Harry made it his job to see to the recruits and their progress whilst Susan and a few of the other Ministry brats were working on getting more information. Neville introduced him to some of those who had made it to the higher ranks within what they could achieve, seeming excited about each one. They came to a middle aged wizard, probably the oldest out of all of them.

"Here's Azariah Westenberg. He used to be a Hit Wizard and he's good at running drills and organizational stuff. Not used to roughing it out in the woods, but we've got Cassiopeia Ducreaux for that- that's her over there, she's the best at making wherever we are livable."

"So, we're effectively all independent here?"

"There were skills we did not have and we made up for it quickly," the older wizard said. "There are about thirty of us now who appear at every practice. Our only problem is that we need a reason for all the practice."

"Hopefully, we'll never need to fight in large numbers," Harry said. "We're training for something that we don't want to do... even then, though, it might come soon. The Ministry hasn't seen us do anything in a while, but they still know we're propping up The Quibbler, and they're not just going to let that stand. They probably realize that we've bugged out, and they don't have the resources to search the entire country. They're going to go after anyone who might be helping us, but our numbers are high enough for an efficient food production system, so we don't really need anyone to supply us with anything."

"We're not like the Death Eaters, then, with an extensive spiderweb of connections all over the country," Azariah said. "In their case, though, even if we look at the Ministry naively and assume that they want to get rid of them, they might risk causing too much damage to everyone else in the process if they took that approach."

"Yeah," he said, somewhat surprised that the older wizard was on the same page. "If your men are itching to do something, I understand. No one likes being told to hurry up and wait. I don't exactly have a target for you to attack, though. We have to limit our use of force or we'll be the ones escalating. If the enemy just starts burning down neighborhoods left and right, the Aurors won't have a choice but to get involved. Right now we think they're distracted by Dumbledore's absence and they're trying to work their way deeper into the departments so that they can control the other power from below."

"From below?" Neville asked.

"You can't get a search warrant to search the Selwyn Estate if you have to submit it to the secretary and she loses track of it before it can ever reach a magistrate," Harry said, shaking his head. "They have Lucius already but he's mostly a donor- it'd be easy to get their third cousins a job just obstructing anything they don't like." He frowned. "We'd have to have more people if we really wanted to do something like that and it sounds like some people-"

"We are not bloodthirsty," the older wizard asserted.

"I'm sorry," he said after a moment. "I didn't mean to imply that. I wasn't about to say that the recruits wouldn't be thrilled by anything that doesn't involve people dying, just that they might have been hoping for something with more action, more active spellwork."

"No, no, I was somewhat hasty for the usual bounds- I should have allowed you to finish. I admit there are some who probably only desire excitement because they have never had it before. I've removed everyone that I thought was not here for the right reasons."

Harry decided to thank Azariah rather than asking him why he had the authority; it seemed pointless to question his judgement, especially when they had only just alluded to a reason why a recruit might be turned down. If anything, he had earned himself a somewhat higher rank.

"If you're interested, we had a thought that we could effectively replace the service of the courts. The recruits could act as guards and enforcers in addition to their other duties. The goal, of course-"

"-is to get people invested in our cause, yes. Even those not terribly enamored with us or not terribly enraged in us cannot very well have their disputes in lower court whilst the officials are tied up with pointless tasks like monitoring the Hogwarts students." According to everyone who seemed to know anything, that much was true. The classic legal disputes like one wizard's hippogryff ate another wizard's venomous tentacula, had no one to officially rule on them, or when they did it was after an excess. A line was forming, and it did not look like a passing thing at all. "Our only process is the basis by which we would judge them."

"You can speak with Terry about that," he said, looking back just in case he had decided to join them. "I'm sure he would like to see what he could do about coming up with a standard and explaining it to everyone. I'm not sure if too many other people believe the book he's got, but it doesn't seem that objectionable. It doesn't seem like something that came out of nowhere."

"Very well."

The recruits had not been as excited as the anticipated about the fake candidate, Eleazar Higgen, or protecting him, but he was getting the attention of virtually everyone else. The two of them went to rejoin the others, exchanging the occasional word about how various parts of the process were going. Neville had become exceptionally dependable, and it stood to reason that he should know it. The team that they had selected for the actual stealing consisted of Blaise, Luna, and Hermione, and they were all getting prepared for their roles, though the last of the three had done much of the planning. As far as either of them were concerned, they needed no help; the other team was a different matter.

"I'm watching Michael," Ron had said a day earlier. "I don't give a damn how good he is with this sort of thing. After the last incident, he needs someone watching him on something so important."

"Going with your sister on emergency cleanup?" Harry asked.

"It's not a bad place to start."

The third team, the one that actually involved him, would basically give him and Neville an alibi, and they were taking Susan with them to further throw off the suspicion. It would have been convenient if they could have their candidate make an appearance, but that was impossible and what they had in mind was something they had planned for years. Everyone else was working with the recruits. There was still a gap between them and the regular members, but one of the most important things was to offer them a contract, one Hermione had hastily drafted before leaving.

"Is there any way this all goes sideways?" his companion asked as the witch smiled slightly and stood in between them before they apparated. They were in the middle of Diagon Alley, a place where he would not have been caught dead before.

"There are about a thousand," he said. "We're hoping most of them cancel each other out."

Even when they did absolutely everything they could, there were still variables that they could not know until the day of the heist. They had arranged for a Prophet-Ministry inquiry into the recent activities of Harry Potter, giving him an excuse to be in London that did not relate to the sudden appearance of the Locket. He had every reason to believe that if anyone with any real authority saw him, they would arrest him just to be on the safe side and figure out the charges later, but he needed Voldemort to at least have a reason to think that he knew nothing of the Horcruces. His backup was primarily there to give him updates from Hermione and Michael respectively; apparently the latter had reached a rudimentary level of skill in Legilimency without telling anyone.

When people started recognizing him, they cleared a path rather than mobbing him, which was good; he did not want to have to start with the shield charms so early in the morning. The person he wanted to meet appeared right in front of him, exactly where they had arranged. It was not entirely correct to say that he wanted to meet her, but he was smiling as if he did. She was somewhat surprised to find that he had brought friends, but upon seeing each one, it was clearly a pleasant surprise. He could wonder how her colleagues reacted to the fact that she was an unregistered Animagus, but it was probably about the same.

"Who would have guessed, after all this time?"

"Well, we could have avoided such a long drought," he said.

"Yes, we could have. I see that you did not bring the one who stuffed me into a glass jar for a matter of months."

"I would have squashed you," Susan said. "You slandered him by suggesting that he's a fame-seeking debutante and that he voluntarily fed you all of those utter lies you printed during the Triwizard Tournament. He couldn't have sued you for slander because there were no facts on public record to decisively prove you were lying, and it only would have looked like another bid for fame to the Wizengamot; it's fundamentally impossible to convince anyone that you don't want attention and making a big public affair of it at the same time. The damage you did to his reputation can never be repaired, and it's the central reason why the average person doesn't believe that Voldemort has returned."

The photographer that Skeeter had brought as backup looked around in the crowded street as if expecting someone else to weigh in, else give him instruction on how to respond.

"Letting bygones be bygones seems like it would be the best policy for both of us," Neville said. "We didn't come here to go over yesterday's news."

It sounded enough like a joke for everyone to laugh at it and move on, precisely as suggested.

"So, a public interview. I suppose you wanted to be able to apparate out if you didn't like a question?"

"Ask whatever you like."

"Isn't it awfully convenient that Cedric Diggory, a rival of yours, happens to be killed by a mysteriously returning dark wizard?"

"I didn't need or want the gold. I didn't even want to win, just to live through the whole thing. You can ask any of the teachers; they know that I didn't enter myself. As soon as I got the gold I gave it away to the Weasley twins, who just so happened to be there. There's no reason for me to want to murder a schoolmate and no record of a killing curse on my wand. The Ministry officially checked it when I showed up for my hearing last year. It wasn't convenient that Cedric died on me; it was something of a recurring nightmare."

"Are you in contact with your former Headmaster?"

"No, I haven't seen or heard from him. I wouldn't know where to start looking for him. If I had to guess, he doesn't want to be found."

"You don't feel abandoned?"

"I've gone back and forth on it. I've got no idea what he's doing out there, but every time I'm done being frustrated with that, I can only think that it has to be important." He shrugged. "Whatever he's doing out there, I'll be grateful for it."

"I've been working on something that might interest you, in that case," Skeeter said. "There's no need to draw too much attention to something that will fly off the shelves as soon as it's released, though. What do you think of Eleazar Higgen?"

There it was, the exact question he had expected. She was not stupid enough to think it was a coincidence that he wanted to speak with her in the middle of the rise of a controversial figure, and even before that it was basic journalism to ask about the thing that was on everyone's minds. It would be utterly senseless if the topic never came up at all, and he was grateful that she was not making him fish for it. Though she was not exactly nice with him in past interviews, as long as he was playing the game and giving her what she wanted, she would go along with what he wanted.

"He's the best thing that ever happened to this country," he said. The idea was to reserve absolutely nothing, to praise him as unabashedly as possible. "Everyone should be working to promote his cause, everyone who knows that there's something that's gone wrong here. I'm not his campaign manager, but I would be promising full amnesty to everyone who's ever been dragged along in some other crusade thinking that was the only way to fix things."

"How interesting... what would that entail, exactly?"

"There's a difference between a marked Death Eater and someone who was just related to the wrong people. My godfather, Sirius Black, is one of the latter. From a young age, he opposed his own family's prejudices and there were others like him. I believe, though, that he's made of sterner stuff than most people. Anyone else would have been scared into it and would have told themselves whatever worked to keep from breaking rank. If they had been smarter about it, rather than trusting that he would come around because of his bloodline, they would have made sure he was implicated so that he couldn't change sides."

"Is there anyone else you would forgive for their past mistakes?"

"Of course." If the question made him sound sanctimonious, he supposed there was no avoiding it. "There are some people who are working in certain departments in the Ministry with what's called a 'Writ of Security' and if you're from the muggle world, you might have heard of a security clearance or privilege level. It's the same thing. To apply for it, you have to submit the names and locations of all of your family members, and if they don't have anyone they can threaten if you don't like something you learn about what they're doing, they'll just innocuously turn down your application."

"That's a rather startling accusation," Skeeter said. The expression on her own face, which he was sure the quill would not record, was unmistakably pleased. "Care to elaborate?"

"I have only said what I know so far, and I only know it from those who've told me. I can't claim to have worked in the Ministry myself. My point in saying as much as I have is just to establish that if you're reading this right now, and you think you're too far in to get out, you might not be."

His goal was not to establish himself as a moderate or someone just in between other existing camps; there was no 'go back' button that was going to make things simple again, so he needed to have a real way to a better world if that was where he wanted to be. Lucius Malfoy was right about that much, at least. He had heard it said that people really followed other people, and not ideals or reasons, but he was not entirely sure that was true; it certainly sounded like an excuse to be inconsistent. If it was the case that he could only win by some kind of force of personality, then he would have to make sure no one had anything so terrible to say about him.

Susan and Neville answered a few of the questions, exactly as planned, and he took a turn with the diagnostic charms. His wand was technically in his hand, which was not normally considered polite, but in the pocket of his robes, no one was going to call attention to it. There were Hit Wizards in the area already, but that was par for the course, if what the veteran had told him was accurate at all; they were assessing the threat before the moved in.

"We'll wrap this up here," Harry said after they got finished with another question. He did not really have to listen to what they said because he had already gone over what they could and could not reveal. "I'm sure that if our esteemed colleague wants to talk to us again, she knows how to make us newsworthy."

"Oh, certainly. And here I thought that was the last thing you would have wanted."

"I'll see you later, then, Mr. Potter. Do your best not to get arrested in the meantime."

They apparated out right as they were surrounded. Susan knew a rare shield that, as long as they were standing in one place, could even protect them from magical effects that surrounded them, so anyone who placed an anti-apparation jinx after that was probably quite disappointed. Neville's purpose there was probably harder for most anyone else to realize, but he was just as important, as not more. They were trying to keep Voldemort specifically from realizing they were after his Horcruces, and he would probably think that the alternate child of prophecy would be the only other enemy fated to go after him, and when he saw them both in one place, it would capture his attention, or at least that was their best bet.

"Were they waiting for the interview to be over?" Neville asked right as they arrived at the base.

"It's more likely that they just weren't under a specific order to capture us, and the leader of the squad made a judgement call right when he thought we would turn around and walk off," Susan said. "We definitely didn't give them any kind of cause to arrest us."

"The others aren't back yet," Harry obviated. "They had to have run into some trouble."

"If they have, we'll hear about it when they get back," Terry said, putting a hand on his shoulder. It was clear that the rest of the group had been waiting for them to get back, and was not in a hurry to see them compromise the plan just because something unexpected happened. Did he really have a problem trusting people, even friends? Was everyone else just as concerned, but not willing or able to take any steps about it?

What he knew for certain was that the older recruits knew he was a normal young wizard, and they were only following him because he seemed to have been chosen by some force far greater than any of them, to be the subject of a prophecy, or even to have defeated Lord Voldemort- he thought it was a laughable notion at one point, even more so when looking back at a memory of a man who randomly bowed to him as a child. It was not, though, entirely wrong for them to think that there was something special about him; if there was any way of saying that his parents defeated the man who killed them, then why had no one else done as they would? He and Dumbledore were both certain that they had done something, and there was a time that he would have been terribly unsatisfied with an answer such as 'love', but as he grew to respect Voldemort as an enemy, he became frightfully more aware there was nothing else he would not have understood.

"Very well," he said after a moment, to a collective sigh of relief, if most of them were restrained enough to keep it to a minimum. He would be their hero, and if they insisted that he refrain from risking his life when it was not part of the plan, then he could go along with that, at least most of the time. If they expected him to agree to that even when he had no idea what was going on, though, then they expected too much maturity, or perhaps some other word for a willingness to go along with something unpleasant, of him. "In that case, we'll compromise. Get Daphne. We're opening up a line of communication."