The interview with Rita Skeeter and Xenophilus Lovegood did not go as expected. They were perfectly willing to work with each other and did not speak one over the other, nor did they devote too much time to attacking each other's publications. Instead, the whole focus was on him. He answered all the questions that they had and found himself surprised almost that it was so easy. Most of the trouble came from the Quibbler- the questions were incoherent; he had no way of expecting one after the other and it was not like a conversation at all, though he supposed that it was a press conference. He would have invited other reporters if he knew any, but he supposed it was fine to just have two.

"What do you intend to do now, Mr. Potter?" Rita Skeeter asked. He wondered if she possessed any actual ideology or if she just wanted something interesting to happen so that she could follow it. He was sure that she would make a hypocrite of herself if she said anything about respect for privacy or truth in journalism, but then, he supposed she could not betray anything without actually being on any particular side.

"My enemies know who they are. I've said to you before that I don't believe in being born on one side or another. I've said that anyone out there who wants to get out of the way can do it. It's been a long time since then, so I'll have to assume that everyone I've killed heard me, and didn't take my offer. One of the biggest failures the Ministry ever had was in letting several Death Eaters off with a warning. As expected, they didn't do much while their master was away, but they were right there waiting for him to come back, attacking the World Cup and then Azkaban as soon as he was back with them. Many of you asked 'how can someone come back to life?', but did you ever see a body in the first place? Can someone die without leaving a body behind? Why did you all turn into philosophers now?"

"It sounds like your foremost concern is getting the story straight. Is that because the demands you made were unmet?"

"That's what I need to accomplish in public, of course, and it is. If you don't get anything else from this, ask yourselves this. If you're someone who believes that Voldemort is back and someone pushes back on you, asking how you know he's come back to life, ask 'how do you know he died in the first place?'. I'll go ahead and give you the answer. People think something ceases to be an issue when it ceases to be covered, and the more something is covered, the more of an issue people think it is. You might be thinking that there must be some reason why it didn't get covered anymore and there was, but nothing happened where Voldemort could not come back. I don't blame anyone for not waiting with baited breath, but his return should have been expected, not some kind of surprise."

There was nothing more to say in the interview and it was time to go to meet with the parents who had agreed to attend their school. He recognized one right away; the moment he apparated in and saw her, he saw the girl whom he had helped in escaping from the school. There was a small collection of people he had never met before, and the requisite awkwardness.

"I want to thank you for even considering something as ridiculous as this," he said as he reached out to shake their hands. The fact that no one immediately took it suggested he had perhaps not chosen the best opening line. "What questions can I answer for you?"

"We admit that we don't really know what to make of all this," one of the parents said. "I mean, we heard about how you apparently have a few of the teachers working with you, but we just don't know what to expect. With Hogwarts, we always had this baseline that we could count on."

"I know. There isn't going to be anything like that, not as long as any of us are alive." He frowned. "People have to decide what they want in terms of education, and then they're going to have to keep making that decision for many years if we're going to rebuild the school."

"We appreciate your honesty," one of the parents said. "I've come to ask about the next few years, not the next few decades. Do you think that the teachers can manage this, with their involvement in a secret organization?"

"There's no better use of their time, not according to its leadership. We've fought all the battles that we're going to fight for the time being, at least I hope; now it's a matter of reducing the current government's power by undermining its institutions. Think of it this way. So many of the variable people have died that there is now no hope that the war will be won by direct combat. We'll be on guard for a last, desperate strike, but- and I'm not happy to report this, but the most likely way that the enemy is going to attack us going forward is by hitting soft targets in the magical world, and they'll most likely start with anyone remotely aligned with us, anyone who's made any kind of statement or really anyone who hasn't made some kind of statement that's in favor of the Death Eaters or the Ministry, regardless of the facts. It's not clear where they'll start, actually, because they might think that certain targets are too obvious and they might just kill people who might be on their list somewhere without regard to how high up they are."

"We get it," another one of the parents said. "For the record, I agree that there is no other safe place for our children. I just want to know that you don't intend to radicalize them to a specific ideology. We're sending them to learn, not to become child soldiers."

"I would like to make a single point on that, and then you'll have my assurance that most of us can't even agree on an ideology. My point is this. You can try to avoid ideologically compromised instructors, but you can't have a seventeen year old blank slate, if that's what you're going for. There are too many influences out there that aren't even related to education, and unless you can root out every single one of them from your child's life, then what we recommend is what we've done, and teaching them the truth so they'll know not to listen to anyone else. It's not just some solution that sounds nice and hopeful; it's genuinely the only thing that practically works. I'm serious; if your kids even socialize with other kids, at all, they're being exposed to something. Technically, that's not a bad thing. It's only likely to make them think about things in the future."

The parents seemed to understand and accept his argument. One clarified for him that he and his wife were not at all worried, because their own beliefs were not baseless, and could stand on their own; they did not need total silence from all possible opposition to be believed. It looked like another one of the parents was saying that it was not so simple, that children were not likely to believe the truth even if it was presented to them. Harry nodded along before answering.

"To some extent, I agree. When I was in Hogwarts, plenty of the other students were possessed of various mad notions about me, or that's how I'd put it in polite company. There probably wasn't anything their parents could have said to them, if they knew or cared, that would have changed their minds. At the same time, it really only had a negative effect on me and my general social life. Many of those students went on to become sensible people, some great friends of mine, like Ernest Macmillan. It's not hugely consequential that they were idiots once upon a time, actually." He thought for a moment. "I had a classmate named Seamus Finnegan who was completely convinced the Ministry and the Prophet had been right about me, and it wasn't a few months later he joined the DA with us. He's not still a part of our organization, not once I decided that we all had to be willing to risk death, but I don't blame him for that."

"It's not that I am bothered by strange things that my son and daughter might believe at one point or another," a parent said. "What they cannot mature out of, however, is joining in some army, swearing allegiance to some cause."

"I can effectively guarantee that won't happen at our school, but I can't guarantee that the other kids aren't going to bring something in from outside. Think about what would have to happen for it to win over your kids, though; your kids would have to be rebelling against you or not terribly sure why you believe anything, and then their kids would have to be running argumentative drills on a daily basis. Those arguments would have to be more than rhetoric to keep up with the substance that your kids should be getting from you, and then they would have to not be insufferable children who drive everyone else away without even trying, and then we would have to not notice that they're violating our rules by swearing allegiance to something outside of the school."

"Then the only questions we have left are peculiar to the kinds of material they'll be taught."

"I'll have to direct you to to the teachers themselves. There's a meeting with them for matriculation. I've acknowledged that I'm just the face of the school; I'm just giving you my personal guarantee, for what that's worth to you."

"It's worth a lot to me, actually," one of the parents said, showing him a scroll from her robes before putting it back. "In any event, you've convinced me that we haven't wasted our time. We'll be sure to reach out to other parents who have been on the fence about this."

"I can't quite express how much we all appreciate it."

"Oh, no, the fact that you haven't charged us anything got that message across," one parent said, smiling a little.

He could only expect good things from the meeting that was still to come. Technically, it was up to the teachers, but he had done most of the work for them; if the parents had some kind of problem, it would not have been with the material that the kids were learning; up until recently, there had never been a parent interested in that. The only place where it had ever been an issue, in any meaningful sense, had been in Defense, in fifth year, and in History. Apparently, the way that certain historical conflicts had been covered had not been entirely accurate. Taking a deep breath, he apparated out to yet another meeting, though this one was of a completely different nature.

Ginny and Blaise needed help with a deployable snake trap of sorts, and they had a theory that he could help them with it, having been a snake before, at least in a sense. According to them, Neville was taking his turn with the Time Turner, so there were two of him at the moment. The trap had a complicated sound ward on the inside, and after working at it a few hours, they had gotten it to say a single word in Parseltongue. The idea was pretty straightforward; they were trying to forcibly summon it into the trap, but they knew that it had something like a will of its own and would not just obey any order, even though the trick worked with other snakes. Obviously, the enemy could have warned his own snake that there was another Parselmouth without his or her best interests in mind.

"I can't think of any way of making the Imperius work like that," the witch said after a few successful runs with regular snakes. "I don't understand how it works in the first place."

"That's just the name of the game with dark magic," Harry said. "I don't need to tell you that, though. We're going to need to get creative with the snake. I can't believe I controlled it once, or maybe I was just looking at the world through its eyes. I couldn't have killed it, not unless I somehow sabotaged it enough for Arthur Weasley to kill it himself, but I didn't have the skills for that. I probably still don't."

"Well, maybe that should be our next idea," Ginny said. "Blaise and I have both become rather accomplished at the Imperius Curse. Using it and resisting it should strengthen your willpower. I don't know if we could ever get it stronger than Voldemort's, but there's no way that he's just training like that himself. He doesn't trust anyone enough."

"That's probably correct," he said after a moment. Despite the incredible emphasis he put on his own magical ability, it very much was unlikely that he could train with anyone. The loyalists who might have literally no thought in their minds of ever resisting him would not help him very much, not really testing him, and anyone who would be in a position to help would present an unacceptably high risk of controlling him completely. If he had some kind of protection through the Dark Mark, allowing him to kill one of his supporters at any time, even without control over his own faculties, that would have to be disabled in order to brain-wrestle with any of them, or they would simply never agree to it, perhaps making only a token effort and then confessing that he was simply too strong.

"Then let's get started," she said, holding her wand to his head. "I promise I won't take the risk of doing anything that goes against the group, since that would kill me by my own agreement, not even by something that you control. I can't promise that I won't uncover anything embarrassing, though."

"You're thinking of Legilimency," Blaise said. "We both did well enough at that, but it's a matter of skill, not strength. In this case, it's also not about what you might uncover. If you want to embarrass him, you'll have to make him do something."

"How's your singing voice, for starters?" she asked, turning back to him.

"Rubbish."

"We'll go with that then. Imperio."

Fighting Ginny off was taking a different set of muscles, as promised. She was fast and ruthless, pushing against him and trying to get him to sing. The hardest part was the fact that he was trying not to do something rather than to do something else; he had something of a direct, active personality and when he lacked an alternative, he was finding it harder to resist. A strange notion came across that he could prove how much he was resisting by humming or something, and he realized that feeling came from her. It was as if everything was happening at a lower level than an Occlumency battle; it could only be described in a language of feelings, or maybe that was just his partner's approach to it. Right as it felt like he was getting his foothold, Blaise joined in and made him work for it. He wondered if it was like working out and he could hurt himself by trying to do too much too quickly.

When it was over, they were all on the ground. It was hard to describe, but he was forming a theory that while having help with anything was theoretically good, there was a limiting return for adding more people to try to break the will of one other. Similarly, there was probably nothing anyone else could do to help keep him from getting broken; the best anyone could do to back him up would be to try to break Ginny in her own mind. He aired his theories while they stared up at the sky and it seemed they had been thinking the same thing.

"I'm thinking you have to get it up to three or four to really start seeing an effect," Blaise said. "It's also challenging because everyone really has to be on the same wavelength. If you tell the target to do something even slightly different; you're practically defending him from your own partner."

"Really?" the witch asked. "I would think that if I were trying to get him to sing, and you were trying to get him to... I don't know, sing in a different key, then whichever way he went..."

"It would make it easier for him to go neither way, which is what he really wants. It's easy to push back and say that it's impossible. It's easy to tune the voice out when there's more voices saying to do different things. As someone who's used this for interrogations, trust me. You can probably overwhelm anyone with enough numbers, but two isn't really enough for that to start to take effect. Before that point, you'd be better off using the Cruciatus or something."

"We'll have to remember that when we try to use the Imperius against the snake," he said.

"Well, that's the thing, Harry... you might be the only one who can do that," Ginny said. "You know me, I'll hit it with a killing curse as soon as I see it, but I can only think that Voldemort would have something prepared for that."

"Like what?" Blaise asked.

"Susan has a shield that effectively moves her out of the way by itself. It could be something like that, or it could be an illusion that makes you think it's somewhere else- I don't really know. That's why I'm trying to get inside of its head... I might be the only one who could understand it."

"Then you'll need help from the other Legilimens. You'll need to approach this from multiple angles to make sure you've got it," Ginny said. "Don't let the damn snake beat you in anything, not willpower, not mental shielding, not magic, and certainly not brains."

"That's not going to be the issue. The snake's going to be guarded by something a lot more developed and dangerous than any of that- been in the works almost uninterrupted for seventy years," Blaise said. There was almost some kind of admiration, and yet, there was no one who did not have some amount of respect if for nothing else than that mad, single minded commitment to a goal too absurd to be allowed. Everything else that came after that was just its logical conclusion.

"He'll have to have other things to worry about," Harry said after a moment. "Even if he sees me kill that snake, he's not going to immediately know that there are other Horcruces rounded up already. Can't tell you how many layered procedures we have for Ron to get out there and destroy them, worst comes to worst- if not him, Michael's taking care of it, since Hermione's out at the moment. "He actually gets some form of communication every day that there's no need to destroy them right away, and the day comes he doesn't get it, he won't need to ask."

"That's a good system," Ginny said softly after a moment. "You'll need to kill the man himself, though."

"That's true. I've got a plan in the works for that. You can bet your-"

"I really hope whatever I'm betting is worth that much," she said, her mood changing, as quickly as ever. "You're worth a lot to me, Harry. I don't care if you know that."

"It's the same with both of you. Don't think for a moment I've written anyone off." Losing Ernie and Hannah had hurt more than he could say. "Voldemort's not going to be the one that kills me. No, I'll make sure of that much."