"It really does feel like it should have gotten easier than this," Neville said while they were out on a rooftop. "I'm saying I can't help but agree."

"It's a difference in perspective," he said after a moment, lowering his wand. The diagnostics had not told him anything good. "A few of his more vulnerable servants dying is not what Voldemort would consider concerning. He doesn't think of himself as being on the back foot unless we gain some advantage that he can't immediately use for his own purposes or nullify. He might be someone who is absolutely trying as hard as he can to avoid dying, but he's not a pessimist. He doesn't lack confidence in himself or his more useful minions."

"I never thought about it like that." He frowned. "I didn't think he was a complete coward, though; he wouldn't be all that threatening if he were."

"He might have just made one or two Horcruces and kept one each of them in completely different locations that he could check without being observed. There's a reason he wants to live, though. It's not all about living for the sake of living another day." He frowned. "He can't allow himself to die. I've never heard of whether or not he sleeps, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's somehow cursed himself to stay awake."

"I suppose you didn't."

"Yeah," he muttered back, not bothering to deny it. "You can tell, then."

"Everyone can tell, mate."

"I don't have much of a choice in the matter," he said after a moment. "I hate to admit it, but I'm afraid to go to sleep now."

"That was how all this started, didn't it?" Neville observed neutrally as he lowered his Omniculars. "It all started because you were getting dreams more frequently."

"Yeah," he supposed. "I started getting them back in fourth year, but then it was always the same. I can't be sure if Voldemort even knew he was doing it. It's likely enough that he didn't. He certainly wasn't tailoring the message to me."

"At some point he figured it out, though, and then he started feeding you a little bit of information here and there, and you-"

"It's indefensible. I thought either he somehow wasn't aware of it, and I was, or I thought that I could use it more to my advantage than he could to his." He shook his head. "It wouldn't have been hard for him to look around and see what I was doing, but he probably thought there wasn't any point in that. He knew the people around me were concealing things from me, so he didn't do anything that might help me see that he could consciously use the connection." Harry shrugged. "He might have even known that I saw it as valuable information, and he did all he could to reinforce that. I don't think I'll ever know whether he deliberately sent me that dream about Arthur Weasley or not."

"I can see how that would bolster your confidence in the value of the mental connection," Neville said after a moment, choosing his words carefully. "Why wouldn't you realize, though, that there was something that he wanted in the Department of Mysteries, though? If he sent a snake to go looking for it, it has to be important, right? It has to be something that he's willing to take a risk to get."

"The only thing I'll say for myself is that it didn't seem like the snake could really get in," he said, shaking his head. "Even if it's a powerful snake with a piece of Voldemort's soul in it, there's no way for it to get past so much as a locked door. It can't use magic on its own. I thought that it was there for no reason other than to attack my friends' dad, maybe some especially cruel way of sending us a message. If the way I looked at it, I thought that a snake could retrieve whatever was in there, then there would be no need to send me there looking for it. That was something I never could have guessed."

"Oh," his friend said as they apparated to another building, in another city. "So, you didn't have enough information after all."

"I had more than enough information to know that I shouldn't have listened. After the first three years of my Hogwarts career, I got a bit cocky. For one reason or another, the challenge was always something that my friends and I could handle. I don't think I thought all the adults were incompetents, but I might have thought that what was out there couldn't be much worse than what I'd faced so far. My first instinct was always to handle it myself, and maybe that comes from my upbringing. Fourth year really should have straightened me out. I was manipulated by a Death Eater using a potion that I'd used before, and none of us knew it until it was too late. I really should have figured that there would be threats too strong for me to fight and mysteries too huge to untangle with a mediocre arsenal of spells and two old friends for backup."

"I see," Neville said after a moment, pointing something out. Harry waved it away. It was a muggle wearing a robe and a mask as some kind of film reference, though Halloween was not for a few months. "So, it wasn't that you should have figured out what the enemy's plan was, it was that you should have accepted that you couldn't figure it out."

"The best way I could have been spending my time was by practicing Occlumency. It was pretty much exactly what everyone around me had been saying." He shook his head. "I don't know what I would have said if you had asked me if I thought I was smarter than everyone else around me, but actions speak louder than words anyway." It was his turn to point something out; he saw a wand raised in the distance, but it turned out to just be someone apparating.

It was another few minutes before Hedwig showed up with a letter. She was recognizable, and had apparently been photographed next to him in newspaper articles, but it was not as if every Death Eater and other bad actor was constantly looking out for her, and even if they did, they would have to have spectacular vision to pick her out and then even better aim to kill her. It was more likely they were using flying creatures to seek out owls, and with Macnair captured, there was no way that they were keeping the same track of whatever magical creatures they had been using, and it was a sobering thought. Even if Voldemort considered the deaths of useless servants to be of no particular consequence, he had to start getting concerned if he had no one to take care of surveillance for him.

"What's it say?" his friend asked.

"Well, it's about as bad as we thought. Ginny estimates about thirty muggles have been killed in Swansea. They'll probably call it a natural gas explosion because they're building a new system over there, but any of us can tell what it really was."

"Fiendfyre?"

"I never thought their master would authorize its use." He squinted. "It's not like his Horcruces are over there, but he wouldn't want to give anyone any ideas. I can only think that Pyrite likes the sound of it too much and decided to bend the rules for something flashier after agreeing to use fire because it could be explained. He wanted to truly terrify the victims by showing them something beyond their comprehension."

"Is that your opinion?"

"No; it's Ginny's. She can cast it herself; she knows how it works." He frowned. "You have to hate whatever's in front of you so badly you don't care whatever else gets caught in the inferno, because there's no way of putting it out. It's been contained, through highly complicated magic, but it's never been extinguished- it'll run itself to the ground until it's consumed and actively fight to spread."

"It sounds like he just burned down a whole neighborhood," Neville said as the two of them shared the Time Turner.

"He might be able to argue that it was necessary for that very reason; he could make sure anyone who had seen him, or the blaze, was dead. I don't know about that, though; there could have been someone watching from a long way off who saw the forms that the cursed fire would take. At this point, though, if a muggle said he saw that, no one would believe them, or if they did, they'd call it a trauma response."

The rooftops were the same a few hours back in time.

"A trauma response?"

"This is just an anecdote, but about fifty years ago, muggles fought with gas masks on because they were using poison gas, and many of them would swear they saw the men on the other side laughing, when there was no way you could see that through the gas mask. Memories aren't perfectly reliable, even if no one is using magic."

They apparated to the smaller Welsh city on the southern coast and found Ginny and Susan where they expected them.

"What are you doing here?"

"The four of us are about an hour ahead of Pyrite," he said. "This should be enough on our side. Any more and he might detect us first, though I'm not sure he'd care."

"We should assume he does," Susan said. "That means we've only got one shot at this. If we fail and have to travel back again, he'll see even more of us at a range. Even if he's trying to make trouble for the Ministry on Statute grounds, he can't just get himself killed, so he's attacking these muggle population centers precisely because there aren't going to be enough wands in the crowd to off him before he gets anything done."

"We're going for the kill this time, right?" Neville asked. There was no trepidation in his voice.

"Voldemort might have split up valuable information between his remaining minions, but it's not practical to try to bring them all in alive, and this one is probably a worst case. Our rule is the same as ever. If you for some reason can get a clear shot and he doesn't see you, then go ahead and stun him, but otherwise you should assume that he's going to use a shield before the spell hits him. A single body is the most likely out of all the acceptable ways that this can end. If one of us die, as we've said, we won't be going back, so go on and meet your eternal reward without us."

"Where is he going to appear?" Ginny asked.

"Well, you wrote this; you said the epicenter seemed to be the western part of the waterfront, but it's Fiendfyre, so it's hard to say for certain."

"How far behind was I?"

"Not long. We were out here the better part of the day before the letter came in. You could have even seen it start from far off and by then the losses would already be off the charts."

Her face formed a tight frown. It was clear enough she did not want to believe she would watch people die in favor of keeping herself alive to give the man with the Time Turner an accurate idea of what happened, but those had been her orders, and she would have to be reprimanded in the event that she violated them, even in another timeline that ran its course and merged with the current timeline.

The fateful crack of apparation rang out and they all targeted the enemy right as he was about to cast something, but as soon as he saw them, he was gone.

"Damn," Susan muttered. "He saw us."

"Well, it's not like his vision is any worse than ours," Harry muttered back. "We should have seen this coming. Unless he's under orders to retreat if he gets made, he'll pick another target."

"Voldemort sent him because he's unpredictable. Where the hell is he going to attack?" Ginny asked.

"I don't know. Any logic behind picking Swansea would have been abandoned for the choice of his next victims."

"Theoretically, we could split up again and keep doing the same thing until there were copies of us all over the country, but I think our secret would be out at that point," Neville said. "If the enemy realizes we have the Time Turner-"

"He'll get the only wizard still alive who knows how to build something to counter it," Harry finished. "Let's think about this differently. Where is Argo Pyrites buried?"

"What does that matter?" Ginny asked. "We might only have seconds-"

"There are others among us who can use the Time Turner. We can get Blaise on it. What we need is a way of getting the enemy to come to us."

"Harry's right," the other witch said. "Everything that their family does is for clout. If we were to graverob that monument that he built way out by their family home, he wouldn't be able to ignore that. With the mass media apparatus, we could make sure he's received the threat." She frowned. "The only hole in all this is that he wouldn't be able to ignore his master's orders either."

"We'll give him a way to do both. We'll need a muggle population center where we can get away with-"

"We can't risk their lives or Secrecy," Susan interrupted, changing course immediately. "It will have to be some place that he might think that there are muggles around, but we'll already have cleaned them out."

"Well, I'm betting the Death Eaters don't celebrate the early May bank holiday," he argued back. "The goblins wouldn't either. If it's a small town where really the only big thing around is a bank, then it wouldn't be hard to get Argo's remains over there and get Blaise to piss on them or something. The cover story is that- we'll basically tell the public the truth. We'll tell them that to avoid massive casualties and a Statute violation, we need to get the enemy to attack us, and we'll have to do a good enough job to where they won't complain about the method."

"We might not have any other choice." She took a breath. "We also can't allow Pyrites to report this back to his master; we'll have to go back far enough to where he'll know we've made an announcement, but not so soon that he requests permission. I don't want to find out if the enemy has some kind of time manipulation spell."

"If he did, this would already be over," Harry said, apparating to the base with the girls, where he had left Michael and Blaise to work on something else. "Boomslang General Zabini, as you know, you're the only other specialist with time travel, and for that reason, I'm assigning you to help us bring down the Death Eater we're tracking."

"Even if you've been made, you can just go back to when you haven't-"

"I don't want too many copies of myself to exist at any given time. Voldemort might have spies around. Get a move on; I don't want to make this an order. Take anyone except me or Neville." He had been left behind to clean up their tracks, but that would probably not prove necessary.

"Very well," he said, taking a deep breath. "Susan, are you up for it?"

"Of course. It might be better to have Michael with us as well."

Harry watched them disappear. It was the first time he had ever seen someone else use the Time Turner, except when they were doing experiments with it, and it was still unnerving. Had they already changed the past? When would he find out about it?

"Did you just hear them?" Ginny asked. "They totally snubbed me. I literally led Blaise in using dark magic and now he's acting like I'm tainted too-"

"We're all tainted," he said. "We're tainted with something worse than that, and we've all used dark magic." He took a breath. "Have you managed to stop using it?"

"No," she admitted. "I can't break the patterns of behavior that I've started. I'm a prisoner in my own mind. I can try not to use magic at all, but I keep hating people and wanting to kill them. The main reason that I'm so angry right now is because I know I should be relieved, but-"

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know, or I didn't get it- trying to do things differently is only half the battle. You need the Phoenix just as much as I do. I also want you to consult with Hermione; we have to see if your own magic is somehow taking part in this feedback loop where you're forcing your own emotions to respond to your needs."

"You're not the first to think of that. I've been afraid of that the whole time." She shook her head. "I want to be useful. I don't want to get sidelined like the others. I don't want to be one of the ones who-"

"Don't think about it like that," he said, taking a deep breath. "I still have plenty of people helping me."

"I just want to be one of them, Harry," she said. "Is that asking for too much?"

"If you want to help me, I'm afraid you'll have to get help for yourself. By your own admission, your motives are corrupt."

"Are yours?"

"I wish I could do what you're doing," he said. "For what it's worth, I wish the Phoenix would just... I don't know, take the Horcrux out of my head? Give me some time off until I could come back without any major concerns?" He shook his head. "I'll be honest, even after all the reading I've done, I still don't know how the whole thing is supposed to work, and I... somehow I haven't collapsed or given up. Somehow I've had the strength to keep going, no more and no less."

"I... I didn't want to compare my suffering to-"

"Ginny. You're saying something unnecessary. I'm here for you, and that doesn't come with a condition." He held her for a moment. "I mean, after the one about how you have to be loyal to this group or you die; can't have any conditions other than that."

"I'm grateful for that," she said, taking a deep breath. "You don't know how nice it is to have an unbreakable curse like that hanging over me. So many times, I've been tempted to do something awful and I don't even have to tell myself that I would be betraying you."

"Well, at least you realize you have a problem," he said. "Being grateful for having a wand to your head is not what would happen if it were on straight."

"If I didn't have it against my head, I never would have realized that I needed help."

"I... well, I don't know what to say to that."

"You've talked about how we might no longer have the curse active at some point... like we might disband the group so there's nothing to betray anymore or we might have to-"

"You're telling me that you don't want that, and you want to be a house elf for the rest of your life."

"I... It's not what I wanted when all this started, but I don't know what I'm going to do when I don't have the threat hanging over me."

"Well, you're going to find out," he decided. "There's no way to break the curse, but when we came up with the agreement that bound us together in the first place, we left ourselves with every right to come up with a new agreement. As long as there are at least two of us alive at the end of this, we'll have a way out."

"Okay... then I'm not sure I want to be one of the last two, if I'm being honest."

"That's another thing that we'll have to find out."