Harry looked around the hut in which he had spent the past two months of his life. It was the day before Halloween, and they were leaving for England after the final test of Harry's progress with warding (both creating and dismantling). Albus had already packed all his own possessions, which only left Harry's possessions.

Harry focused on the packing spell as he concentrated on the final state of his trunk. With a swirl of his wand, all his possessions zoomed from every corner of the room towards the open lid. The clothes neatly folded on their own, with precise folds to ensure the most efficient packing while avoiding crumpling. His books hovered over the trunk until the clothes were properly placed, and then they shuffled into the trunk in neat alphabetized stacks. His remaining possessions then fit themselves in to the free space, leaving an open area for his box of letters which he had kept from being packed. The Sword of Gryffindor ended up leaning against the trunk, held in a dragon hide sheath that Deathspear had gifted him.

He smiled at the packed trunk. His first attempts at the spell had ended up leaving him with a mass of wadded up clothes, haphazardly placed books, and a trunk that was so overstuffed that closing it would require forceful magic which would likely break the spines of most of his books. Well, it could be closed if Albus expanded the interior, all Harry had to do was to admit "being defeated by a box" (Harry knew he was being manipulated, but it still worked to get him to keep working on the spell).

At first, he had tried to focus on every detail of the packing process. He hadn't realized how many steps there were in folding a single shirt until he had to explicitly picture every miniscule detail that he normally was able to do by hand without thought. Annoyingly, getting one shirt folded properly did not apply to the other shirts, so just folding his shirts required him to precisely memorize over a hundred steps. Even with his Occlumency skills, it was easy to forget one step, which would then cascade into chaos.

As it turned out, he figured out the trick as he reviewed his warding notes and remembered Albus talking about magic trading off between power and versatility.

Since that conversation (and subsequent pranking of Sirius and Remus), he had mainly concerned himself with improving the power of his wandless magic (which still required direct touching), by intentionally focusing all the weakness of the magic into a single spot. It had worked wonders when he had performed a wandless levitation on the clothesline and clothes (Albus had cast the spells to reinforce the clothes from tearing). His wandless spells were already difficult to cancel by others, but the act of focusing all weakness into one randomly placed and absurdly weak spot caused the rest of the spelled item to become nearly impervious to cancellation spells (they weren't impervious to Albus's overpowered cancellation spells, but that was hardly a fair baseline).

He had been so focused on sacrificing versatility to increase power, that he hadn't thought of sacrificing power for versatility. As Albus had said, "Magic only cares about fulfilling the goal of the wards, it doesn't care about the details."

With that realization, the packing process became better with each attempt. As his picture of the end goal of the packed truck became clearer, the neater the folding became along with the increased precision of the packing itself.

He had his breakthrough eight days prior and had taken many notes whenever he had thoughts on when less powerful and more versatile versions of his spell repertoire could come in handy. Specifically, to figure out a way to pull another prank on Albus. The man was incredibly wily, and so Harry was keeping his newfound versatility to himself until the time was right to strike.

With a satisfied sigh, he turned away from his trunk to look at his box of letters.

Opening the box, he looked at the expanded interior and the neat stacks of letters. One stack contained his personal correspondence. All the other stacks contained the MANY fan letters.

He was still not comfortable having fans and would prefer to not have to deal with people who wanted to talk to The Boy Who Lived. However, he had discovered that it wasn't so bad dealing with his fans when it was not in person. It was certainly less annoying dealing with Colin Creevey's daily fawning when it was only through letters.

In the first three weeks of opening his post box, he had received nearly a thousand letters. Surprisingly, only a few dozen of them had any magic or potions applied to them (Albus had requested he inspect every letter, and Harry agreed. While Dobby didn't ask for permission and inspected them proactively, to be fair the elf had experience with intercepting Harry's mail already). After Albus took note of the sender, he would forward the letter on to appropriate law enforcement agency (depending on country of origin). For the more offensive cases, Dobby would merely disappear and return later that day with a smug look on his face. Harry felt it was best to not ask what Dobby had done to look so smug.

Most of the letters were simple missives from adults, thanking Harry for stopping "You Know Who" and offering condolences for his lost parents. Some even offered stories about his parents or grandparents. Those received a simple thank you letter in return (with additional thanks to those who shared stories about his family).

If the letters talked about specific family members who were killed before Harry had stopped Tom (sometimes in an angry tone, implying Harry should have stopped "You Know Who" earlier), Harry wrote back and asked them to tell him stories about the lives of those who had died. Harry, feeling very uncomfortable, had wanted to just write something like "I'm sorry". However, Gilderoy had convinced Harry to be empathetic and ask questions to give the people a chance to remember their lost family. Well, Gilderoy had said "Harry, Harry, Harry, people love sharing their pain, so it is important to be good at faking empathy to fool them into believing you care", but Harry was used to filtering the man's cynicism out of his advice. Those who had responded to his queries (even the initially angry ones) were mostly grateful for the chance to share their stories. While the stories could be depressing (or disturbing), Harry did feel his heart warm and seeing the letters change to a happier tone.

The letters from his former classmates were annoying, but he still responded politely. Albus helped to craft the responses there, using his greater insight to each student's psyche (he was a bit like Olivander, except he never forgot a student instead of never forgetting a wand). Harry chose to ignore his instinct of telling every one of them to go screw themselves, and instead pretended like he accepted their apologies (he no longer felt the anger, but it didn't mean he was free of bitterness). In the case of Colin Creevey, he told the excitable boy that he was "very busy" and so could only respond once a month (not that it decreased the volume of letters he received from the superfan, but it seemed to appease him).

In all fairness, not all the fan mail was a chore. He did find himself enjoying the letters from the very young children. They were mainly writing to the Harry Potter of their bedtime stories, who was their hero. Those kids received autographed copies of their favorite book of the series along with personalized notes. Those were often followed up by thank you notes from grateful parents along with adorable photographs of the children waving joyously at Harry, while holding up the autographed book. Harry found immense satisfaction in helping to add to the happiness to the childhood of the very young.

Luckily, after the initial onslaught of letters, their flow slowed down to a trickle of around a dozen a fortnight (excluding the daily letters from Colin).

It was just as well that the flow had decreased, as Gilderoy had found himself becoming busier. He had discovered the term "PR Firm" in the muggle world, and found his passion ignited. Albus connected Gilderoy with a former Hogwarts Professor by the name of Horace Slughorn (who had a large network of famous friends), and the two had created the magical world's first PR Firm. They had quickly become a highly sought-after firm to handle the public image of the cream of the crop of celebrity witches and wizards. This was helped by Gilderoy's newly formed (yet serious) romantic relationship with a reporter named Rita Skeeter (Gilderoy had gushed about her being a perfect match as "she is as committed to sharing the truth as I am").

Harry looked away from the fan mail and looked at his personal correspondence.

While it wasn't at the top of the stack, he knew Ron's letter was in there. He had finally heard from his former friend at the beginning of October. It wasn't as long as a normal Hermione letter, but was practically a novel based on Ron's standards. Apparently, Ron had still been convinced that Harry would be coming back to Hogwarts any day now. It had taken many conversations with McGonagall (who was now taking her role as Head of House seriously and had embraced the idea of the students being her children by being emotionally supportive, taking the time to help them with problems both personal and scholastic, and defending them against Snape) before Ron understood that he had truly lost Harry. The letter was a surprisingly honest apology where Ron admitted that he had been "an utter prat". Harry had written back to accept the apology. Other than that response, Harry didn't feel much pressure to pursue renewing the friendship and would wait to see if Ron tried writing further letters to rebuild their relationship.

On the other hand, his relationship with Hermione had been improving. She had taken his concerns to heart and seemed to be working towards becoming a better friend and less enamored by books and authority. She had been reading books on teenage rebellion and had been committing epic acts of bucking authority (although they were mainly epic because Hermione would write at least ten pages for each incident). The first act of rebellion was that she had snuck a candy bar (with sugar) into her house and eaten almost a full half of it before throwing out the rest and hiding it from her dentist parents.

The latest act of rebellion was when she set off a dung bomb in the dungeons of Hogwarts, though she of course ended up having to clean it all up. Harry had received a letter from the twins also sharing their take on the "epic" prank. Hermione had come to the duo and asked to be trained by them. They had agreed as both an act of repentance to Harry and because they could not pass up the opportunity to corrupt a junior Percy. From the twins' description, Hermione was mainly helping with Research and Development (coming up with some innovative ideas) but had been itching to perform a prank of her own. So, she went down to a disused area of the dungeons and set off the dung bomb. An hour before curfew, she panicked, snuck down and cleaned up the mess before it had been discovered, and was back in bed before curfew.

Harry smiled as he pictured how panicked and thrilled his former… err… his frien… umm… his friendly acquaintance must have been. He knew she could perform incredible feats of rebellion, but that was when lives were on the line. Rebellion for its own sake went against all her instincts. So, he was proud of her and was finding her to become someone he could see calling a friend again someday (not yet, but maybe someday).

Harry turned his attention to the table where he could see one last letter. It was from Sirius and had arrived that morning. He and Remus had been gone for the past week. Sirius was testifying at the trial of the Ministry official who was taking the fall for him being imprisoned without trial. One of the unintended side effects of Harry's responding to fan mail had been a marked improvement in Harry's public image, which in turn increased the public demand that justice be served for Harry (and his godfather they supposed). It took a while before the pressure mounted to sufficient levels, but Minister Fudge decided the time was right to take the bold stance of bending to the will of the public.

Harry wasn't sure if the official, Bartemius Crouch, was going to be convicted. But it appeared that people were exceptionally angry at him, as his house had been burned down a few days after he had been placed in a Ministry holding cell. Sirius assured Harry that neither he nor Remus had anything to do with the act of arson, but they were also certainly not broken up about the event.

Harry smiled with a sense of contentment filling his heart. He would see the pair of pranksters tomorrow (tonight was the full moon, so Remus would be curled up at Sirius's home as Albus and Harry stayed at the bowling alley). He placed Sirius's letter on top of his stack of personal correspondence, closed the box, placed the box in the open space of his trunk, and closed the trunk. He then layered three locking and protection wards to protect his possessions (this was more for practice, for while it would be effective against most magical people, it might as well be unlocked if encountered by an experienced ward breaker). Albus would shrink the trunk later, as Harry had not gotten the hang of shrinking containers which were internally expanded (especially when those containers held other containers which were internally expanded).

Harry then grabbed the sheathed Sword of Gryffindor and strapped it to his back. Albus had enchanted the sheath to make the sword and sheath invisible and unnoticeable, even to those who happened to physically touch it.

With a fond look at the hut, he walked out for the last time to attend his final test.

Harry was staring at an innocent box, the size of a bread box, sitting on a plain wooden table.

It was the final box of twenty-three, each one representative of the twenty-three elementary warding schemes. According to Bill Weasley, an applicant to the ward breaking program of Gringotts was required to pass this test within half an hour before they were even brought in for a face to face interview. Harry had so far bypassed the prior twenty-two wards, and it so far had only taken twenty minutes (give or take two hours… or three hours… it had been a bit more than three hours already). He focused his attention on this final box.

He cast the general ward detection spell. He smelled the sound of a child's laugh, saw seven runes related to power rotating around a red eyeball, and felt the hairs on the left side of his neck stand on end. So, this was in the family of wards that were conditionally powered by… by… humor? NO! The hairs on the right side of his neck were not standing, and it was seven runes instead of eleven. Sarcastic humor!

The way to deal with this ward was… was… damn it! What was it? He had only read about this ward scheme yesterday, and he hadn't read about how to handle all the different emotional cases. But emotion wards were definitely affected by emotion-based spells. At this point, Harry only had two emotion-based spells in his arsenal.

Shrugging, Harry pictured the box transforming into an easily opened box containing an oversized treacle tart, and…

"RIDIKULUS!"

The spell for handling a Boggart shot at the box and… nothing.

"Well, it was worth a shot."

Harry stared at the box in contemplation. That left one spell to try. However, pure happiness didn't feel like it would do the trick. But… what if the happy memory was also a moment of sarcastic humor? Maybe he could overload the ward somehow.

His mind went back and conjured up the moment when he, Albus, Remus, Sirius, and Dobby had been relaxing together one evening in their shared hut. Sirius was wondering why Lucius Malfoy had been so willing to help get him pardoned.

"Maybe he's not as bad as I remember him being."

Harry then rolled his eyes. "Yes, Sirius. Malfoy is a paragon of goodness."

"And he is not being the worst Master a House Elf could ever have" piped in Dobby.

"And a happily firm defender of those with non-magical parents" included Albus.

"And the best friend of werewolves everywhere" spoke Remus.

"Fine… fine! He's still the worst, but why would he help?" laughed Sirius.

Harry and Albus shared glances, but before they could say anything, Dobby snapped his fingers and Sirius found himself with a mouth stuffed with birthday cake.

"Dobby be thinking Doggy Man be making Dobby think too much about Bad Master!"

Harry left the memory, holding on to the joy, the sarcastic tone, and Sirius's wide eyes as he choked down a slice of cake the size of his head. As an extra step, he then pictured himself casting his spell as if he was only doing it as a sarcastic joke.

"EXPECTO PATRONUM!" Harry bellowed ironically.

A familiar white phoenix burst from his wand. He felt the normal peace of the Patronus, but the peace felt slightly off. It was likely he was being slightly insulted, and the phoenix was rolling its non-existent eyes.

Harry directed the Patronus to envelop the warded box in front of him. The box began vibrating slowly. The box started to shimmer with a pale-yellow light. The vibrations started to speed up. The shimmer's hue started to darken around the center of the box.

Harry directed his Patronus to float through the center of the box. The vibrations started to become violent. The shimmer's hue became even darker near the center of the top front edge of the box.

Harry directed his Patronus to pour all its energy at the darker area. The box was vibrating so intensely that he could feel it through the floor. There was now a single spot of dark yellow (nearly black) at a position 1.5 inches left of the center of the top front edge.

Harry cast the general ward disabling charm, directed right at the spot. It was the sort of spell that only worked if the exact right spot was hit or if the ward was insanely weak, so normally it had limited to no use. And… the box stopped vibrating instantly and the shimmer disappeared.

Eyes widening in excitement, he dispelled the Patronus. With a final cast of the detection spell, nothing pinged.

Cautiously, he approached the table holding the box, his senses at full attention. He opened the lid of the box and looked inside. There was a small piece of parchment with the number of "23" written on it. This was the final test. If he was able to lift the parchment without it burning, then it would be a success.

And… success!

Slow clapping startled him out of his silent jubilations. Turning around, he saw both Albus and Deathspear standing behind him.

"Well done, Mister Potter" spoke Deathspear. "While the Patronus trick was not the normally accepted response, it still worked I suppose. You are now good enough that if you were applying for a job, you would be asked to try again in a few years as opposed to be charged a fee for wasting everyone's time."

Harry smiled broadly. Deathspear was very personable outside of training, but during training you had to excel to get anything better than a backhanded compliment. Considering that Harry barely understood what he was doing for each box, that backhanded compliment made him feel like he had just caught the snitch and singlehandedly won the Quidditch Cup.

Seeing the pride in Albus's eyes was the icing on the cake.

"Thanks, Deathspear! So, did I win our bet?"

Deathspear frowned. "You did not complete the challenge in the allotted time."

Albus chuckled. "As I recall, the bet only required Harry to get each slip of parchment from the boxes. You did not specify the time frame."

"It was implied!"

Harry smirked playfully. "It's OK, Deathspear. If you don't want to honor the bet, I understand."

Deathspear stared piercingly at Harry. After half a minute of staring at the young boy who struggled to maintain a mask of pure innocence, the goblin huffed.

"Fine! You have earned the right to have us call each other by our proper first names. Are you happy… Harry?"

Harry's eyes sparkled in delight. "I will be, once you tell me your proper first name."

Deathspear grumbled.

Harry spoke encouragingly. "What's the big deal? Jeff didn't mind telling me his name."

Deathspear scoffed dismissively. "Of course, HE doesn't, he mainly works with Albus and people that Albus likes. Even those Goblins not from the village know about the Miracle at Dewbrook and give Albus his due respect for singlehandedly preventing the worst massacre of Goblins in centuries. But for those who live there, he is nearly worshipped. Do you know how many Goblin mothers have tried to either adopt Albus or offer to have one of their children marry him?"

Harry looked over at Albus, who shrugged while being clearly embarrassed. "I'm a bit too old to be adopted. And, no matter how nice the offers of marriage are, I am not… ready to settle down."

Harry smiled at his mentor, and then turned back to Deathspear. "Well, I'm also not ready to settle down, so I'll settle for your name for now."

Deathspear huffed in mock annoyance. "Fine. My name is", followed by a harsh guttural string of sounds that made Harry decide he needed to have Albus teach him Gobbledegook.

"But you can feel free to shorten that and just call me… Liz."

Harry grinned.

Liz narrowed her eyes menacingly. "Remember, if you call me that in front of my subordinates, I will make sure you know why I chose the name Deathspear when I was hired by Gringotts!"

Harry's smile did not dissipate. "No problem, Liz! Can I write to you some time?"

Liz chuckled. "Sure, Harry. And… only if he is interested… you can let Dobby know he can write to me as well… if he wants to that is…"

For the entire trip back to England, Harry could not stop beaming at the memory of his first sight of a goblin blushing.

Harry stood outside of Albus's room, staring at the closed the door.

It was two in the morning, and the older man was deep asleep. After arriving at the Lord Bowl-Some-More bowling alley, Harry had made sure they played as many games as possible to help tire out his mentor. It was vitally important that the man was exhausted. Please let him be asleep!

With a calming breath, Harry focused on the door and activated his ability to see magic.

Albus was unaware of how far Harry can come along with this ability. Once Harry had begun to think on ways to make his spells more versatile, he couldn't help but apply those thoughts to his technique for holding back the excruciating stabbing pain in his eyes that accompanied seeing magic.

He had realized his problem was that he was trying to emulate Albus. Albus had decades of practice to create a room in his mind that could handle a scarily immense amount of pain (where the pain in the eyes took up an insignificant fraction of the space). Harry's room was growing bigger, but at the rate he was going it would likely take at least a year to reach one minute of pain free sight. A large part of Albus's training sessions (which had only gotten more intense over time) was encouraging Harry to learn how to recognize his own weaknesses and then figure out how to keep them from becoming liabilities (or minimize the scope of the liability). And Harry had decided it was time to stop letting his small room be a liability.

His primary issue had been that he was fine until the room was filled, and then the door to the room would become strained and eventually burst open and flood him with mind-searing pain.

However, if spells became more versatile as he added weak points, then perhaps he should change tactics from enforcing the single weak point of his door to instead adding many more weak points. His image of the room transformed into a small room filled with weak windows. That small room was then placed into a slightly bigger room, also filled with weak windows. And that was then placed in the main room, that was also filled with weak windows. He also pictured all the windows being opened just a smidge.

As he activated his ability to see magic, the pain started to fill the smallest room. The pain trickled out of the cracks into the middle room, which then trickled a smaller amount to the biggest room, which then trickled out a tiny fraction to Harry. Instead of feeling no pain, his eyes felt like they were straining as if he had been reading all day in a poorly lit room. It was a pain he could handle.

Eventually, the withheld pain would become too much, and would start shattering the windows starting in the smallest room and working outward. The flow of pain reaching his eyes would only increase as time progressed, but now it was be a steadier increase instead of the flash flood of pain he would feel with the single door. He had reached a maximum endurance time of nine minutes before the pain was too great, though that was a stretch and eight minutes was the more realistic time.

Hopefully, he would need far less than eight minutes tonight.

He stared at the door and saw a sheen of blue covering its surface. There were no odd sensations, numbers circling runes, or anything else that a normal ward breaker would encounter. It was simply magic revealing itself to him. Recalling Perenelle's book, he looked for places in the ward where the blue seemed to swirl (each color had its own approaches, and blue indicated that it would have set off an alarm if a normal detection spell had been cast). Finding only three swirls, he cast Perenelle's custom spells at them in a clockwise pattern.

The blue magic dissipated, leaving a magic-free door.

With a silent prayer, he reached out and grasped the doorknob and… wait!

Sirius's pranking lessons came to mind. It was always the simple things that would trip up a prankster. Harry looked at the hinges of the door and cast a Marauder invented spell for removing squeaks from hinges. It was important to use the Marauder spell because the well-known silencing spells were easier to counter or setup detection wards against. Custom spells were the key to taking on big game, and they didn't come much bigger than a prepared Albus Dumbledore.

Harry grasped the doorknob, turned, and pulled. The door opened silently. Peering into the room, he saw Albus still sleeping soundly. That was good.

What was not good was the complex web of magic covering every surface of the inside of the room, along with the shell surrounding Albus's sleeping form. Harry had enough belief in Perenelle's research in wards that he felt confident that he could eventually bring down every ward he saw. He just doubted he would be able to successfully do it without waking Albus, and certainly not within the remaining five minutes he likely had before the pain forced him to stop seeing magic.

Luckily, he had planned for this likelihood.

Harry touched his pants and shirt, reinforcing the material to the strongest he could manage.

Once he was certain the clothes wouldn't rip, he lied down flat on his stomach. His body lying parallel to the hall wall opposite Albus's open door.

Once again, he touched his pants and shirt with one hand, and focused on the levitation spell. He felt his body press firmly into the front of his clothes as both articles began to levitate while holding his body inside them. With his free hand against the wall, he dragged his clothes upward (and thus his body as well). When he reached the proper height, he then rotated his body until his feet were pressing against the wall, and his head was poking through the doorway.

He looked forward and saw that he had a magic-free corridor to float through. He just had to avoid touching any portion of the bed, walls, or any physical item within the room. With the pain in his eyes now ramped up to feel like he was aggressively pressing his thumbs into his pupils, he stopped himself from seeing the magic. The downside of his new technique was that it would take several minutes for the pain to drain away, but it had been six minutes well spent and would hopefully be worth it.

With a small flex of his feet, he pushed against the wall and began to glide forward towards the space above Albus's bed. His hand held in front of his chest. As he passed over Albus, unable to stop his forward momentum. He cast the touch version of Aguamenti. The wand-based version of the spell would shoot a stream of water at whatever the wand was pointing at, but he dared not discover if Albus had additional defenses to detect wands or wand-based magic. His wandless version was normally useless, as it had no stream and just generated a giant blob of water that gravity immediately asserted control over and just resulted in a soaked floor. In this case, however, gravity asserted control right onto Albus's face.

Harry had a fraction of a second to celebrate before he a wand whipped up with unbelievable speed and he saw a flash of red light.

With a shock he became aware again. Turning his head, he saw Albus standing completely soaked. His eyes sparkled with mirth.

"I apologize for stunning you, Harry. My reflexes got ahead of me."

Harry merely grinned like a loon.

"Do you need help getting back to your room?"

Harry laughed. "Just nudge me towards the door, please."

Albus chuckled as he nudged Harry and watched his body glide through the air.

"I'm impressed by your innovation. We'll have to brainstorm ways to add this as a secret weapon to your arsenal."

As Harry worked his way down the wall to his room he spoke loudly. "Looking forward to it!"

"You probably could have just cancelled the spell and walked to your room by now. I presume you know that?"

"YEP!"

Harry heard Albus chuckling deeply. "You know, now that you have shown your hand, you've just proven that you are ready to increase the intensity of your training."

Harry grinned widely as he hovered over his bed, even though he knew future Harry would be paying the price. For now, though, that was future Harry's problem. His final words for the night were shouted at the top of his lungs with delight.

"WORTH IT!"

He cancelled his levitation and crashed onto his bed.

His final thought before drifting off to sleep was that Albus was going to make him up his game yet again to successfully pull off another prank. It was probably going to be a while before he got another victory.

He couldn't wait!