiding because they can't just blast their way in."

His inclination, he knew, was to fight, or else figure out what exactly happened, from the beginning, but that was the trick of it; he was certain they were trying to get him chasing pointless details. He had been tricked, or nearly tricked before, and either he would make the same mistake again, or he would do his absolute damnedest to avoid it, and end up dying over it. Almost certainly, he was right about the point that he had just used to reassure himself, and he had to take that into consideration; he had to assume that the problem was at least mostly in his head. The reason he though 'mostly' was because if they could get a plan together with nothing more than that, they would have done so a long time ago. There had to have been some kind of real-life detail that threw him off, either distracting him from the moment of impact, or coinciding with when the waking nightmare began. If there had been so much as a single word that Voldemort had known he would hear, he could have started the vision there and Harry never would have known the difference.

"Accio Cloak." It emerged from where it was hidden in his pack and he put it on without a second thought. Though there were other cloaks out there, his enemy had no way of replicating his own, even in his own dream, a dream that he generated partially on his own steam. There was no way that anyone who wanted to keep him down would trap him in a dream that was not itself confined to reality; he would be able to determine he was being tricked right away, and he had no idea how his own cloak worked, so he could not with his own mind just generate a perfectly working cloak that had been in use for decades at least.

Without another word except to muffle his own footsteps, he sneaked into the facility. Whether he was still being tricked or not, whether he was still asleep or not, there were some things that he knew for sure, and that was enough to get started. He had come a long way from not knowing he was being misled with a vision, in that he was probably currently still under some malicious effect, and he was aware of it, but this time, even more than the last time, he was certain that the correct course was to jump into action, and he knew just where to go to deal the most damage to his enemies' plans.