A/N: Since so many of you have asked me for a follow-up… here it is! Hope you like. I really don't expect anything else to come out of this, though.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.

Re-circled

(She'd waited decades for this moment.)

Arianna did as she said she was going to do. When a young blonde boy arrived in the neighborhood, she knew he was the one – new faces were so rare in Godric's Hollow that there was no doubt that this was the boy she had been warned against.

(The candles in the air cast a warm golden light on hundreds of heads beneath the stars.)

Albus had already gone away to school when Gellert Grindlewald showed up. She made it her mission to befriend him, in spite of her father's and mother's attempts to the contrary. Aberforth didn't know what she was doing or why, but he helped too, and she was grateful.

(Just like every year before that, the Deputy Headmistress pushed open the doors, and the Hall fell silent.)

Gellert was kind, but misinformed. Bigoted. In the year before Abe had to go to school – the year before Albus would come back – she did her best to show him why Muggles were not so different. He was a tough nut to crack. But she managed something in him; there was no way she hadn't, not judging by the looks he wound up exchanging with a curious Albus. She just hoped it was the right something.

(Everyone knew better – you displease Minerva McGonagall at your own risk.)

With Percival still in the house; with Aberforth free to go to school; with Kendra alive, and well, since she wasn't forever worrying about Arianna… There was nothing to stop Gellert and Albus from journeying to see the world. Arianna worried, but she'd done what she could, and only hoped that her eldest brother had the right kind of brain in his head, if the future she'd been told began to come to its own fruition anyway. In the only female Dumbledore, a more oddly cunning Hufflepuff the world had never seen.

(She supposed in the years after a war, the student-count might be low, but no recent war had ravaged this count: 200 new, trembling first years took their first step into the Great Hall.)

In Arianna's third year at Hogwarts, news of war spread through the world. The Muggle war was being led by a man named Adolph Hitler, and the wizarding war was being led by the Grindlewald-Dumbledore duo. She and Aberforth both suffered, some of their peers ostracizing them for the sins of their older brother and some demanding that they must see things his way, as his siblings, so why didn't the war excite them? It took the Muggles seven years to burn Hitler down, and Aurors another year to bring her brother and his mad lover to heel. The strain of knowing his son had started a bloody war had been too much for Percival – three years in, he drank himself to death.

(The frayed old Sorting Hat's song this year was especially jubilant – its own journey into her first-year-mind had revealed her secret to it, and it was just as excited for the coming first years as she was.)

Without her husband, Kendra wasted away to a shell of herself. Aberforth – on Arianna's encouragement – bought a bar in the wizarding village of Hogsmeade, and he brought both Kendra and Arianna to live with him. A change of scenery, he declared, was just what their mother needed while Arianna finished her schooling.

(The parchment with the first year's names on it unwound from the roll Minerva's hands, spilling to the floor with a whispered hush, loud in the expectant quiet.)

Aberforth's bar – with his mother in attendance – actually became a tough contender for The Three Broomsticks, even if it did cater to the rougher residents of Hogsmeade on occasion. Arianna graduated, and immediately applied for the Potions position. She was accepted, and taught there for fifteen years before finally gaining the additional post of Deputy Headmistress.

(The familiar Scottish brogue of her Deputy rolled confidently across the first name on the list, "Abbott, Hannah!")

It was tougher to figure out the child who might one day become the horrific He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. There were plenty of children who she kept a close eye on as the nineteen-forties rolled over from the thirties. There was no way to know for sure, but she got a bad feeling from a couple of them – Abraxas Malfoy, Ally Warren, Tom Riddle, Orion Black, Yvette Roe, and Baritus LeStrange, to name a few. Determined to keep the man who'd saved her from a life of prophetic pain and crazy, homicidal wizards, every child she taught that didn't come out morally 'right' from the school eventually gained an Auror-tail until they were caught in illegal situations, paid for out of her own pocket. Never let it be said that she didn't watch over her children.

(The Sorting Hat went about its job, faster for some, slower for others, and always politely applauded.)

Charles Potter's arrival made her giddy. Getting nominated, and then accepted, for Headmistress was a plus. She tracked his progress with fondness, and was asked to officiate his and Dorea's wedding. As the decades began to trickle by, and no sign of a Potter child appeared, Arianna's heart began to drop – had she messed up the timeline so bad that her savior would never be born at all? And then James Charlus Potter was born.

(A nervous Muggle-born, Hermione Granger, became a Ravenclaw, after a long stint with the Hat; young Neville Longbottom entered the Hufflepuff domain, after an easy decision; and the pure-blooded child, Draco Malfoy, followed his family into Slytherin, after barely touching the Hat.)

The combination of James, Remus, Peter, and Sirius was dangerous. Arianna decided to keep a close eye on them. James she watched because, as much as she loved him as his godmother, he really, really took after the mischievous, Slytherin nature of his mother, and was a spoiled, only, miracle child on top of it all. Remus she watched because of his 'condition', and the propensity it gave him to give into those who befriended him, in an effort to endear himself to them. Peter she watched because the shy little Gryffindor gave her the same feeling as those children she'd learned to watch since the forties. And Sirius she watched because of his family's history, even if he seemed to want to be the white sheep of the Black family.

(Unlike one universe, where she supposed the world stopped and the students stared when one particular name was called, nothing was different from one first year's Sorting to the next, even when, "Potter, Harry," was called.)

James married Lily, and had Harry. Remus grew courage, and befriended Severus Snape, who ended up inventing a potion to help with lycanthropy. Peter – as the children she'd eyed before him – ended up in Azkaban shortly after his graduation; he was one of the less crafty she'd come up against. And Sirius truly broke from the mold when he not only fell in love with, but sided with Remus, over the values of his family. Severus, while different in the extreme, was able to slip into the opening Peter left, and the Marauder's became a whole new group.

("GRYFFINDOR!")

Watching a skinny, delighted, eleven-year-old Harry James Potter walk through her doors was indescribable. She knew things were different; this Harry wasn't 'her' Harry. But that was okay, because he was happy, and he was only the kid that he wanted to be, not some hyped up icon. She knew when she smiled at him – as the Weasley Twins of Mischief greeted him with the same enthusiasm they'd greeted all their new Housemates – that he wouldn't understand, but that was okay, too. She had stuck to her promise, and she'd continue to stick to it.

(And Arianna murmured to herself as he sat down, "Harry James Potter lives again.")