Eight Years Later

The ring of the Floo woke Harry up late in the morning, an hour after he usually got up for work. He flailed around in the bed, his arms passing through empty space to come to a rest on an extra blanket, and he had all but settled back in to doze when the Floo ward sounded off again. Someone wanted to come through.

"I'm coming!" he yelled, knowing that nobody could hear him. He stumbled out of bed, into the bathroom, and out of the bathroom again with a comfortable bathrobe. There were advantages to sleeping in one's boxers, but those advantages did not extend to meeting unexpected guests in a timely fashion.

"What's up?" he asked, crouching down in front of the Floo in the living room of his flat. It was a cozy little place, very well-kept and within walking distance of the Ministry, smack in the middle of Diagon Alley's newest high-density housing space. Expansion charms made space very inexpensive, but there was something to be said for a home that was no bigger than it needed to be, especially when it was only temporary.

The head of Sirius Black stuck through the flames. Sirius, usually about as fond of mornings as Harry was, looked like he had already gone through a few late nights and early mornings himself. "You said you'd play the owl for these letters," Sirius told him. "Still willing?"

"Bet you're regretting inventing Wizarding spam mail now," Harry said, without an ounce of sympathy. The quickly-developed countermeasures to singing Howlers extolling the virtues of cheap enlargement potions had drastically cut down on the reliability of owl mail in general.

"It was your mum's idea, I only put it into practice," Sirius replied, pulling back from the fire to look at something on his side, then returning. "Nobody bothers sending howlers anymore, so I consider it a net gain. Look through these and pick out the ones you can deliver today without too much trouble. I'm stuck doing the rest."

Harry accepted the stack of fancy addressed envelopes and scattered them out on the rug without further ado. "I've got the day off," he said. "I can do all the ones for Hogwarts," that was easy, "and Neville, and if I do this one I can probably get out there for these," he trailed off, still sorting letters. It would be a busy day, but he could take at least half of these envelopes off of Sirius' hands. "Are these all of them?" he asked.

Sirius, who was waiting in the fire, shook his head. "Nah, but I got most of the fancy high-society ones going by verified Goblin Delivery. I'm not sending you to play courier with the snobs."

"I appreciate it." They would probably look down on him if he showed up at their manor doorstep with letters, no matter how fancy. "I can take these," he said, indicating the smaller of the two piles, though not by much.

"Nice. Busy day?" Sirius reached out for the rejected letters. "Not as busy as mine, but you know…"

"Big event next week, plenty to do at home," Harry said. "Yeah, I know. Try to sleep sometime before next Friday? Mum won't mind too much if some random, inconsequential detail is out of place."

"It must be perfect," Sirius intoned. "The sacrifice will accept no imperfections if the world-ending ritual is to be performed…"

"If you end the world, it will be because you tripped over someone else's ritual and set it off," Harry quipped.

"That burn is going to keep me up at night," Sirius complained. "Say hi to everyone for me, and make sure you read your invitation carefully!"

"Will do." Harry shut the Floo grate and went into the kitchen to fix himself something to eat. His first stop would require a visit to the international travel department and a long-distance portkey. Never a good idea to do all of that on an empty stomach.

The day-trip portkey deposited him deep in an unpopulated magical wildlife preserve in India, after a quick stopover in the Indian equivalent of the Ministry to confirm his identity, that yes, his translation charms were working, and no, he did not intend to stay more than a few hours. Border-crossing in the magical world was still refreshingly straightforward, though it helped that he was a known international traveler. Being in and out of Britain on a monthly basis with Luna had its perks.

He quickly found Neville's base camp, by merit of following the clearly laid-out magical signal flares. The forest was ominously dark and something slithered through the trees behind him, but he made it to a ring of tents without any kind of incident.

Neville was there, in the clearing in the middle of the tent ring, setting up something with a lot of moving parts that spewed water everywhere but on Neville himself. Three Indian wizards were working on similar contraptions on the edges of the camp.

"Harry!" Neville cast a spell at the device that cut off the water flow, then strode over to clap Harry on the shoulder. The years since Hogwarts had been good to him, and he towered over Harry, taller than he had been only two months ago. Unnaturally tall.

"Uh, Neville?" Harry had to look up to meet Neville's amused gaze. "Did you get stretched out or something?"

"Embiggening potion," Neville explained. "Some of the fauna around here… You've got to make like Hagrid and wrestle it to the ground, otherwise it will never recognize you as a threat and leave well enough alone. It's a good one, not like the cheap ones Sirius was hawking, so it'll wear off in a few months. What brings you to the camp? We're not set up for the Mirage Vine yet, so there's nothing to see."

Harry looked around the dense, magically-brimming forest. It was the sort of place Luna might take a month-long trip to just to look at all the animals, magical and mundane. "If this is your idea of normal, I guess not," he said. "Here, invitation to the thing. Can you make it?"

"Finally set a date?" Neville asked, pocketing the letter. "I'll make time. Is Susan going to be there?"

"Yeah, probably. Is that going to be an issue?" Harry asked.

"We parted on good terms," Neville dismissed. "Just didn't want to be surprised, is all. It'll be great to get back to Britain!" He clapped Harry on the shoulder again, sending Harry reeling. "Sorry. Still not used to being this size."

"I'll be okay… once the bones knit," Harry told him. "What are you doing here, anyway? I don't recognize these things. Are they just magical sprinklers?"

"Glad you asked!" Neville grinned at him. "Fancy lending a wand?"

Harry had a few hours to kill before his portkey took him back to Britain, so he rolled up his sleeves and took out his wand, the Acacia and Unicorn wand Ollivander had matched him with after he lost his original wand to Voldemort. "What do I do?"

Later that day, after a soaking, return portkey trip, quick lunch, and change of robes, Harry apparated to Hogsmeade and walked the path from the village to the front gates. Hagrid was out and about, trimming the weeds around the gates. "Harry!" he boomed.

Harry smiled at the similarities between Neville and Hagrid, shoulder clap and all, and appreciated his own foresight for healing up the bruise from Neville's greeting before coming here. "Afternoon, Hagrid," he said. "I have some letters to deliver." He shuffled through the letters until he got to Hagrid's. All of Hogwarts' current teachers had one, given the nature of the event. Most of them had provided advice or an all-out consultation at one point or another, Hagrid included.

"Was wonderin' when these would come," Hagrid said, taking his invitation with exaggerated care. "Go on in, they'll know you're here. Mind the wards, they're a mite ticklish if you set 'em off now. Bill gave them a tweaking that hasn't come out quite right."

"That fills me with confidence," Harry said as he stepped through the gates. He felt what Hagrid meant immediately; when the half-Giant said ticklish, he really meant 'abominably itchy'. The wards, an invisible but tangible force, held him as if in a thick slime mold for a good five seconds, during which he had the uncontrollable urge to scratch absolutely everywhere. After, a Hogwarts elf popped up in front of him, not one step onto the grounds of Hogwarts. It caught him mid-scratch, thankfully on his nose and not somewhere more embarrassing.

"Master Harry is an animagus," the elf said brightly. "Is Master Harry registered?"

"What if I'm not?" Harry asked, intrigued. This was new.

"Is Master Harry registered…" The elf looked from side to side, then leaned in, with the effect of seeming to be whispering to his kneecaps. "On the 'unofficial' list for practicing students?"

That was new too. "No…" he said. "But I am registered with the Ministry, as it happens. I was just curious. Why the separate list?"

"There have been students caught by the wards who were not being an Animagus, but were trying to be," the elf explained. "No changing to spy or sneak, Hogwarts will know!"

"I understand." The elf popped away, and he was free to continue on to the castle. He wondered if the Weasley twins knew yet that their prized map, passed down to him in their last year, was serving as the base of Hogwarts' new security system these days. Probably not. They hadn't filled his home with fireworks in protest. Gone were the days of students sneaking around after curfew with impunity. Also gone were the days of an animagus infiltrating every nook and cranny of the castle without being noticed, whether they were evil or benign, so it was a tradeoff.

Once in the castle, he walked a meandering path aimed vaguely in the direction of the Great Hall, where he expected to find most of the people he had letters for. It wasn't a direct path, but the direct path he had originally intended to take didn't exist anymore, a blank wall where a corridor used to be. Five years since graduation was a long time for a castle like Hogwarts. Long enough that not everything was where he remembered.

The halls were empty, it being summer. The students had left or graduated only a few weeks ago, and the many moving paintings and portraits were mostly still, unstimulated by the boring, unchanging passages with no students to crowd them and cause chaos. He saw no one, and heard no one, until he eventually reached the Great Hall.

Inside the Great Hall, he found most of the castle's summer occupants. The staff table hosted a collection of familiar faces. Professor McGonagall was there, and Professor Sprout, and Professor Flitwick. Slughorn was there too, an amusing addition whom Harry didn't care much for on his own merits… But he was there because Snape had been fired in Harry's seventh year, so his presence was a welcome one.

Harry walked down the table, greeting his old Professors and giving them their invitations. He spared a wide smile for Professor Sprout, his old head of house, and deftly avoided being entrapped in Slughorn's ramblings. When he reached the end of the table, he forced himself to give just as polite and eager a greeting. "Headmaster Dumbledore," he said.

"Ah, Harry." Dumbledore was no less formidable for his advanced age. "How nice to see you again. What brings you here, is it only the invitations? We do still accept owls here at Hogwarts."

"Mum didn't want to chance someone not getting their invitation," he said. He could have avoided mentioning his mother, but with Dumbledore, every time she came up it was a test.

"Yes, Ms. Hebert…" He trailed off, but only for a second, barely noticeable. "I must admit, it is embarrassing to receive an invitation to an event from someone I still have yet to meet in person," he continued. "I will most certainly be there."

Harry nodded. The obliviation still held. Eight years and counting. The aftereffects had tapered off during his fifth year of Hogwarts, but the actual obliviation was as strong as ever. It might hold indefinitely at this rate, which was the expected outcome for the spell, but this was Dumbledore. Nobody had really planned for it to last more than a few months.

They would take their good luck where they could, though. Taylor kept her distance from the man, so as to not tempt fate. That he was invited to this was a surprise to Harry, but he supposed his mum knew what she was doing.

"I take it the rest of those letters are for my colleagues who aren't here today?" Dumbledore asked. "You'll find Professor Weasley in his classroom, but I'm afraid the rest are out on business in one way or another. I can deliver their invitations."

"Thanks, that saves me some time." He gave Dumbledore the letters for all of the Professors besides Bill, then used that remaining letter as an excuse to leave without any further pleasantries.

Dumbledore was mostly a good man, so long as his attention was pointed in the right directions, but Harry would never be all that comfortable around him. Once burned, twice shy.

Bill Weasley's Defense classroom was a lot like what Harry had always thought Binn's history class should have been, decked out in artifacts and trinkets from all over the world. Most of it was Egyptian in origin, sourced from his work as a cursebreaker there for Gringotts. According to school rumors at the time, Bill had originally signed on for a single year for the express purpose of finding the curse on the position, and teaching was a secondary, unwanted responsibility that came along with the opportunity. He brought his work for Gringotts with him, expecting to go back to it soon enough.

Nine years later, having found the curse and a new fascination for the school's mysteries, Bill Weasley was still here. Harry found him in his classroom with four student desks pulled together, serving as a large platform for a truly massive skull caked in dried mud.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, coming up alongside Bill to look at it.

"Bottom of the Black Lake, the squid led me to it," Bill explained. "What do you think it is?"

"I have no idea." He wanted to say it was a crocodile, based on the elongated snout, but they were in the wrong part of the world for those. "Letter for you, here. I'll leave it on your desk."

"Hey, Harry." Bill reached out to grab his arm. "Tell me something, since you're here. Do you know about Dumbledore's trinket collection?"

The question was serious, despite the flippant wording, and Harry answered seriously. "If you mean the things in his office, I've seen them but they're always changing and I think half don't really do anything," he said. "Do you mean that?"

"No." Bill shook his head. "I've been improving the wards. Dumbledore asked if I could make something to detect a 'certain class of dark object' based on some damaged artifacts. You know what I mean?"

"Cup, locket, tiara, ring?" he asked. "The collection he put together in my sixth and seventh years here? Yes, I know them." He'd even been invited along to retrieve some of them. He said no, obviously, and suggested Dumbledore take someone qualified to rob Voldemort blind, but Dumbledore insisted on showing him what they found. "Careful with them."

"He said you knew, but I had to check." Bill shuddered. "Black magic, those. You'd only find their like in the worst of the tombs back in Egypt, and journeymen like me weren't allowed near them."

"Nasty stuff." Harry also found it hilarious that Dumbledore still played his cards so close to the chest that he only showed Bill, his resident cursebreaker, such things nine years after Bill came to work at Hogwarts. At least this time they were broken curiosities, not active threats that Dumbledore was keeping under wraps. Bill probably wouldn't appreciate him pointing out how long it had taken Dumbledore to trust him. "Did you want to ask me something specific about them?"

"No, I only wanted to make sure what I've been told adds up," Bill explained. "Dumbledore is a great man, but he's averse to giving straight answers and incomplete information gets cursebreakers killed. Maybe I'll go to Ginny, this might be right up her alley." He frowned.

"She's brilliant," Harry said, always willing to speak well of his friends. "She can definitely tell you more." More than anyone else possibly could. He appreciated Dumbledore leaving the diary out of the collection he showed Bill. The last thing Ginny needed was a reason for her family to be wary of her. Sometimes keeping secrets worked out for everyone involved.

The Minister was busy. Then again, the Minister was always busy. Harry hadn't come straight from Hogwarts to see the Minister, he was here in the Ministry – on his day off, no less – to see the Minister's new Undersecretary.

"You'll need an appointment," the Undersecretary's secretary told him, entirely unamused by his presence. The fore-office leading to the Undersecretary's office was empty apart from him, Harry, and many stacks of parchment lining the walls. The door to the Undersecretary's office itself was firmly closed.

"I'm not here for a long meeting," Harry assured Ernie Macmillan. "How's the job going, by the way? I didn't know you were working here."

"I'm this close to a good position in the foreign relations department," Ernie admitted, holding his hands a few centimeters apart. "The next person to complain about the Minister being too busy to see them is going to get a hex to the face, but if I can hold out, it'll be worth it." The Hufflepuff looked right at home behind his desk, but Harry could hear his eagerness to be anywhere else.

"They promote secretaries to foreign ambassadors?" Harry asked, intrigued despite himself. He hadn't expected to see Ernie here. In the Ministry, yes, but this wasn't really the position one would think to find a scion of an old Pureblood family filling, even now. Things hadn't changed that much yet.

"New policy direct from Marchbanks," Ernie explained. "Everyone who wants to get an important position has to spend at least six months in a menial position, public-facing. It's a massive pain, but it did thin out my competition, so I can't complain."

"Swings and roundabouts, I suppose." Harry didn't have a letter for Ernie, but he could still extend an invitation. "You know the big thing Lord Black is doing, right?" he asked, referring to the person Ernie was more likely to have heard of. His mum wasn't a mystery in the wizarding world anymore, people knew of her, but she wasn't a public figure either.

Rita Skeeter was to thank for that, funnily enough. One tell-all interview with her, and 'Taylor Hebert, mother of Harry Hebert and secret witch' managed to somehow come across as the most boring, ordinary witch to ever adopt a child. Harry had no idea what dirt his mum had on Rita Skeeter, but it had to be legendary for her to get such a thing out of the journalist best known for putting out the killing blow article that ended Minister Fudge's career.

"Everyone has heard," Ernie confirmed. "Is that why you're here? I can pass on an invitation. The Undersecretary is very busy today. No joke, he's been in here since before I came in this morning and he'll be here after I leave."

"If you can get me a day pass to Azkaban, I can leave the letter, along with a warning not to work too hard. His brothers might kidnap him for his day off again." Harry handed the invitation to Ernie. "Also, I don't have a fancy invitation for you, but feel free to come. It's not open to the general public, but I'll let Sirius know you're on the list." His mum would appreciate one more person attending who wasn't a massive snob. Ernie was a minor snob at worst.

"I might, I think what they're doing is bloody interesting. About time. Also, yes, I can get you to Azkaban." Ernie leaned down to retrieve something from a drawer under his desk. "Policy is anyone with a good reason to visit can go. The Aurors are on alert and we've got to start training them for more active guard duty some time. More visitors is an easy way to start with that, without having to go through the Wizengamot."

Harry waited, looking around the office, while Ernie filled out a piece of parchment. He hadn't been in the Ministry back when Fudge was still in office, but he thought he could tell the difference now that he was out and Marchbanks – an ancient witch who had been in charge of the education department – was in. She was good enough to run the country on a daily basis, of that there was no doubt, but everyone knew she would be stepping down soon. The lower levels of the Ministry were filled with people hoping for higher positions in the coming shuffle, young people.

The political side of things wasn't his cup of tea, not even close, but from what he heard from Sirius, things were going well. It wasn't a revolution, bloody or otherwise, but it was a definite changing of the guard. It helped that the old guard were suffering many minor and not so minor misfortunes as of late…

"Here you go." Ernie handed over a stamped, filled-out card. "Good for any day this week. Give the Aurors a little scare, if you could?"

"Maybe," Harry said, though he had no intention of doing that. They could get their training from someone paid to bait their wands into action. His plans for today would be totally derailed by any number of disfiguring or debilitating hexes. "Say hello to Percy for me." The Undersecretary might be a busy man, but he would find time for this event. Nobody would want to miss it.

Azkaban would always be a dreary, unfriendly place. Even on this sunny, otherwise pleasant afternoon, the dark fortress' angular walls and old, imposing stone construction sucked the light out of the sky, reducing the water around it to a gloomy twilight.

Harry checked in with the Auror guards, got his pass inspected, and noted that the security at Azkaban was tighter than that at the border in India. Unlike foreign countries, he almost never came here, and Azkaban had a strict no-emigration policy.

"I'm here to speak to the researchers," he told them. "Not a prisoner." Pettigrew and Barty Crouch Junior were both somewhere within these dark walls, but he had no interest in them.

The Auror checking him over frowned. "I'll take you to them," he said, "but be careful. The Dementors don't like them, or anyone associated with them."

"No surprise there." The guard laughed sourly at him, and they were off. The lower levels of Azkaban were the least gloomy, with the fewest Dementors and no prisoners at all, the short-term cells permanently empty as of a few years ago. Many of the cells now lacked bars, leaving the corridors lumpy, misshapen things with cell-shaped holes in the wall every few paces. It was bright outside, but the oil lamps secured on the walls burned only fitfully, and all natural light died more than a few paces from the originating window.

The Auror led him up a few levels, to near the center of Azkaban as a whole. As they ascended the last flight of stairs, the Auror's little chipmunk Patronus – unobtrusive and so small Harry had barely noticed it up until this point – ran ahead, disturbing a swirling wall of cloaks.

"Monsters," the Auror muttered, using his Patronus to clear out a path through the middle of a gathering of at least twenty Dementors. "Back to your posts! Go bother someone who deserves to deal with you!"

The Dementors leaned away as the Auror's tiny Patronus swiped at their faces, running on empty air. Harry had his wand ready to cast his own Patronus – a badger, much to the delight of anyone who wanted to make jokes about Hufflepuffs – if it became necessary. The cold, creeping dread of Dementors began to seep into him, dragging his thoughts down–

But they pulled away as he and the Auror passed by, unwilling to provoke the one wielding the Patronus, and then they were at a solid iron door set into the corridor with much paler stone flanking it, obviously a new construction set down in the middle of an otherwise empty corridor.

The Auror produced a key and opened the door, ushering Harry inside. The Dementors swarmed, attempting to shove their way in too, but the chipmunk Patronus blocked the way. The door swung shut, was relocked, and then a second door in front of Harry opened of its own accord.

"Come in, watch your step," Ginny called out. Harry ventured into her and Hermione's domain, taking in the sight of a place he had only heard described before today.

It was a retrofitted guard station from back when there were enough prisoners to warrant using more than a few floors of the prison at all times. The room was only twenty paces across, a square open space with low ceilings. Thick orange carpets covered the stone floor everywhere except for a narrow path leading through the room and to a massive, deadbolted iron door set into the opposite wall. There were no windows, and the walls were lined with alternating chalkboards and tapestries, the boards filled with Arithmantic and Runic formulae while the tapestries depicted varied nature scenes. In one corner a small table was piled high with food, with an abundance of chocolate taking center stage. In the opposite corner of the room a tall bookshelf was only half-filled with leatherbound journals and tied bundled of parchment. Books, spread-out parchment diagrams, and piles of iron chains littered the carpet everywhere else, producing a maze of clear and cluttered spaces for the unwary foot.

The domain of any serious magical researcher was already inherently a strange place, but Ginny and Hermione had turned that up to eleven in their recent study of Dementors. Harry understood why it was this way, he already felt less unnaturally depressed, but that made the combination of a homely living room and academia no less jarring.

Hermione was nowhere to be seen, but Ginny was busy reshelving books. "Harry, what brings you to this miserable rock?" she asked, brushing her hair out of her face.

"You and Hermione, what else?" There was nothing in Azkaban he cared about, save for them.

"We do have a home back in non-Dementor-infested London," Ginny reminded him.

"I'll be busy tonight, and I thought now would be a good time to see this place." He waved her and Hermione's invitations about and set them on the food table, next to a cheese platter. "What are you doing today?"

"Testing a few theories," Ginny said, carefully picking her way through the mess to meet him at the table. "In basic terms, Hermione is torching a Dementor with a magical blowtorch and measuring how much the surrounding cell heats up. We know how much heat the torch puts out. We can tell how much is going into the air around it, the stone of the cell walls, and the chains. Subtract the latter from the former, and what do you get?"

"Hang on, it's been a few years…" He mimed counting on his fingers. "How much the Dementor heats up?"

"No!" Ginny exclaimed. She took her letter and opened it. Elsewhere in the room, the Auror who had brought Harry in was staring at one one of the rune-filled chalkboards, thoughtfully tracing the runes outlined there with one finger.

"No?" Harry asked, as it didn't seem she was going to explain.

"No, that's not how it works for them," Ginny confirmed, putting the letter down. "We'll definitely be there for the opening night. Your mum will have to put up security to stop Hermione from showing up ten hours early. You would think the Dementor would heat up, wouldn't you? But if it did, we would just have to trap it in a strong enough heat source to destroy it. Anything that takes in heat can take in too much heat."

"Right?" He was following, mostly. This stuff, the conceptual overview, that was easy. It was all of the rigorous magical theory underpinning it that made his head spin. He was more of a practical wizard.

"Come see." Ginny led him across the room to the other bolted door. "My break is over, or close enough," she added, slamming the heavy bolt back. "Two coming in!" she yelled.

"You're clear to enter!" Hermione yelled back.

Beyond the door was a small, bare room the size of a broom closet, with one wall charmed transparent to show another room of the same size on the other side. Hermione was in the closer room, watching a pulse of magical light emanating from her wand, while in the other a Dementor was wrapped in chains, trapped above a single jet of violet flame. It was uncomfortably warm in Hermione's side of the chamber.

"No readings yet," Hermione reported. "If it's absorbing any heat at all, it's at magnitudes too small for our monitoring spell. The Dementor's temperature hasn't changed at all. Hello, Harry," she said after, only then noticing his presence.

"As expected," Ginny said, likely for Harry's benefit. "Did you try the phoenix ash additive yet?"

"I was waiting for you." Hermione flicked her wand, throwing off the monitoring spell. It impacted the clear wall in a burst of light and stuck there. She pressed a quick kiss to Ginny's forehead as she shuffled around to make room for them both. "From three?"

They both counted down, and the flame turned a pure, flickering white when they hit zero. The Dementor, which up until that moment had been hanging mostly still in its ridiculous cocoon of chains, started to struggle against its bonds. The flame didn't appear to be doing anything to it, the frayed cloak wasn't burning or moldering away, but something about the flame made it very unhappy.

"That's promising," Hermione said as they watched. Her monitor spell was glowing faintly blue around the edges. "There's a heat discrepancy. Harry, do you feel any change in your mood? We're too acclimatized to make objective assessments."

"No, I don't think so," he said, after a moment's thought. "It's hard to tell."

"Not getting any data on whether the fight or flight response in the Dementor affects its output, then," Hermione said. "Something for another day. We're one step closer to figuring out how to destroy these things."

"Speaking of another day, Harry brought our invitations," Ginny told Hermione. "Come look."

"We need to run this until our Phoenix ash supply burns out," Hermione objected. "But thank you, Harry. I'll be there. You can stay and watch, if you like."

"No, I've other things to do." Including, but not limited to, delivering the last letter in his pocket. "You two stay safe." It worried him, seeing them so close to Dementors, even if the balance of power was firmly on their side. He stepped out of the monitoring box, back into the bright, well-lit main room.

"We wouldn't be here if we didn't have ten different security systems," Ginny told him. "Dementors can't even enter this room. We know how to keep them away, it's destroying them that's a puzzle."

"It's true, they set up the same wards on the guard stations," the Auror from before added. "Never been less dreary in there. If you're done here, I need to get back to my patrols."

"I won't keep you much longer." He looked to Ginny. "I would say good luck, but I know luck has nothing to do with this."

"Damn right it doesn't," Ginny agreed. "We'll be in Hogsmeade this weekend. Same time, same place."

"See you there." He was looking forward to it. He was also looking forward to not being anywhere near Azkaban, but everyone who set foot in the prison felt that way. Maybe it wouldn't always be such a viscerally depressing place. Hermione and Ginny were working on getting rid of the main cause. But as Wizarding Britain's most serious prison, he doubted it would ever be a pleasant place, either.

Thankfully, the rest of his day promised to be easy and enjoyable.

Harry made it back to his flat with half an hour to spare, plenty of time. He had stopped off to get Muggle takeout, in lieu of actually cooking something, but that just meant he had time to change his robes – again – and clean up the flat. With food on the table, a few cleaning charms took care of the mundane chores, and he busied himself picking up the junk he wasn't willing to vanish.

Two left boots went into the closet, as his job was not kind on footwear and some finicky transfiguration could turn them into one good, matching set of boots later. The cups stacked up on the side table by the couch went into the sink, and since he had no idea what was in them that made them resistant to scouring charms, he left them there. The art supplies laid out on the desk in the bedroom lined up and fell into order with a flick of his wand, organized and nearly arranged by ascending color. Muggle pens and pencils, quills and colored inkpots, clean parchment, spelled parchment ready for the creation of moving pictures… The whole lot was easy to organize, and he could see the surface of the desk underneath when he was done.

The Floo flared, fire flaming up to disgorge a beautiful witch in Ministry Unspeakable robes. Her hair was fully silver, dyed to perfection, and her smile was as wide and entrancing as ever.

"The Pygmy Erumpents are doing well," Luna informed him, stripping her robes as she walked into the bedroom. "You missed Fawley throwing a fit about the requisition for more time-resistant glass. He doesn't like my project much."

Harry followed her into the bedroom, helpfully retrieving her robes as she dropped them. Carelessly scattering things about the flat was Luna's way of saying she was tired, without actually saying it. He had expected that. "I got take-out," he told her. "Fawley can go stuff himself." He was gone for one day… Being the closest equivalent to a mediator for the Unspeakables, while a job his friends had inadvertently trained him for throughout their Hogwarts career, was a never-ending struggle. An interesting struggle, with a score of different projects going on at any one time, all there for him to lend a hand with, but a struggle nonetheless.

Luna pulled on a much thinner, more comfortable set of robes. "Did you have a good day traipsing all over the world?" she asked, pulling him in for a brief kiss. Her fingers found his hand and she clasped it.

Harry relaxed into the kiss, but Luna broke it just as suddenly, moving away to drop something from her pocket on their bed. "Yes, and it's looking like everyone can come," he said.

"None would miss it, not even the ones who would rather it never happened," Luna said sagely. "I hope Taylor has adequately prepared. Did she ask us?"

"Ask us what?" He went out into the dining room to serve out their food. His engagement ring flared weakly over the entire bag, so he hit it with a strong warming charm. That fixed the problem, thankfully. Food poisoning was the last thing he needed.

"To help her with the fight," Luna said. The door to the bathroom slammed shut. Harry spent the next few minutes wondering what fight Luna could possibly be talking about.

"Is this something I'm out of the loop on?" he asked once she came out into the kitchen. "I don't remember mum planning a fight for next week."

"Have you looked at your letter yet?" Luna asked. "Where is mine? I think I know what will be on it."

Harry handed hers over, then took her by the shoulders and gently guided her to the table. He suspected she had skipped lunch, and he didn't think she had made breakfast for herself, either. Working on her life's passion as a job made her… radiant was the best word for it, in his opinion, but it did come with some downsides. Such as her getting so caught up in her thoughts that she forgot other important things.

"Luna Lovegood, you are invited to… Luna Lovegood." Luna took her wand out and wrapped the parchment of the invitation around it, and said her name a third time. "Luna Lovegood."

The parchment shimmered, and when she unwrapped it there were four extra lines of writing on the bottom.

Harry had totally forgotten to check his own invitation for hidden messages. Sirius was involved, the odds were good there would be one, especially with his cryptic hint on the subject. "What does it say?" he asked.

"We will finally be washing the unicorn off," Luna said with a sly smile, tucking the parchment away before he could read it. She sat down at the table.

Harry knew he had just been presented with a puzzle. Instead of taking out his own letter and cheating, he sat down and started eating, thinking hard. Unicorn, washing a unicorn, a message sent by Sirius or possibly his mum, and Luna had mentioned a fight they would be asked to watch or participate in.

He liked to think that three years of a magically-significant seven-year engagement to Luna Lovegood had taught him how to interpret her even when she was being intentionally cryptic, but it took him most of the meal to puzzle that one out. He felt quite slow when the answer finally came to him.

"It's been dirty for a long time, hasn't it?" he eventually asked. "Ignored, but still dirty if anyone thought to look."

"We finally have enough water to do the job without being kicked or impaled by the horn," Luna replied.

"And if we don't?" Harry asked, certain he knew what they were talking about now.

"Sirius can make them ignore it again, until we're ready to try once more."

This big event was going to be even bigger than he had thought. "How did you know about this before I did?" he asked.

"Taylor asked me to check the hall of prophecies last week," Luna explained. "There are no active prophecies naming her or him. Yours is still marked as completed. You were not left out of the loop, she plans to propose it to us this weekend. That's what's in the letter, a request that we meet in secret then."

Good. He didn't like the hall of prophecies. He had fulfilled his without any knowledge of it whatsoever, but partial knowledge had set Voldemort to murdering James and Lily Potter and self-fulfilling his end of the prophecy. Knowing of them never made a positive difference. In the long-running disagreement between Taylor and Sirius, he was firmly of Sirius' opinion. Divination was never practical, even when it was correct. Not in this world.

"Planning on bringing the Dire Wings, then?" he asked. If there was to be a fight, Luna would want to be ready.

Luna smiled mysteriously. "I will bring something. What, though… Won't that be more fun as a surprise?"

"I'll charm the closet to hold any possible beast, then," he said dryly. "Just don't bring a bottle of accelerated time. You know the mess those make when they break, Mum would force us to clean it up as payback."

"Is someone still sore about last month?" Luna asked, setting her plate down on the counter, food untouched.

"A little?" he admitted. "It was very convenient, how you accidentally stepped into that patch of temporarily slowed time and couldn't help us clean all day." Glass charmed to accelerate the time between it and another piece of glass facing the other way was a ridiculously complicated mess-making material when it shattered. Thousands of pieces of still-enchanted glass, laid out randomly on a flat stone floor casting the effects between every other piece of glass and accelerating any caught in between… They ended up having to disenchant each shard of glass, one by one.

"It was an accident…" Luna turned to look at him, instead of the nature scene out the window. "But this isn't."

She leaned in to kiss him, and he met her halfway, absently discarding his plate on the counter next to hers. The food could wait.

"Can't you be nervous?" Sirius pleaded. "Please? Instead of… this?" This was a big day. One he and Taylor had worked toward for years. He was nervous, and he was just the guy funding the thing and a backup wand if it went to shit. This was Taylor's show, and yes she was multitasking like crazy, standing in the middle of the venue casting marking spells at the walls while simultaneously checking a hundred different things with her bugs, but she was cool, calm, and collected. It made him feel more frazzled by contrast.

"This is the victory lap," Taylor told him as she aimed her wand at the third floor balcony. "I was nervous during that ridiculous Wizengamot hearing. I was nervous when Nott set a small army of House Elves to stealing the books, and I couldn't be here to stop it myself. I was nervous when Dumbledore offered to donate his pensieve if we wanted it, out of the blue. I will not be nervous tonight, and I'm not nervous now. Is there a mimicry enchantment on the second floor banister?"

"Oh, sure," he grumbled as he went up to check the aforementioned banister. "Nothing to worry about tonight. Total victory. Not like half the old geezers who tried to stop this from happening will be in attendance. Not to mention the secret grand finale, that'll go over just fine." The stairs were nicely enchanted to only be four steps between landings no matter the vertical distance traveled, so he got to the banister in no time. A simple diagnostic charm revealed the enchantments on it, and sure enough, it was missing the subtle illusion enchantment that was meant to display an illusory wax candle atop it, like all of the other banisters.

"How did you even notice this was wrong?" he mumbled as he set about fixing it. The charms hadn't been activated yet, so there was no visible absence of an illusory candle to clue her in.

"I see everything," Taylor whispered in his ear.

"Gah!" he jumped, then remembered some of the other features of the building. "Ha, ha, ha. Scare the poor, sleep-deprived, long-suffering–"

"Long whining," her voice continued in a conversational tone.

"Long everything," he agreed. "I will accept that descriptor."

Taylor's laughter echoed around the building as he went up onto the third, highest floor and walked out to lean over the balcony and look down.

He really was tired, but tonight was the night. The end – and the beginning – of Taylor's 'empty nest project.' Or so he called it, when she wasn't around to scowl at him.

The building was big, a full four stories in size and larger on the inside. The center chamber was hexagonal, for warding reasons that went over his well-educated but not fanatically knowledgeable head, and only the ground floor was a proper floor. The first, second, and third floors consisted of balconies all around the hexagon, looking down. As of right now, that was all that was accessible, but there were five secondary sections of the building, one for each side of the hexagon except the front. Everything was made of heavily enchanted marble, and the ceiling was nigh-unbreakable sloped glass, giving the entire building an airy, open feel with filtered sunlight illuminating the interior.

Not everything was as it would be on a normal day, though. The walls were bare, lined with out-of-place wooden planks with nary a crack between them. The fake candles were part of a whole set of decorations, and down below he saw Taylor adjusting the exact dimensions of the circular tables being set up on the ground floor. All throughout the building, her bugs were undoubtedly working to check the special passageways and enchantments… somehow. A lot of the preparation was for this night, specifically. All of the base, everyday-use enchantments and wards had long since been set, giving the building the sort of magical ambiance one only got in heavily magical environments.

As magical buildings went, it was much more grand than, say, Madam Puddifoots. It was no Hogwarts, but nowhere but Hogwarts was. Neither was it like the Ministry, which was meant for a lot more foot traffic and hundreds of employees. Taylor had a bare handful of employees lined up to work here at present, all new Hogwarts graduates who happened to have relevant experience. There would be plenty of patrons, but not in the numbers somewhere like Hogwarts or the Ministry had to be designed for.

The open atmosphere, the architecture, and the purpose this building would serve starting tomorrow… There was nothing like it in Magical Britain. That was the point. Filling a big, obvious hole in the country, and stepping on as many Pureblood toes as necessary to do so.

Taylor waved her wand up at him, and a streak of blue light shot from her towards the third floor. He cast a Protego and blocked it. "Oy, can't a man sleep with his eyes open without getting marked up by spells?"

"You can Floo home if you're that tired," Taylor said, her voice a low, soothing presence just behind him, though he could see her down on the ground floor. "Really. I'll probably be busy tweaking and checking things until tonight. You can sleep all day."

"I might just do that." Or, more likely, he would down a Pepper-Up and power through. Or both, with the Pepper-Up coming right before the secret main event… Yes, that would do nicely. "But what about you? You need to be in tip-top shape for tonight, and I'm sure you already double-checked everything." He moved to examine one of the many wooden barriers obscuring the walls, checking each enchantment with a cursory swipe of his wand and revealing charm. They were all there.

"Are you asking me to go to bed with you?" Taylor whispered.

"Now, now," he chided her, ignoring the shiver that ran down his spine at her tone. "What would all of those stuffy noble types think if we showed up tonight all mussed and sweaty? I must remain the perfect picture of an eligible bachelor for… some stupid reason." Probably because they couldn't stand to see someone having fun when they were stuck in their arranged marriages. "You should have heard the lecture Narcissa tried to give me about 'curtailing rumors before no woman in good standing would lower herself to marry you'. I tell you, I so regretted not meeting her in a Muggle truck stop for that, it would have made the whole thing so much more entertaining. Does she not remember my last two years at Hogwarts? That ship sailed, burnt, and sunk long ago."

"Why do you still talk to her?" Taylor asked.

"Can't tweak her nose about the Malfoys falling from grace if I never see her," he answered. "She still thinks someone cast an undetectable misfortune curse on Lucius."

"That would have been simpler than what you did." Her voice was still right next to him, though she was down on the ground floor.

"True. Less fun, though." And requiring at least one major sacrifice, so not an option anyway. "But let's not talk about the Malfoys. It's killing the mood." The 'don't worry about tonight' mood, but it was only a hop, skip and jump from flirting as a distraction to actual flirting, and then from there to the things that had the witches gossiping and the older wizards disapproving.

"The mood?" she whispered in his ear. It wasn't real, she wasn't actually right behind him–

He yelped when her real, very much there arms wrapped around him from behind. He had been ambushed!

"You must like being surprised, it happens so often these days," she told him.

He relaxed in her grip, shamelessly enjoying the close contact. "When it comes with being felt up by a beautiful woman, I can learn to roll with the punches. Also, this whole building is keyed to you. Not fair. I don't have a building helping me pull pranks."

"Make one," she suggested.

"I could, couldn't I?" His fingers traced the runes on her arms, mindlessly following the intricate patterns. A drop of blood from his hand could suborn either arm to his will, but she trusted him not to do that, even for a prank. That trust was hard won, easily lost, and then much harder to earn back, but he had earned it, in the end. It and more.

They weren't married, engaged, or officially together in any capacity, despite throwing out all sorts of signs that they were more than business partners and good friends. That bothered the prude old women and resentful old men he had made it his life's work to aggravate and inconvenience, and also neatly sidestepped some of the more problematic aspects of him being the only Black male left to continue the line. Magic involved in generations of ancestors focused on continuing their legacy at all costs was… difficult to work around, and in this case essential to avoid. Taylor was working on that, because she was working on everything magic that she didn't yet understand, but not urgently. They had all the time in the world.

Unofficially, out of sight of the public to keep those amusing rumors from being confirmed or denied, they were together and had been for going on three years. She was the woman for him, eldritch aura and quest to find immortality to satisfy the voice in her head included. What she saw in him was a lot less clear, but he figured some combination of his many qualities happened to outweigh his many flaws.

Thus, Taylor's arms around his waist, and his realistic appraisal of whether or not 'go to bed' was likely to include activities other than sleeping. Even though, if he was being honest with himself, it probably shouldn't on this particular day. He was dead tired, and nothing was worse than the mind being willing but the body deciding sleep was more appealing. Pepper-Up potion didn't work for everything. If it was just the preparation for the party he would have been fine, but add in the curveball Taylor had thrown into the mix at the last minute? He was all for seizing opportunities as they presented themselves, but three hours of sleep a night was taking its toll.

Elsewhere in the building, something crashed to the marble floor. He winced. "How about I bring Pepper-Up for two?" he proposed. "We can save the fun stuff for later."

"You're getting responsible in your old age," she told him.

"I'm not even fifty, thank you very much!" He was still young and virile! Wizards didn't age as fast, anyway. Everyone knew that. She was the one searching for a moral method of immortality at the behest of her Ravenclaw assistant, not him. "It'll serve you right if the only acceptable cure for aging makes you all saggy," he grumbled.

Another crash echoed through the building, and they both winced. "I don't know what that is," Taylor admitted. "Nothing is falling, physically."

"Probably a smudged rune in the auditory enchantments." He shrugged out of her grip, raised his wand, and turned to her. "First one to find it gets to pick the–"

"Position?" she interrupted.

"I was going to say the place we order food from when we break for lunch," he claimed, the picture of innocence. "And you say I haven't corrupted you!"

"The only way to beat an incorrigible flirt is to outdo them," she said. "Really, though. You're on."

She apparated away, reappearing with a pop on the third floor.

"Hey!" That wasn't fair! She was keyed into the wards, he wasn't, and her apparating wasn't even technically real apparition, she was being side-alonged by her Ravenclaw assistant. She didn't even have to do the spin!

He sprinted for the nearest maintenance hatch. He would win that prize, whichever of the two she was referring to. Then he would get the Pepper-Up potions.

Knowledge was power. Especially here, in the world of magic, where a single old secret could be the difference between dying to a freak accident and that being the end of it, or dying only to return a decade later. Knowledge was also concentrated, in book form, in four places in Britain. Hogwarts, where the selection was curated and only children could freely go. Bookstores, which sold to the lowest common denominator, and only stocked the things that were likely to sell profitably. The Department of Mysteries, which was not open to the public. And finally, most gallingly, the personal libraries of old families, private collections that were unevenly concentrated on certain subjects but often held singular editions or private research, locked away from anyone not of that family.

This was a situation that had not affected Taylor personally, though it very well could have. She had the good fortune to come into contact with a tradition-scorning pureblood heir who gladly dusted off his family library for the sole purpose of her doing whatever she wanted with it. But it was a problem, and it did contribute to the power imbalance in the wizarding world, in Britain specifically. It also disproportionately increased the obscurity of dark and illegal spells, both in who knew how to cast them, and who knew how to defend against them.

There were other problems in magical Britain. Big ones, like their lumbering, ridiculous government. Like the corruption and bigotry that permeated said government, further hindering it. Like the way they treated normal, non-magical people as a whole. Those problems were ingrained, and they were societal. They could be fixed, but not easily, and not by a single dedicated individual or one master plan. The solution to the lack of accessible knowledge, on the other hand, was one Taylor had found herself well-suited to devise and in the right position to implement.

She stood on the roof of Britain's first magical public library, her shoes finding minimal traction on charmed glass, and looked up at the stars. Below, the guests were arriving. They were mingling, taking food and drink from the caterers hired for the event, and waiting for the event to begin. Most of them were people she either didn't know well enough to have an opinion on, or people she actively disliked.

Politics. Her opinion on the subject had not improved since her days in the Wards, back on Earth Bet. Thank Merlin she had Sirius for that. He didn't like it either, but he had been taught how to navigate the often backwards, occasionally mystifying waters of last-century political discourse. He was busy greeting the important guests at the door, decked out in dapper dress robes and his ridiculous talking hat.

She had her bugs in the special-made observation holes around the building, next to the output of a set of enchantments that channeled and relayed sound. Her listening ability was not curtailed at all by having to keep her bugs within the walls and out of sight, a necessity given the environment.

She let herself be diverted by listening to his greetings. They all followed the same pattern; he would bow to the person or people coming in the door, sweep his hat off, greet them with all of their titles, and then he would say something personal that came off as complimentary until a few minutes later when they actually thought about it, if they knew enough to realize they had been insulted at all. Even better, he performed each greeting with an unbearably posh accent the ones who knew him knew was fake. In between guests he conferred with his hat in hushed tones, consulting on new and better backhanded compliments and veiled insults.

"Lord Byron, it is so nice to see you in a place of fine repute, such a pleasant rarity!"

"Lady Zabini, it is a pleasure to see you on British soil! I hope you will take the time to peruse our natural biology section after the ribbon is cut, we have an interesting scholarly volume on the courting habits of Praying Mantises that made me think of you."

"Lord Malfoy, how is your son? Good, I hope? A shame he could not be here tonight, but from what I have heard this is not the sort of place he would want to frequent anyway, so it is eminently understandable. It's better that he's hard at work finding a way to restore the unfortunate loss of your fortune."

Invariably, the posh witches and wizards favored Sirius with fake smiles and afterward gravitated towards others who navigated the same social circles, ignoring the less affluent among them. That was fine. They were only here because they would raise a completely avoidable stink if they weren't invited, and because it was fun to watch Sirius poke at them.

"Minister Marchbanks!" Sirius greeted an incredibly old-looking woman. "Please don't quote my Newt scores at me, I know them by heart. And Undersecretary, you're looking well!" Sirius nodded to Percy Weasley. "Your old school friends all look to be gathering on the second floor, if you're interested. It's a shame Hogwarts doesn't do class reunions."

Percy didn't take the offered escape from his Ministry duties to catch up with friends, electing instead to continue helping the Minister. Helping was indeed the word for it, as well; Minister Marchbanks was genuinely frail. Only the advantages of magic were keeping her upright and active, if Taylor was any judge of physical condition. Her mind might still be sharp, but her body was not.

Elsewhere, up on the upper balconies, the people she actually wanted to enjoy the party were greeting each other. She saw, again with her bugs tapping into observation and listening charms from inside the walls, that Harry and his friends had all gathered on the third floor.

"Have you been kissing your plants, Neville?" Luna asked. "Or is that lipstick?"

"Got nicked by a Fungal Thumper," Neville admitted, pointedly not touching the red bulge on the top of his upper lip. "My mistake, really, it was just spitting at a fly."

Ginny and Hermione were picking at the wooden blockades barring them from the books hidden behind. Based on the spell feedback Taylor could make out, they were within a few minutes of cracking the not-insubstantial protections keeping the barrier in place. Thankfully, Harry noticed them. "Hey, don't mess those up," Harry called out.

Hermione spun with a fierce blush, but Ginny just shrugged her shoulders. "We're not getting through it without alerting your mum anyway, it was a lost cause from the start."

"Tell your mum she's cruel, Harry," Hermione complained. "Walling it all off…"

"Maybe she just knows you too well," Harry suggested. "How are things since I saw you last? Did the Phoenix ash thing go anywhere?" He said nothing about the actual last time they had all met. As far as anyone outside of the group was concerned, that hadn't happened. One never knew who might be listening.

"Yes, and we think it's a big lead," Ginny said proudly. "We've been busy. How about you? Still enjoying a boring government job?"

"I'll have you know I just came from protecting the Wizarding world from an invasion of Pygmy Erumpents," Harry said seriously. "You wouldn't want that. They explode when they sneeze."

"It's fascinating what sped-up isolated evolution can produce," Luna sighed. "So many cycles of reproduction and mutation…"

"Don't get started on reproduction," Hermione said darkly. "Molly is in time-out, don't think I won't put you in time-out too."

"What's this?" Harry, Luna, Hermione, and Ginny took seats around a five-person circular table, while Neville leaned over the balcony to look down at the rest of the library. "Please tell me she didn't put her foot in her mouth again."

"That's too nice a way of saying it," Ginny griped. "You know the situation with the possibility of Weasley grandbabies as it stands, right?"

"No?" Harry said truthfully. "I don't really follow Weasley gossip. Are there any?"

"Well, let's go down the list, shall we?" Hermione said sardonically, leaning back in her chair. "Bill is still Defense Professor, and the only new people he meets are his students. He's single, though a lot of them want to change that. Charlie may as well be dating a dragon, for all anyone knows."

"We don't know if he has dated anyone since moving to Romania," Ginny added. "Best to assume he won't, or if he is he's got the good sense to keep it secret."

"The twins don't have steady girlfriends and aside from that prank last year, no kids," Hermione continued. "Percy is married to–"

"Justice!" Ginny interjected with a wicked smile. "Justice and cleansing magical Britain of corruption in all its forms."

"Yes, that," Hermione agreed. "Also, according to some rumors he's shagging the Minister on the sly."

Taylor mentally compared Percy – who was still in his twenties – to Marchbanks, who was past her twenties, and also past her one-hundred-and-twenties. She hoped that wasn't true.

"Uh…" Harry sounded like he wasn't sure whether he wanted to believe it. "You're joking? Please? At least tell me you don't mean our current Minister. Not that the last one would be much better, but at least that wouldn't make me worry about possible elder abuse."

"I think Percy Weasley would be the power top if he was in a relationship with Cornelius Fudge," Luna said.

Everyone paused to not imagine that. Or if they did, to wish Luna hadn't said anything.

"It's a rumor," Hermione explained. One Ginny started."

Ginny crossed her arms and huffed. "Nobody believes it, but he deserves to squirm a little for what he did. He's dating Susan, for the record."

"Percy isn't in our good books right now, either," Hermione explained. "He's the one who provoked Molly by telling her he was using protection, and why he felt he had to explain that to her… Ugh. Do the math. How many Weasleys are looking likely to pop out grandbabies?"

One not dating, one probably not dating, two unwilling to be tied down, one in the beginning of a relationship… "What about Ron?" Harry asked, mirroring Taylor's own line of thought.

"Shagging every Quidditch groupie who can convince him she's interested in more than his fame as the only good Keeper the Cannons have ever had," Ginny explained. "I'm more worried for him than the groupies, to be honest. They're taking advantage of him. No children as of yet, though."

"Right. So that leaves you two?" Harry looked at Hermione and Ginny, and at the rings on both of their fingers.

It had been a nice ceremony. A little touch-and-go on the Granger side, what with Hermione's Muggle grandparents not knowing about magic, but Taylor happily played interference for the couple. Molly Weasley cried a river and accidentally burned a few napkins while tipsy, but other than that they hadn't noticed anything amiss. Hermione hadn't noticed her grandfather's less than wholehearted approval either, because Taylor got to him first. By the time Hermione interacted with him, he was all smiles and intimidated praise.

Taylor remembered that day fondly.

"She decided it would have to be us," Ginny concluded with a groan. "Percy made her think about grandbabies when he denied the possibility of her getting any from him anytime soon. Then we walk in, ready for our weekly lunch with her and dad, while he skips out, mayhem caused and Justice waiting for him at the Ministry. She's got baby rabies now, and it's all his fault."

"She brought it up," Hermione continued. "We're in the very beginning stages of looking into adopting, as something for the future once we're done working on the Dementor problem and not dealing with mood-altering effects every day. I made the mistake of telling her that."

"As it turns out," Ginny sighed, "adoption 'doesn't count.'" She did the exaggerated finger quotations and scowled angrily. "Not really a Weasley that way."

"Did she use those exact words?" Luna asked. "Maybe she was tripping over her own tongue, or over alcohol."

"She did use those words, and she only got pushier from there," Hermione confirmed. "According to her, we are to find a willing donor or wait for her to pick one out, both get pregnant at the same time, and move into the Burrow for the duration of the pregnancies as well as the following eighteen years so she doesn't have to part from her new grandbabies for as long as possible."

Harry's eyes bulged. "Did she really mean that?" he asked.

"We'll find out in a month when her time-out ends and we talk to her again," Ginny said grimly. "Maybe she'll realize she was out of line. Maybe not."

"Isolation does tend to kill off Nargles," Luna said sagely. "If it doesn't work, just ignore her."

"I'd rather not, but we will if she makes us," Ginny agreed. "How about you? Taylor pushing you to tie the knot yet?"

"Taylor agrees that a seven-year engagement is a magically advantageous number," Luna replied. "We are only on year three, she would not want us to cut it short."

"She's been great, of course," Harry said. "No pressure, and no out-of-control longing for grandchildren." He laughed at the irritated face Ginny pulled at him.

Taylor wondered if now would be a good time to announce her presence… But no. Magical intercom pranks were reserved for Sirius. They wouldn't be as funny if she did them to anyone else.

"Where is she, anyway?" Neville asked, taking a moment to look around the balcony. He did not, of course, see her. She was on the roof, and the glass ceiling was charmed to not show any obstructions directly in contact with it, in case she ever figured out how to integrate computers into a high-magic environment and needed some sort of antenna for communication purposes. There was no way anyone knew where–

"Up on the roof," Luna said serenely.

Scratch that. Luna knew, somehow. She was much more observant than most people realized, but Taylor had no idea how she had figured that out. Maybe it was an educated guess.

Down below, a wizard in gaudy pale green robes said hello to Sirius.

"Albus Persimmon Wolfy Bob Dumbledore!" Sirius proclaimed.

"Those are not quite my middle names," Dumbledore corrected him.

Sirius' hat spoke up. "Yes, but you may notice that nobody cares. Did you bring my counterpart?"

"Sadly, ever since an anonymous break-in to my office, the Sorting Hat has been tied to the Hogwarts wards to prevent a theft," Dumbledore admitted. "I'll pass along a message, hat to hat, shall I?"

"Scratch that." Sirius reached up to grab the brim of the hat. "He would make it too vulgar for you to repeat. Welcome to the library, and thank you for your donation."

Dumbledore was here. He had been invited, he was expected, and he knew nothing. He was still the most important person in the building. Not for the event, but for the real reason he had been invited beyond common courtesy.

Taylor decided that it was time to go down and get the main event out of the way. Everyone she was expecting had arrived. She descended the stairwell installed in the roof of one of the secondary wings currently closed to the public, reaching the ground floor without interacting with anyone. From there, she unlocked the door to the main chamber from the inside, slipped through, and relocked it behind her, walking out into the gathering of witches and wizards.

Many recognized her immediately; her arms were distinctive. When the vampires said no covering, they didn't mean that the runes had to be exposed to light, or air, or any simple physical dependency, as she had initially assumed. They meant it in the conceptual sense, as tied to the balanced nature of the magic itself, which was much harder to work around. Most of the time she simply went around in sleeveless robes and kept a wary watch over any possible source of fresh blood, but for a fancy-robe occasion like tonight, she settled for simple fishnet opera gloves to match her sleeveless robe. Blood could seep right through and the runes were visible, so the gloves did not count as concealment, despite technically covering her arms.

Her arms marked her apart from the crowd, and those who knew her knew why she was here. "Miss Hebert," a short wizard in a gaudy tophat greeted her. He was Dedalus Diggle, a wizard of some renown and no apparent profession, a member of the Order of the Phoenix in the war. "How are you on this fine night?"

"Excited," she said honestly. "Though you might not be able to tell just from looking at me."

"You have the 'stern head librarian' look down," he assured her. "It will only get better with time. Did you have Madam Pince give you tips?"

"Not on the look, but yes." Taylor pointed her out, having already been well aware of her presence. "If you want to compare, she's up on the second floor. The ribbon-cutting will be soon, though, so don't go too far."

"Ha! Good luck to you." Diggle disappeared among the crowd as a much taller, more severe woman took his place opposite Taylor. This one, Taylor knew fairly well.

"Andromeda," she greeted. It was said the woman looked a lot like her insane cousin in Azkaban, but Taylor mostly knew her for being a healer who constantly rebuffed Sirius' attempts to drag her into anything resembling Black family business. "Is your daughter here tonight?"

"Possibly as an incognito guard for the Minister, or possibly she decided she wished to get drunk in the company of her own age group," Andromeda said noncommittally. "Has Sirius given up on making me the Black Wizengamot representative?"

"No, and he will only push harder now that we've got this set up and he doesn't need to be there to argue for it." Sirius did not like being a member of the legislative body. Too much responsibility, even when he was using it for his own gain.

"Then I'll continue avoiding him," Andromeda concluded. "Are you and he finally going to tie the knot now that this has been worked out?"

Taylor blatantly ignored that question. Even if she was willing to give an answer to Andromeda, who was an acquaintance at best, it wouldn't be given here, in the middle of a crowd of people who would like nothing more than to tarnish her reputation in any way possible as petty payback. "I hope you enjoy this evening," she said formally.

Someone muttered behind her, something that would have completely escaped the notice of a person without practically limitless multitasking abilities and a relay system of bugs connected to listening charms throughout the entire building. She was ignoring most of the inane conversations, but this?

"Lord… Nott, is it?" She turned, smiled coldly, and met the gaze of the man who had been her chief enemy in the fight to obtain all of the necessary legal niceties for setting up Britain's first magical public library. She knew very well who he was, but he bristled at the implication that he was unimportant enough to forget. "I appreciate the advice," if one could call a muttered derogatory comment advice, in which case she appreciated the excuse to cut through some of the otherwise mandatory politeness, " but I don't think you're very qualified to give it, what with all of the unfortunate incidents plaguing you of late."

She wasn't fond of politics, but there wasn't much political about spending a month spying on a stuck-up arse in his manor, suborning one of his many house elves, and sneaking in to acquire blackmail material, which then mysteriously found its way into the Ministry the day Nott once again put a bureaucratic chokehold on her library… And now rubbing his face in the fact that he had no idea who had done it. That wasn't politics.

Nott's face might as well have been carved of granite for all that he reacted, but it made Taylor feel a lot better to have said that. She edged through the crowd, stopping for many meaninglessly polite smiles and handshakes along the way.

There were not her people. Some of them were likely Death Eaters. Others had ties to the Death Eaters, or to pureblood causes that led back to the Death Eaters. Others were simply stuck-up snobs. And yet, there was a perverse pleasure inherent in having them here. This building was her attempt at fixing part of their rotten society, and so few of them truly understood that.

The clock struck eight, harmonious chimes echoing through the open space, off the marble floors and wooden blockades lining the walls.

Taylor made her way to the back of the ground floor, where the door to the central secondary wing was still blocked by more wooden barriers. Sirius was already there, transfiguring a waist-high set of steps with two poles on top, sporting a red ribbon stretched between them.

"After you." He let his hand brush against her arm as she passed him, reassuringly warm. "No tricks or traps, I made it myself."

"All the more reason to suspect tricks," she whispered.

"Not tonight," he replied.

She ascended the steps, stopping at the top, and looked out at the crowd she was now head and shoulders above. The balconies of the first, second, and third floors were lined with watchers. Harry and his friends were up at the very top, looking down.

"Tonight," she said, and her voice was carried to every single ear by the library's enchantments, "we gather to celebrate the opening of Britain's first magical public library. It is not publicly funded," not yet, that was too much of a leap for the financially conservative Ministry which was not used to paying for any libraries at all, "but it is open to the public and the same rules will apply to all who enter this building. Heed those rules, treat the books, the building, the librarians, and the other patrons with respect…"

She lifted her arms. Elsewhere, her bugs physically gnawed through the sheet of parchment serving as a runic anchor for hundreds of ongoing conjurations. All of the wooden blockades hiding the walls from sight disappeared.

"And all of the magical knowledge of the library will be open to you, any day, for as long as you wish," she concluded.

The shelves of this central chamber were already lined with books. Hundreds upon hundreds, organized by subject and author, some common and some so rare there was only one copy in existence.

"Ground floor, basic magic principles and general information, help desk," she announced. "First floor, magical history and a selection of fiction. Second floor, advanced magical studies, treatises, and papers. Third floor, reference materials. Lists of spells, textbooks, dictionaries, atlases, books on language, books on culture." Books from the Muggle side of literature, sorted in without any indication of their origin. Biology, Medicine, Anatomy, Economics, Mathematics, Physics, the whole lot. Not that she would announce that, no, let it be discovered on its own, just like it would be discovered that there was no 'restricted' section in her library. Not even for the truly dangerous spells and magic. There were other protections, such as needing the aid of a librarian to take certain books off the shelf, but those were lesser measures.

It sounded risky on paper, making such things available to everyone, but in truth they were already available to the people most likely to want them, who used and abused them at will. This was only leveling the playing field, and unlike with powers, knowledge of a magical concept allowed for the development of magic intended to negate or counter it, something that was sorely lacking at present.

"There are five more, larger wings to the library," she continued. "These are not open to the public today, and they will be expanded and opened as the space becomes necessary. Your donations have ensured that two of the five wings are in the process of being sorted and prepared for the public. Tonight, please feel free to browse what is currently available! It's not Hogwarts' library yet, but you may be surprised by what we have that Hogwarts does not."

She let that settle in. The crowd was quiet, not because they were composed or unimpressed, but because she had activated the auditory enchantments that dampened anything below a yell to a low murmur.

"Now, a few words from the main supporter of this library. Sirius Black." She swiped her hand down, snapping the ribbon, and stepped down to let Sirius up.

"I won't talk long, because the longer I talk the likelier it is that I'll say something incredibly ill-advised," Sirius began jovially. "That was Taylor Hebert, head librarian of this fine establishment. Make no mistake, I might have spent the money and donated the entire Black library, but she rules this place. It was her idea, the many innovative enchantments making it possible were mostly inspired by her proposals, and when it comes to security, she's the one I trust to ensure we don't lose all of our books by the end of tonight."

The crowd laughed, and Sirius smiled widely. "I've got to thank the other old and exceedingly noble houses of this and that," he continued irreverently. "You know who you are. Your personal libraries may be lighter, but don't fret, it's all right here whenever you want to look at it. We appreciate your donations!"

The scowls that graced certain faces in the crowd were amusing, to say the least. Some had truly donated of their own free will. Others had been convinced to part with books for fair prices, or not-so-fair prices. But the ones who were angry were the ones who had conveniently fallen on hard times and been unable to refuse a vital infusion of gold at exactly the right moment, even if it came at the cost of their entire libraries. Those people all happened to be former Death Eaters, and they all happened to be much poorer now than when Taylor had first heard of them.

The library's advanced magic collection leaned heavily to the dark side of magic as a result, but Taylor had great ambitions for that changing once people like Hermione and Ginny had free access to all of that dark magic and a desire to develop proper countermeasures.

"I could go on," Sirius said. "I could spend all night talking about how we got here. The boring budget meetings I for some reason had to go to despite giving the project a blank check, the even more boring legislation that had to be passed to allow us to publicly show all of the 'family heirlooms' my books were classified as, the meetings with contractors, with security, with Ministry inspectors, with the Minister, with the Minister's favorite advisor of the week, with Hogwarts professors, and we can't forget all of the random wizards off the street with uninformed complaints… None of it was particularly difficult or noteworthy, but taken all together, there's a reason we're only opening up now! If it were up to me we would have installed a Floo in the Black Library, removed the old curses and called it done! But no, we had to do it properly, and now we're finally here… So who the hell wants to listen to a speech? Go, browse, read, explore, stick to the open areas because locked doors are locked for a reason, there's nothing interesting behind them."

Sirius swiped his hand down, then actually looked down. "Taylor, you didn't conjure another ceremonial ribbon," he stage-whispered.

In response, Taylor took her wand out and fluidly conjured a ribbon, flinging it at him. He deftly snatched it out of the air, took one end in each hand, wrapped it around the poles. Then he cut it with a cutting charm.

"Told you, let me talk for long enough and something will go wrong," he told the crowd. "Party on!"

That was it, officially. They would disperse, mingle, and everyone would be gone by midnight. If tonight was just about the library, she would be able to relax.

Tonight was about the library. It was real, she had spent the last five years working for it, and this was her idea finally coming to fruition. But it wasn't only about the library.

This was also a night for doing something she was finally strong enough to attempt.

Her power, still a vague presence in the back of her head, sent over a burst of confidence.

They could do this.

She put on a show for a while. Wandering around, offering insight into the placement of certain books, fending off probing questions and occasionally freeing someone from a security measure they triggered by trying to fiddle with the book enchantments. Those were all things a normal librarian with no ulterior motives would do, so she did them. She even enjoyed it, underneath the nerves.

But when the party started to die down and the guests began to leave… When Sirius gathered the others and took them back into one of the mostly empty wings… When she came across Dumbledore, reading a Biology textbook on the third floor…

"I wanted to thank you," she told him. "I know we haven't technically met, but Sirius told me you were willing to donate your pensieve."

Dumbledore looked up from the book. "Why yes, you would be Ms. Hebert…" He frowned for a moment. "I feel as if I should know more about you than I do, but that is because I know Sirius but we have not had a chance to meet."

"Yes." She smiled and shook his hand. The memory charm still held. She didn't know why or how, but it did. Theoretically, it could hold forever. There was no need to tickle a sleeping dragon.

Too bad she hadn't gone to Hogwarts back when that motto was coined. She could have told them that sometimes, in some situations, tickling and subsequently waking up the sleeping dragon was the only way to get it out of the way so one could move on.

"Would you like to come see it?" she suggested. "That wing isn't open to the public yet, but Sirius is showing it to some of our friends, and as it's your donation we agreed you can have a look now."

"I think I would like that." Dumbledore reshelved the biology textbook and followed her to the nearest door leading into the leftmost wing. "I am very curious as to what the rest of the building looks like," he admitted. "And you, Ms. Hebert. Was it truly chance that kept us apart for so long?"

He might be missing key memories, but that made him no less perceptive in the moment. "I don't know what Sirius might have told you," she said as she led him down to the ground floor, through a much more traditional warren of corridors and bookshelves, "but I'm sure it wasn't the truth. He likes to protect my ego, even when it doesn't need protecting."

She found Sirius and the others around the pensieve, in a bare marble room. Tight quarters, thick walls, and the only thing in the room was the pensieve in the center.

She closed the door behind them. Eight people in a sealed room. One was Dumbledore.

One on seven. The one was a revered, powerful wizard, but none of the seven were pushovers. She had not waited this long out of fear or out of hoping that the obliviation would never break on its own. She had waited because every day that passed was a day she grew stronger. A day that Harry and his friends, trustworthy and reliable, all learned more and grew stronger, more skilled, more dangerous.

They had all improved, but none of them had her peculiar relationship with magic. She was not in the situation she had been in eight years ago, when Dumbledore was some unapproachable giant of magical prowess.

"This is not a tour, is it?" Dumbledore asked warily, sensing the shifting mood in the room. He had his wand out, a much more traditional wand instead of the knobbly old stick he had used the last time she saw him.

"A tour down memory lane," Sirius said, pointing to the pensieve. There was already a thin soup of white liquid waiting in the bowl, with occasional contorting wisps of pure white steam rising from its surface. "We're here for security."

"If I refuse?" Dumbledore asked.

"You really don't want to," Sirius replied. "They're just memories. You're not even going in alone."

"I see additional runes on the pensieve," Dumbledore remarked.

"They allow for someone inside to extract and view a new memory without leaving it," Sirius said. "Small change. Makes it easier to use in spontaneous situations."

"If you thought this was something I would agree to of my own free will, you would not have brought me here, now." Dumbledore looked from face to face. Nobody made eye contact.

Nobody except for her. Her mind was locked behind an externally imposed Occlumency barrier these days, but her surface thoughts were purposefully left available.

Whether he looked at them or not, something tipped the scales for him. "I will see what you have prepared with such care and secrecy," he decided, putting his wand away. "Who will be joining me?"

"I will." Taylor stepped forward. They put their heads in the pensieve at the same time.

The first memory was simple. Taylor walked through her home – under a Fidelius these days, so she could keep the house without outright brainwashing her neighbors to do it – with Dumbledore, watching herself as she pulled a knife from the block.

Taylor had seen the memory before, several times over, but the edge to her younger self's movements still set her on edge. She had forgotten exactly how sudden the wave of paranoia was that day. Unjustified based on what she knew then, but in retrospect? This confrontation was absolutely inevitable, and it was never going to have a good outcome no matter what she did. Dread was the right reaction.

"That is you," Dumbledore observed. "When is this?"

"About ten years ago. Summer, 1991." She wasn't wary of Dumbledore here. Physically, he could touch her, but magic wasn't an option within the pensieve. It was a shared magical simulation, not a place where they were physically. Sirius, Harry and the others would only see her and Dumbledore face-down in the pensieve, not transported to some other dimension. As such, he couldn't actually harm or otherwise affect her.

They stood, side by side behind her memory self as she opened the door. Dumbledore watched with narrowed eyes as she and his counterpart interacted.

"I have been obliviated," he said as his counterpart began explaining magic. It was not a question.

"Of a lot more than just this," she told him.

"Why not attempt to undo it?" he asked.

"Because we're not sure it can be undone," there had to be a reason the obliviation had held for eight years, and while Sirius was good with a memory charm that did not translate to skill in the delicate legilimency required to even try to reverse an obliviation from the outside. "And because this way, you can see things with fresh eyes."

The memory faded out, and the next one ran. Taylor turned away as Dumbledore watched himself obliviate her. She had seen it before. Lived it. What mattered was that he saw it.

More importantly, that he saw it first. Without any context or explanation for his own past actions. She was coming clean, in a sense, but not without stacking the deck. If they returned his memories, he would remember a decade of searching for Harry and years of delving into Summoning, building up theories and reinforcing them. Remus was an example of how much that could change a person's attitude–

Though Remus was not a good example of how to correctly handle things. It was more than a little fucked-up that Sirius had leaped right to obliviating him back then, without even trying to explain, when Remus didn't pose any of the potential complications Dumbledore had. That was water way under the bridge, though. Sirius had a much clearer grasp of obliviation ethics now.

The memory faded to black, replaced by another, much older. Her, bouncing five-year-old Harry on her knee, watching a funny little British television show for children. There was absolutely nothing significant about the scene, save for Harry's age.

Dumbledore stared intently at her and Harry, one hand on his forehead. That would be the obliviation, as he tried to reconcile this with what he 'knew' about how Harry had spent his childhood, which was… nothing.

A curious fact about obliviation was that while seeing proof one was missing time did absolutely nothing to break the obliviation down, it did allow those who were aware obliviation existed to dismiss the confusion that usually came with it, just like settling on an 'explanation' ended the confusion.

The scene changed again. Harry was younger, barely two. She didn't quite have everything together yet; those first two years were rough. She looked unremarkable, save for her missing arm and the dark blotches under her eyes, but the way she moved as she put Harry to bed implied she was exhausted. Not her worst day, not by far, but not a happy one.

Normal, though. A moment that obviously wasn't fake, performed for nobody, with nothing to hide.

That was the last of the pre-loaded memories. Dumbledore wouldn't sit still for a movie-length set of memories without asking for clarification, or proof, or something. Thus, the extra runes that allowed her to direct things, so they weren't diving in and out of the pensieve every few minutes. The runes let her smooth out the process.

Not that it came easily. While Dumbledore was distracted, peering into the crib to look at baby Harry as Taylor's younger self tiredly puttered around the room, she attempted to relax. Not to leave the pensieve, but to shift her awareness.

There were no bugs in a pensieve memory, not even for memories where she had her power. Pensieves showed an exterior view, not an interior one, and they did not simulate things, they displayed them. A pensieve was a monitor, not a computer. Outside, in the real world, there were bugs. She could feel them, the same way she could feel the not-liquid of her memories on her face, in her nose and mouth but not preventing her from breathing clean air. It was an unpleasant sensation.

With some effort, she focused on that awareness, that version of herself, and shakily drew her wand while keeping her head in. She put her wand and hand in the basin, placing the tip on her forehead in preparation.

"You are showing me this to give your side of a story I don't know my side of," Dumbledore remarked, looking at the present-day her. "I have to wonder if this is real, or staged."

"I know." She crossed her arms. "It's a fair question. I had Harry for over ten years. Name a day within that timeframe, any day. Any time. I can show you a memory from then. Momentous events or significant dates are easier for me to remember, obviously, but I can try to get it close to the day."

Another quirk of pensieve memory viewing made her incapable of offering any moment he wanted to the exact timeframe. Any memory she still remembered at all could be withdrawn and viewed in perfect detail, but the more obscure the memory, the harder it was to get the initial withdrawing process to work. It was a downright fascinating branch of magic, and she wished pensieves weren't so rare. She could have done with one of these years ago.

"We would have to leave… ah, no, the modifications to the pensieve." He looked around. "In that case, show me October fourteenth, 1989."

That would be when Harry was either nine or ten years old, depending on whether she counted from the birthday he celebrated, or Harry Potter's actual birthday. He would have been in school, it was October so there would be a Halloween coming up… Difficult, but she thought she could remember something they had done that week.

The runes allowing her to concentrate on her real self while in the pensieve did not make the process easy, and it took her several minutes to focus on the memory, focus on the wordless charm necessary to withdraw it, and successfully pull the memory out. It plopped into the bowl of the pensieve with a wet splash, and the scene changed around them.

They were dumped into an old version of her home neighborhood, at the park, in the late afternoon, after Harry's school let out. The her of memory watched him play with two of his old friends.

Had Harry ever reconnected with them? She would have to ask. She had long since quit her Muggle job, and she didn't have any good friends in the neighborhood, but Harry had real friends in the Muggle world. She didn't know if he still kept up with them or not.

"He was too cool to be seen playing with me for a while there," she remembered, seeing herself on the park bench. "I was uneasy about letting him out of my sight during rush hour, on a weekday, five blocks from the house in a park with no adult supervision. We compromised." The memory version of her had a book, one on recent Japanese history that she was pretending to read. No newspaper, annoyingly. No way to verify this was happening at any time more specific than 'some autumn, sometime.'

Dumbledore wandered into the park, sitting down on the bench next to her past self. He looked up, then down, taking in the entire scene from her point of view. Clever. That way he could see everything she directly observed, so he knew where the details would be clear. They got fuzzy and indistinct outside her direct observation, to reflect that she didn't actually know, for instance, what was happening behind her bench.

That would change with memories outside of this particular period of her life, but he didn't know it yet.

"Here we are." He poked at her past self's bookmark, a receipt she hadn't even noticed was there. "October thirteenth, 1989," he read off of it.

"Close enough," she judged, noticing that it was a receipt from the local bookstore. She must have kept it for exactly the purpose it was serving in the memory. She barely remembered doing such a thing, demonstrating exactly how powerful pensieves and the related mind magic really were. "I can do this as many times as you like, but if you want to take that as a given and continue for now?"

"I imagine you have a lot to show me," Dumbledore said gravely. "What is your purpose with all of this?"

"To be a better person." She shrugged her shoulders. "To not be blindsided because one day you might throw off the obliviation. It's a miracle it has held this long. You've been missing memories for–"

"Eight years, two months," Dumbledore interrupted.

She gave him a hard look.

"I was not entirely unaware that something was amiss, Ms. Hebert," he said. "Your memory charm was perfect. That does not take into account externalities."

She was worried about what that might mean, but the sheer time that had passed between the obliviation and now ruled out any but the longest of long cons. "I don't know what we missed," she admitted. "I know you didn't have any backup memories stored like your Horcrux history lessons."

She only knew that because Harry had, upon learning that memories could be extracted and stored for later, had a minor panic attack and arranged a heist of Dumbledore's office to check for incriminating evidence. That heist had taken up most of Harry's fifth year in Hogwarts.

"I should have," he said, "if it was something I considered important."

"I don't have any answers for you on that subject," she said. Save, perhaps, that storing memories of a threat that could feasibly spread by knowledge of its existence was a risky proposition. "Now. What we have here is my life, shortly after coming to Britain up to that day you obliviated me. Do you want the cause or the effect next?"

"Of the obliviation?" He frowned. "This is carefully curated. Do I truly have a choice?"

"This is worthless if you aren't confident you are seeing the truth. It is the truth, so it won't all fail to make sense if you see it in a different order than the one I would prefer. I would suggest you look at the cause first, but either works." The order didn't matter so much now. What mattered was that he would only see her memories, her viewpoint. None of his long nights of agonizing over Summoning. The information set he was learning from was different this time around, and it came with none of the urgency or fog of war the actual events did.

"Show me the cause," he decided.

"You asked." She would start with the best beginner explanation she had ever been given as to what powers really were…

A pity that explanation came from Bonesaw.

Sirius watched the pensieve. He knew what Dumbledore was getting into. He and Harry knew. Taylor had to pick and choose which memories she showed Dumbledore, and that meant getting feedback from an outside source.

Hearing about it and seeing it, the former years ago and the latter in this last week since the pensieve had been delivered, were two very different things. It made sense that they were the ones least comfortable with this whole operation.

Sirius had his doubts. Very substantial ones. In his opinion, Dumbledore staying obliviated was a gift from Merlin, and shouldn't be squandered. It was fair play, him living the rest of his life not remembering anything related to Taylor. It didn't even impact his life much after the first few months, unlike Taylor's obliviation. They shouldn't be jeopardizing that, even if Taylor had steadily learned enough magic in the intervening years that he would bet on her against Dumbledore in a fight. Not because she was more powerful, but because the gap between them was now small enough that he thought her ruthlessness would easily carry the day. It still wasn't worth risking making Dumbledore an enemy once more.

Taylor thought otherwise. They tended to disagree when it came to obliviation. He was too trigger-happy, or so she said, while she was too reluctant to rely on it to solve the problems it was uniquely suited for. He got his way when Remus broke his obliviation two years after it was applied, but only temporarily. This was coming, whether he liked it or not. And he would like to be able to say that the whole 'unprotected mind giving off Summoning vibes' problem was completely, entirely resolved. That would never happen while Dumbledore and to a lesser extent Remus were walking around with obliviations.

Still… He was prepared for this to go very badly wrong. 'Can't re-obliviate the lethal-force avenging war veteran Dumbledore' levels of wrong. To that end, he'd pick-pocketed Dumbledore's wands the moment he went into the pensieve. It would take him a while, maybe half an hour, to figure out how to use the runic alteration to have any awareness of his real body without coming out, so there was no way he knew.

And damn, if the old-man-power wand didn't feel exactly as good as he remembered from eight years ago in Saint Mungo's. Why Dumbledore was using a normal one instead of the old-man one when he had both on him was a mystery.

Taylor moved to point her wand at her own head, never taking it out of the pensieve.

"She's done with the starting memories," Harry noted.

"I want to see those memories too," Hermione remarked.

"No you don't," Ginny and Luna both retorted.

"What, have you seen them?" Hermione demanded.

Harry had an answer for her. "No, but they know not to want to."

Taylor moved again, twitching another memory out of her head. A minute later, she repeated the process. Time passed differently in the pensieve, only flowing at normal speed when the individuals within were actively interacting with each other. If they were just watching, the memories went by much faster than they would have played out in real life. She got through a half-dozen without incident.

Dumbledore moved. His legs spasmed. His hands, lightly gripping the bowl, slipped off and reached into the liquid memory.

"He's not coming out, he knows how to get out," Sirius said. "So what–"

Dumbledore lurched back, breaking contact with the bowl as his face flung out, wet beard and all. He reached for his wand, scrabbling at his own robes, eyes wide and unseeing.

Sirius helpfully petrified him. "Hey, come back to reality," he barked.

Dumbledore's eyes slowly focused on the wand Sirius held. He had used the old-man one, because he could. What other reason did he need?

Taylor pulled out of the pensieve, her hair shedding the liquid in a silvery wave. "Good, you got him," she breathed. "What was it, Dumbledore? Did you pull out on purpose?"

"So… you are the one who defeated me and then returned it," Dumbledore breathed, completely ignoring Taylor. He really needed to straighten his priorities out.

"Yeah, needed it to get the drop on you way back when, figured it would be smart to disarm you tonight." Sirius shrugged. He hadn't defeated Dumbledore, Taylor took the wand and stunned him, but he had suffered a nasty spider bite to get it, and that was almost the same thing. Also, Dumbledore didn't need another reason to dislike Taylor. "So? It's a nice wand, I'll give you that."

"It is not a nice wand," Dumbledore said slowly. "Is it the one you obliviated me with?"

"Yes." Sirius considered the knobbly old stick he was holding. It really was a powerful wand… He didn't think wands were supposed to feel like this.

"Keep it." Dumbledore closed his eyes. "It has not behaved quite right since that day. That, by the way…" He nodded to Taylor. "I did not know why. But I knew something had changed."

"Are you willing to come back?" She gestured to the pensieve. "You haven't seen enough to get a clear picture yet."

"If I am not willing, you will obliviate me again," Dumbledore said.

"Yeah. We will." Sirius waved the wand. "If you do keep going, I might see fit to remove the first obliviation," he offered.

"You will not be able to. That wand is ever-suited to destruction. Those memories are not covered up or hidden, they are gone." Dumbledore sighed. "Free me. I must see it all."

"Must you?" Sirius asked.

"I am in too far to back out now."

Sirius considered the distressed old man. He didn't look on the edge of sanity, or like he was plotting to attack them all. It seemed safe enough, relative to the baseline level of risk this entire operation depended on. "Keep going. I won't say it gets better, but if you're anything like me you'll come out the other end relieved, not terrified."

He unpetrified Dumbledore, and Dumbledore immediately returned to the pensieve, dunking his face with the attitude of a man bracing for a shock.

"Good work. I think…" Taylor looked at all of them. "I think this may actually be working," she said softly. "Let's see it through."

Dumbledore was made of tough stuff. Taylor knew he had to be, considering the things he had seen and done as a matter of public record, but this trip through her life on Earth Bet was showing her that she had underestimated him.

Bonesaw startled and disgusted him. Her talk of passengers scared him more. Flashes of theoretical discussions about powers during her time with the Wards genuinely interested him, their casual power use more so. The thing that had finally undermined his resolve was no less than Leviathan. The deaths, the never-ending toll listed out by Dragon, flood waves, a moving terror infinitely more disturbing and inexorable than the greatest magical beast she had seen in this world…

She couldn't fault anyone for looking away when they were first faced with something as terrible as an Endbringer. There was a reason she was never going to put any memory of the Simurgh into the pensieve. At least Leviathan was a purely physical threat.

They stood on a street flooded ankle-deep. In the distance, a few blocks away, heroes flew in the storm, batted back and forth. Lasers flashed, Leviathan moved, his water echo crashing down behind him.

They could be this far away and not be standing in a soupy mess of nothing because her bugs had perceived blocks around her. That made her pensieve memories very large. It gave them a way to talk, without being in the middle of the fight. Instead, it played out far away, and yet uncomfortably close.

"This world was a world without hope," Dumbledore said soberly.

"Yes." For the most part.

"That thing. For that, I might cast my first killing curse." He looked down, as if the admission pained him. "I take it that would not have worked? The sheer variety of abilities on display here…"

"I don't think it's technically alive. Also, it's made of dead mass." A killing curse against Leviathan, or any of the Endbringers? It just wouldn't work. They were, if she remembered correctly, crystalline inorganic matter. Killing curses didn't work against metalwork golems, they wouldn't work here. There was also a matter of sheer scale, though she had no idea whether that was a factor. It took energy to kill something. How much energy did a single Avada Kedavra convey?

"So no." He put his hands behind his back and straightened up. "This is the worst?"

"The absolute worst?" She shook her head. "No. This is the baseline worst. The thing any normal person might fear most, from day to day. There's more, beyond what everyone knew to be afraid of."

Next would be Scion. Then a few earlier memories to link the nature of her shard to Scion, and then an explanation of Contessa, and showing her actions after the fight.

He knew who she was. He knew what she was. Not every sordid detail, she glossed over her own actions beyond a few key moments, but this wasn't about her. He could condemn or approve her personal actions at his leisure, later when he inevitably picked over her life to satisfy his curiosity and confirm her truthfulness.

No, the important thing here was the shards themselves. What they were, how they operated, and how they were limited. He was afraid of the unknown. She was showing him that it wasn't unknown, and it was bad, but not in the ways he feared.

Harry already had his wand pointed at Dumbledore when he and Taylor emerged from the pensieve for the second time. Dumbledore looked seasick. Taylor too was drawn. Viewing those memories wasn't easy for her.

"Sirius, we're up to your contribution," Taylor called out.

"Yes, that." Sirius waited while Taylor returned the memories in the pensieve to her own head, then added his own. "Full disclosure, Dumbledore pre-obliviation warned me, but I didn't know anything about what you just saw. Just so you don't think I'm a braindead moron for doing what I did."

"I will keep it in mind, alongside everything else I have seen." Dumbledore all but dove back into the pensieve as soon as the memory was put in.

"No clue what his final opinion is going to be, but these are the last ones," Taylor admitted. "Be ready for anything when he next comes out. I'm going to try and keep him in until I know what he's thinking, but I can't actually hold him in."

Sirius' meeting with Dumbledore. His interrogation of Taylor, and by extension her shard. His memory of the hospital confrontation. Three simple events. No real fighting, no terror – except, perhaps, on Sirius' part – just talking. She knew them almost by heart. They were soothing, in comparison to what came before. Not her memories, not her mistakes. Things that had happened. A setup, a harsh moment, and a redemption.

For Dumbledore, they were just as difficult to deal with as the first set of memories, more so since two of the three were directly poking at things the obliviation had removed from him. She ran through each twice, for his benefit. He watched them in overwhelmed silence.

When they were done, she cut to the last memory she intended to show unless he asked for something specific. Her, Sirius, and Harry on a beach that summer after Dumbledore's obliviation.

He looked out of place on the remembered sand, standing on top of a dune. He stood stiffly, his robe hems dragging on the sand as his feet sank in.

"It's a lot to take in," she said, feeling out his state of mind.

"More, with the full picture," he said. "Is our world doomed to become like yours? Chaotic, hopeless struggle?"

"It had better not be," she said. "It won't happen because of Scion, he's dead. It won't happen because of me or my shard, I want peace and my shard only wants to learn. This world has its flaws. I'm not denying that. But the shards don't understand magic, so we know your magic doesn't come from them. The game isn't rigged against you. Apocalypse and endless violent conflict isn't inevitable." With magic, she could even say she had hope if another set of entities showed up. Her shard's constant struggle to assimilate magic meant it was an unknown factor. It was a chance.

Dumbledore sat down on the dune, facing the ocean. His beard fluttered in the remembered wind. Down by the tideline, Harry splashed Sirius, who turned into a dog and began backpaddling water at him. The remembered version of Taylor joined them, changing into a dolphin, to the surprise and delight of both.

"I see now, why you did what you did," Dumbledore said. "You were working with more complete information than I. Why did you not tell all of this to me first?"

"Because you're a threat." She sat down next to him, more comfortable around him in the pensieve than she would ever be in real life. "You had all the power. You had an opinion. Your opinion would stop you from listening to me. Also, we didn't have a pensieve and didn't know you had one. It would have been my word, and maybe legilimency, if you could be convinced to try it after freaking out. I wouldn't advise that even now, because I only trust my shard to do what it thinks I want, if left to make a choice. Putting yourself at its mercy? About as scary as me putting myself at your mercy."

"I would have listened," Dumbledore argued.

"How could I know?" she asked. "Why would I believe that if someone told me so? You obliviated me. You said my death was a possibility when talking to Sirius and Remus. You suspected things that would make listening to me a game of endless second-guessing, and you weren't wrong. This is different for two important reasons."

"One is that you have had an additional eight years to prove my worries invalid," Dumbledore guessed. "You are a known figure in magical society. You know all kinds of magic. The world is your oyster, you and your shard. This has allowed you to romance a wealthy bachelor, raise a child without my meddling, and found a library. Hardly things to fear. You won, and in winning you proved there was nothing bad about your victory."

"Don't forget my shard is probably part of the reason Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes were crippled," she reminded him. "I know you did the legwork of finding and finishing them off, and they weren't completely broken, but he never came back from that. That wasn't me, and I don't think it was only Harry's spell. Voldemort went into my mind. My shard didn't like that."

"Your Occlumency shields?" he asked.

"Strong. It won't happen again. But me proving myself wasn't one of my two reasons this is different than me telling you back then would have been."

"What are they?" He lifted a hand to tuck the fluttering end of his beard into his robe.

"First, you're coming at this with a fresh perspective." She picked up a handful of remembered sand. It was cold in her palm. "Back then, everything I told you would have been filtered through your preconceptions. You were certain it was Summoning. You were certain I was a victim, or no longer existed except as a shell for something worse. I had nothing to convince you, from that perspective, that you were wrong. Here, without those memories, you're more open minded. It's hard to throw away years of assumptions. Easier, to go at it from scratch. It might still have been possible, but it wasn't about whether it could work, it was about me getting things to a point where I was willing to take the risk." Neither she nor Sirius thought of that at the time of his obliviation, but it was definitely a factor in deciding to do this now. As was receiving the pensieve.

"Your reasoning is that the obliviation was a necessary prelude." He didn't sound happy about that. "The other reason?"

"You held the power back then." She let the sand fall from her hand. "In Saint Mungo's, it was the most pronounced. Sure, we had you as a powerless snake, but that was inherently temporary if we wanted to try talking to you. I was injured, and Voldemort, who is said to have only ever feared you, had just thrashed me to an inch of my life despite my best efforts. You said my death was an option, and you almost ruined my life through negligence, thinking you were keeping me relatively safe. Power plus a bad history meant I was not willing. Before that moment, I still knew you were too far above me to fight."

"You could have explained and then obliviated me if it didn't work…" He looked out at the horizon. "But you would never know if I was of the same mind as you if I simply lied. You wouldn't know until my wand was back in my hand and I had the power again. What is different now?"

"Eight years," she said. "I learned slow. I learned hard. But eight years is a long time. A year more than the time needed for a child to go from clueless to competent while still having time to live a life and study inefficiently."

Dumbledore turned slowly, ever so slowly, to look at her. "Do you think yourself my equal now?" he asked.

"No, I don't," she said. Not yet. "But if I had to fight you tonight? With the help of Sirius, Harry, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, and Luna, all of whom are talented in their own right, with their own diversified skills and tactics?" Most of them were Harry's friends, Harry's team though the world was not so harsh as to force them to fight to survive. They were all exceptional, and unlike the magical friends she had made over the years, they were wholly on Harry's side when it came to matters involving Dumbledore, already in the loop to some degree. "I would pit myself and them against anyone in Britain without hesitation. Anyone in the world without losing hope. I'm not you, I'm not Voldemort, but I have my own skills, and the gap between us isn't insurmountable. You're not my new Scion. You were my Alexandria, back then, only beatable in specific circumstances from an unexpected angle. Now, you're more like Lung. Obviously more powerful, inherently stronger and with a better grasp on your abilities…"

"But in no way insurmountable," he finished. He had seen both of those moments. They were important to who she became. He had also seen her working with Lung later on, in Cauldron's base. Hopefully the comparison stuck with him.

Down on the beach, the Taylor of her memory had turned back into a human to lift dog-Sirius up, her tattooed arms wet with seawater. Harry cheered as she threw him out into an oncoming wave.

"The balance of power isn't in your favor any longer," Taylor concluded. "That's why I waited until now, why I didn't do it after the first summer, or the first year, or when Harry graduated and you had no more say in his life. I could have waited forever, apparently, but that…"

"Why did you not?" he asked. "Truly?"

"Because obliviating you wasn't fixing things. It was postponing dealing with the problem." Postponing indefinitely. If he had died falling down an unexpected flight of stairs two days after his obliviation, the problem would have resolved itself. But that wasn't fixing it, that was pure chance taking it away, obliviation or not. "Also, this way I can hold to my own values. Believe it or not, I don't like obliviation. If I could remove that spell from existence, I would. Maybe it's the cornerstone of your Statute of Secrecy, maybe removing it would cause all sorts of problems, but I don't believe it solves anything. Not really. At best, it lets you ignore that there was a problem to start with."

"And yet you relied upon it," he said.

"Don't like and won't use are two different things," she said dryly. "I'll do it again if I have to. But I hope I don't."

Dumbledore stood and brushed the sand off the back of his robe. "You only want me to leave you alone to live your life."

"I want to know that you won't ambush me in the dark and leave me mindless or dead," she confirmed. "And I want to know I'm not relying on an obliviation to protect me. If you still think I'm a danger, come out of the pensieve fighting, because you'll never get a better chance to put me down."

She stretched her arms and pulled her hands back, marveling once again at how real they felt. Her knuckles cracked, one by one. Her wand wasn't here in the pensieve, but she could feel it in her hand, back in her real body.

"I won't attack you," he said. "You've convinced me. I may not agree with your every decision, but you acted with the right intentions."

"Funny. I could say the same of you. The road to hell is paved with good intentions." She hadn't forgiven him for what he did, and unlike with Sirius she didn't think she ever would. But forgiveness and tolerance were not the same thing. "I won't say we're even."

"Why's that?" he asked.

"I kept tabs on you while you were obliviated."

Taylor returned to her body with her wand pointed at Dumbledore's head, not her own. Everyone else had their wands trained on him, too.

Dumbledore rose from the pensieve slowly, his hands going to his beard to straighten it out. "What time is it?" he asked.

"Late," Sirius supplied.

"You've been in there for three hours," Hermione supplied.

"I need either a long sleep or a barrel of strong spirits, and for my own sake I am going to choose the former, if I can get it," Dumbledore said. "Sirius, you may keep the wand. It is yours, and has been for a long time. Beware those who might covet it."

"Okay…" Sirius examined the wand, then tucked it up his sleeve. "Need me to call you a ride? The Knight Bus?"

"Fawkes!" Dumbledore called. His phoenix burst into being above him. It crooned sadly when it saw him, and immediately landed on his shoulder. "If you would, please…"

Sirius gave back the normal wand. Dumbledore did nothing with it, beyond putting it away. "Ms. Hebert, I will return to look through your memories more thoroughly once I have had time to determine what is worth the price of seeing such things."

"No price, it's in my best interest to make sure you're satisfied with what you've learned," she told him.

"I was referring to the mental toll of looking upon such horrors," he said sadly. "I do not envy you."

With one final caw, his phoenix flashed them both out of the room in a burst of flame.

"That's it." He could be lying, but she wasn't lying when she told him attacking immediately was his best shot. She had backup plans, contingencies, and ways to avoid being ambushed. Magic offered almost infinite possibility, and she had anticipated the possibility of him breaking the obliviation at any time in the last eight years. If he tried something tomorrow, next week, or next month, he would fail. She rubbed her arm absently, feeling more tired than she had all week. "Mission success. Probably. Thanks for coming, everyone–"

Harry hugged her. His forehead bumped into her nose. "I'm proud of you, mum," he said. "You didn't have to do this."

"I don't think it's anything to be proud of." Correcting her own moral compromises and postponements should be the expected bare minimum, not worthy of praise.

"Well, you always say that about the things you do, and it's never true," he shot back. He let go, stepped back, and Sirius immediately took his place, though his hands drifted a lot lower than Harry's ever would.

"I'm taking you home and not letting you out of bed until you're too well-rested to want to hex me," Sirius whispered.

"So long as you use a time turner to get me back here bright and early, or wait until tomorrow evening." She still had a job to do. Confronting Dumbledore was for her own peace of mind. Running her library was her chosen responsibility.

"We'll negotiate," he promised. "You trained that kid to do the job, didn't you? Have him fill in."

"On my first day?" She laughed and pushed him away before he could apparate her, because she felt him gathering the magic to do that, and waved to Harry's friends. "Really, thank you all for coming. I know it didn't amount to much, but if it had, I would have needed your help."

"Better to be prepared for nothing, than to be unprepared for anything," Luna said. "Did your caterers prepare?"

"The extra food should have been taken to the employee break room," Taylor replied, unfazed by the abrupt change in topic. "It's yours if you want it."

"Save some for me! I never got around to eating anything, I was so busy annoying people," Sirius remarked. "Oh, also, the hat is on the roof. Don't ask why."

"We've been standing here for hours," Harry said.

"I could eat," Neville agreed. "My portkey home leaves at seven in the morning today, and my sleep schedule is totally out of whack because of the time difference and the plants being nocturnal. I'm probably not sleeping tonight."

"You'll take me out of this library over my dead, reanimated, and subsequently re-killed body," Hermione told Ginny.

"Take you out?" Ginny asked incredulously. "We're staying until Taylor makes us leave or the food runs out."

It looked like nobody was going home just yet.

Dawn found them, one and all, asleep in the staff break room. Neville was on the floor, having fallen out of a chair transfigured to fit him once the transfiguration wore off. Ginny and Hermione were cuddled in a corner, next to a stack of books they had pilfered on the way to the break room, a book still open across Hermione's lap. Harry was slumped back in his chair, his neck braced by a pillow Luna had produced from her robes, along with two tiny bat-like reptilian creatures, with exactly as much explanation as she ever gave for anything. She was using him as a pillow as she stretched across three chairs lined up beside him

Sirius was, at the moment, a dog on the floor. Taylor didn't know why this was, except perhaps that he was too tired to change back after changing to help Harry recount a story of a misadventure she had never heard about back when it happened. Taylor had one arm draped over him, and her back to the cushioned wall. Magic was good for many things, but in-the-moment convenience had to be at the top of the list. Bending reality to be more comfortable was a ridiculous use of the ability to bend reality.

With the dawn came sunlight through the charmed windows, flooding the room with early-morning light. Taylor woke first, the ache in her back from sleeping upright unexpected and annoying.

Her arms were inactive; the charm to activate them had worn off. Usually she took them off before sleeping, safe in the knowledge that were anything to happen, they were within a single levitation spell's reach. This morning, all she had to do was will them on, and they reconnected.

In a minute, she would wake Neville, who depending on the type of portkey would either have to rush to the Ministry to make it, or was currently running the risk of being whisked away while still sleeping. She would take Ginny and Hermione over to the front desk and properly authorize their books being withdrawn, as they had gravitated directly to the most obscure, illegal tomes she could get from the Malfoys and those couldn't just be taken off the shelf without following procedure. She would help Harry and Luna find the two bat-things that were not on Luna anymore, but couldn't possibly have left the room. Harry would help her get Sirius home without waking him, because unlike the rest of them he had pushed himself entirely too hard for no reason in the last week. She would greet her new assistant librarians when they turned up for their first day of work.

But not quite yet. For now, she would savor the moment, aches and all. For the first time in a very long while, she felt entirely, unconditionally at peace.

Author's Note: In a way, this isn't an epilogue. Epilogues don't involve the final resolution to the main conflict, they come after that resolution. But the final act to the Dumbledore conflict was set to come after a significant time gap (to justify Taylor feeling safe in revisiting it when she doesn't strictly have to), and the end of last chapter could have worked, mechanically, as an end. If not quite so satisfying. It's mostly an epilogue, so I labeled it as such.

(Also, how did everyone like the library thing? I'd been sprinkling in hints towards it all throughout the story. Taylor's occupation and how she gravitated towards the administrative, technical side of things getting experience in all of the necessary parts of running a library, Sirius explaining that she would be severely disadvantaged if she didn't have access to his personal library, her thinking about how she would need a 'fix the country' project once Harry was grown up, Sirius having money to burn and a need to stick it to the masses and the Malfoys in particular, the constant importance of books and recorded knowledge throughout the story, at every turn… It was very spread-out, and she didn't come up with the idea until well after the events of chapter 11, but I dropped plenty of thematic clues to it. I hope that works from the reader side of things.)

But all in all, that's it for the main story. I like my conclusions with wide-open worlds, a double handful of interesting characters, and enough empty space that the blanks can be filled in with 'and they all had many more adventures'.

I learned a lot from this story, more through posting than writing, oddly. My number one takeaway may be a bit jaded: I think I don't like having insanely popular stories. I appreciate all of the of positive support and constructive criticism (and typo-callouts, can't forget those), as well as the less well-meaning complaints with their grains of truth (less so, the lack of reading comprehension or tact), but something, or perhaps multiple things, about this story drew out the crazies in droves. More on FF than AO3 (make of that what you will), and the stuff you can see in the reviews there is the less offensive subset of the aggressively negative reviews. I had to outright disallow some of the line-crossing aggressive, obscenity-laden rants against myself and Dumbledore (you know, the fictional character?). The latter was honestly just weird, not hurtful, but some members of the HP fandom need serious help.

Beyond that? This story has been an object lesson in how you can't please everyone, and I don't mean that in a smarmy, 'justify doing exactly what I want' way. I mean that for this story, more than any other, I've received well explained, well-reasoned comments praising specific things, and been able to contrast them directly with equally well-explained, well-reasoned comments complaining about the exact same things from a different perspective. What the heck am I supposed to do with that? Ideally, rewrite the entire thing so perfectly that everyone is happy, taking into account all of this valid, well-expressed feedback, but most of the time when I try that it comes out with me feeling like shit and the new version being objectively worse or just untenable, so I don't use it. The 1 out of 10 times when I do produce something better, well… Those just make it worse. If it wasn't for those times, I could adopt a 'let it ride' policy and not try at all.

This story was also a thorough reminder of my own shortcomings as a writer, by the way. It is by no means perfect. It's not even as good as I thought it was when I started posting. Thankfully, that's part of why I write. To improve. There's a lot of room for improvement here, but I never claimed this was perfect. Only that I thought, by posting it, that it was good enough to be worth sharing. I still think that. Please note that as it stands, this story is a living document. Now that it's done and I have all this feedback, I'm going to go back, do another typo run, stick all of the author notes into the designated spots on AO3 (just for you, that one reader, because I'm going back anyway and I might as well), and then? There are some bigger things in this story I think I can revise and possibly fix, or possibly not. (Not saying which or making any promises in case that turns out to be 'not' and nothing changes). I'll keep you updated...

To see those updates aside from any end results, and for those of you who enjoyed Intercession and want more (I hope there are some of you who fit that description? Honestly, I have little understanding of the proportion of 'happy readers' to 'disappointed readers' and 'batshit insane readers', except to hope the former might be the mostly-silent majority based on views and comment ratios?). Go check out Summoning, Snakes, and Sorting Hats, the newest thing I've posted on both AO3 and FF. I'm putting all of my Intercession deleted scenes, alternate takes, extra POVs of the story, and side-stories over there to avoid bloating this entry. There's already a selection of interesting things to look through, with more coming as I write it or polish already written content.

For those who reviewed in good faith, whether or not you are happy with this story, thank you for your feedback. On the whole, it's been an experience sharing this with all of you. This has been Intercession.