Full Summary:

Shortly after the Battle of Hogwarts, Harry is evaluated for Auror candidacy and denied acceptance into the Auror Academy due to his declining mental state. He is advised by Minerva McGonigall to continue his magical education by way of the American Exchange, a program which has been recently reinstated at the conclusion of the War. Students who participate in the American Exchange are required to spend a full year studying in the United States of American at one of the 11 American magic schools. Harry, in an attempt to escape the press in England, agrees, and attends the Pacific Transfiguration Institute in Portland, Oregon; Neville, having also been rejected by the Auror Academy, chooses to study at the Sonoran Herbology Institute in Tucson, Arizona; Hermione, wanting to complete her magical education regardless, becomes the first Hogwarts student in 50 years to be admitted to the American Sorcerer's Academy in New York, New York; and Draco Malfoy, taking some time from the climate in England to restore his family name abroad, attends the Laveau Potioneering Institute in New Orleans, Louisiana. Each of the four students participating in the American Exchange learn new things about themselves and the world in which the live, and deeper, darker secrets seem to float to the surface as they complete their educations and try to find where they belong in the wizarding world.

Possible warnings in the story include mature content in the forms of strong sexual themes, slash, gore, mild to medium violence, and adult situations. This story will be psychological and visceral, but it will feature some very humorous scenes as well.

Hope you enjoy!

oOo

Chapter 1: Duty Calls

As Harry, Ron, and Hermione prepared to leave the Headmasters study and head to Gryffindor Tower, Harry turned to them and said, "Wait. I just want to ask them one more thing."

Ron and Hermione looked at him, surprised, and stood quietly at the door, expecting him to speak again. When he did not, Hermione nudged Ron, who grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door open, and it wasn't entirely clear whether it was Ron or Hermione who escorted the other out.

After watching the other two leave the room ahead of him, Harry went to the door and gently closed it again, listening to the others talk softly on their way down the revolving spiral staircase outside. After making sure they couldn't hear him, he spun around in the room again, looking at all the portraits of previous Headmasters and Headmistresses beaming at him. He saw in their faces pride and thankfulness for what he had done today, but he also saw something else in the eyes of some of them, and those expectant looks from the previous Heads of Hogwarts made him very uneasy indeed. He strode over to the portrait of Dumbledore, who was resting the tips of his index fingers together and gazed intently on his greatest accomplishment.

Harry opened and closed his mouth, and the words to his next question ghosted in his mind several times over. He had been thinking about what he was about to say since he had dueled Voldemort in the Great Hall, and amid the celebration and the mourning and the contentment he felt over the conclusion of the War, he was still frightened by the prospect of what he was about to ask.

Dumbledore lowered his fingers and leaned forward in the high-backed chair on which he was painted. Harry looked at him anxiously, and leaned in close to the portrait and whispered, "What do I do next?"

Dumbledore didn't move for a moment, but then he leaned back in the chair on which he was painted. He looked up, a thoughtful expression on his face, and said, "You know as well as I do what the future holds. All I know is that whatever you do with your life, my dear man, it will be spectacular."

Harry looked at Dumbledore, and then he looked down at the floor. He suddenly felt more exhausted than ever, and a bit ill. Dumbledore ran a hand through his long beard and said, "I was under the impression that you'd wanted to be an Auror after you left Hogwarts."

Harry looked up at Dumbledore again, and he nodded briefly. Harry said, "First I think I need some sleep."

Dumbledore replied, "I agree. You need rest. A well-rested mind is the key to making any big decision."

With that, Harry took one more long, droopy look at the portrait of Albus Dumbledore, who smiled fondly at him, turned on one foot, and strode across the room again, pulled open the door, and said, "Thanks."

oOo

Ron and Hermione were waiting for him at the bottom of the spiral staircase. They were sitting on the floor next to the head of the gargoyle that once guarded the entrance to the Headmasters' Study. They were holding hands, and Hermione was nestled into the space between Ron's shoulder and head. When he got of the staircase, they looked up and him, stood up, and faced him.

Harry could tell that they were happier now than they had been in months, but Ron looked defeated and Hermione distinctly concerned. It was Hermione who spoke first, and she said, "Do you want to go to Gryffindor Tower, then?"

Harry looked at her, and nodded.

She joined hands with both Ron and Harry, and they walked the familiar path of the shattered and smoldering castle to the Fat Lady's portrait, which they found, blasted off its hinges. They looked around the corridor, and saw no one approaching from either end, and the ascended through the portrait hold to find the Gryffindor common room in ruin.

It had burnt completely. The once comfortable chairs were lying on their sides, charred and broken. The carpet was still burning in places, and the tables were cracked and blackened. The worst what was sitting in front of the fireplace, and when they approached it, Ron covered his nose and swore loudly and Hermione let out a scream.

It was a corpse, burnt to a crisp, its blood staining the floor, utterly unrecognizable par the Gryffindor emblem on its tattered robes. It was the size of a child, and it couldn't have been older than First or Second year. Above it, words were painted on the mantle in what was unmistakably blood:

GRYFFINDORS, BRAVE AND TRUE.

Hermione turned away into Ron, who looked disgusted and horrified at the tragedy in front of them. Harry turned slightly and fell to his knees and vomited onto the floor.

oOo

Minerva McGonagall had come running as soon as she had received the message from the silvery otter saying there had been an incident in what remained of the Gyffindor common room. When she approached the room, she saw the Fat Lady's portrait lying on the floor left of the portrait hole, and Harry sitting on the floor next on the right of it.

"What is it, Potter?"

Harry looked up at her, his face blank and he said, with no change in expression and no inflection on his voice, "We found another body."

McGonagall stiffened, and continued, "Do you know who it is? Could you identify it?"

Harry shook his head, staring at the floor, and replied, "Hermione and Ron are still in there, trying to figure out what happened, but I… I didn't want to stay."

McGonagall studied Harry Potter for a while on the back of his words. The boy looked completely drained, both physically and emotionally. He looked sick and frail, and by her reckoning, he could only really be a shadow of the person she had taught for six years, especially after what he had gone through tonight.

McGonagall raised her wand, and directed it down the corridor, and said, "Potter, I am very concerned for your wellbeing. I will call Madam Pomfrey…"

"Professor, I think Madam Pomfrey has enough on her plate at the moment," said Harry, a stony look in his eyes. He continued, "I think I'll be fine."

"Mr. Potter, you need…"

"I need sleep, Professor."

There was no denying that, certainly. Minerva said to Harry, "Potter, I will call Madam Pomfrey for some Dreamless Sleep. It's the very least we can do, and you'll need it."

"I'm all right, Professor," said Harry, and he got up, and began to walk away, saying, "I just need to be alone. Everything's better when I'm alone. No one else gets hurt."

With a sigh, Minerva muttered, "Expecto Patronum." Two silvery cats issued from the tip of her wand. One cantered down the corridor past Harry, turned down another corridor, and vanished from sight. The other slinked along beside Harry, and when Harry stopped, the Patronus slid along his leg gently. He reached down and scratched it behind the ears.

"Harry," said McGonagall, "I cannot allow you to be alone at the moment."

He turned back and looked at her blankly, and a small, wistful smile sneaked onto his face. He said, his voice low, "Thanks, Professor."

oOo

Minerva McGonagall was utterly unprepared for the sight that greeted her eyes upon entering what was once the Gryffindor common room. The room she remembered so well, not only after 40 years of teaching but after her years of learning at Hogwarts, when she could call the place no less than familiar, was completely unrecognizable. And the sight of Ronald Weasley, his head bowed low over the corpse on the floor, and of Hermione Granger, who was examining the terrible message left on the mantle, was almost too much to bear.

Her two former students raised their heads and turned towards her when she came into the room. The faces of Ron and Hermione were grave, but there was a sort of distant professionalism to both of them, as though this was some usual crime scene and they were the lead investigators. McGonagall cleared her throat and said, "I do not expect you to solve this mystery at the moment."

Hermione narrowed her eyes at her former teacher and said, "Professor, don't insult my intelligence. You taught me for six years. Whether you expect it or not, I wanted to know what happened here. From what I can reason, this student was Cruciated, and then his or her blood was siphoned while he or she was still alive to make the message. The message is permanently written on the mantle, but I'm not yet sure how the murderer did it. Only then was he or she killed, though I'm not sure it was by loss of blood or the Killing Curse."

Ron nodded, "The student was set on fire after he or she was killed. Probably burned while the rest of the room was burning. He or she was moved into this position before the fire started, because he or she melted onto the floor, and there would've been no way to have moved the corpse into the position before the fire begun."

McGonagall blinked and stiffened, "Please do not touch anything. I will, in due course have an Auror team come up here to do a full investigation."

Ron and Hermione exchanged a grim look, and McGonagall continued, "I think you two would make an excellent team in investigative work, but I don't want you to spend any more energy today on catching those responsible. There will be time to persecute and punish those responsible for the destruction of this castle and the deaths of its inhabitants. That time is not now, at least not for you. I want you to rest, and I want you to have time with your family and friends."

"Where's Harry, Professor?"

McGonagall whipped out her wand, and said, "Patronum Revelio."

At that moment, a silvery mirror appeared above her, which showed her Patronus that she had sent along with Potter, pacing back and forth along a blank stretch of wall on the seventh floor corridor, mewing and spitting loudly. She sighed deeply and thankfully, and replied, "He's safe, but he's alone."

oOo

To be truthful, Harry didn't even know if his plan to achieve solitude would work. He didn't know if the Fiendfyre had indeed broken the enchantments on the room, or if it would ever work again. But, to him, escaping to the Room of Requirement was worth trying.

To his amazement, though bleak and unrelenting his amazement was, after passing by that blank stretch of wall thrice, thinking about being alone and trying to forget about everything that had happened to him and praying that it would all work out, the door appeared. Harry stepped inside, and found himself content with what he found.

It was a small white room. There was a bed in one corner, a daybed in another with a few glossy books laid out on a table in front of it, and another chair sitting across from the bed. Something about the simplicity of the room reminded him of King's Cross, and if there was a purgatory, something clicked in Harry's mind that this must be it. Without thinking about what he was doing, Harry crossed the room, placed the Elder Wand, the wand that once belonged to Draco Malfoy, and his holly wand on the bedside table, kicked off his shoes, undressed to his underwear, and crawled into the bed. He pulled off his glasses, put them on the same bedside table on which he hand just placed the two wands, and then pulled the blankets over his aching body.

Harry didn't know what the bed was made out of, but it reminded him of what lying on a cloud must feel like, and with that singular thought racing through his mind, he immediately fell asleep.

oOo

Upon further search of the school, six more bodies were found like the one found in the remains of Gryffindor Tower. McGonagall was pacing back and forth in what was now her study, something she had seen Albus do on countless occasions. She had hoped that after the terrible process of retrieving each unrecognizable corpse and trying everything she could to remove the horrible graffiti from the walls at each of the sites that she would get some sort of levity from the repetitive motion that she had seen him practice, but no new solution came to her. In the aftermath of the battle and the stark discovery of how much damage had been done to the castle and to its inhabitants, she felt more conscious of her position than she ever had before: she was in charge of rebuilding the castle, she was the one who need to be omnipresent at the funerals of the fallen defenders of Hogwarts, and she was required to be the steadfast force necessary in order to reopen the school in the fall. All that power and responsibility fell on her as the new Headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

A small cough came from the space behind the Head's desk, and Albus Dumbledore said, "Minerva, if I may, would it be appropriate of me to ask what it is that is troubling you so?"

McGonagall turned to face him, and stiffly replied, "No, Albus, it would not be inappropriate for you to ask that. I," she paused, measuring the flurry of thoughts in her mind into words of equal impact, "am very concerned about the amount of work that I must attend to in the near future."

Dumbledore inclined his head, "It is my experience that there will never be enough time, so we must make do with the limited quantity of it that we have."

"It is not a question of time management," said McGonagall, perhaps a little more coldly than she'd meant to.

"Of course not, my dear," corrected Dumbledore at once. "You've always been remarkably good with time management."

McGonagall narrowed her eyes at the portrait, who grinned hopefully back at her, and said, "How do you do that?"

Dumbledore serenely replied, "I'm afraid I don't understand you, Minerva. 'That' is an undeclared pronoun. As you know, many people used undeclared pronouns in regular speech, and I have to say, with the way people talk to each other, I'm not quite sure how anyone understand anything else anyone says. Sometimes I believe we should offer courses in grammar at a school such as this."

McGonagall blinked.

"I know what it is that troubles you, Minerva. You are concerned for the stability of the school and for its students, past and present. You are concerned for the wellbeing of the families who have lost so many loved ones. You are concerned for the wellbeing of Harry Potter, whom, I fear is not prepared for the position into which he has been thrust. Most of all, however you are concerned for yourself, and whether you will be able to maintain a level head throughout all of this."

McGonagall looked at the portrait of Albus Dumbledore for a few moments, in which silently she communicated, without knowing it, that all Dumbledore's guesses had been correct. She turned away from him, pulled out the high-backed chair, and sat down at the desk. She laid her arms on the table and closed her eyes, hoping that there would be good news soon. When she opened them and there was no such news, she said, "You are, as always, right, Albus."

Dumbledore spoke from behind her, saying, "You give me more credit than I deserved, Minerva. It was not I who rid the world of Lord Voldemort this morning, and it was not I who was able to protect the school from his forces last night. You have proven time and time again that you are a spectacular witch and even more impressive person, and you will be strong enough to rebuild the reputation of this school. You are the most steadfast person I knew in life and I have all the confidences I did then that I do now. You can and will ask yourself if you are capable of doing everything you must, and I will tell you that the answer is yes, you can. You are Minerva McGonagall, and you have provided evidence than you can do anything to which you set your mind."

At that moment, Rubeus Hagrid entered the office. Hagrid was looking elated and he said, his booming voice crashing against the silence of the office, "Professor McGonagall, th' most amazin' thing is happening to th' castle!"

Professor McGonagall, taken aback, furrowed her eyebrows and said, "What is it, Hagrid?"

"Hogwarts is repairing itself, Professor."

McGonagall looked nonplussed, turning to Albus, who nodded once, smiling widely. He said, "The Founders always thought it would be best that if the school was ever considerably damaged, then there would be a system in place that would manage the repairs. I do not believe that the system has ever determined that there have been as extensive of damages as the damages that occurred tonight, so as far as I know, there has never been any need for the system to activate. Hogwarts is much like a living organism: there may be remnants of the trials and tribulations that this school has undergone, but if it is wounded, the place will heal itself. There may be some permanent scarring, but, well, there are reasons that I never fully fixed my nose. Hogwarts will heal, Minerva. It will take time, but everything will be all right."

Minerva looked a Dumbledore gratefully and said, "I never knew."

He said, "You would have, had you thoroughly read Hogwarts: A History."

She gave him a piercing but playful look, moved around the desk in one swift movement, her cloak billowing behind her, walking around Hagrid, eager to see the miracles of Hogwarts once more. Hagrid looked at Dumbledore, who flashed him a glittering smile from his gilded frame and said, "Thank you, Hagrid, for such marvelous and prudent news. I was beginning to wonder when the enchantments would begin to retake the school."

Hagrid beamed at the portrait, "No problem, Professor."

Hagrid took several massive steps to the door and beat McGonagall to it, who ushered him forward in front of her, perhaps out of politeness, but more likely out of fear for being trampled in the half-giant's glee. When Hagrid had descended the staircase McGonagall turned back to Dumbledore and said, "Thank you, Albus."

Dumbledore held up his hand in a wave and said, "Minerva, this is your office now. I imagine we will be seeing rather a lot of each other."

Minerva crossed to the door, but before she had left, Dumbledore said, "Wait, Minerva, I've just had a thought!"

Though she was quite sure Dumbledore had not just had this thought but was instead waiting for precisely the right moment to voice it, McGonagall replied, "What is it, Albus?"

Dumbledore straightened up to his full (and still considerable) height in high chair and said, "I think, having managed to solve the conflicts that have plagued this magical nation for the better part of this century, you should consider contacting our peers overseas. Reinstate our international friendships and rebuild the programs that have disintegrated during our war."

McGonagall was again surprised by this sudden revelation. She said, "I will do what I can, Albus."

Albus Dumbledore gave her one last twinkling look and said, "Which is to say that you will do it damn well."

McGonagall smiled to herself and left the room, closing the door gently behind her.

oOo

When Hagrid and McGonagall reached the Entrance Hall, they were assaulted by a throng of people; among them were their fellow Hogwarts faculty members and members of the Order of the Phoenix alike. Minerva opened her mouth to speak, but Molly Weasley cut across her, "You'll never believe what's happening in the Great Hall, Minerva."

With that, Minerva was led into the Great Hall by her entourage of friends and peers, and she was greeted by a sight that even after having published papers on the extraordinary properties of transfiguration was dazzling to the eye.

Bricks were floating where the candles would have been during any Hogwarts feast, and they were gluing themselves with the mortar that was appearing from nowhere back to their original positions on the walls of the Hall. The tables, previously splintered and smashed, were reassembling themselves, parts of them drawn to the pieces of furniture as though by magnetism. The enchanted ceiling was pulling shingles up from the base of the cliff Hogwarts was rested on, and they were becoming once again translucent so all could see the stark blue sky above them. The windows were melding outside their frames, each becoming an elaborate scene from the history of the school in ornate moving stained glass depictions.

Hogwarts was repairing itself, and Minerva knew that one day it would be even grander than it was before. Albus was right: Hogwarts would heal, and she would be strong enough to watch. All would be well someday.

oOo

Ron and Hermione walked along the seventh floor corridor to the place where they knew the Room of Requirement was. McGonagall's silvery cat, which was lounging on the floor in front of it, looked up at them wistfully, and then vanished into silver vapor. Ron and Hermione looked at that blank stretch of wall for several minutes, holding hands, wishing that their best friends in the world would reappear.

Hermione was first to break the silence, "Do you think he'll ever come out?"

"If it were me," said Ron flatly. "I don't think I would."

oOo

It was night when Harry awoke in the Room of Requirement. He had clearly slept most of the day. He fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table, and rammed them onto his face. He got up, pulled on the robe that had materialized suddenly on the table beside the bed, and went to sit on one of the white couches when he noticed a roll of parchment sitting on one of the tables in the middle of the room. He unfurled it, and read:

Dear Mr. Harry James Potter,

It is my request that you report to the Ministry of Magic Auror Headquarters at 8:00 AM tomorrow to begin immediate consideration for the Auror Academy. Report directly to my office, where we will discuss your candidacy as an Auror with the faculty of the Academy and the Minister of Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt.

Sincerely,

Gawain Robards

Head Auror

Harry read the letter through twice, yawned, and returned to bed, knowing that he would need his energy for his visit to the Ministry tomorrow. He took off his glasses again, turned over his pillow, and drifted back to sleep again.

oOo

A/N: Well, here it is. I've been reading Harry Potter fanfiction since there was Harry Potter fanfiction, but, until now, I've never tried my hand at writing it.

I'll update this about every Tuesday, because arbitrarily picking a day and sticking to it seems like the only way I'll ever finish anything.

I'm still looking for a regular Beta for this fic.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

-Theo Green