On Monday morning, Hermione slammed the Daily Prophet down next to my porridge.
"Read that," she said.
The headline took up half the front page. THE BOY WHO SWAM: POTTER'S LAKESIDE HEROICS.
Underneath it was a photo of me coming out of the water with a girl under each arm, and underneath that was an article by Rita Skeeter.
I read it while Hermione sat down and watched me.
It was the nicest thing Rita had ever written. She called me "modest" and "brave beyond his years". There was a whole paragraph about Gabrielle.
There was even a line about "his clever and charming girlfriend, Miss Hermione Granger, who bore her ordeal at the bottom of the lake with great composure."
"Charming," Hermione said. "She called me charming."
"You are charming," I said.
"Rita Skeeter doesn't think I'm charming. Rita Skeeter thinks I'm a nosy little know-it-all who should mind her own business." She jabbed the paper. "A month ago she was trying to dig up a scandal about us in the middle of the Three Broomsticks."
She had a point. And in the books, this was right around when Rita's big Witch Weekly article came out, the one about Hermione breaking poor Harry Potter's heart.
Hermione had got hate mail for weeks. Somebody had sent her a letter full of undiluted Bubotuber pus.
Instead, Rita was writing me fan mail. Somewhere along the way she'd gone from recurring villain to my unpaid PR department.
"Butterfly effect," I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
"One little chat about jars, and she's terrified of me," I said, turning the page. "It's working."
Hermione looked at the article again. She seemed a bit pleased about that.
"Good," she said, and stole my toast.
Over at the Slytherin table, Malfoy was reading the same article. He didn't look happy about it.
I waved at him, and he shoved the paper at Crabbe, who started reading it upside down.
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On Wednesday, a big brown owl dropped a letter from Sirius onto my plate. It was short, and it looked like he'd written it in a hurry.
Harry,
Saw the Prophet. Fourteen minutes. James would have been unbearable about it for a month.
Next Hogsmeade weekend. Be at the stile at the end of the road out of the village, two o'clock on Saturday. Bring as much food as you can carry.
Bring Hermione too. I want to meet the girl who's been keeping you in line.
Sirius
Hermione read it over my shoulder, as usual.
"Keeping you in line," she said, sounding rather pleased.
"Don't let it go to your head," I said.
She took the letter off me and read it again, and her face changed. "Hogsmeade? Harry, he can't come to Hogsmeade. Half the school will be there. Someone will recognise him."
"Nobody looks twice at a big black dog," I said. "And I'll be there."
She thought about that. It was the second part that seemed to settle it.
"Fine," she said. "But we're bringing him something healthy."
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I asked Dobby for food on Friday night. I'd been planning to ask for a few sandwiches.
What I got, on Saturday morning, was a wicker basket the size of a small car.
"Dobby has packed chicken, sir," he said proudly, sitting on top of it. "And ham, and bread, and cheese, and pies, and the pumpkin pasties, and the treacle tart, and the little cakes, and..."
"Dobby," I said, "how many people do you think we're feeding?"
He looked at me with enormous, innocent eyes. "Harry Potter said as much as you can carry, sir. Harry Potter can carry a lot."
I couldn't really argue with that. I shrank it with a quick charm and put it in my pocket.
Hermione watched me do it. "You could have just carried it."
"I'm not walking through Hogsmeade with a basket the size of a car," I said. "Half the school would follow us to see who it was for."
Hermione considered it. "To be fair, though."
Vikkstar would have been proud.
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The walk to Hogsmeade was cold and bright, and Hermione held my hand the whole way down.
We did Honeydukes first, because you have to. On the way out we passed Madam Puddifoot's, which still looked like a Valentine's card had thrown up on it.
Through the window I could see Cedric and Cho at a tiny table covered in pink doilies, looking very happy and slightly trapped.
"Do you want to go in?" I asked.
Hermione looked at the cherubs hanging from the ceiling. "I would genuinely rather fight the grindylows."
"That's my girl," I said.
After that we walked out past the last few cottages to where the road turned into a muddy lane.
There was a wooden stile at the end, and sitting next to it, with its front paws in a puddle, was a very large, very shaggy black dog.
It had a newspaper in its mouth.
"Hi, Padfoot," I said.
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The dog wagged its tail so hard its whole back end went with it. Then it trotted off up the lane without a word, which, honestly, was how dogs usually did things.
We followed it up into the hills. After twenty minutes of steep, rocky path, we reached a narrow crack in the hillside that opened into a cave.
A secret meeting in a cave with an escaped convict. Very normal Hogsmeade date.
Buckbeak was inside, tethered to a big rock and chewing on something I didn't look at too closely. He swung his head round and fixed us with one huge orange eye.
I bowed. Hermione bowed. Buckbeak looked at us both for a while, decided we were acceptable, and bowed back.
Then the dog in the corner turned into my godfather.
Sirius looked better than he had in third year, which wasn't saying much. He was still thin and scruffy, and he still looked like he'd cut his own hair with a knife. But he'd put on a bit of weight, and he grinned at me as if he meant it.
"Harry," he said, and pulled me into a hug that nearly knocked me over. Then he let go and looked me up and down. "Merlin, you've grown. How are you this tall? You were tiny last summer."
"Good food," I said. "And exercise."
"Liar." He turned to Hermione, and his grin got wider. "Hermione. Last time I saw you, you were helping Harry break me out of a tower on a hippogriff."
Hermione went pink. "Hello, Sirius."
"I've heard a lot about you since."
"Have you?" She shot me a look. "From who?"
"Harry's letters," Sirius said. "They're very short, but you're in all of them. Usually in the bit where he says everything's fine."
I took the basket out of my pocket and unshrank it before this could go any further.
Sirius stared at it. "Is that all food?"
"Dobby packed it," I said.
"Who's Dobby?"
"House-elf. He likes me."
"Clearly." Sirius was already pulling the lid off. He found a whole roast chicken on top and made a noise that I'm fairly sure no human being had made since the Middle Ages.
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Hermione and I sat down on a rock and waited. It took a while. Sirius ate like someone who'd spent the last three days as a dog getting here, which he had.
When he got to the third chicken leg, she quietly pushed a bunch of grapes she'd brought from breakfast towards him. He ate those too.
"Right," he said eventually, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "That's the best meal I've had in fourteen years. Don't tell Kreacher. Thank Dobby for me." He leaned back against the cave wall. "Now. You owe me an explanation."
So I told him.
I told him about Horcruxes, and about the piece that used to be in my scar, and about how I'd got rid of it.
I told him about the threads, and about the memories I'd got from the shard. Four pieces gone. Three left, plus him.
In an anime, this would have been a ten-minute flashback with dramatic music. Instead it was just me talking for ages while a hippogriff ate a rat in the corner.
Sirius didn't say anything for most of it. He went quiet around the bit where I explained what a Horcrux actually was, and stayed that way.
When I'd finished, he looked at Hermione.
"Is he making any of this up?"
"No," Hermione said. "I was there for two of them. The diadem screamed."
Sirius rubbed his face with both hands. "Fourteen," he muttered. "You're fourteen. When I was fourteen, the worst thing I did was turn Snape's hair pink. Well, your dad did. I held Snape down." He dropped his hands. "Does Dumbledore know?"
"He knows something," I said. "He's not stupid. I'll tell him the rest when it's useful."
Sirius didn't look happy. "He could help, you know."
"He could," Hermione said, and gave me a very pointed look.
"I've got it handled," I said. "Honestly. I know what I'm doing."
Sirius looked at me for a bit. Then he sighed.
"Fine," he said. "Then tell me about the locket."
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This part was harder.
I told him about Regulus: the cave, the potion, and Regulus drinking it himself so Kreacher wouldn't have to.
The fake locket he left behind, and the order he gave Kreacher to destroy the real one, which Kreacher had spent sixteen years failing to do.
Sirius didn't say a word the whole time. When I finished, he just stared at the floor of the cave.
Hermione nudged me. I shook my head slightly. Sometimes you just leave it.
"I thought he got cold feet," Sirius said finally, still looking at the floor.
"That's what everyone thought. He joined up, he got scared, he tried to back out, and they killed him for it. I thought he was a coward." He laughed, not very convincingly. "He was sixteen when he joined. Idiot. Absolute idiot."
Then he shook his head. "He went into that cave on his own," he said. "Against Voldemort. With an elf."
"He did," I said.
Sirius didn't say anything else for a while. Then he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Hermione and I both suddenly found the cave wall very interesting.
"Brave idiot, then," he said roughly. "Mum would have been furious. Both ways."
After that, he wanted to talk about anything else, so Hermione asked him about Kreacher, and that helped a lot.
"I've been staying at the old house since I found your locket," Sirius said. "Don't ask. And last week, Kreacher made me a cup of tea." He sounded genuinely disturbed.
"He walked into the kitchen, put it down in front of me, said 'Master Sirius's tea' and walked out again. I sat there staring at it for an hour. I thought it was poisoned."
"Was it?" Hermione asked.
"No. It was a perfectly good cup of tea." He shook his head. "Then on Thursday he dusted the drawing room. Voluntarily. He's still calling me a blood traitor under his breath, mind. But he says it nicer."
Hermione looked very pleased about that. I could tell a speech about house-elf rights was coming, and so could Sirius, because he quickly changed the subject.
"The insider," he said, turning to me. "The one who put your name in the Goblet. You said it was someone at Hogwarts. Any closer?"
"Not yet," I said.
Sirius frowned. "Harry, if someone in that castle is trying to kill you..."
"They're not trying to kill me," I said. "If they wanted me dead, they'd have done it by now. They want me to get to the end of the tournament for some reason. So I'm keeping my eyes open and letting them think it's working."
"I don't like it," Hermione said quietly.
"That's..." Sirius started, then stopped. "That's actually not a bad plan."
"I know," I said.
"It's a very Slytherin plan."
"Hermione says that about all my plans," I said.
"Because they all are," Hermione said.
Sirius looked between the two of us, and then he started laughing, properly this time.
"James would have just punched someone," he said.
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Then he stopped laughing and pointed a chicken bone at me. "But if anything happens, anything at all, I want to know straight away. Not three days later by owl."
"Owls are what we've got," I said.
"James and I had a better way, at school." He leaned back against the wall, smiling a bit.
"A pair of mirrors. You said the other one's name into yours, and his face turned up in it. We used them to talk when McGonagall put us in separate detentions."
"Where are they now?" Hermione asked.
He stopped smiling. "Mine's in a trunk at the house somewhere. James had the other one." He shrugged. "So. Owls."
I looked around the cave floor and picked up two flat bits of slate, each about the size of my palm.
"What are you doing?" Sirius asked.
"Hang on," I said.
The two-way mirrors. In the books, Sirius gave Harry his half in fifth year, wrapped up in a parcel, and Harry didn't open it until it was far too late.
I wasn't letting that happen this time. Making a fresh pair would be quicker than digging his out of a trunk anyway.
I turned the first bit of slate into glass, backed it with silver and gave it a little wooden frame, because I'm not an animal.
Then I did the same with the second one. After that, all I had to do was link the two together and tie the link to a name.
The whole thing took about a minute, mostly because I wanted the frames to match.
Hermione leaned in to watch. "Is that a Protean Charm? Linking two objects so they change together?"
"Something like that," I said. "With a bit more on top."
I handed one of the mirrors to Sirius. "Say my name into it."
He gave me a look like I'd lost my mind. Then he held it up. "Harry Potter."
The mirror in my hand went cloudy, and then Sirius's face was in it, staring out at me from about two feet away.
"Hi," I said to the mirror.
"Hi," said the Sirius in the mirror, and the real one, at the same time.
Sirius lowered his mirror very slowly. "That took James and me most of a term," he said. "We nearly blew up the dormitory twice."
"You told me how it worked," I said. "That's most of the hard bit."
Wizards had pocket-sized video calls back in the seventies, and they still sent most of their post by owl. Honestly.
Hermione was eyeing the mirror in my hand.
"Can you make me one?" she asked.
"You live in the same tower as me," I said.
"That's not the point," she said. "What if something happens and you're off somewhere on your own?"
I made her one that night.
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There was one more thing I wanted to say before we left, and I'd been saving it.
"Sirius," I said. "You're going to get your name cleared. I don't know when yet, but it's going to happen."
Sirius just looked at me, like he wasn't sure he'd heard right.
"You can't promise that," he said quietly.
"I just did," I said.
In every fanfic I'd ever read, this was the bit where the godfather got his name cleared. Usually there was a trial, and Fudge got humiliated, and everyone cried. I couldn't promise Fudge would be humiliated. But I was going to try.
Sirius rubbed his face again. "Is he always like this?" he asked Hermione.
"Yes," Hermione said, at the same time as I said, "Mostly."
Sirius laughed, a bit shakily. "Your mother," he said to me, "used to look at your father exactly the way Hermione's looking at you right now."
"What way?" Hermione said, immediately suspicious.
"Like she was going to murder him, and also marry him," Sirius said.
Hermione turned bright red. I decided this was the best day of my life.
We left Sirius with what was left of the basket, which was still most of it, and walked back down to Hogsmeade as it started to get dark.
Hermione was quiet for most of the way back, thinking. Halfway down the hill, she took my hand again.
"He loved his brother," she said.
"Yeah," I said.
"And he spent all those years thinking he was a coward." She shook her head. "That's awful."
"He knows now," I said.
"Because of you," she said.
"Because of Kreacher," I said. "I just asked nicely."
She squeezed my hand. "You were very good with him today. Sirius, I mean. You knew when to stop talking."
"I have my moments," I said.
"You're usually terrible at it," she said. "That's why it was impressive."
We walked a bit further. The lights of Hogsmeade were coming on below us, and from somewhere up the hill behind us, Buckbeak gave a loud, unhappy screech, probably because Sirius had started on the treacle tart without him.
"Harry," Hermione said. "What Sirius said. About your mum and dad."
"The murder and marry thing?" I said.
"Yes." She didn't look at me. "Do I really look at you like that?"
I thought about lying. Then I thought about how many times she'd glared at me this year, and how many times, about ten seconds later, she'd stolen my toast.
"A bit," I said.
She went pink again. Then she bumped my shoulder with hers, hard, and didn't let go of my hand.
"Good," she said.
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