The first summer meeting was slated to be after the decision was read aloud. Harry wondered if he would ever forget the moment. It was not precisely what he expected, but in its inconsistencies from what he was expected, he might have paid attention more, and he might have spent less time plotting his next move, and perhaps that was why it was still ringing in his head by the time he had all the members of the new DA in front of him. Their expressions ranged from blase to worried, though he was pretty sure Neville was faking excitement, so he discounted that.

"Were they really convicted?" Ron asked. He had been getting the word out instead of attending the trial. It turned out to be a better use of time.

"You'll all hear about it soon enough. Hand only evaded responsibility because they basically tricked him into saying that the tribe is responsible as a whole." It had been a clever trick of course, and he could hardly blame even a well-spoken intellectual centaur for falling into the trap. The cleverness demanded of him in the trial had nothing to do with what he could apply to divination and the kinds of war-like hunting that the tribe had to carry out to make sure that the hags did not take too much of their grounds. It was factual knowledge of the law that he lacked more than anything else.

"How'd they do that?" Ginny asked.

"Might as well have it out. It'll be a learning experience for everyone," he said, glancing at Hermione. "The rule that we all learned as first years was that we were not to go into the Forbidden Forest. It couldn't be simpler. The school would never be held responsible for anything that happened when we violated that rule. There were reasons why that rule wasn't going to be good enough for the Ministry, but that's beside the point. The court asked if the defendant was under an obligation to defend the forest, or his part of it, should any witch or wizard come in to threaten them."

"What would it matter if he was?" Ron asked. Hermione gave him a strange look. Hours earlier, she had said that probably nothing else could get him to so quickly change position on the plight of the centaur. Harry did not think he really changed his opinions about how they behaved, because that was not required to sympathize with their position, but she was right in that he had never seemed particularly concerned for them before.

"It basically allowed them to ignore the fact that Umbridge was doing something dangerous entirely," she said. "By saying that his tribe was obligated to respond to any witch or wizard going in on their land, he made the fact that she was holding us hostage a moot point. Without realizing it, he implied that the reason the school rule was in place was because the centaurs would have shot first years for wandering into the wood, even though we came back without a scratch."

"There's all sorts of things in there!" someone called out. "It's not just the centaurs!"

"Of course there are," Harry said. "Most of the court, if not all of it, should also be aware of that. If someone who knew what he was doing was in charge of the defense, we could have called attention to it. After that, it came down to a choice between admitting fault and claiming that he was only part of his tribe and I genuinely think he didn't understand the question, or he would have brought all the blame on himself. It wouldn't have made a difference for our case; the court would have been satisfied with either."

"What does he think he's doing, just unilaterally making the decision to represent himself... all out of some misplaced lack of trust-" It was Macmillan who started off on that particular tangent, but he would have understood it out of anyone. Only recently, he had made decisions that might well have impacted the entire world, everyone Voldemort would ever threaten, and he had made them out of a misplaced lack of trust in the Order. It was entirely possible that Snape hated him exactly as much as he always knew, and at the same time entirely possible that he would not be allowed to sabotage a central objective over a grudge; that the rest of the organization would have known that he could be trusted in spite of it.

"It wasn't entirely misplaced, but I'm not the most familiar with the history," he said, stopping Hermione from having to intervene herself. He did not want it to be just something she was saying all on her own. "Suffice to say, their entire experience with us has been negative. They thought it was about as likely that we would help them as we thought it was for Umbridge to help us." He sighed. "Are we the only ones allowed to not trust people? For the record, the Ministry gave us every written and verbal assurance that they had our best interests in mind and this was the only way to protect us from some poorly defined danger-"

"Our honor is intact," Blaise said. "The Ministry's lied countless times. I get what you're saying, but it's not a good comparison."

"They might have lied, but without anything else to point out the fact that they lied, no one realizes it, so it's the same," Ron said. "We might not have lied, but they barely know who we are, so it doesn't make a difference. It's strange that you-"

"What's strange, exactly-"

"That's enough, both of you," Harry said. "We've been over this; honor and courage are not the same thing." It was not exactly as if there were no disagreements between them, but there was no room for distrust, not with all of their lives on the line. The new DA had ironed out a lot of the major conflicts, but no one expected all their problems to be over.

"What does this mean for us?" Susan asked after a moment. She had become something of an unpopular figure among some of them, because she still supported the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, which was fair, since her aunt was in charge of it, and everything indicated that she was a good leader, but not positioned to fix all of the problems by herself. It would all be easier, he thought, if she had not made so many comments about rebels in a professional capacity, but then, she had to have some faith in her own office to act in its intended capacity.

He told them all that they had to prepare for the possibility that it would be impossible to return to Hogwarts, and the best thing they could do was organize a mass walk out by teachers and students alike. Obviously, some would remain; there was nothing they could do about that, but the more that left, the less the Ministry would have under its control. There were objections about how bad it was really going to get, but so far no one disagreed with his approach if it came to that, which was well enough, because they had assignments to hand out.

"To some extent, we all need to learn Occlumency, but we can't do everything like that. We need to specialize more on everything else."

"What do you mean, everything else?" Michael asked.

"We're all going to learn Apparation soon enough. It's a simple enough trick and we'll all need it. Apart from that, though, I really do mean everything else. Hermione's already started on Legilimency; we'll need someone who can everything else. It doesn't matter if there's some overlap, but we don't know what we'll need, so we'll need someone on everything." They had already had the conversation about dark magic. He was somewhat surprised, but Ginny, knowing the risks, still wanted to pursue it, along with Blaise. He had already approved of her decision.

"I'll take Charms," Neville said.

"Longbottom, that's a class; it's not what we meant by a skillset-"

"If you want to make yourself responsible for learning loads of new charms, be my guest," Harry said. "It doesn't have to be anything that sounds special; we just need you to make effective use of your time. I'll be working on Occlumency first, and I want to work on Apparation after that; it'll go faster for all of us if someone learns it first."

Luna made a curious expression in response to his executive decision, but there was no time to worry about that. She wanted to learn more about magical creatures and he just had to hope that she meant ones that actually existed. As long as there had to be some application to what they were doing, he supposed that was a prerequisite, but he was never quite sure with her. If she was not doing something of interest in a certain time frame, it would be easy enough to tell.

Like that, the others followed. Some of them stated that they would only be starting with one thing and moving on to another. Others wanted more time to think about it, which was expected; he had never told them that they were going to be specializing. It looked like Hermione wanted a word when he was in the middle of drilling some of the others on dodging against dark magic rather than trying to block.

"Harry, I think Luna wants to speak with you once you're done with this."

"That's fine. She might just want to ask about how she can apply what she's learning."

"I would not exactly count on that."

When he did speak with her, it was in the middle of an Occlumency test. Though there were members of the new DA that agreed with the perspective that forced, repeated exposure to Legilimency was how dark wizards were born, there was no way of testing the strength of their mental shields without attempting to get through or past them. It certainly sounded vague and confusing, but Harry knew what it all meant from firsthand experience.

"You wanted to see me?" he asked.

"Did I not tell Hermione?"

"I don't know; I thought she might have caught you looking over or something, did you?"

"Do you like the question game?"

"Luna, please-"

"You are a strange wizard, Harry," she said, in the middle of a silent laugh. "You have only set for yourself to learn what everyone will learn, and you only seem to want to learn it so that you may teach everyone else. You must have no fear for your position."

For a moment he was thinking she was calling him lazy or something, and he would have explained that there were more duties involved with being effectively the leader than there were for anyone else, so when her tone shifted, he was momentarily at a loss. There was a chance she was praising him.

"I don't have any fear for my position," he said. "No one wants this job. That's the trick. You only have to take on loads of responsibilities and no one will ever want to come and take them off your hands." It was not the whole truth, so he decided to continue, even though he usually stopped with what he would consider a satisfactory answer from anyone else. "I don't think being the strongest is really going to make sure I stay on top here. I think we're going to find out that we're all good at different things, and I really hope I'm a decent leader."

"Decent?" she asked. "You've been great so far. For the record, I do mean that."

"I wasn't under the impression you were joking," he said. It went without saying that what he usually thought about her was that she was being eccentric, not that she was being funny. That was what everyone thought, after all. Was it terrible to have everything taken seriously? What was it like to not be able to tell jokes? Was there anyone who could tell what kind of ridiculous she was currently being?

"Some people think that your position is not secure."

"I don't think about it," he said honestly. He was tired of keeping up appearances, and as with Ron, it never seemed like he had to try terribly hard around Luna. "Honestly, the only reason I started the old DA was just because I knew that no one else was going to do it. If someone did, I'd have been more than happy to join."

"Do you like taking the initiative?"

That was a hard question to answer. When he was a kid, things seemed so simple. The Stone was at risk of being stolen, so he went to go get it, to protect it. Was he always impulsive, and were his impulses just usually right in those days? Were they less likely to have consequences, good or bad, when no one expected all that much of him? Over the last summer, as frustrated as he was with not having any information, he knew he was never going to get anything done without help. Of late it seemed like he hardly had any choice in the matter; that he would only be allowed to do things if he had no one leading him and he would only accomplish anything by leading someone else.

"I don't know how to answer that. I just... it's all been thrust upon me," he said, vaguely quoting some half-remembered missive about greatness. As much as Voldemort went on about it, he hardly ever felt great. It was a serious question as to whether not he had ever felt good. He had been happy, here and there, but that was a different kind of feeling good. "I'm trying to welcome- well, to invite people to take their own initiative here and there. I think, when we're in school, there's a certain way that things are meant to work and everyone falls in to patterns." She cocked her head. "Well, most everyone. At some point it's hard to think of what you really even want, and that's even though they try to encourage it."

"Oh, yes, Michael was saying something about this. Did you hear it from him too?"

"See, that's my point. I think I have stuff to learn from everyone. I never wanted to set myself up as the only person who can ever lead a class- I don't even like thinking of it as a class. The simplest problem with that is I don't know everything- I really don't even know all that much at all, and I can't always be there for a meeting."

No words were exchanged for a moment. Luna sometimes took between thirty seconds and a minute just thinking about what had been said, because she rather did not care whether anyone else thought her response to some thought came too quickly or slowly. It made dealing with her a bit more of a challenge, but it was worth the effort, in his estimation.

"I think there will still come a day that you will have to insist on your way, Harry. You may have been able to come this far as the tentative organizer of a group, and I believe you are genuine. It does not seem to me that you are trying to evade responsibility. There will, however, be a time when the informal support of everyone around is not enough." She looked around. "Terry said he feels ashamed that someone from Ravenclaw sold out the first DA. What was worse, though, was when we found that some of the older students regarded the whole thing with cold pragmatism."

It was not hard for him to remember that most of the older students, who had invested more into their education, mostly went along with Umbridge's ridiculous demands, since they would be out of there next year anyway. Those young enough probably did not have much of a concept of what the school was like before she showed up, but it was not as if he had ever tried to recruit that age group. Had they been doing enough, though, to make sure that they would have some kind of future? His first two years at Hogwarts had been inestimably valuable for him in terms of everything that he learned, both in Defense, thanks to Quirrell, regrettable as his employment was, and what was basically self-study during Lockhart's tenure. Had he assumed that no matter what the Ministry attempted for his fifth year, that it would all be over at the end, because no one ever kept the job longer than a year?

"Everything's going to get worse unless we come up with real evidence," he had said when he was with Ron and Hermione. "It'd be nice if Voldemort just showed up right in front of the Minister, but that's not going to happen. He'd need something way more important to him than remaining a secret for him to slip up like that."

"We've been over the options," Ron said. "It's come down to fighting. Let's say we did prove that the Ministry lied. What makes us think that the public is going to decide that they lied about everything and we've been telling the truth the whole time? Does that ever really happen?"

"No," he admitted. "It really doesn't ever happen, even in the muggle world." He sighed. "It takes more than just showing someone that something was false. I'm honestly kind of impressed that we came round on Sirius back when he and Lupin explained everything. Really, Pettigrew should have doubled down instead of confessing to everything, but he was too much of a coward."

The fact that Wormtail had hidden for years and years was because he was convinced that faking his death was perfectly necessary to remain out of Azkaban, and as a result, he lived as a rat, uninterrupted, for over twelve years, with only the luck of the devil to thank. It was probably wiser than just turning up alive again as if nothing had happened, but he was unwilling to take the risk at getting out of the country. He was unwilling to risk crafting a new identity for himself and thus took the one that was thrust upon him, that of Scabbers, the lazy, useless rat.

When the meeting ended he was happy with his progress on Occlumency. He had been at it the longest, he had been training against the best Legilimens out of all of them, and he had the most compelling reason, so he supposed it was obvious, but for all the time that it had taken him, he could not help but feel a sense of accomplishment. He was not sure that he could keep Snape out, so Hermione was insisting on studying more herself, but he was reasonably certain she would have done so anyway.

"Do we know what will happen to the centaurs?" she asked him in a quiet voice.

"No, not in the long term. I don't really mean to act like they just deserved it because they didn't take our help, but... we prepared so much and it all went down the drain. There had to have been something else we could have done."

"At this point, there might only be one thing that we can do."

"What?"

"We'll have to relocate them. If the Ministry wants to get rid of them, the simplest thing would be to force a fight, and then even if some of them run away, the rest of them would get killed by everything else in the Forest." She sighed. "Really, I wish they could live among us, but the differences in lifestyle would make things impossible. They would be worse off than squibs, generally speaking."

"If they didn't trust us enough with a legal defense, why are they going to trust us to move them to some other forest?"

"It's all they have."

"Siding with us in the first place was the only chance they had."

"Well, it's all I have," she said before packing up her things. As convenient as it would be, she could not simply live with Neville, so she used the floo to get back to the London outskirts where her parents lived every afternoon. In a matter of minutes, he would be taking one to the Figg residence. Ron's parents were not particular whether he came back or stayed over, so he usually did not follow them to the fireplace. "Sorry," she said out of nowhere.

"It's hard for everyone."