To worship the Sun (working title)
Chapter 1: What happened to our boy, exactly?
Key: (you should know what speech and thoughts look like now)
"Richmond, Virginia!"
The monocled woman stepped into the green-hued flames, calling out her destination. Floo travel was normally disorienting, but International Floo travel was much more so. The world spun for several minutes, before she was able to exit out the other side.
As she stepped over the threshold of the stone fireplace, the change in locality was obvious. The scent of the room was different, and it was much cooler in the small wooden building that she appeared in than it had been at the International Floo station she had just left in London. Dumbledore, and the British ambassador to America, Earnest Swambeck, stood near the external doorway, waiting for her, and brushing off the soot they had accumulated during their travel.
Earnest reached for the doorknob, twisting it and opening the door, gesturing with his free hand to her. "After you, Amelia."
On the other side, an American customs agent stood waiting patiently for their arrival, with the customs building a few dozen paces past him, through a heavily reinforced wrought iron gate. He approached the British trio, keeping his hands at his sides. If he had a wand, it was not visible, but he was clearly expecting them.
"Mister Dumbledore, Madame Bones, Ambassador Swambeck: welcome to America. I am Agent Jackson, United States Customs. Please follow me; your appointment is shortly, and the Secretary is a very busy man. He insists that all appointments be prompt."
The customs agent was smartly dressed, with a tailored black Muggle suit, oddly complimenting his short-cropped blond hair. The customs building beyond him was Spartan and undecorated save for the sign near the large doors, which read "US Customs Office". The building was a dark gray, slate-like color, interspersed with white bits, cut as smooth as glass; it appeared as though it were carved out of a single solid block of granite. The heavy wards on the structure were obvious from the extensive rune networks etched into the stone, to say nothing of what could be detected of them by the magically sensitive. There were not many windows.
Amelia responded, "After you." As they followed him, she spared a glance back at the entry building. It was tiny, not much larger than her own office. But there were no other structures, or anything else, nearby. 'A security precaution, perhaps?'
The agent turned and led the way through the gates, passing both Muggle and magical armed guards, who looked over the foreign guests suspiciously as they passed. Dumbledore commented, "This place seems oddly fortified. Are you expecting trouble?"
Without turning, the agent responded, "America is currently engaged in numerous hostilities, Mr. Dumbledore, in the Balkan peninsula, in various areas of the Middle East, and with our own local problems. This level of security is nothing new. You will probably see similar security around any buildings in America that support International Floo travel. The building ahead of you was constructed during wartime, and as such was built to withstand tremendous punishment."
Inside the building, more guards were present. The interior was unremarkable, for all appearances the same as any other customs office, save for the fact that the reception desks were unmanned, and there were no people awaiting passage into the country. Passing through a number of halls, the agent led them to a heavily reinforced, and quite clearly enchanted, doorway. "Please surrender your wands for a moment. The scanner will record the magical signatures of your person as you pass, but as you are foreign visitors we also need to record your wands."
Through the doorway, it was obvious what he was talking about. A sculpted bronze archway stood just inside the door, with all the more rune carvings on it. More guards stood nearby, and a receptionist sat at her desk a short distance past the archway. The three British visitors drew their wands, handing them to the agent, who then took all three to a small box upon a table next to the archway, placing them inside and closing the lid. The box was made of a reflective black material, with a glowing screen on the side. He motioned for them to step through the arch.
As they passed through, he retrieved their wands from the box, the scan obviously complete. Returning their wands, he gestured again for them to follow him, saying, "The Secretary's office is down this hall."
He turned and walked straight towards a blank wall near the receptionist, who did not even glance up from her work as he went by. Nor did she glance at the visitors. As they approached the wall, a haze appeared, before vanishing to reveal a hallway beyond the blank wall. A mahogany door, heavily carved and darkly stained was visible at the end of the hall. As they approached, the agent stopped, turning to say, "Please wait here. I will inform the Secretary of your arrival."
Neither Amelia nor Earnest wanted to talk while they waited, which left Dumbledore alone with his thoughts. 'Two years. Two years of searching. On top of nearly ten since Harry went missing.'
Initially, in the years following the Potters' deaths, and Harry's subsequent placement with his relatives, Dumbledore had kept close watch on the instruments he had tied to the boy, almost obsessively monitoring his well-being. Nearly three years after the fall of the Dark Lord, however, a long series of legislative battles consumed all the attention he could spare. After some initial anxiety, he convinced himself to stop worrying. He had Arabella keeping watch over the boy, after all. Surely, he had thought, she would report to him if anything happened. She had always been reliable, after all.
It wasn't until the boy's eighth birthday that he managed to find the time to meet with her. But when he called on her, there was no answer at her Floo. And when he visited her home unannounced, the house was empty. Empty and dead as a tomb, as though no one had lived there for years.
His initial thoughts about the house proved prophetic, because when he finally tracked her down, it turned out that she had been interred at the nearest cemetery to Privet Drive; the victim of a lorry accident nearly four years prior. He stood there before her gravestone for a long time, utterly in shock. It was the one possibility that had completely escaped him, that she might die on the job. It was only when he considered the implications of what that meant with regards to the reason she'd been stationed at Privet Drive in the first place that he started to panic.
For so long he'd assumed, effectively, that no news was good news. He had told her of the importance of Harry's security, after all, and how the best security was anonymity. And since his instruments never showed any problems, he hadn't thought to check. But she'd been dead nearly four years… Four years since anyone had checked up on Harry.
With all the speed that magic could grant his aging body, he rushed to Privet Drive to find that the Dursley family had moved out more than two years prior, and had left no forwarding address. A chill crawled up his spine: his instruments definitely would have registered the Dursleys leaving. A thought, like a bolt of lightning, struck him. Why? Why hadn't his instruments registered this?
An examination of his instruments, however, gave him so strong a shock that it nearly killed him. The reason they had never responded, never showed anything, was because… they were no longer attached to anything. The realization had made his heart stop, momentarily. They weren't connected to the boy, and they hadn't been for a long time. Dumbledore's knowledge of enchantments was considerable; but in spite of his frantic, all-consuming dissection of the devices, in the end it was all he could do to determine that the connection had been severed sometime close to Arabella's death.
He was floored. The only thing that should have been able to sever the connection, after all, would have been Harry's death.
Two and a half years later, Dumbledore had nearly reached his wit's end. With Harry's disappearance, and the severing of his instruments, he'd nearly lost hope. But one thing had kept him going: the Hogwarts student book. Its enchantments were much older, and more powerful, than his own instruments had been. If Harry was alive at all, the book would know.
But maddeningly, the book worked in a specific fashion. It would only report on those living on their eleventh birthday, and at no other time. Nothing he could do could access the book's contents, not without potentially ruining the enchantments on the book. Knowing he would not be able to repair whatever damage he might accidentally do, he was forced to bide his time, and wait.
More than two years of terrified, frustrating waiting had taken its toll on him. More restless than he had been in his youth, he threw himself into whatever projects he could, furiously aiming his energy anywhere else. At night, and whenever there was nothing to be done, he turned to his cups; but eventually, Poppy's objections forced him to put them aside.
Informing Minerva and the staff of what had occurred was galling, but keeping it from them would be worse in the long run, he had known; still, telling them had been the hardest thing he could recall doing. Minerva's fury had been a sight to behold. He hadn't seen her so angry since the day her fiancé had been killed, murdered by a former Grindelwald supporter.
Naught but twenty-three then, she'd cast so many spells at the successful assassin that the overload had destroyed her wand. His body was unidentifiable; none of the spells could be broken, so powerful had her rage been. The rictus of fury on her face would be something he would never forget; the sobbing he heard from her quarters a few days later would be another regret that would never leave him. Regret that he hadn't seen the attack coming; regret that he couldn't stop attacker; and still more regret that he hadn't stopped her, hadn't prevented her anger from nearly destroying her.
That passion had been the reason he'd suggested teaching to her; partially as a way to put her sorrows to rest, partially to fill the void of the children she would now never have, and of course partially because of the phenomenal skill she'd displayed avenging her beloved. Armando had approved, of course, of Dumbledore's choice of replacement for Transfiguration professor, though he'd expressed some reservations about her teaching ability. Her Scottish temper, however, won his approval.
Since then, his staff had helped him in his search. None of them understood the urgency, save Severus and Minerva, beyond Harry's status as a hero, but that was enough to motivate them. But still, after two years, not even a single credible rumor had reached him.
It was a hard lesson, recognizing his own involvement in this particular failure, but the knowledge drove him to speak up when Dolores Umbridge proposed her bill to put employment restrictions on people with creature heritage. That day, he'd reminded his supporters why they supported him, and his enemies why they hated him; but neither really mattered. Neither had influenced his decision to speak that day, rather than save his energy for some of the bigger fights. What made him speak up that day was knowing what would likely happen if he didn't, and with it the sudden realization that he didn't want any more regrets keeping him awake at night.
It was no simple task, convincing the Wizengamot to reject the bill, and it cost him considerable political capital, but when it was finally put to a vote, nearly four-fifths of the chamber voted against it. It was a landslide victory; one that would keep discussion of any further such bills out of the chamber for years to come.
That night was the first time in many years that he slept well.
That was six months ago, on the 31st of January. Today, on the 30th of July, he stood before the book, waiting with baited breath. The clock approached midnight, but not a single sound reached him. He could not peel his eyes from the old tome, nor from the ancient quill and stack of envelopes nearby. His ears could discern nothing but his own breathing, and only barely that. He didn't feel the warmth of the nearby fire lighting the room, nor the discomfort of his feet, standing stock still as he had for more than an hour. The book had been made long before he was born, before Dippet had been born, in fact. The details of its construction had been lost to history, and despite his long curiosity about its function, he'd never spent much time studying it.
But tonight, he could think about, could focus on, nothing else.
His vision traced the leather-bound volume, noting the faint impressions of runes carved into the surface. Many of them were no longer visible to the unaided eye, but for someone as sensitive to magic as he, they shown as though they glowed. A faint scratching noise, emanating from within the book, told him that a new name had been added. A new magical child had been born. But he could not muster the curiosity to wonder to whom it had been born.
The clock, three floors away, began chiming. Once, twice, thrice… On and on it went, counting upwards, until finally it struck twelve, and went silent. The castle, so recently filled with noise, was again silent as the grave. And he still waited. Time passed, he didn't know how much, and nothing. Nothing happened.
Not knowing how long he waited, he felt his heart break. 'The boy must have died those many years ago,' he thought. A single tear appeared, falling to his beard, as he slowly turned towards the door. Where he intended to go, whether it was to bed, or to leap from the tower, he wasn't sure. But just as his hand reached for the knob, a scratching sound penetrated his daze, and he turned. The quill was moving writing upon an envelope; the book was just closing ('When did it open? I didn't hear it'). And then the quill stopped.
It took every last bit of strength of will he possessed to make himself walk to the desk. To look upon the parchment; to see what was written there. The years threatened to overwhelm him, but he managed to raise his eyes.
And read these words:
Harry Potter
Unknown
Unknown
Unknown.
~~End chapter~~