Now that exams were well and truly over, at least for the Fifth-Years, Harry found himself with an almost intoxicating amount of free time – and, in particular, free time in which he was able to use magic.

One of the first things he did was make a belated trip to Fort William to return some library books, take others out and pick up anything new and interesting in the book shops, and one of the first books he saw while he was there was one by the same person who'd written A Tale of Time City and Howl's Moving Castle – only it wasn't really in the same sort of style as those books, instead it was in a sort of guide book style which Harry puzzled over for a minute or two before deciding that it was meant to be a guide to fantasy novels.

At that point, it became extremely funny. Harry particularly liked the entry on Swords, which announced that if you found a broken sword you should discard it immediately because before too long 'you will be required to reforge the bugger' and it would mean about a year learning metalwork.

And the bit about how Rings were usually the sort of thing that could put you under the influence of the Dark Lord was entirely relevant to Harry's experience.

As it was the first time Harry had had such an extended period of homework-free time at Hogwarts, that also meant he spent an hour or two a day in the library. The atmosphere there was sort of highly charged, in the sense that there were a lot of people there still revising for their own exams – the last few NEWTs or just the end-of-year exams – because the OWLs came first, but Harry did his best to just sit there in a vaguely available sort of way on the grounds that he was a Prefect and this was one way he could help with that.

"I wonder if the books in the Restricted Section are available if you're doing NEWTs?" Neville mused. "I don't know how they organize it."

"Maybe it's if you want a specific book from the Restricted Section you have to ask the librarian?" Dean suggested.

"I'm not sure that would work," Neville shrugged.

After a pause, he elaborated. "Half the point of a library is that you can browse through it, right? So you can check which books fit what you're after. And if you already knew what books you wanted, there wouldn't be much point."

"But the books in the Restricted Section are dangerous," Harry said, craning his neck a bit. (He had quite a good capacity for craning his neck, which was just one of the nice things about being a dragon.) "And it looks like a lot of them don't have the titles on them, either."

"Maybe you just get a pass," Neville pondered. "And then you have to take the books to the librarian? And it's if you're doing the subject…"

"Maybe we should ask," Dean determined.

"Do we ask someone doing NEWTs, though, or Madam Pince?" Harry said.

He frowned. "Or Hermione. I imagine she's probably retrieved a book from the Restricted Section at some point."

"Where is Hermione, actually?" Neville checked.

"Watching Quidditch practice," Dean told him. "I might see if the librarian's around to ask."

Before he could, though, there were some raised voices from around one of the bookshelves.

It sounded like someone was unhappy about their book – or, rather, two someones were unhappy for different reasons, and that one of those someones had the book.

Harry got up, slipping one of his bookmarks into the book he'd been reading, and leaned around the corner. "Is everything okay?"

"No, it's not!" said one of the students hotly, a Slytherin boy who Harry thought was in third-year. "That book was mine, and she-"

"Hey!" the Ravenclaw girl replied. "It was an-"

"Hold on," Harry asked them both. "If you're both speaking at once I can't understand either of you."

He looked at the book in question, a copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs And Fungi which didn't look like it was in a good way. It seemed as though it had somehow been dropped wrong, and maybe had been in a bad way before, because the binding had torn and the pages were hanging out.

"Is that book one that someone else had before you?" he asked the boy. "Or is it one you got from a bookshop recently?"

"It was my mother's," the Slytherin said. "And she-"

"Hold on," Harry asked again, as he thought the shouting was about to start, and turned to the girl. "What happened?"

"Well…" the girl began, sounding a bit embarrassed. "I wanted to borrow Smitty's book for revision, because our Herbology exam is coming up soon and I don't have one myself. And he said I could, but it…"

She waved her hand. "...slipped."

"Okay," Harry said. "Do you mind if I try repairing it?"

"You think you could?" Smitty asked, hopefully.

Harry's reply was to take his wand out of his robe pocket and tap the spine, near the bit which had torn. "Reparo."

The binding re-bound itself smoothly, pulling back into place so that the book looked as it should (except for how it was an older book with the inevitable little scuffs and slightly yellowed pages), and Harry closed it before putting it on the table and turning his attention to the girl. "And I think you should apologize. Even breaking someone's things by mistake still means they got broken."

"Right," the girl agreed. "Uh… sorry, yeah. I suppose I should have been more careful."

Smitty looked at her critically for a few seconds, then nodded. "Okay, just be more careful next time."

"I'm kind of surprised there's going to be a next time," the girl admitted. "I mean…"

"I had the time to think about it a bit," Smitty said, a bit sheepishly. "And I realized that there are things of yours that I'd want to borrow..."

Harry felt good about that for the rest of the week.

Though it did take him an hour or so to realize that "Smitty" was probably a nickname for someone called "Smith".

The final Quidditch matches of the year came around after NEWTs, and fortunately they came around enough after NEWTs that there was time for those players who'd been doing exams to get some quick practice in and make sure their standard of play was as high as possible.

Slytherin against Hufflepuff came first, and after twenty or thirty minutes of play Cedric caught the Snitch – which gave him a clean Snitch sweep – though Hufflepuff didn't have a truly commanding lead, and when he wrote out the numbers he realized that it was one of those weird situations where if Ravenclaw won by a lot of points then they'd win, otherwise Hufflepuff would win unless it was Gryffindor who won by a lot of points.

Slytherin were just behind Hufflepuff, all told, but without a game in hand it was just not mathematically possible for them to win.

"Blimey, no pressure," Ron muttered, the morning of the game.

"It's about having fun, right?" Harry asked. "You just see how it works out."

"Of course it's about having fun," Ginny agreed. "And you know what's fun?"

She pointed at Fred and George.

"To crush your enemies," Fred said.

"To see them driven before you," George agreed.

"And to hear the lamentations of their Seeker," Fred concluded.

"I think that gets mentioned in one of the Discworld books," Harry told them. "Only in that one because Cohen the Barbarian is about eighty years old he wants hot water, good dentistry and soft lavatory paper."

"...actually, he has a point," Ginny mused. "But yeah, it's about fun, and winning is fun."

"Just remember not to catch the Snitch until you're meant to catch the Snitch," Ron told her.

"Thank you, Ron, that's very helpful," Ginny said, with a bit of a sigh in her voice. "Any other useful insights?"

"Nope, just that one," Ron shrugged.

"Very helpful."

The way this sort of thing was supposed to work was that there would be a beautiful summer's day for the final Quidditch match of the year, one that celebrated the end of exams – and the end of school – and started everyone off on their summer holidays.

What actually happened, however, was that it rained a lot.

It was still warm, but not hot, and that meant the rain wasn't as bad as it could have been (at least as far as everyone else was concerned; Harry had heard of humidity but he didn't think it bothered dragons much). In fact, even though the rain was annoying, the temperature was probably better for a lot of people than it would have been without the rainstorm coming down.

That didn't make it anything other than annoying, though.

Despite the unfortunate weather, the Quidditch game was excellent. Fred and George were truly on form, sending their Bludgers every which way, and more than once Harry saw one go rocketing at Ron or Ginny only for the Weasley in question to dodge out of the way – not without a few complaints – and the Bludger go on to do something useful which the Ravenclaw team hadn't properly allowed for, like curving around to have a second run at Ron and knocking a Ravenclaw chaser off his broom. Or smashing into the other Bludger with an echoing clang that kept Katie safe from the Ravenclaw Beaters and able to go through and score.

Harry was impressed, and he was impressed with the Gryffindor Chasers as well. After what was now at least five years working together they'd reached a kind of coordination where half the time they didn't even need signals, and the Quaffle bounced from one to another with a fluid grace that more often than not ended in a goal – and when it didn't it was usually the result of a tiring, last-minute save from the Ravenclaw Keeper.

Harry might have been biased, but he thought it was Ginny and Ron who were the real stars of the Gryffindor team. The Ravenclaw Chasers were good, and Ron had to make plenty of saves, but – and as the game went on it got more impressive by the minute – Ron was saving so many of the shots on goal that the Ravenclaw score was going up about four times more slowly than the Gryffindor one. And Ginny kept diving through the rest of the game at speed, only coming up to altitude to look around for the Snitch for a moment before stooping back down to disrupt a Ravenclaw attempt on goal or distract the Keeper before another Gryffindor shot.

"The funny thing is, in a few years this is probably going to be the other way around," Dean guessed. "By our seventh year the only people from this team who are still going to be in it are Ron and Ginny, but the Ravenclaws are mostly going to be the same people with more practice."

Harry nodded, then saw Ginny swooping down.

Something about how she was moving was different, and it took only a moment to realize she must have seen the Snitch. The problem was, Cho Chang from Ravenclaw had noticed as well, and she sped down to intercept.

"I think she hasn't seen the Snitch," Harry said, speaking quickly, and judging by the position of the Snitch and where both Seekers were flying. "Ginny has but Cho hasn't-"

Cho Chang suddenly swerved, just as Ginny let go of her broom to do her Perry trick, and there was a complicated blur of wood and feather and Quidditch player which ended with Cho holding the Golden Snitch aloft.

Ginny let out a loud call which sounded like 'cak', then began gliding down to where her broom had hit the grass.

"Cho Chang catches the Snitch!" Lee Jordan announced from the commentator's booth. "That means – that means Gryffindor win the match by thirty points, and it means Hufflepuff win the Quidditch Cup! Is my Arithmancy right, Professor?"

"Much as I would like to correct you, Mr. Jordan, I believe you are correct," Professor McGonagall told him.

"Why did she do that?" Neville asked.

"Cedric's her boyfriend," Dean told him. "Probably has something to do with it."

"Or, just perhaps, she was trying to do her job as part of her team?" Hermione suggested.

"That's crazy talk," Dean said, shaking his head.

Harry made sure to have a bath in the Prefect's Bathroom the night before the Leaving Feast, reasoning that he wasn't going to get a chance to enjoy it in at least a couple of months so he may as well, and then – because he'd just finished a book with her – he offered Empress the option of switching from the Pern books to the Discworld.

"A lot of it might not really be something you can understand very well," he admitted. "But since a lot of what's in them that you might not understand is something about the modern world – even if a lot of that is the modern Muggle world rather than the modern Wizarding world – I thought it might be good because that way we can talk about things when they come up."

"That does sound like a reasonable idea, at this point," Empress said. "But then, I don't know enough to say."

"There's kind of… several different story lines, and they sometimes meet up," Harry told her, wondering which would be the best one to start with. "There's one that's about Death, who's a person and not really very unpleasant… and there's another one which is about some witches…"

Thinking about how the first story with the Lancre Witches was based most strongly on Macbeth, which was something that Empress couldn't possibly have read or experienced, Harry moved on a bit. "Maybe the one which would work best to start with is the one about the City Watch. That's actually got dragons in it, though most of them aren't very impressive."

"Why am I not surprised that dragons are involved," Empress hissed, with what translated to Harry's ears as a chuckle. "If you think it would be a good idea, then that sounds like as good a reason as any."

Harry smiled, and opened the book to the foreword. "They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time-"

"How long is a film, usually?" Empress asked. "I gather that it is a way of telling stories, but…"

"Oh, usually about one and a half hours to two hours," Harry told her. "And you're right, it's a way of telling stories using moving pictures with sound. Sort of like-"

Harry was going to say it was sort of like a Wizarding photograph with sound, but then he remembered that photographs hadn't been invented that long ago.

"Like a painting?" Empress suggested.

"Like that, sort of," Harry agreed, then resumed.

At the Leaving Feast itself, before the food had actually been put out, Dumbledore stood and cleared his throat.

"If I could have a moment to make a few announcements?" he asked.

There was a silence in reply, one which went on for an uncomfortably long time. Harry started counting, trying to count one second at a time, and he'd reached twenty-four when Cedric coughed diffidently.

"I don't think anyone would stop you, Professor," he said.

"Excellent!" Dumbledore smiled, as if there'd been no awkward pause. "First and foremost, allow me to congratulate Hufflepuff House most heartily on their victory in the Quidditch Cup!"

Harry applauded along with the rest of the room, because the Hufflepuff team really had done well – he thought the Gryffindor team had been slightly better, overall, but that was no reason not to give them their due for winning the Quidditch Cup.

Cedric went up to take it, and thanked the rest of his team – which was nice – and then Dumbledore continued. "Secondly, I wish to extend my congratulations to Messers. Fred and George Weasley for having done very little to disrupt the school's learning environment this year. This has of course meant that some, and I am among them, might say that things have been a trifle boring, but it also means I can announce that Gryffindor has won the House Cup!"

Almost the moment he said it, there was a hissing shriek and a whole constellation of fireworks exploded in the air over the Great Hall's tables.

Catherine wheels five feet in diameter shot through the air, chased by lions made of golden sparks that trailed smoke from their manes. A rocket with a trail of red sparks orbited one of the lions like a comet, speeding up the closer it got and shooting out pyrotechnic embers, then burst with an emphatic bang and sent a wave of multicoloured butterflies spreading out in all directions.

A Roman candle whistled into the air, with the trail splitting with a succession of thundercrack bangs at three different heights and creating the illusion of a green and silver oak tree floating over the Slytherin table – one which dropped acorns that burst into wisps of white smoke upon striking anything remotely solid. One table over there was a much stranger combination of effects that produced a waterfall of smoke, up which salmon made of bronze stars swam before exploding upon reaching the top, and to cap things off there was an ominous rumble before a volcanic eruption made entirely out of firework sparks and trails burst into the air.

Harry was quite impressed that they'd got the pyroclastic flows right. And it might have technically been a guess, but it wasn't like anyone didn't know who the culprits were – a suspicion which was confirmed when a brilliant orange sparkler wrote words ten feet high over the high table.

Marauders' Magical Miscellany

Opening this summer

In Diagon Alley probably

And a funny logo with a MMM.

"How long have you been working on that?" Hermione called, over the shrieks and bangs.

She sounded more impressed than anything.

"All year!" Fred replied. "We had to keep ourselves busy with something!"

Once the impromptu display was over, and Dumbledore had admitted with a wink that he could not take points because the House Cup was already given, it was time for the food. Harry found it all as tasty as usual, and there were even some new dishes he hadn't had yet – in particular a kind of buttered melange of beans and maize, which had a name that was difficult to pronounce and according to someone from the other end of the table was from South Africa.

This sort of take-what-you-want feast was a good time for trying new things, in Harry's opinion, because if you didn't end up liking any of the new things you could just have the old things instead. Though he hadn't encountered much food he didn't like – he was sure there was something but you'd have to give him a few minutes to think of one.

"The school's not going to be the same without Gred and Forge," Ron mused. "...on the other hand, there are still Anne and Tyler, so it's not going to get completely normal any time soon."

"They've learned well," George said solemnly.

"They learned from the best," Fred agreed.

"And you," Ginny piped up.

"...walked into that one," Fred grumbled.

Finally, the puddings were all had, and Dumbledore stood one more time.

"I wish to make one final announcement," he told the room. "And then you can all go off and sleep, before the train takes you off tomorrow morning. That announcement is this."

He smiled pleasantly. "The position of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher is now vacant."

Umbridge looked like someone had just hit her over the head very hard, possibly with a classroom. Everyone else sort of just sat there in surprise for a moment, and then – and Harry couldn't have told you where – the cheering started.

"So!" Cedric asked, in the Prefect's Carriage, as they sped out of the station. "How's your first year as a Prefect been?"

"I have to admit, it's been a bit less fun than I was expecting," Draco said, inspecting his badge. "When I was a First-Year I seem to remember Prefects mostly turning up and doing things for no reason, but now that I am a Prefect there seem to be reasons for everything I'm doing."

He shook his head. "It's most annoying."

"Isn't that just called perspective?" Patricia asked.

"I'm sure it's nothing of the sort," Draco dismissed.

"One thing I've noticed is that I think Fifth Year might be the hardest year for a Prefect," Harry said. "It's the year you have your OWLs, and everyone has at least nine of those, while there's much less in the way of NEWTs – so your schedule is crowded – and you're also trying to learn how to be a Prefect, on top of that."

"Well noticed," Cedric told him. "And yes, it does get a bit easier. It helps if you're not trying to win an international competition on top of that, actually."

That prompted a few sniggers.

"Well, I think that's just about everything," Cedric added. "Anyone got anything else?"

"Is that it?" Hannah said, trying not to smile.

"Well, there isn't much point having you try and remember things over the summer," Cedric pointed out. "You'll have a couple of months to forget them, like Professor Dumbledore says."

He looked around at the television, which had just started working again as they sped away from Hogwarts (and which had apparently been fixed, as instead of showing Ceefax it was showing a documentary about how you could colour in a map with only four colours), and got up out of his chair. He spun the chair around to point at the television with a flick of his wand, then sat in it and turned into a badger.

"...since when could you do that?" Hermione asked.

"He learned earlier this year," Ernie told her. "Something about how it might have been useful, and he had enough free time."

Harry waited in the Prefect's Carriage a bit longer, to see if anyone would come to them with something urgent, then decided to go and see everyone for what would be the last time until towards the end of summer (or, in some cases, until he visited them for other reasons, like Fred and George).

The customary expanded compartment was already set up when he arrived – probably the work of the Weasley Twins – and just about all the unusually shaped students who didn't live in the Forbidden Forest were there, plus Melody who wasn't technically unusually shaped but who counted, and since it was about half an hour after they'd set off everyone was already settling into how they were going to use the long hours as the train sped south.

Ron was trying to explain to two sets of travel wizard chess pieces that he wanted them to try playing together on a big non-travel chessboard, albeit without much success, while next to him Neville was leafing through his copy of a book about the development of The Lord of The Rings.

Harry remembered reading that the last of that series was going to come out later this year, and he was interested to see what it included.

On one of the seats Dean was trying to explain about West Ham to Melody, and by the sounds of things either she was trying to mess with him (which was entirely possible) or she wanted to know about the other teams he mentioned just as much as she wanted to know about West Ham (which was also entirely possible), and Harry couldn't tell which was more likely.

"So here's my question," Anna said, sitting up and pointing at Fred. "How are you going to include something that represents the rest of us in the shop sign?"

"Are you saying you're not Marauders by association?" George asked, answering the question he hadn't been asked with another question.

"That counts all of us, sure," Anna allowed. "But you originally wanted to call it Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, and if you put a mirror over the top of the MMM logo then you get a WWW logo."

"Do you?" Fred said, sounding shocked. "That had not occurred to either of us."

"Yeah, no," Tyler told him. "You two might be slippery enough to be kitsune but we're not going to believe you missed that."

"I missed that," Lee Jordan confessed. "But then again, I was mostly trying to make sure these two got at least some NEWTs."

"I'll have you know that we're very talented magic users," George sniffed.

"Unfortunately, Professor Tofty doesn't take chocolates as proof of Transfiguration skill at NEWT level," Lee shrugged. "Even if they turn him into a newt."

Perhaps predictably, Hermione got out a big book she'd borrowed from the Hogwarts library to read over the summer – one of several, probably – and Ginny, Luna and Tanisis were soon absorbed in a discussion about scheduling things so they could do their shared homework together as much as possible over the course of July. That left Harry with time to read (he was reading a book called Shadows of the Empire which was set sort of between the second and third Star Wars films, so it was a bit like it was Episode Five And A Half) and he was some way into reading about the Many Bothans who had Died to Bring Them That Information when something occurred to him.

It looked like Isaac had ended up sort of left without anyone to talk to.

Rummaging through the books in his backpack – a collection of new ones he hadn't read before and old classics he wanted to read again – Harry selected a few, among them Mort by Terry Pratchett and The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey.

"Do you want to borrow a book for the journey?" he asked, getting Isaac's attention. "This one's sort of a comedy one, and this one's more of a magic adventure story sort of thing."

He was about to continue, but Isaac tapped on The Black Gryphon with a claw. "That one, please," he requested, in perfect English with a faint Scouse accent.

All the rest of the conversations going on in the compartment just stopped, and there were several seconds of silence. (Harry could understand why, because he was having a bit of trouble with what had just happened himself.)

"...now that," George said, eventually, "is the kind of Slytherin I can support."

Quite a few people had questions for Isaac, and the griffin ended up spending the next ten or twenty minutes explaining things instead of reading the book Harry had lent him.

Which did at least solve the problem of having nobody to talk to.

It seemed that when they'd started the year Isaac had been able to speak a little bit of English, but not much, and had been using the slate for long enough that he'd just preferred to keep it up rather than speaking in broken English. Then the thing with Umbridge had come up, and Isaac had just stuck to it as he'd gradually improved (mostly by practising on a mirror-call with a wizard he knew back home in Liverpool, which explained the accent).

Harry decided to be Responsible for a bit, based on his badge, and pointed out that it might actually be a bit of a problem if someone found out, because that would mean that someone like Umbridge could say Isaac had been disrupting class by not answering.

"...oh," Isaac said, looking a bit nervous. "I didn't think of that."

"So why did you learn that click language?" Tyler asked.

"That's much easier to learn," the griffin answered. "I had a lot more trouble with some of the syllables in English."

He shrugged a wing. "I'm still not great, though."

"Well, maybe if you improve a bit more over the summer, you can focus on that?" Harry suggested.

Really, it wasn't even the first time the way someone had learned a language had been sort of sensitive information.

Harry let Isaac keep The Black Gryphon, because he had another copy, and flew back to Privet Drive himself.

Surprisingly, there'd been a few changes since the last time Harry had been there. The house was still the same size and shape, except for a bigger greenhouse, but the front drive had been made larger and there was a shiny new moped next to a car that Harry didn't recognize and that had replaced Uncle Vernon's old car.

That had made Harry slightly concerned that his aunt and uncle had moved out without telling him, but nothing of the sort had happened – instead, it was quite the reverse, and the reasons for the changes started with the fact that Grunnings was doing very well indeed.

Harry wasn't sure of the details of the car, except that it was expensive, but Uncle Vernon was so proud of it that he spent several minutes showing Harry around the inside of it (albeit from the outside).

Diplomatically, Harry didn't mention how tasty the new car smell smelled.

The moped's explanation was even simpler, and it was that Dudley had turned sixteen a few days previously – which meant that he was now able to learn to drive a moped, even if he was still a year too young to start learning on a car. He was still big (if Dudley ever didn't look big then Harry would know something was wrong) but it seemed like his new pursuit of boxing was agreeing with him.

Possibly as a result of intimidation.

"Hey, Harry!" Dudley called, as Harry was on his way upstairs one day. "Come and have a look at this!"

Harry took his claws off the ladder and went into Dudley's main bedroom, where one of his televisions was hooked up to a complicated mess of wires that led to a videotape machine and several games consoles.

There were bits attached to some of the game consoles that Harry didn't think had been there last year, and he looked at them before glancing at Dudley.

"It's on the screen," Dudley explained, pointing, and started enthusiastically pressing buttons on the controller.

He appeared to be controlling a golden robot man, and whenever he hit one of the buttons the robot jumped so high he sometimes vanished off the top of the screen. He was also firing huge blasts of energy every second or two, completely destroying almost every enemy that appeared before they had time to do anything.

"Isn't it great?" Dudley asked. "I got loads of Action Replay codes off Piers, and there's one that gives you a green sword that kills anything! This is much more fun than trying to do it the hard way."

He paused, then gave Harry a look. "Actually, do you have games like this and stuff at… you know, your school?"

"TVs don't work there," Harry replied. "Not sure why yet, but it's probably something to do with magic. A Game Boy is fine, though."

"Weird," Dudley summarized. "I wouldn't want to go to school somewhere where you can't watch telly. You must be…"

He stopped. "Or, no, you like books and stuff. So you wouldn't be bored."

For most of July, Harry found himself at sort of a loose end.

He did have books to read, and there was cooking and cleaning to do – he was able to try out a few new recipes – and Harry also took the time to write out some more ideas for Dungeons and Dragons, in case he had enough time to spare now OWLs were done to actually start the club up again.

There was also a letter from Draco that turned up about halfway through July, delivered by the Slytherin boy's enormous Screech Owl, in which Draco said that he'd found out just why they'd ended up with Umbridge and it was because his father had supported her for reasons that Draco said sounded not really worth it all things considered.

He didn't say what the reasons were, and in Harry's opinion it would be quite hard for there to be a reason which qualified as worth it, but she didn't have the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher job any more so it didn't really matter any more.

Then towards the end of July a letter arrived from Dumbledore – delivered by Fawkes, in fact – in which he said that, in his opinion, the most likely place for Tom Riddle's final Horcrux to be was that it would be in someone's vault somewhere in Gringotts.

In a way that was good to know, but in another way it meant there was still a problem, because getting into the vault would be very difficult indeed. Gringotts had an all but spotless reputation, which they guarded zealously, and while (as Dumbledore outlined) there were only so many people who had Gringotts vaults who had been part of the Death Eaters – Imperiused, 'Imperiused' or not – there were still several of them, and they didn't even know which vault to look into as a result.

There was something about the list which Harry thought he wasn't quite seeing, something which would be a clue, but after teasing at it for a bit he ultimately decided to put it aside for now and started making himself a cake. It was a recipe that used yoghurt and chocolate, and he thought it would be just the sort of thing to have on his birthday.

Twenty minutes later and halfway through the mixing process, Harry realized that Mr. Malfoy had been one of the people who had had a Horcrux – and that because of Draco's mother the family was actually Malfoys plus one of the Blacks.

And it had been Kreacher, the Black House-Elf, who'd been involved in hiding another one of the Horcruxes – one which Regulus had retrieved, though of course they hoped that Riddle didn't know about that.

Sirius obviously didn't have a Horcrux, and nor did Andromeda, but the last of the Blacks from that generation was Bellatrix… someone who had most certainly been a Death Eater, and who'd married into the Lestrange family. And she'd been one of Voldemort's most committed supporters, as well.

It all made a great deal of sense, and Harry almost sent a Patronus to see if Dumbledore was alone (to see if he could talk about the sensitive information) before remembering that he was at home and he wasn't allowed to use magic yet.

Instead he got out the mirror that linked to Sirius, called Sirius, and had him do it.

The result was that Fawkes returned, ready to take a letter, and Harry resolved to apologize to Hedwig once she got back from delivering a birthday card and present to Neville.

Dumbledore's reply was that he thought it was an excellent place to start looking, assuming of course that they worked out a way to actually look in the first place. He added that he would see if he could get anything out of Gringotts that might be useful, though he was not sure how quickly it could be done.

Unfortunately, after all that, the recipe went a bit wrong. Harry got mixed up with some of the ingredients, and the cake he produced was sort of soaked through with runny icing that oozed out when it was cut.

It would have been a great effect if it was what he was going for, but it wasn't so Harry mostly just sighed and decided to try again tomorrow.

Harry left Number Four, Privet Drive on his sixteenth birthday, flying from the window towards Grimmauld Place, and it was only once he'd left that it occurred to him to wonder what his Aunt and Uncle thought of his occasional disappearing acts like that.

It was sometimes hard to remember that they were Muggles and therefore didn't know that he was a dragon, because Harry had spent the first several years of his life as a dragon assuming they did know and had more or less immediately gone from that to living around people who knew he was a dragon for eleven months of every year. With people he'd only met after finding out about magic it was much easier to remember, but the habits of a lifetime were hard to shake.

Maybe they just thought he used magic, really. Which wasn't wrong, though it had very few details and it wouldn't go well on an OWL paper.

The door to Grimmauld Place opened as Harry landed, and Sirius waved him inside.

"Happy Birthday, Harry!" he said. "How does it feel being sixteen?"

"Not very different from when I was fifteen, really," Harry replied, thinking. "I don't think there's anything new I can do now that I couldn't do before."

"I think there is some stuff you can do," Sirius frowned. "I know I moved out of here as soon as I turned sixteen, and I must have had a reason for waiting that long."

"That's not really something that bothers me," Harry said.

He tilted his head. "I think I'm now Of Age for some Muggle things, but they're not things I'm interested in. I know I can't legally cast magic outside of school until I'm seventeen."

"Which is a bit funny, if you ask me," Sirius shrugged. "You've got your OWLs, you'd think it'd be that. Anyway, Kreacher's got the birthday lunch ready, and there are some presents as well. And Sarah Abbott – that's your schoolmate Hannah's mum – says it won't be a problem if we use their Floo this afternoon."

They'd reached the living room while Sirius was talking, and he theatrically sank back onto a sofa. "I'm planning ahead and being responsible… what's happened to me?"

"Well, you are an old dog," Harry said, doing a quick bit of mental calculation. "You're, what, three hundred in dog years?"

"Low blow," Sirius grinned. "How old are you in dragon years? Is it even your birthday in dragon years?"

"...actually, I've got no idea," Harry admitted. "Some dragons live quite a long time, but I don't know if I'm one of them and the only way to find out is to ask myself that question again once I'm older."

"Age is funny like that," Sirius agreed. "You don't know how much you're going to get at the start, which is terrible planning. Make sure to give a bad review."

He got up again, taking a plate from the side of the table and starting to butter a slice of baguette. "The only question is who you send the review to…"

Harry got some quite good presents, like a new Redwall book called The Pearls of Lutra (from Dean) and a bag that was bigger on the inside (from Hermione, who said it would make it easier for him to carry things from class to class), as well as spider plants from Neville.

Harry had the feeling he'd be getting spider plants from Neville for years, because the one he'd got for Neville years ago had turned out to be the progenitor of a whole forest of spider plants.

Was that the collective noun? Harry wasn't sure.

There was also a book from Dumbledore, which contained with it a letter that apologized for getting Harry a book but he rather thought that Harry would appreciate this one. (Not a hard guess, for Harry, unless it was a book he already had – but this book was not a book Harry already had, so it qualified.)

"What's that, then?" Sirius asked, as Harry turned the thick book over in his paws.

"The Hermetic Book of Alchemy," Harry read off the front cover, then opened it to see what was inside. "It says it's by Nicholas Flamel."

"Wonder how old it is, then," Sirius said.

Harry wondered that, as well, because Nicholas Flamel was more than six hundred and sixty years old and so he could have written this book well before the discovery of America.

Or in French, though the inside leaf did seem to be English.

He opened it carefully to an inside page, and felt the paper before looking at what was written on it (in typeset text, not handwriting). "It feels quite new, and the paper isn't yellow…" he said, thinking out loud, then had an idea and turned to the inside back cover.

"About the Author," he read off. "Nicholas Flamel is six hundred and seventy at the time of writing and enjoys a quiet life in Devon with his wife, Perenelle."

Turning back to the front, and feeling faintly foolish he hadn't done that in the first place, Harry checked and saw that the book had been first published in 1996 – and was signed by Nicholas Flamel himself on the frontleaf.

"I think that's got to be some kind of record," Sirius mused. "Do you think anyone else has ever written a book at age six hundred and seventy?"

"Probably not," Harry agreed.

"Is that your Alchemy text book?" Sirius added. "I know you said you were interested in that, and I can never keep track of when the letters go out – do you know your OWL marks?"

"I haven't got either yet," Harry told him. "They have to send out the marks before the book list, right?"

Sirius shrugged.

Harry could have read the alchemy book all day, and indeed he thought he should give it a try at some point in the summer, but around two in the afternoon (and surrounded by drifts of wrapping paper, which Kreacher insisted they leave for him to clean up) Sirius reminded him that it was time to take the Floo.

Going by Floo to somewhere that wasn't a public place and wasn't somewhere Harry was actually going felt a bit strange. It wasn't like when he went to Neville's house by Floo, because that was like driving to someone's house – you were going there so you went there – but going to Hannah Abbott's house by Floo just to get to Godric's Hollow felt more like visiting Liverpool by driving your car to someone's house and parking in the garage.

Harry thought about whether that was the best way to put it, then thought about it a bit more, and as Mrs. Abbott showed them through the house from the Floo room to the front door he decided that he was probably thinking about this a lot more than most wizards did.

Harry didn't really know what he'd expected.

Godric's Hollow wasn't like Hogsmeade, which was an all-magical village and which wore magic on its sleeve. It was a normal if sleepy West Country village, with hills around it on three sides, and while there were certainly magical people there (he'd already seen some people he recognized from Hogwarts) it wasn't everywhere.

The first hint of what they'd come there to see was a war memorial, the sort of thing you found in villages all over Britain, but when you got close to this particular one it turned out that it was actually a statue (if you were magical, anyway).

Looking up at statues of his parents, who would never get any older – and of him, but him as a human rather than a dragon – was just strange and uncomfortable and at the same time Harry was glad he had a chance to do it.

Then there was the graveyard behind the church. The names and dates told Harry that a lot more Wizarding families had once lived there, compared to now, and there was even the name Ignotus which Harry thought was one of the names Dumbledore had mentioned once.

That was just what he saw on the way past, though, because Sirius led Harry right to the right gravestone. It was white marble, and carried the names of both James and Lily, and Harry just sort of stared for a long time trying to work out what he was thinking.

"I come here, sometimes," Sirius told him, and the words seemed to be coming from a long way away. "I don't know if it helps."

"I… think it's good that I had a look," Harry said, swallowing. "But I don't know what to say, or…"

"You don't need to say anything," Sirius told him. "And, speaking as James' best friend, I think they'd have been proud of you. If they can see you now, they are proud of you."

He paused. "If, probably, slightly confused."

Something about that struck Harry as hilarious, and he started laughing. He was crying a bit as well, and he tried to stop himself laughing because it didn't seem right, and the two things ended up sort of tangled up together for a few minutes until he managed to get himself under control again.

"Sorry," he said, holding up a paw. "I… think I'm okay now."

"It's all right to be not okay about this, Harry," Sirius assured him. "It took Andy months to get me to understand that, so you'd better pay attention because she often turns out to be right about this sort of thing."

Harry's ears went flat, and he nodded slowly.

"Do you want to see the house?" Sirius asked.

"Maybe," Harry replied, finding his voice a bit raw in his throat. "And then I might… go and spend some time somewhere else for a bit. To think."

"We're not far from the sea, here," Sirius told him. "You've got your wand, right?"

"Yeah," Harry agreed – it was in his backpack, because while wearing robes led to Muggles seeing him wearing robes for some reason not wearing robes led to Muggles seeing him dressed normally. "And some money."

"Then if you can't find your way back to Godric's Hollow, just use the Knight Bus," Sirius advised. "I'll wait outside the church."

Harry had known Sirius for a long time – over three and a half years, now – but he didn't think he'd ever felt more gratitude towards his dogfather.

Seeing the house, blasted open and left unrepaired as a memorial, was… hard. Harry couldn't help but think about how his life might have been if he'd lived there for years longer, if he'd grown up normally – or whatever path his family would have taken, if he hadn't been orphaned at age one.

It was a peculiar feeling, to be wistfully nostalgic for something that had never happened – and which, in a more Discworld-y way, Harry was quite aware might not have been anything like as pleasant as he was imagining. It was like the bit in Lords and Ladies where Granny Weatherwax punctured someone else imagining a life they could have had together by wistfully remembering them being caught in a house fire months after the wedding, which was sort of blunt but was a good reminder to keep in mind.

It helped, anyway.

Then Harry took off in a sudden whir of wings, wanting more than anything to be somewhere else for a bit. He climbed until he was on the level of the hills that cupped Godric's Hollow for three sides, then higher – seeing what was probably Bristol to his east and north, an expanse of town not as big as London but quite big enough to be getting on with.

There was a motorway just on the other side of a ridge from Godric's Hollow, with a nice recognizable bit where the two halves of it split, and Harry decided that that would make a good landmark. Following it away from Bristol led to a somewhat smaller town, with a large beach onto what was probably the Severn Estuary and a long pier with a pagoda at the end.

Harry spent the next hour or so throwing stones into the sea, some of it with the assistance of some nearby Muggles. Almost inevitably a competition about skipping stones started, and while the waves spoiled it a bit Harry managed to get quite a few skips in a row.

He made sure to be appropriately appreciative when a boy of about five or six told him about how flat stones could skip better, and – largely by luck – the first one he threw after being told that went further than the last one before being told that.

All in all, the hour or so by the sea (in a town which turned out to be called Clevedon) was just what he needed to sort out his thoughts a bit, and by the end of it Harry was quite sure that going to visit Godric's Hollow had been a good idea.

AN:

There's actually quite a small bucket of places where Godric's Hollow could be, since it's in the West Country and somewhere that flying from it to Surrey involves going over Bristol.

I elected to put it in a three-sided hollow of hills east of Tickenham Golf Club. That puts it not far from Clevedon, where one of my grandmothers used to live.