They reuinited with their friends more quickly than expected, though when they saw McGonagall, it seemed they were less inclined to explain what had happened. Hermione went ahead and told her part first as Ginny returned her wand. He wondered for a moment why Umbridge had been carrying his own, since he was pretty sure Malfoy had been the one to take it, but he was not going to worry about that. The Transfiguration teacher would not be delayed by anyone trying to preface the situation for her and opened the door to the office, where the Slytherins were either knocked out, tied up, or petrified.

"That was about what I expected."

"Professor, they were holding us hostage-"

"Now is not the time," the Headmistress said. "As of this moment, I am deputizing each one of you to inform both the teachers and students that Surpeme Undersecretary Umbridge is not with us, and I am taking control of the school during the investigation of the death. Do not look for Professor Snape. Teachers are to aid in preventing students from going anywhere near the scene and inviting suspicion on themselves."

"Teachers first?" Hermione asked, though she ran off without waiting for an answer, since McGonagall was casting a healing spell on Neville before leaving in a different direction; they all had bruises and cuts of some kind, with Ron sporting a black eye that only just started to hurt right when in the presence of a teacher. Harry quietly surmised that without their leader around, the Slytherins probably took a stupid risk just to be cruel to someone, and his friends fought their way out, using their wands effectively as soon as they got ahold of one. Malfoy had demonstrated a tripping jinx earlier, but apart from that, he really did not think any of them had demonstrated dueling prowess that had become the expectation for DA members.

"You got your wand back?" Ginny asked, seeing he was holding his. "I didn't see Umbridge pick it up."

"I wasn't watching; I was thinking about Sirius and everything else. She might have wanted to hold onto at least one of the wands herself as evidence against us."

"Can we still get out of here?"

"We talked it over with McGonagall and found out Snape alerted the other Order members. Sirius was never in danger. It turns out Kreacher probably just lied to us to be cruel." He ran a hand through his hair, breathing out sharply. "I just-"

"I know," she said after a second, looking around and seeing they were alone, derelict of duty by any fair estimation. "There were a few times that I blacked out, but... I know what it's like to have someone in your head." She shook her head. "Would you believe I had three brothers in the castle and the diary convinced me I couldn't trust them?"

There was something in her voice he had only heard a few times before. Progressively more he was finding that he wanted to listen on.

"I think it's pretty likely he wasn't just sending you these visions," she said after a moment. "He was also sending these vague feelings, making you panic. It wasn't just information; he was influencing how you were interpreting it."

"People have been telling me to just shut it out," he said.

"I can believe it. I can also see why that might be complicated." She put her arms around him, just standing in the hallway when there were important things to do. "Thanks for saving my dad. I keep thinking about what I would do if I lost him." All of a sudden it became easy to tell himself they were saving time they would be spending later on.

"I... Ginny, I didn't know it was so similar," he said. "I thought I was just getting visions here and there and... I know you described it to me once, but..."

"Let's get going. We can have this conversation later."

"Yeah." It was even easier to get back to what they really should have been doing. They split up without saying anything, the witch getting off at a lower floor while he kept going down. Reaching the ground floor, he found Ron talking to a crowd of students. Rather than shouting demanding questions at him, it seemed they were all listening.

"Right, so basically that's how Umbridge bought it; couldn't have asked for a better end-of-year fiasco, all things considered- Oh, there's the man of the hour-"

"How did you get away from the centaurs?" an older student asked; he might have been a seventh year, and from his tie, he was a Hufflepuff. "They just killed her and left you to get away?"

"They had a wary look," he said. "I think they knew that if they made any more trouble, they'd be in more trouble themselves. They waited to see what we'd do after they killed her and... well, we weren't attacking them, so they knew they'd be going too far if they did anything to us." He sighed as he thought back. It seemed like it had only just happened, when really at least half an hour had passed.

"Did you lead her out there?"

"Yeah," he said. "We didn't hold her hand and force her to attack the centaurs, though, so that's on her." It occurred to him that he could have lied, but then he would have had to arrange that with Hermione, and probably the centaurs as well. Though they seemed to want to be left alone, they probably had a reasonably good grasp of the situation and could tell that the two students were being frog-marched by their teacher, and they were probably going to send someone who hated humans the least to explain the situation to investigators when they showed up. Most likely, they had even heard some of the words that were exchanged as they were coming over.

"We'll see what the Prophet says."

"I'm sure you will," he spat back, thinking of how there was a chance that Voldemort would be seen soon. The crowd dispersed and he turned to his friend. "Did I make things worse?"

"Well, they don't exactly like you, but it's better that you're taking questions than not. They'll go and tell the others."

He could not say how his friend had become so good at things like talking to a crowd of students without them biting back in any way, but he supposed that 'Ron Weasley, the boy who lied' was not the headline of every other edition of the news. It went without saying that he was funny and related well with others, but he rarely put his talents on display, hanging out with him and Hermione almost exclusively the past five years.

"Thanks," he said, thinking a second. "Should I go look for the lower years or the upper years?"

"The midgets won't be any easier on you just because they can't use a Stinging Hex. They're probably worse, not getting an idea of who you really are. All they have is the news."

"Right. Yeah, I should have figured. I'm sorry about earlier."

"Mate, I don't know what it's like having... well, I don't know what it's like having anyone in my head. I don't envy you." He seemed to think for a moment. "I didn't know for sure, but I was betting on you being right. I'm surprised as you are."

"I think I'll go see about those upper years," he said, not knowing how else to respond. Generally, the older students would spend their spare time in the courtyard and it was an unspoken rule that if younger students wanted to get some reading done, they could do it in the library, or on the grounds if it was pleasant out. He did not know of any time that the rule ever had been enforced, but everyone figured it out quickly enough. Going out to the courtyard himself, he found a substantial amount of students there, mostly from the last two years by his estimation.

"It's Potter."

"Yes, it's Potter, and if you want to know what happened this time, you'll have to help me keep everyone inside. We can't let anyone go down there and become a suspect in a murder investigation; it's just what the Ministry wants."

The most familiar with the way things at Hogwarts used to work, and the privileges that they expected to enjoy for all their younger years, he could have found a crowd more sympathetic to cutting off the overreach. They were going to want answers, and many probably had their doubts about him, but they would at least have some reason to go against Umbridge from the start, and he had less of a reason to be concerned that they would talk out of turn or go off on an irrelevant tangent.

"We've heard what's going on," someone who seemed to have appointed himself speaker for the group said. "What were you doing to draw the Headmistress's attention?"

"It started before she was even High Inquisitor," he said. "I don't know if you heard this, but I stand by my position that Voldemort is back, and on the first day of class, when she told us she basically wasn't going to teach us anything, she had a problem with that. She said I was lying and gave me detention, made me write lines with a blood quill." Once more, he held up his knuckles. "When she decided she wasn't going to teach us anything, well, my friends and I organized a study group, and we kept it secret until someone turned on us, and then she decided that Dumbledore must've recruited us to hide some weapon... that he was going to use against the Ministry, and it wasn't enough that she caught us and was going to expel us, she used the Cruciatus on me to try to get me to reveal where this weapon thing was-"

"There are going to be traces of that on her wand," one of the students offered. "We'll know if you're making that up."

"Yeah, I know about Priori Incantatem. It's not a secret. I've proved that my wand was stolen at the World Cup."

There was an issue that seemed to spark an interest in the form of murmurs in the crowd. Even those who had more or less tolerated Umbridge, perhaps tepidly believing the news, had heard of the Death Eater attack on Dartmoor. Even if it was not the case that Voldemort had come back, why was it not worth learning defensive magic to protect themselves against those who supported him, if they were having a resurgence? Not to mention- why, exactly, were they having a resurgence?

"Anyway," he said, trying to turn the attention back to the matter at hand. "That's why we need to keep people from getting over there. If someone else touches the wand, the case against her is going to be ruined. They might even start saying that she was some innocent victim."

"I'm sure you wouldn't like that."

"No, I wouldn't, because I was doing the right thing the whole year," he said, understanding how important it was not to back down. He could allow Umbridge to teach her pointless class without interruption, but he could not act as if she had defeated him. If all that was important for Prophet readers was who won, who lost, who was speaking, and who was silent, then a quiet sense of integrity would not be good enough. It would not matter if he had never been contradicted by evidence, and only by appeals to authority coupled with draconian punishments, not for enough of the school that just went along with the rules and could not be trusted to be invited to the Defense Association.

"What happened, then?" someone else asked after a moment. "You said she caught you running a club against the rules, and then she used the Cruciatus."

"Right. Eventually, Hermione- I guess she couldn't stand to see it go on, so she came up with a story about how this weapon was in the Forest. I don't know what she was planning, if she had a plan, but she forced us to lead her out there."

"Why did she need both of you?"

"Search me. Why did she need my wand? I think she wanted me out there as a hostage to keep my friends from trying anything." It had not worked, if that was the intent. "She wanted to hold onto my wand as evidence against me, probably. I haven't done anything with it since she took it, so it might still count for something."

"Did the centaurs just intercept you, then?" the same student asked. If Harry did not know better, he would say that it was even a generous question.

"Yeah. We've known that they're out there- everyone does, but we weren't going over specifically to where they live. I'm not sure I could identify what part of the Forest is theirs. If I could, I know I wouldn't go there. There was no way of predicting that they'd basically save us."

Harry had in the past had a few positive interactions with centaurs, but really only when a first year, and really only with Firenze. With him in the castle teaching Divination, it was not as if he could have come to the rescue again, so he went ahead and left him out of the story. Unless someone asked if he had a conception about creatures being overly violent or something of that nature, and it became relevant, he would not bring up what had happened first year. He was also leaving out actually saying that there was no way of predicting that they would kill Umbridge, right up until she attacked them.

Basically, when he tried to put on his house elf liberation front hat, when he tried to remember everything Hermione had told him about wizards and their not so friendly relations with other sorts of things, he was of two minds about it. Either the centaurs were dangerous, unpredictable creatures and it was pure folly to go anywhere near them, or they were basically going to be treated like wizards, in that it could be presumed they would not attack unless provoked. In the first case, the testimony of the centaurs themselves would reveal that the deceased had all the wands, and therefore all the control of the situation. She could have easily gone into the Forest herself after being told where to go, but chose to drag the unarmed students as hostages. Their experience looking up magical law for Buckbeak's case might actually turn out to be useful, against all odds. In the second, it was a standard self-defense case, and he had at least some experience arguing his way out of those charges, though that was pretty much all Dumbledore; it was all because there was something that the Ministry did not want to acknowledge at all costs.

As he went through some more monotonous conversations, repeating what he had said until he was no longer annoyed at people for how little they knew about the situation, asking for their help in getting the word out and keeping other students from going outside, he started trying to think of how they would pitch it if it came to a self defense case. Even if they were talking about a witch or wizard claiming that Umbridge had gone homicidal, the court was not going to be in favor. One potential complication was the fact that she had only used non-lethal spells on the centaurs, but they had no recourse against her apart from their bows, which did not come with special sleep arrows like in spy movies or something. In an ideal case, the fact that they were supposed to be able to feel safe on their own land would add to their case, but as had been said, it was doubtful that there was anyone who really cared if they were protected; the whole strategy was punishing the government for the wording it used.

When the sun set, the teachers had established a perimeter and there was no serious doubt by anyone in the castle that the situation was as described. All questions were entertained and generally, the situation was handled well, but he was still on edge. He knew that Sirius was not in danger, but the situation in London felt way more important than what he was doing at the moment. The very idea that they knew where Voldemort was had been unthinkable all year; they could only guess at his next moves. Was this his new chance to be helpful after rescuing Arthur Weasley?

While he was eating supper, he could only think about what the Order was doing, making plans in his head to go to McGonagall's office and ask for updates. If she was being direct with him about what they were protecting, he had a good chance of getting another straight answer out of her. Simultaneously, the fact that he had to one day defeat Voldemort was weighing on him; he could not even tell himself that it was not the correct interpretation of the prophecy, even not having heard the exact wording. If the enemy was there, and they could not defeat him because that was his fate, were they all just going to get slaughtered, or was there some way of working around it to where they would not fully defeat him? Since when were prophecies real in the first place?

He shook his head. As much of a day-to-day fraud as Trelawney was, he had heard a real prophecy, and he heard it from her. It was all in plain language, and it had all happened exactly the way she described. There might have been a different way of interpreting it when she said it, but when it happened, there were no surprises, and nothing seemed unusual in retrospect. He had not thought to copy down the exact wording, but technically there was no sense in worrying about that, because it had all happened already. It came with a date; he could clearly remember that the first thing she said was 'It will happen tonight'.

That central difference stood out to him. If there was no set time that the was meant to defeat Voldemort, then it could be in decades from the present, if he stayed alive long enough. If he became immortal, if he made it so that he would live on after death somehow, then for the prophecy, there was no end in sight. No matter what the enemy did, he would never be able to get rid of the fear he had for the chance of dying, but Harry was not sure that was better. Voldemort was evidently a problem for more than just him- even if he didn't have Sirius, he was willing to hurt and kill anyone else just to get to him, and now it was clear why. Maybe there was some chance that if he really studied, and if he somehow remained hidden for years and years that he would eventually grow more powerful than the enemy, or just have some way of defeating him, but what was Voldemort going to be doing during that time? Was he going to be taking steps to expand his own power, so that no one could catch up to him, or was he just going to be killing everyone he could find?

"Harry?"

He looked up. Ron was trying to get his attention. The entire DA, he noticed, was sitting with him, and strangely it seemed like they were all trying to protect him, ignoring the general rule about sitting with one's house at mealtimes.

"Sorry," he said. "I was just... processing."

"No, it's just... whenever I was going around telling people about what happened, the one question I couldn't really answer... and I brushed it off, because it wasn't relevant... it was how he came back. That's the main reason there are people who don't believe you."

"Ron's right," Hermione said after a moment. "We may get an update from the Order saying that they have evidence Voldemort returned, which would be good, but if they don't, then we have to come up with some explanation."

"It was news to me too," he said. "I never knew someone could come back to life, but that's what happened." He sighed loudly. It was similar to what he was thinking before. "Unfortunately, we're going to have to do better than that. If there were some way of making a Pensieve publicly available..."

"Even if they weren't rare magical artefacts, there are problems with that," Hermione said after thinking about it. "For one thing, someone might have edited your memory. For another, it's too late. If you had presented this memory to the public shortly after it happened, when that was the last thing on anyone's minds, then they at least would not be able to say that you were lying to draw attention to yourself. The world would at least have to accept that whether or not it was true, that you believed it, or at least the sensible part of the world."

"Well, what if he never really died in the first place?" Ron asked. "Like... I'm not saying he was faking it, but what if he was not exactly dead, and someone else, someone working for him, put a corpse in there and burned it beyond recognition or something, and then he went into hiding so he could recover."

They were all silent for a moment. Had there been any doubt that it was Voldemort trying to steal the Stone years ago, or could that have simply been a misguided old follower? It occurred to him that he never knew how it was reported; he had never even touched a newspaper until his third year, if memory served. Then, even supposing that Sirius had been a trusted friend, what was his reason for breaking out? Revenge? Why then?

He started to realize that his godfather had represented a serious blow to the ability to sell the 'everything is fine' narrative to the general public, of which they were currently in the critical damage control stage. The escape was something the Ministry was unable to explain, and either that was because they really had no idea how he got out, or because they had no way of securing the prison against Animagi, which was not something they could afford to report. They also had no idea why he decided to get out twelve years after he was locked up rather than the next day, because they had no idea what his motives were. He had never once confessed to being a servant of Voldemort; they just decided he was and threw him in Azkaban. The central reason they lost control of the situation was because they had no interest in finding out the truth of the matter, and from that point on they had to pretend like they knew everything, and that was why no fact-finding ever had to be done. From that point on, they had to make Sirius into this mysterious villain who did things that made no sense whatsoever, a replacement for the real problem, and abandon any hope they had of actually solving the problem.

Harry had no immediate answer for Ron's question, but he had reached another conclusion, one he felt was just as important. He was not going to repeat any of the Ministry's mistakes.