It was starting to get strange, being public.

The DA had been a completely secret organization only just recently, and now apparently they were the subject of every discussion. Rita Skeeter was enthralled by the presence of even more teenagers for more teenage drama, especially after learning that the group could not account for some of them. It took her only days to find all the families of the deceased, though the Weasleys never spoke to her except to tell her to get the hell out. Without the fact that she was working with them to help Harry's reputation because he was willing to play her game, many people especially close to him had soured on her; she had outlived her usefulness and now was just contributing to a patronizing and stupid legacy. Harry could not care less about what people said about him after he was dead, though; he was only worried about what would happen then- he had a hard time explaining to anyone that there was no limit to the amount of time that the enemy could keep him under in dreams, and he had no idea what to do to wake up.

"I can only think that they have some way of finding us," he said to the group. "Most likely, it's through me. Voldemort intends to have me stuck in a dream so long that I forget it's not real or just wear down my defenses enough to find out where we are. I've asked Luna to remove the location of this base from my memory, as well as the location of the Horcruces. I'd love to leave you all under Hermione's command, because she's been invaluable even in her current condition, but I don't think that's viable. For that reason, I leave Neville, the highest current rank, in charge in case I go to sleep and never wake up."

"Can you reach us with Legilimency?"

"No. It's not like what happened with Daphne. I'm completely trapped in the dream." He took a breath. "I'll have to be killed if I can no longer fight. Whatever happens, we can't allow Voldemort to kill me himself."

"That hardly matters," Ginny said. "The prophecy specifically says that you're the only one with the power to kill him. If he puts you down and you can't get up again, we can wipe your memory and then drop you on him when he's an inch from death after getting beaten by the rest of us."

"That's not how prophecies work," Susan said, taking a breath. "It's not that Harry's the only one allowed to kill him, and it has to happen like that no matter what. The Phoenix is telling us that one of them will kill the other, and in all the other prophecies that he's given to non-seers, it's never happened in the kind of convoluted way that it sometimes happens with seers. You might not expect when it happens, and you might be placed too close to it to really get the full picture, but by the time all is said and done, it happens exactly the way it was stated. It's not a prediction, it's a promise. Either the Phoenix wants to... help us in some way or it sees Voldemort as an abomination and-"

"It's a forked prophecy," Neville said. "They haven't all been forked. I heard that back in third year-"

"I heard that as well," Blaise said. "Personally, I still don't put too much stock in prophecies; I prefer to take responsibility for my actions. I would think anyone with any amount of control over himself could only be the subject of a forked prophecy."

Terry frowned.

"Well, I don't know how you know that, without reading, but that's more or less correct. Whenever a prophecy was about a good person showing up to save the day, it was forked or it at least seemed to imply that the hero would only do the work out of his own volition. There was a story about someone trying to avoid fulfilling a promise, and the result was that he was detained until he agreed to help with that fulfillment. Against all odds, his life was preserved through this trial and he begged for another chance." He took a breath. "Those who are corrupt and have surrendered themselves to their desire through dark magic have much clearer fates."

"I thought there was only one right thing to do and a million wrong things to do," Ginny said. "Doesn't that mean the evil have more options?"

"In superficial ways, yes," Harry said. "The wicked have a million different things they can do to still be wicked, but nothing they're going to do is ever going to be good. Good people can make mistakes and still be good, and it's only when you choose to do something good because you wanted. Acting out of obligation is a good place to start, but if you can't ever move on from that, there's something wrong."

No one said anything for a moment. It was hard for a lot of them to have lost Ron after already having lost two others, and having another two cursed to where no one in the Order knew how to help them. Having a contingency for killing their leader was not exactly pleasant, and it was something that would soon be impossible to keep secret. They could keep him in a chamber with a time bomb in it or something and just hope he survives long enough for the war to be otherwise over, but they were only struggling with their current problem because that was where Voldemort had invested his time; if for some reason he lost confidence in his current plan, he would accept the advantage that it brought, and move onto another plan. Everything that he had tried so far had a chance of still working, but the most likely course of action would be to get the current government to change gears entirely, along with enough of the old guard from the media who had not attended the conference.

"You're thinking something," Blaise said. "I'm not sure I like it, but I suppose we'll hear about it eventually, so-"

"They're going to act like Voldemort did, in fact, return, and that he and I are the same person. All they have to do is go through Hogwarts's records and find out that I used parseltongue at an age where I never could have learned it. Most likely, they'll decide that I've always been Voldemort and I was just waiting to gain influence for a few years, cleaning up a few of my old mistakes and making a little bit of a name for myself. It won't be clear why a dark wizard decided to possess a baby in the first place; maybe he really died, but then decided to take advantage of the situation, or maybe he was trying to skirt the prophecy."

"That's diabolical," Ginny said. "At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised. Why do you think he would be trying so desperately to get people to believe he had returned?"

"It's not that I didn't want people to know, it's that I was ramping up my plans and I thought it would be just exceptionally clever to put it in such a ridiculous light that no one would ever take it seriously if more evidence came forward. They don't have to get everything right in order for the theory to at least explain a few key things- one, why did a powerful dark wizard, who aggressively eliminated every enemy, never kill a teenager flying around on a broomstick? Two, why did that same teenager, who apparently had put together a fighting force strong enough to eliminate several Death Eaters, not end the conflict already? No doubt that the Death Eaters aren't really dead, but working on something nefarious somewhere..."

"Do we have any way of proving that isn't the case?"

"No, not really, especially not after the whole show we made of proving that Voldemort came from my own blood. Perhaps some will say that I've been studying dark magic and I just created him for my own purposes, or I brought him back as a thrall." He shrugged. "It doesn't really matter what they say. As long as there are any amount of other possible explanations, then we would either have to prove them all wrong, or to prove that the actual explanation is correct. For that, we would have to bring in an actual body."

"So, that's it?" Susan asked. "Was that his whole game the whole time? I can't believe he cares so much about your public image."

"Getting out ahead of it might help, but the point is just to kick down a sandcastle that I've been building. Luna, tell your father to put out an article about how loads of the old guard are going to try to evade responsibility; it might get the audience more ready for what's to come. No, he doesn't care about his own public image, and he didn't really care about mine until it started to produce returns. If I actually had the current government on my side, I'd have that many more eyes on the issue, and sooner or later, they'd get an idea of where he was and perform a coordinated strike. Whether or not he's got plans in the works for it, it'd cause problems for him."

"That makes sense, unfortunately," Michael said. "I'll look into it and find at least one person at a newspaper who's heard whispers of a massive coverup or something." He took a breath. "Even for the Quibbler, it helps to have some small amount of evidence."

"Thank you; see that you do, and let me know if we can't find anything," the witch said before leaving. "You would be surprised, though. Some of our oldest readers have said that whenever we post something with evidence, it takes out all the fun."

"We'll pen an apology letter to them all eventually," Harry muttered as he heard the door close. "Voldemort seems to believe that it's impossible for me to find him. His plan seems to hinge on that. He might have found something to conceal himself better than simply hiding somewhere."

"The whole point of using some method of self-concealment in this context would be that it would be impossible for us to simply guess what it was," Blaise said after a moment. "We may have discovered the reason why all the Death Eaters that we've tortured have disappointed us."

"That's entirely possible," Susan said. "During the early years of his reign of terror, the Department of Magical Law Enforcement was for the most part, not compromised, and he acted appropriately. He was harder to find than a ghost, and he disappeared with less effort."

"Hermione seems to think that basically, the way magic works, anyone who doesn't want to be found, can avoid it, if committed enough," the leader said after a moment of thought. "For every way of finding the truth, there's multiple ways of covering it up. It would have been easy, or at least doable, for the Department, which was strong once, to get rid of him through normal means."

They had all been made aware that there were ways of finding suspects, involving everything from basic magical record keeping to divination, and while the methods they had were vast, the methods of avoiding the long arm of the law were so much more varied that the whole idea of law and order was almost a joke. The wizarding world seemed to lack the same kind of low-effort criminal that the muggle world had aplenty, and there were a fair amount of decently smart criminals, and that was probably why. Not only did they lack the same push factors for crime, wizards had different methods of crime and methods of law enforcement.

"I think it's a pride thing," Blaise said after a moment, noticing Michael had left. "He won't come out of hiding because it seems to be what you want. You seem to have found a way to come out of hiding yourself, and that annoys him. He can't let you win at anything, and he can't let you decide the course of the war."

"That's entirely possible, knowing what we know. I just don't see how we can counter that, except by appearing to lose."

"That's what I was about to suggest, actually." He sighed. "It's pretty much inevitable that we can expect a counteroffensive on two fronts. We haven't been so stupid as to reveal the location of our actual base, just make ourselves available for an interview here and there. We'll invite a few good journalists to some hastily thrown together place that Voldemort might not have searched before, and even if we lost a lot of people when a plausible explanation for his return comes out, we won't lose everyone. I'm reasonably certain that if Voldemort conducts a strike somewhere, and it's a location where we said we were, it will at least seem equally plausible he's trying to kill us."

"What we've done, then, is we've given our supporters a reason to support us," Ginny said. "Fewer people will probably be neutral to the whole thing. I... I hate to say it, but the conflict could expand outward. Even if that weren't a bad thing in and of itself, it gets us no closer to finding Voldemort." It looked like she was trying to demonstrate that she was changed after getting off the dark magic, but no one said anything about that. Harry hoped everyone knew it was all terribly complicated, at least.

"Well, as we said, getting more eyes on the problem gives us more of a chance to find a solution," Neville said, always at least somewhat optimistic. Had he only ever lacked confidence in himself specifically? He never came off as dour back in school. "It's a pity that some of them might get killed, but if they organize and stick together and work on a way to solve the problem, then they're not likely to even get attacked. I think the majority of people hearing this wild theory about how Harry and Voldemort are the same person wouldn't go out and kill their neighbors upon hearing it; they'd just have an excuse for everything they've said so far. Many of them wouldn't intervene any further; they'd be too careful about committing to one side or another after so much got overturned all at once. For the majority of them, I think, it'd be something of a perverse comfort, and nothing more."

"A ray of hope, then," Blaise said. "If that's true, though, it takes us back to the problem we had before. What do we do to find the enemy?"

"We keep trying to draw him out," Harry said. "Now isn't the time to get discouraged. He might have noticed that we're inclined to change course whenever he does something different, like here he's been withdrawing from the public and allowing us to take the forefront, and then threatening to switch it around on us... I wanted to talk through the thought of going back into hiding with our hands up, but I'm starting to think we really can't afford to do that, and it might be just what he wants. If we remain in public and don't go back to what might have seemed like it was working, then I think the worst thing that comes of that is a confession that we're concerned he might be able to mentally overpower me at some point, but we have backup plans for that, and I don't think he realizes." He took a breath. "It's the best of both- most likely, as Neville said, the people who believe the story they're about to put out will do nothing more than meanly grumble about how they still might have been right, and everyone else will be looking for the enemy, looking for evidence about what they might be doing. I'm starting to think that there is a way of countering the natural advantage of magic going to the deceiver, and it's numbers. If you've got enough eyes on something trying to find out what it is, there's no way of keeping them from finding out."

No one said anything for a moment, and he wondered if it was because they were all tired of just talking about it. Did they want to get out and do something for a change? He could certainly help them with that. He nodded over at Susan.

"Not five hours ago, the International Confederation of Wizards designated the British Isles as being a Zone Ungoverned, and therefore a secrecy risk. To their credit, there are magical creatures attacking a few different places in the east and in Scotland, probably at the prompting of Lord Voldemort, and the Ministry's been on the fence. Between the fact the official acknowledgement from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement that we were telling the truth the whole time and the attack on the refugee settlement, as well as a slight uptick in regular crime, they've been treating the issue as a low priority because the beasts are killing people in ways that could be explained by nonmagical creatures, and so far it isn't a secrecy risk."

"They've fallen for his trap, then," Ginny muttered. "I suppose I can't say I'm surprised."

"Yes, most likely, he assumed that they would leave it alone, thinking that it was not an immediate issue, or at least not as much as the current conflict. The trick of it is, that's not entirely wrong, but it's missing the more foundational issue that they're not responding to a problem of objective fact with which their citizens are struggling. It's telling, when they're more concerned about what's going to cause an issue for them and not what's going to cause an issue for the governed." Harry took a breath, looking down. "It wasn't the first sign, but they're convinced now that the current government effectively does not count as a government, per their standards, and they have no confidence in our ability to maintain Secrecy."

"Isn't this a good thing?" Blaise asked. "Won't they toss out most of the old guard in the Ministry?"

"They'll do a lot more than that," Susan said. "That's the real problem. They'll get rid of most of the people who were causing problems for us, but they'll basically install a puppet government that does whatever they say. If we can't get the situation under control, then it's an arguably fair punishment, but we'll lose our independence, and we'll never have a basis for getting it back. We'll end up an ICW zone, like Denmark."

It was a lesser known fact, but the current government of the Jutland Peninsula was only recently allowed to hold its own elections. After a long-term subversion by Grindelwald, the international community lost confidence in the Danish Ministry to maintain Secrecy. Countless officials had been arrested and taken to black sites in various places in Europe, and since then, their appointment or election had to be approved. The country mostly kept working like before; it was not as if the confederation wanted to intervene with every single aspect of their lives, but the average Dane who was old enough to remember the previous system would describe tit as less restrictive compared to the present. Perhaps the idea had been that it was not so bad to be controlled from the outside, but the truth was that they were lucky to never have a crisis in their own land; they would never have been able to solve it themselves and would have to depend on the ICW to handle it for them, according to its own priorities.

"Well, at least we know what to do now," Neville said, getting up. "It's time to start tackling a greater variety of problems, like the Order's been doing the whole time... Let's just maybe not mention it to Hermione that we're about to go out and kill some werewolves."