"Ground!" the hat shouted from the top of Harry's head, out loud and into the boy's mind.

Harry had never dropped to the ground faster in his life. Even his magical sense wouldn't have informed him fast enough and he realised that if he hadn't taken the hat with him tonight, he would have died.

Tonks shrieked as the werewolf leapt over Harry, wide open mouth and claws extended. It landed behind him on all fours, separating the two students from the castle.

Considering that what separated them from safety was more than 500 metres of flat plains, they were royally fucked, because they were never going to outrun a werewolf.

Harry looked at the hideous and large form, illuminated by the full moon as it stared at the two of them. More than two metres tall, with lanky arms and canine legs it snarled at them, but didn't howl. There was a glimmer of intelligence in its eyes, not offset at all by the saliva dripping from its mouth on its chest which was marred by an ugly X-shaped scar.

"He's conscious, somehow. Intelligent," the hat said, somehow.

"I thought the wolfsbane potion didn't exist," Harry muttered while Tonks gasped and staggered back from where she'd drawn her wand.

"It's Greyback. I recognize him from the papers back then," Tonks said in a trembling voice.

"Ah," Harry realised as the werewolf tilted his head at them, eerily similar to how a dog would have done it. "That's why he's here. Probably wants revenge on Potter," he concluded, glad to be finally rid of that mystery at least.

"That bastard," the werewolf rasped in a voice oddly unafflicted by its condition. "I walked through deserts and swam across seas to get back here. To kill him!" he growled.

"If you were beaten back then, then you won't win this time!" Tonks said and brandished her wand again, not casting any spell. Smart, the longer they kept the thing talking, the likelier a teacher would come to save their sorry asses.

"He couldn't kill me back then. He had to resort to using the Portkey!" Greyback said arrogantly. "And if I can't get to him, I'll get to those close to him."

"Hey," Harry interjected. "So, since you want Potter, how about letting the two of us go on the condition that we fetch him and tell him to come alone," he suggested, semi-calmly, despite the fact that his heart was beating probably too fast for his fragile body to handle.

"What?!" Tonks shouted, but Greyback just laughed.

"What a refreshing attitude," he rasped. "But no, killing the students under his protection will hurt him more than killing him." He paused. "How about you join me, we can wreak havoc together. Life is good when you're free to do what you want."

"Considering that it seems a fight is inevitable, I'll say that I'll join you if you succeed in beating and turning me. I won't follow anyone weaker than me," Harry said while Tonks stared at him as if she was seeing a ghost.

"What the fuck, Harry," she whispered.

He could only shrug. "Hey, I like being alive, it's great. I'd rather be a werewolf than die a wizard," he said, speaking to Tonks, but intending the words for Greyback, who was looking at him curiously. From what Harry remembered the man liked turning children, so he was hoping that if he didn't go for a killing blow and tried to turn Harry, it would be more likely that he would leave an opening allowing Harry to go for the killing blow himself.

"I haven't laughed so much in ten years," Greyback howled with a raspy chuckle. "I accept your challenge. And if I succeed in turning you, the first people you're killing are the next students that make the mistake of leaving the castle!"

Harry shrugged. "Alright, there's some I wouldn't mind putting down for good, so that's ok." He turned to Tonks. "You can use this to see if you really want to be an auror. Being put in a death match against powerful dark wizards slash werewolves slash criminals is what it's all about, no?"

"Harry," Tonks replied softly. "I'm killing Greyback, then I'm killing you for the shit you're pulling."

"You got balls of steel, kid. I could use someone like you," Grey back with a smirk that revealed a few too many fangs. However, instead of going for Harry as his words indicated, he went down on all fours, pushed all his claws against the ground and shot towards Tonks in one incredible leap, maw open and aiming for the girl's throat.

It was obvious that the girl reacted instinctually, rather than rationally, and while Harry was already transfiguring a blade of grass into an iron spike, she put up a simple shield charm. Harry cursed and abandoned his transfiguration, casting a strong summoning charm on her robes, dumping a ridiculous amount of magic into it to get her to stumble towards him and thus dodge Greyback's leap. The protego hadn't even held a second, a simple punch shattering its opaque surface as if it were glass.

"Get your head in the game. Physical objects only, he's resistant to magic," Harry helpfully reminded her as Greyback once again crouched down for a jump forward.

Tonks nodded and brought up her wand, a hand tearing away at her neck. Harry once again abandoned a transfiguration to take what she handed to him, feeling the warm glass of the vial against his hand, feeling that it was still half full.

Greyback leapt, and while Tonks quickly transfigured an iron slab between them, Harry chugged down half a dose of liquid luck. Although, when one considered what sort of situation the potion had gotten Tonks in, he wasn't sure if it was expired or not.

He tapped himself on the head, turning invisible as Greyback smashed against the iron slab, probably having expected to simply use it as a battering ram against the two young magicals. However, Tonks had apparently started using her brain, as she held the slab up with a wingardium leviosa.

It was still too much for the girl though, and her magical strength wasn't capable of matching Greyback's sheer physical might when he was transformed. He picked up the slab, claws gripping it by the edges, and ripped it out of where Tonks had pushed it into the ground. He swung it at the girl, only for Harry to untransfigure the improvised weapon before it could decapitate his friend. Hairy clawed fists full of grass swung right past the girl's face, and another summoning charm brought her out of the reach of a pair of snapping jaws.

'You'll never outmanoeuvre him enough to have time to actually transfigure something,' the hat helpfully offered inside his head while Harry desperately tried to get into a good position, while pulling Tonks away from a series of deadly-looking swipes.

It was clear that Greyback was planning on killing Tonks and turning Harry, but he was also following a second objective. With every second the battle was shifting more and more away from the clearing where a teacher might have noticed the life-and-death struggle going on and into the forest.

'I have no momentum, I know. What am I supposed to do? The guy's like a war veteran or something,' Harry shot back at the hat as he continued his role of being a glorified puppet master of one pink-haired girl, leading her around while she desperately tried to send iron spikes and needles at the werewolf, only for them to all be dodged or simply blocked with a less sensitive part of the body.

Greyback was laughing the whole while, and in general, looked like he was having a bit too much fun for Harry's tastes. Even while invisible he didn't feel particularly safe anywhere near the madman. This proved to be doubly true when the werewolf apparently got sick of Tonks always being pulled out of harm's way and shifted directions, jumping straight at Harry instead, revealing that he'd known where he was the whole time.

So much for being invisible.

Instead of conjuring anything, transfiguring grass or backpedalling in the face of the angry werewolf flying at his face Harry used a tactic that might have seemed a bit contradictory at first glance. He jumped forward and got to see the surprise in Greyback's eyes, before Harry fell to the floor, sliding on the grass underneath the beast, avoiding getting nicked by the claws on the man's feet by about a millimetre.

'This is going to sound weird, but I'd prefer it if you didn't die,' the hat started in his mind, sounding like he was about to go on a whole spiel.

'Tell me what to do and fast!' Harry interrupted him as Greywolf got to his feet from where he'd landed and turned to face Harry.

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'Drink the potion in your pocket and let me take control of your mind,' the hat said in his mind. It was a testament to how royally fucked Harry was that he didn't bother back-talking. A quick search of his pockets revealed that he was somehow in possession of one of the strengthening tonics that he and Penny had brewed all those months ago.

It went down his throat and disappeared faster than a bottle of beer given to a homeless alcoholic. Even then, the only reason that he had the time to do so was because a rain of iron spikes fell down on where Greyback was standing, forcing him to jump to the side, rather than at Harry.

Feeling an unnatural amount of physical might surging through his body Harry did something he'd never done before. He opened his mind to intrusion rather than closing it and was rewarded by an alien and ancient intelligence flooding his head with its being, shunting him straight from his body and into a third-person perspective of himself.

Oddly enough, the fact that he was being possessed was not the first thing that Harry thought about when he witnessed this new perspective.

Rather, it was a 'fuck I'm scrawny,' that ran through his head as he beheld the scene that he'd given up on salvaging. A completely terrified Tonks trying to transfigure some significant amount of material, and a now visible small red-headed boy facing a two-metre-tall snarling werewolf who was also a war veteran/terrorist.

For all that Harry had practised duelling, theoretically and practically, he realised that all of his transfigurations were currently too slow to really be used effectively in a fight. Tonks seemed to be suffering from the same issue. He'd have to work on that if he got out alive.

He was curious as to what the hat's plan was and looked intently at how his body took the hat from its head and gripped it in his hands like a sword.

If he had an eyebrow he would have raised it. Was the hat planning on summoning the sword of Gryffindor and wielding it with the now physical body it had taken off Harry's hands? If so, why was it gripping the hat as if it were a sword? The sword was in the hat, after all, supposedly.

His metaphorical eyebrows widened, however, as the floppy leather in his body's hands suddenly morphed into a long double-edged silver sword. Rubies glittered on its hilt in the moonlight, and before Harry had the time to properly admire the beauty of the artefact, his body, or rather, Chanithachuah, sprang forward at such a blistering speed that he was surprised the grass didn't ignite.

It was obvious from Greyback's quick freeze that he'd never experienced a wizard running towards him rather than away from him, let alone a twelve-year-old kid with a sword. The freeze allowed Chanithachuah to close in, and direct a stab at the werewolf's torso, which was narrowly avoided by an awkward hop. Suddenly, Greyback was on the back foot as Chanithachuah wielded the sword with unnatural strength and speed, which could only be explained by the potion. What couldn't be explained by the potion was the absolute mastery of the sword that the hat was exhibiting. Every moment flowed seamlessly into another, creating a cage of silver after-images that Greyback couldn't escape from, while each and every swipe got closer to his body.

Chanithachuah was the puppet master and Greyback had just turned from a seemingly unbeatable enemy into a children's doll with too many strings. They danced through the trees, jumping over roots and occasionally clashing the flat of the blade against a claw. A bite was dodged by a smidge and a decapitation strike by a hair.

It was only due to the third-person perspective that Harry had over the event that he saw the web that Chanithachuah was weaving. Greyback wasn't only being pushed back. He was being turned around. His back was now facing Tonks, who'd managed to create two iron spikes the size of her forearms. She looked terrified out of her mind and utterly confused to boot, but there was murder in her eyes when she saw her opportunity.

Harry was still tethered to his mind, he could feel the hat's presence in the space he'd previously occupied. There hadn't been anything there up until now other than a deadly calm only found in snipers and psychopaths. But now there was something. A swelling force builds up inside the hat's matrix. It was as Chanithachuah paused his strikes and pointed two fingers at Greyback, that Harry understood that he was seeing a mental attack from the outside.

"Spikes!" Chanithachuah shouted as a mental attack so powerful it distorted the air around it, shot from Harry's fingers and struck Greyback right in the head, snapping it back. The werewolf's body froze in place, completely and utterly still. A second later two iron spikes shot into its back so violently that they protruded out of his chest. Not dead yet the impact seemed to awaken the werewolf from his state of mental shock, two clawed hands going to his chest to uselessly fumble at the spikes. Instead of helping, the gesture just smeared blood everywhere.

Chanithachuah sprang forward, sword raised. A down-wards strike at the head was dodged as Greyback stumbled backwards, but it was just a feint, Harry's body spun in place, black robes creating a perfect circle of cloth, the sword creating a larger, silver one, only interrupted by Greyback's body. The weapon slid right through, bisecting the monster. A torso with a shocked head and two arms fell to the ground. One second after a pair of legs crumbled, falling first on the knees, then on the pelvis, the reality of their death having just hit them.

Harry didn't get any time to admire the beautiful fatality scene that seemed taken right out of Mortal Kombat. If the mental switch that had occurred between him and the hat could have been described by a rubber band metaphor, then that rubber band snapped. With a violent jerk, ten times worse than what he'd experienced when he'd been born, Harry found himself once again in his own body, stumbling back from the corpse in front of him, and onto his arse. A hand went up to grasp at his violently beating heart and the sword fell to the ground with a thump, reverting back to a leather hat which looked, more than anything, tired.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck me up the ass," Harry muttered shakily as he quickly scrambled to the hat, the strength that he'd felt from the potion leaving his body like diarrhoea. Suddenly and violently. He managed to put the hat on his head, barely. The smell of blood hit him and he retched. Not in any sort of moral disgust, but simply because it smelled really bad. A mix of iron, pus and rotting dead animals.

Out of sheer disgust, rather than any sort of rational thought as to the state of his stamina, Harry slapped a hand onto the ground with as much intent as he could. A hole opened up underneath the corpse of the werewolf and swallowed it up, leaving nothing behind but a few splatters of blood and a freshly tilled earth.

"Harry!" Tonks shouted, suddenly appearing at his side on her knees, holding his shoulders and looking at his eyes through a film of tears. "Are you okay, did you get scratched?" she asked frantically as she shook his back and forth, making his head loll.

Snapping out of her grip he fell backwards, but she followed and kept shaking him, her hands on his chest and hair tickling his face from how far she was leaning down. Tears fell from her eyes on his face and she started apologising. "I'm so sorry, it's all my fault if I hadn't come out here then," she blubbered before falling into complete unintelligibility.

Harry was traumatised as well, but considering he had more experience with death, and, just like last year with Twix, the whole thing seemed to have ended quite well, he wasn't nearly as hysteric.

"Tonks," he started, planning on saying something ridiculous enough to break her out of her funk. "This position is awkward as fuck, either kiss me or stop teasing," he said jokingly. It seemed to work, as the shaking stopped and she just looked at him. Harry couldn't see much of her considering that her head was covering up the moon, but she looked like a grimy miserable wretch.

Then, to probably both their surprise, she leaned down and smashed her lips against his. It wasn't really a kiss by any definition of the word. Just a violent collision of lips that happened in the completely wrong context for it to be anything but bizarre. But, the act seemed to have had a calming effect on both participants and once Tonks lifted her head again from the stunned second-year, they were both silent, lightly panting. Their heartbeats finally slowed down again.

The girl collapsed again, not into a kiss this time, but in a hug. She rested her head on his shoulder. "You're a great friend. I'm sorry. For everything. Thanks for being here."

"Don't mention it, literally," Harry replied with a dry laugh. "If anyone ever finds out what we did, we're getting expelled faster than you can say 'goodbye'." He pushed the girl off of him and stood up. He was weary to the bone, but if nothing else they had to leave the forbidden forest behind before the smell of dead werewolf attracted any other critters.

He offered Tonks a hand from where she'd chosen to lie on her back and stare at him. She took it and he helped pull her up. "You stole the sorting hat?" she asked as they started limping their way back to the castle.

"The sorting hat is a sentient object with its own wants and desires. It just got bored of the headmaster's office and wanted to go around a bit," Harry defended himself. He looked around shiftily as they entered the clearing that separated Hogwarts from the forest. "Just don't tell anyone."

Tonks chuckled weakly. "I can't believe you managed to transfigure it into a sword. That's so cool. Where did you learn to fight like that?" she asked.

'Chanithachuah?' Harry asked mentally.

'Lie your ass off,' the hat demanded.

Harry did as he was told.

"I guess in a past life. Still wouldn't have helped me if I hadn't had a strengthening tonic in my pocket for some reason."

"Very lucky that," Tonks said acerbically, before groaning. "Fucking Slughorn. Felix Felicis my ass."

"We're lucky we're alive, I guess," Harry muttered. "You seem to be in a better mood too, so maybe it worked."

"Who needs emotional resolution when you can almost die fighting a werewolf to speed up the process," she joked. She seemed to be acting weirdly normal considering what had just occurred, but he knew she was just forcing it. He recognized his own efforts in hers.

"Have to remember that next time I'm feeling down," Harry agreed resolutely. The two of them arrived at the castle and quietly entered it, starting to make their way to the Hufflepuff common room.

In some manner of strange luck, they didn't meet anyone on their way, and traversed the path quietly, without speaking.

"I've been a horrible friend. It's stupid, because out of everyone you've been here for me the most," Tonks said once they'd reached the barrels that signalled the entrance.

"I've also been keeping some things from you," Harry admitted. "But I think that's an issue for another day. We can start anew, without any of the bullshit. Just not now. I'm falling asleep as I stand." It was true as well, his eyelids felt heavier than dumbbells, and by the slur in her speech, Tonks wasn't doing any better.

"Yeah, you're right," Tonks admitted.

They entered the common room and split up there, with one last hug. Almost dying next to someone had the tendency to bring you together, Harry guessed. It was sort of surreal, how they hadn't met anyone on their way to their dormitories. The luck continued, and soon Harry was divested of his disgusting sweaty and muddy clothes and lying in his bed. Rather than bother thinking about the implications of all the events that had occurred, he passed out. Sure, it was hard to believe he'd been fighting a werewolf just 20 minutes ago, and that now he was lying in his bed back in the castle.

But sometimes these things just didn't matter, and you only wanted to sleep.