They were halfway across the grounds when Ron said, "Those aren't clouds."
Everyone stopped and looked up.
Dark shapes moving against the darker sky — dozens of them, drifting with the specific wrongness of Dementors. Not two or three. A mass, drawn by the evening's cascade of raw emotion, descending toward the group with patient, unhurried certainty.
"Back to the castle!" Sirius barked. "Don't engage — move!"
He'd lived with them for twelve years. He knew what they were.
They ran.
Not fast enough.
The cold hit first — that spreading, eating cold that had nothing to do with temperature. Happiness draining. The worst things you'd ever lived through crowding back in to fill the space it left.
Harry's wand was already up.
"Expecto Patronum!"
His stag erupted from the tip, fully formed, blazing white, bounding forward to cut off the leading edge of the swarm. Dementors scattered from its light.
"Expecto Patronum!" Hermione, half a second behind him.
Her otter shot forward and joined the stag, the two of them driving the front rank back.
Ron managed a partial — wisps of silver that held for a moment before thinning.
The first wave broke. Scattered. But they weren't fleeing. They pulled back only to the edge of the Patronuses' range and regrouped, patient as things that didn't need to hurry.
Harry's stag was holding, but it was costing him. Under sustained pressure, the light was beginning to thin at the edges.
Then Snape moved.
Harry hadn't expected it.
"Expecto Patronum."
A silver doe leaped from Snape's wand — graceful, immediate, cutting across in front of Harry's stag with the ease of something that had been practiced in private for years. She drove the front rank back, weaving between Harry's patronus with an uncanny, natural closeness.
Harry stared at Snape. At the doe. His stag and Snape's doe, holding the line together.
The Dementors fell back further. But there were too many. Even combined, it was a standoff that wouldn't hold.
Kevin raised his wand.
"Expecto Patronum."
His goldfish appeared — the small silver fish, spinning lazily in the air, looking wholly unimpressive against a swarm of Dementors flanked by a stag and a doe.
Ron started to say something.
Kevin didn't look at him.
The goldfish turned in a slow circle. As it circled, the silver light began to concentrate — drawing inward, compressing, pouring itself from the body into the tail. The tail swelled, brightened, grew until looking directly at it was difficult.
The goldfish looked up.
It launched.
Straight up into the mass of Dementors. Then the tail whipped in one enormous arc — a fan-shaped shockwave of concentrated Patronus energy detonating outward from the centre of the swarm.
The shockwave hit like a hand scattering leaves.
Dementors flew in every direction. The sound they made under a direct Patronus strike was a frequency that seemed to come from inside your skull — a shriek that the air itself seemed to want no part of. They scattered into the upper dark and kept going.
The light faded. The goldfish dissolved.
Kevin lowered his wand.
"You've been holding out on us," Ron said, after a moment.
"No secret technique," Kevin said. "Scatter-shot repels. One concentrated strike disperses a crowd. It's not power — it's application. Focus the force and hit precisely."
He glanced up at the sky. Empty.
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
Dumbledore was standing at the castle doors. He had been watching from the threshold, hands clasped behind his back. He had started to move — to intervene — when Kevin's goldfish had made that unnecessary. He'd watched the tail-whip with the expression of a man adding a data point to an existing model.
"Sirius." His voice was warm. Genuinely warm.
"Albus." Sirius stepped forward, and the twelve years of distance between them collapsed in the way that only happens between people who were once very close.
Dumbledore took his hands. A moment that required no audience.
Snape dragged Peter Pettigrew inside without ceremony.
Dumbledore sent the students to their dormitories with the particular look that left no room for argument, and turned to manage the rest of it himself.
Two days later, the wanted posters changed.
Sirius Black's face — haunted, hollow-eyed — disappeared from every owl post box, every pub board, every shop window. Peter Pettigrew's replaced it. Rat Animagus. Approach with extreme caution. Report all unusual animals.
The Daily Prophet ran the full story. Sirius gave one interview, precise and composed, and declined every subsequent request.
He was free.
Lupin dragged himself back to class looking like a man who had fought something large and lost the cosmetic portion of the contest. He taught the remaining weeks with the same patience and wit he always had. The students didn't know how he managed it and didn't ask.
The morning Kevin found his classroom door shut and knocked, and the voice that answered was tired in a different way.
Lupin was packing a trunk.
He looked up without surprise when Kevin entered. The resignation in his face was old. It had been sitting there, waiting.
"Snape's correction," Kevin said.
"The parents will write," Lupin said. He folded a stack of books carefully. "They always do. I can't put Dumbledore in a position of defending me every term. It isn't fair to him."
"Your Defence lessons were the best this school has had in living memory."
Lupin paused. He smiled — genuine, and sad in the particular way of someone who believes the compliment but also knows it changes nothing. "Thank you for that."
Harry arrived in the doorway first, then Ron, then Hermione, then the others, all of them with the expressions of people who had run from the Great Hall and arrived ready for a fight only to discover there was no one to fight.
"Professor, you don't have to —"
"Harry." Lupin turned from his trunk and looked at him with the steadiness of someone who had made peace with something that wasn't fair. "I've done this before. A few times. It always reaches this point."
"That doesn't make it right," Harry said.
"No. It doesn't. But I'm used to things that aren't right." He said it without self-pity, which was the thing that made it hardest to hear. "Focus on your examinations. Become formidable. That matters more than any single Defence post."
Kevin set three vials on the desk without preamble.
Lupin looked at them.
"Wolfsbane. Three months' supply. More coming by owl."
Lupin's expression shifted through several things quickly. "Kevin, I can't accept —"
"Harry's buying them," Harry said immediately.
"I'm not going to let you —"
"You can't sell it commercially," Kevin said. "There's no market. Most werewolves who need it can't afford it. These would sit unused. You need them." He picked up the vials and placed them in Lupin's open trunk himself. "Take them."
Lupin looked at the trunk. At the vials. At Kevin.
"Thank you," he said, quietly. The two words carrying far more than they usually do.
He closed the trunk. Straightened his coat.
"Don't look at me as though I'm leaving forever," he said. "I suspect I'll run into most of you before long."
He meant it as comfort. They let him.
They said goodbye. He walked out through the entrance hall with his trunk and his straight back, and didn't look behind him.
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