A/N: It's been a long time. This chapter stumped me and then I simply got distracted by school. Back, though. I want to know what you guys think. I know this is a shorter chapter. I'm not sure it ever came out just right.

Disclaimer: Not mine, don't own it, all property of JKR.

Chapter Seven: Black Hole Sun

When he, Ginny, Ron and Hermione took the Floo from Grimmauld Place to The Burrow for Fred's funeral Harry understood that those two snatched days were gone and Ginny was not coming back with him. At first he hadn't had a clue what to do with himself but somehow after watching the spectacular end to Fred's funeral, Harry convinced himself he had the strength to begin to put together if not some real control then a good imitation of it. He knew he would be expected to stand up in front of everyone and say things about two people he felt like he never knew well enough, but cared for. Luckily for him, after Fred's burial, Harry had found himself in the company of the Weasleys as he kept an eye on Teddy, allowing Andromeda to do some much needed working and resting. While it did little to quiet his worry about the small boy who he only let go long enough to let rest, it did wonders for motivating him to form a mask of control and Ginny later curling up to his side did not hurt in the least.

Now the night before seemed far away and he stood planted in front of a mass of people all there to say goodbye to Lupin and Tonks that was still significantly smaller than the one that came to see Fred off. Several ministry officials littered the crowd and among them Aurors who once worked with Tonks. The Weasleys were there to pay their respects, too. Harry saw Ginny, Ron and Hermione in the middle of the crowd and the sight gave him a bit of a bolster to his strength. What he really enjoyed was that despite the majority of them being underage the D.A. had again shown up as if Lupin and Tonks—like Fred—deserved an honor guard. Andromeda gave him a slight nudge and Harry cleared his throat. Having spent very little time on the grounds of the Tonks' household, he was struck again by his surprise at fitting everyone into the yard. This was not The Burrow after all, which was more land than house.

"Hello everybody," Harry started, drawing a deep breath and pulling out bits and pieces of the mental rehearsals he began practicing late last night, too few hours ago. "I want to start by thanking you all for coming out here. I know a lot of you have had a pretty long night and have been to a few funerals this week." Surprised that he wasn't tripping over his words, Harry ran his hand back through his hair and told himself that his carefully constructed façade was not busted open as he feared. Still, he hoped no one noticed that he didn't dare to turn around and look at the open coffins. "I don't know that I can be as eloquent as Andromeda was a moment ago, but I want to say that I personally appreciated her sharing her love for her daughter with all of us like that. It's not easy to be open about what really hurts."

Harry stepped to the edge of the small platform and searched the crowd for a face to focus on. Ginny's was the first he latched onto and she held his gaze as he continued to speak. "I'm going to miss Tonks, a lot. She saved my life at least once, helped me when I was attacked before my sixth year at Hogwarts and she once came to my Aunt and Uncle's house during some of the worst days of my life with Lupin and several other people and brought me home to my friends. That's how I'll remember her, strangely enough, the one who helped me get home." He tried to smile because out of the corner of his eyes he could see many people doing so. It did not come out as a grin but a grimace.

"In school we had a lot of Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers. I mean, a lot. I think Lupin was the best of them and not just because he was only one who never tried to curse or kill me." Met with absolutely no laughter, the joke caused a small choking noise to escape his throat and he coughed once, loudly to cover it up. Fewer people seemed to find this attempt at humor fitting than they did at Fred's funeral. It was a different crowd, though.

"He was also humble and kind to his students. That year he taught me how to cast the Patronus Charm and told me about my parents. Sometimes he let himself get close enough to me that I had this really strange feeling I knew what it might be like to have a parent. I didn't realize at the time, I didn't understand that I already had two who are here right now." Harry did not dare to take his eyes off of Ginny and look toward her mother and father. "When he realized that my friends' and my lives were in danger he hurried out on a full moon at personal risk and saved us, even if things didn't go exactly as he planned. Then he went away, as quickly as he came and I didn't see him for another year." Harry gave a slight shrug. "I barely noticed because of school and You-Know-Who. I only really came to appreciate Lupin in my fifth year when I got to spend the holidays with him and often with Tonks too. Remus Lupin was a tired man who had lived a hard life. A lot of us out here know what that feels like in our own ways."

As Harry finally tore his eyes away from Ginny, a harsh feeling washed over him, a dropping out of his stomach. He took in the crowd as a whole. Most of them were watching him attentively, as they had Andromeda. Something, though, was wrong. Something about the picture in front of him was very, very wrong. He wasn't able to place it and wondered if it was simply his imagination so he pushed it aside and made his face blank as he got back to what he was there to do, despite the steadily increasing heartbeat. "Lupin was a good man, though. He was human and so he was fallible; he made mistakes, doubted himself, undervalued himself and underestimated the strength of those around him. He let his fear get the best of him and he ran away from important things." He let the harsh words settle in as his eyes again slid out of focus. What was happening? The same feeling that he was seeing something wrong, something out of place came back. Yet, this time it was more specific. He was convinced someone was out there who shouldn't be, but who?

"What was most important is that in the end he was not a coward." His voice began to get scratchy and raw. "He could admit his faults and he always tried to make things right. I'll remember most of all, how happy Lupin was when he asked me to be Teddy's godfather. All of those tired and lost feelings you could sometimes see on his face were gone and I never saw them again. So that was the gift that Teddy gave him, a reason to live, a reason to die and a reason to smile. That's why I'll make sure Teddy knows everything I do about his mother and his father and I hope others make the same decision." Harry's whole upper body twitched as that feeling securely took his attention and he drew up to full height, rigid. What was out there?

Somewhere in the middle of the aisle between the chairs, a light flared up, bright green and wrong. It shot through the air, approaching Harry. The air behind it shimmered and seemed to move and Harry watched a pale, drawn face appear, split into a look of glee. Harry threw himself to the dirt out of sheer habit. Others knew what was happening even before he did. The spell struck something behind him and heat washed over the small, raised stage. Harry was still clueless as he felt the flames tickling his feet. He turned over, legs kicking at the ground to put out flames that hadn't quite caught.

Watching the fire start to spread across Lupin's casket, Harry screamed.

In one moment, Hermione was watching Harry awkwardly running through a speech that he seemed to think was going to be met with different responses. As she often did, Hermione noticed the way his voice shifted strangely and the way he differed from how he used to speak. She wasn't allowed to focus on this concern for any long period of time as she watched Harry's face change. At first she thought it was a nervous tick—also something new for Harry—but every time it happened his eyes slid to a spot in the middle of the crowd that was utterly empty. She still found herself looking that way often as the twitch got more and more frequent, more and more pronounced until whispers were passing among the crowd that he was having some sort of fit. That was why she saw the shimmer in the air before the spell flew.

Hermione sat flabbergasted and watched the Invisibility Cloak—which was certainly not as reliable as Harry's—fall away in the wake of the killing curse that set it aflame and hurled towards Harry. Body heaving, mouth wide open and eyes locked forward, Draco Malfoy looked manic. She looked towards the small, raised stage upon which the caskets stood and saw that Remus Lupin's was burning. It took Harry a moment, during which Malfoy stayed rooted in spot, but the fire was put out and then with as much speed as he hit the ground, Harry Potter was gone. Rapidly and with a louder noise than he vanished with, Harry reappeared. Wand in hand, he stood directly in front of the blonde, head tilted down, wand raised and eyes latched firmly on the person who cast the spell he had just dodged.

Hermione, who was used to hoping for the best but preparing for the worse was already standing up. Unprepared to see the contempt in her best friend's face, she stumbled. He was looking at Malfoy much as Malfoy's father looked at her. That was not a look that at all settled easily or often across Harry's visage. Hermione managed to fish her wand free but before she could speak a spell, the blonde's own wand was spinning through the air, off into the other half of the mourners. The distance between Harry and Malfoy was a matter of a couple of meters and she expected Malfoy to give up.

Instead, the blonde, disarmed, hurled himself forward, filthy robes trailing in the air and attempted to tackle Harry to the ground. A wand movement from The-Boy-Who-Lived was enough to tell Hermione it was time to get to the site of the duel. A loud crack resounded across the area and Malfoy's arm turned at a strange angle as he landed in the dirt. She stumbled over peoples' feet as several fought to move out of her way or get to the pair but none of them were quick enough to stop Harry from pulling Malfoy into the air by his ankle, hanging him high above them all.

"Harry," Ginny yelled, from right behind her. "Stop it!"

"Go on, Potter! Go on!" In a higher tone of voice than Ginny's, Malfoy repeated this, goading, spitting, absolutely frothing at the mouth while several people struggled to get to Harry through some apparent, unseen force. Hermione bounced off of a solid wall that felt like some sort of shield charm.

"How many times did we save you?" Harry was yelling as she tried to break the charm down. His wand hovered below the man immobilized in thin air. "How many times did we save your stupid life? Even when you got your mindless crony killed trying to make nice with Voldemort, we saved you." Harry was positively roaring now, but people were encircling the radius of this shield Hermione was trying to despell and trying to shout Harry down. "I saved you, even though I could have died without finishing what I had to finish. I turned around and saved your disgusting life and this is what you're doing?"

"Harry," Minister Kingsley himself had drawn his wand and had it focused on Harry. It seemed fitting enough as the shield bubble split with a loud pop under the onslaught of several different witches and wizards, ministry or mourner alike.

"Go on, Potter, kill me!" The babbling voices in the background did nothing to make things less tense.

"Don't you get it?" Hermione called, cutting across Kingsley's order for Harry to lower his wand. "That's what he wants, Harry. He wants you to kill him. He wants to die, he wants to be a coward as usual and avoid Azkaban, when Azkaban is exactly what he deserves." The mention of the prison, for whatever reason, seemed to jar her friend. Dark, shaggy hair shifted as Harry looked once, twice about him and then dropped his wand and stepped away. The blonde plummeted into the grass with a sickening thud as Harry wiped his hands on his robes, like he was trying to get something gross off of his hands. An auror she remembered from the Battle of Hogwarts placed a hand on Harry's shoulder and lead him away, Harry did not fight it, but refused to accept his wand back as he was lead out of sight. Andromeda was talking to the majority of the people gathered, but Hermione stooped down beside Draco Malfoy. All she could see was that he was unconscious and had definitely broken a couple of bones. He no longer resembled the boy who she came to hate in school but a sick man.

That didn't matter, though.

What mattered is that as she watched her friend's form retreating away with Minister Shacklebolt, Arthur and Ginny Weasley in tow, Hermione realized what had been bothering her the most about Harry's behavior. It was worse than the change in speech and thought patterns, it was worse than the accent shift—until then Harry had always inexplicably sounded as if he was from London—and it was worse even than the violent mood swings that made his days of Voldemort building sand castles in his head look like nothing.

It was that he was alive. Harry Potter had no reason to be alive.

He never told us how he survived.

A/N:

In response to the question by reviewer 'Shalla' who wondered why Harry, feeling lost on how to interact with an infant would turn toward Hermione or Ginny for help, appreciate the review, first off. Second, well, to be honest, it's a matter of comfort. In the end at that moment he's closest to Ginny and, well, what does Harry do when he doesn't know something? What has he always done? Asked Hermione. Literally, he either asks her or he just sits there clueless about an issue. Because Harry is oblivious.