Nightmares

Part 1: Albus' Story

Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry was almost utterly empty. Christmas Vacation had been called over a month early in celebration of Voldemort's defeat at the hands of the infant Harry Potter, and the remaining students had, bar none, gone home to be with whatever family they had left. The professors, even Minerva McGonagall, who usually stayed at Hogwarts every day of the year, had also all left the premises. The ghosts too had one by one floated off the grounds in search of ghostly celebrations for them to attend. Moaning Myrtle was the last to leave, hours after the others, wailing about the fact that no one had waited for her. Only two people had failed to leave Hogwarts, and they were not teacher nor student, ghost nor poltergeist. One was Headmaster Albus Dumbledore and the other was Severus Snape.

Both men had obvious reasons to stay behind: Snape was a hunted man outside of the castle, and Albus had to stay to protect both the building and young Severus. Although Albus was supposed to be protecting Severus, they didn't interact much. In fact, for the first few days of their stay, Severus made a point of avoiding Dumbledore entirely. He stayed locked in his room for the most part, sending for his meals and leaving only in the dead of night, when he could stay in his rooms no longer.

Severus thought that these late-night excursions weren't known, but, really, what at Hogwarts isn't known to Albus Dumbledore? The Headmaster allowed Severus his illusions for a couple of days, thinking that he would eventually come out of his shell, but soon Albus decided that another course of action was necessary.

The young man was sitting at the Head Table, in the empty Great Hall at two thirty in the morning, when Albus decided to show himself.

"Hello, Severus," intoned the old man quietly, coming up behind the former Death Eater.

The young man didn't startle as Dumbledore had expected him to do, nor did he turn his head. Instead, after a second of silence, he answered in a hallow voice, "Hello, Headmaster."

"We're both adults now, Severus," said the Headmaster gently, "you should call me Albus."

"If you say so," responded Severus flatly.

Albus eased himself into a chair next to Severus and conjured up two cups of tea. He pushed one cup towards the younger man, but did not insist he drink it. They sat in silence for awhile, Albus giving Severus a chance to speak, Severus giving Albus a chance to leave. Finally, when it became apparent that Severus was not going to talk, Albus broke the silence.

"You've been here with me for almost a week, and every night of that time you've wandered the halls from midnight till almost dawn."

"Yes," replied Severus, noncommittally, knowing there was no point in lying to the Headmaster.

"And, as you seem to be rather used to this, I do not think I would be incorrect in assuming that this is not a new occurrence?"

"No," answered Severus again.

"Nightmares?" guessed Dumbledore gently; hoping to get Severus to open up about what was so obviously tormenting him.

Severus hesitated for a moment, then, resigned, he let out a sigh and nodded. Albus nodded in return, pushing down the urge to pat the younger man on the hand, and said, "I understand what you're going through."

At this Severus finally emerged from his apathetic shell and sneered, "What can Albus Dumbledore, Champion on the light, possibly know of what I'm going through? Of the horrors that tear through my mind every single time I close my eyes?"

A pained look crossed Dumbledore's features, both at the harsh words and at the memories they caused to surface, and he said softly, "I have seen many horrible things in my years, Severus. I have nightmares of my own."

Severus snorted derisively and bitterly said, "I doubt your nightmares even begin to comparing with mine, Headmaster. No disrespect intended, but seeing the consequences of others and doing the acts themselves are two entirely separate things."

"Have you forgotten that I am the "Great" Killer of Grindelwald? His entire body liquidated before my very eyes."

"Grindelwald was an evil man," Severus replied, though he still sounded a bit sick. "He'd probably killed hundreds of people. I'm talking of innocents. You couldn't understand that."

Dumbledore looked at Severus appraisingly for a second. Then, letting out a resigned sigh, he said, "I was not always the man I am today, Severus. I too was young once, and I made mistakes, the same as you." Seeing that Severus was still unconvinced, Albus sighed and asked, "Severus, have you ever heard of Jon Abrams?"

Severus shook his head, and Dumbledore said, "No, very few have. Especially in England."

"Who is he?" asked Severus, curious.

"I'll get to that in one second," said Albus, wringing his hands. "First I must go back a little. I graduated Hogwarts in 1859, and though I was only eighteen I was considered to be a master of Transfiguration and Charms. In anything relying upon a wand, in fact, I was knowledgeable far beyond my years. So, when it came time to apprentice for a subject I decided to use the opportunity to improve my power in other areas. I asked my Potions professor the name of the greatest practitioner of the subject in the entire word, and I asked my Herbology professor the same thing. Surprisingly, the answer was the same for both subjects: Julian Mayfair."

Severus' eyes widened and he whispered, awestruck, "You studied under the Julian Mayfield?"

Albus grinned at the wonderment present in Severus' voice and said, "For a few years I did. I had to stop suddenly, for reasons I'll reveal shortly."

Though Severus was filled with hundreds of questions about Dumbledore's time with the Great Julian Mayfield, who was regarded almost unanimously as the greatest Potions master of the modern age, he slowly nodded for the Headmaster to go on.

Albus collected his thoughts and steeled himself, continuing, "Because of the recommendations of my Headmaster and most of my teachers, Julian decided to accept me, and in the summer of 1859 I traveled by boat to Louisiana."

"Why didn't you just apparate?"

Albus smiled fondly and remarked, "I was following Julian's first order to me: He told me that I needed to break myself of using "foolish wand-waving" in every situation. He said that that was the biggest handicap a witch or wizard must overcome in order to study Potions correctly.
For a couple of years I studied under Julian peacefully, happier than I had been in my entire life. The only blight on the entire experience was my rising horror and disgust at the way the Americans treated their Black population. The outbreak of their Civil War in my third year of study only made things worse. Prejudice became open violence and Black slaves were killed almost weekly. At first it seemed that I was the only person in all of New Orleans who gave a damn about the slaves, but one day in late 1861 my mind was changed about that.
I was walking down Bourbon Street on one of my free days, like I always did, when I saw a young man, younger than me, surrounded by a crowd of people, shouting at them. I couldn't hear what he was saying so I made my way closer to him. When I got within hearing distance I found, to my utter shock, that this young man, this kid, was upbraiding a huge group of men about their treatment of the slaves. He said that slavery was the worst thing one human being could do to another, that they were lower than monkeys for treating fellow human beings with hatred and contempt without any reason, that they were going to burn in Hell for all eternity while the people they treated so poorly would sit in Heaven and laugh at their torture, and he said much more than that."

"Brave," intoned Severus. "Brave and stupid."

Dumbledore nodded absently, saying, "He was both the smartest and the stupidest man I've ever met. His mind was almost astonishingly sharp, but at the same time he had no regard for his own life, and he regularly gave these 'suicide speeches', as I later named them, and he had dozens of other self-destructive tendencies."

"So, what happened?" questioned Severus.

"I found myself agreeing with ever word he said, though I didn't really believe in the Christian Institutions of Heaven and Hell. I was listening, entranced to everything he said, when, suddenly, a man in front took out a muggle weapon called a 'pistol' and threatened to kill the speaker if he didn't shut his mouth. Instead of being afraid, the speaker stepped closer to the man, whispered something to him, and then took away his weapon so fast I didn't even see it. My respect for the man soared as he began to laugh in the man's dumbfounded face. Then, before anything else could happen, he announced that he was done and began to shoo the crowd away.
After everyone was gone, he turned to me and smiled brightly and said, 'Hello! If you've hung around to try to kill me, can you at least wait until I've had a whisky?'"

Dumbledore leaned back in his chair, grinning, lost in the power and charisma even now, and said, "And that's how I met Jon Abrams."

"Are we getting to the point of this?" asked Severus impatiently, hoping to hear more of Julian Mayfield.

Dumbledore sighed and said, "Unfortunately, yes. Johnny and I became friends quickly, and we were soon spending every spare minute together. It soon became apparent that Johnny was more than just a loudmouth on the street – he was a radical, a revolutionary. And he was much more than just talk. It was a few months into our friendship before he told me about his group. It wasn't much at the time, but it was still responsible for its share of destruction. He told me that we would be changing the way people thought, liberating an entire race of people, and bringing down a tyrannical government all at once. And I bought every word of it.
I dove straight into the group, helping Johnny organize it properly, giving it a proper name – the Order of Minos, stopping Johnny from doing the Suicide Speeches, and we started to recruit members in secret. By the time he figured out I was a wizard, our little group had grown almost tenfold."

Severus' eyes widened and his mouth hung slack. "Did you just say he 'figured out' that you were a wizard?" asked Severus, shocked and incredulous.

Dumbledore nodded and said, "Like I said, Johnny was the most brilliant mind I've ever come across. It took him less than six months of intermittent contact with me to deduce that I was magical, and, what's more, he managed to trick me into confirming his suspicions."

"Merlin's ghost," Severus breathed in wonder.

"Johnny had natural powers of manipulation and persuasion," Dumbledore explained. "Even though he was a muggle, it was as if his breath oozed Veritaserum and his voice was a natural Imperius. After I admitted what I was, Johnny made me his second-in-command, and, basking in the glow of his approval, I told him absolutely everything I knew about the magical world – I even taught him to brew a couple of simple potions. And he used this knowledge to ensnare me even more into his cause. He started telling me that once we finished with the Confederacy we would storm England and win equal rights for Werewolves, Centaurs, Goblins, and anything else that needed it. He used my idealism against me in the worst way after he found out I was a wizard, and afterwards the seduction was complete. I was his, totally, and would do anything for the cause." Dumbledore finished, sounding grim, and said, "And I did."

"Like what?" asked Severus quietly.

Dumbledore's face was lined with sorrow as he said, bitterly, "There wasn't much I didn't do. I brewed explosive potions that couldn't be traced by the muggles and we bombed plantations, supply trains, and countless government buildings; we burned crops; we kidnapped, tortured, and executed overseer and plantation owners. Towards the end of it all, Johnny took to walking up to veterans on the street in broad daylight, shooting as many as possible, and then using me to apparate us out of the area. But the worst thing, his 'masterstroke of genius' as he called it, was…"

Albus trailed off, and Severus, knowing too well the all-consuming shame Albus was experiencing, gave him a moment to compose himself before prompting him again, saying, "Yes?"

"Johnny knew all about Transfiguration because of what I had told him, and he knew that I was good as it. So he devised a plan incorporating those facts. We would…would kidnap the daughters of plantation owners. And, by this time, Johnny had put aside how this was going to change the mindset of anyone. Or maybe it had always been like that, and I was just too foolish to see. By this time Johnny just wanted to hurt and punish the people he hated as painfully and degradingly as possible. He was in it for pure bloodlust. And…so was I.
Anyway, we would kidnap these girls and he would have me transfigure myself or him or the both of us to look like a slave – the bigger the better – and…we would viciously rape them." Albus closed his eyes at that confession and rubbed them with his thumb and his index finger. When he looked back up at Severus, the old man looked worse than Severus had ever seen him. For the first time Severus had ever seen, Dumbledore was not in control of himself. As he continued, tears began to silently fall from his usually lively blue eyes, "Some of these girls weren't even ten yeas old, for Merlin's sake! And I had no qualms whatsoever for the longest time! I thought they deserved it."

Silence fell between the two men, and Severus didn't dare break it. After what seemed like years, Albus finally admitted, in almost a whisper, "I have nightmares about a lot of things, Severus, but the screams of those littler girls that I raped all those years ago punctuate every single one."

There was another long silence after that confession, during which Dumbledore peered into nothing, eyes glassy, and his mind deep in the past. After a long while, he let out a weary sigh, and opened his mouth to finish his story, "Eventually, thank the gods, my sense began to return to me and I started to doubt what we were doing. I didn't voice my thoughts, but Johnny must have sensed something was amiss because he started to slowly phase me out of the Order's activities. I finally decided to leave when the Civil War ended, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, Johnny kept on with his 'fun' even though our enemies, the Confederacy and slavery, had been eradicated. He kept on blowing up government buildings, despite the fact that the government was a good one who had just helped achieve two of our three main goals. It was then that I realized that, truly, Johnny wasn't fighting for a cause or an ideal, and hadn't been for a long while. Secondly, the Wizarding Presidency had stayed with the Union during the war, so the magical elements we used in our bombs couldn't be traced by the Confederacy, which was entirely muggle. Once we started bombing Union buildings, though, they were on our tail. Six months after the war ended the Federal Bureau of Magical Investigation had followed the trail straight to New Orleans. They were mere days away from finding out everything when I told Johnny that I was leaving."

Dumbledore let out a hollow little laugh and said, "It shows how much of a hold Johnny had over me that he convinced me to bring him with me. He said he'd been worrying for months that he'd lost sight of the true cause, and that he believed that some time away with his best friend, his partner, the one who'd always calmed him and kept him grounded would be the perfect thing for him. It wasn't even that good of a lie, but my mind instantly accepted it, happily humming and convinced that the 'real Johnny' was back. He gave me the job of packing up all of our things and then he went to round up the members and officially disband the group.
It was only supposed to take an hour, but that hour passed, then two, then three, and four was almost gone when Johnny burst into the house we shared, which we also used as Headquarters, covered in blood and dirt, holding onto a lantern and four bottles of whisky with rags shoved into the mouths of them. I jumped up, panicked, trying to demand to know where he'd been and what the hell had happened, but he cut me off. 'Go!' he screamed, lighting a couple of the rags with the lantern. 'They're right behind me! Just apparate out of here! Go back to Europe and forget any of this every happened!'
Then he threw the bottles into adjacent rooms, and they exploded into flames, engulfing everything inside. I did what he told me to almost without thinking, and the last time I ever saw Johnny he was dropping one of the flaming bottled right at his feet."

"So you just came back home and never tried to turn yourself in?" asked Severus, indignant at that possibility, considering what he'd done a couple of years earlier.

"I tried to turn myself in a couple of years later, "Dumbledore answered with a laugh, "but Johnny had outsmarted everyone this time."

"What do you mean?" asked Severus, surprised.

"Johnny purged our little group out of existence," Albus answered simply. "He 'disbanded' the Order by calling them all together for an emergency meeting, slipping them all some Paralyzing Potion, and then butchering them all. That's what he was doing for the four hours that I was waiting for him. Then he torched the building they were in, and ran to our house. The authorities were after him, but I learned from an officer in America that it was only because an anonymous tip, which had to be Johnny, had been delivered telling them when and where he was going to be. He orchestrated the whole thing perfectly: they arrived just in time to see a figure run into the house, and before they could even begin to move the place was engulfed in flames. And, at almost the exact same instant, miles away, a bomb at their department headquarters detonated, the last act of the Order of Minos. Johnny disappeared from the world that night after killing over 100 people, burning down two buildings, and bombing a Federal Agency in less than four hours. All the files on him and the Order were gone, all our notes were burned, and all the people in the entire word who could say for sure that a terrorist group called the Order of Minos existed at all were dead, except for me. Johnny knew that I could easily overpower him if he tried to kill me, so he flawlessly placed me out of reach until everything just went away. When I tried to turn myself in, they practically laughed in my face. The whole debacle had been one of the biggest embarrassments in the history of the Bureau, and no one wanted anything to do with it. Not only did no one care anymore, but there was no proof that the Order ever even existed. It was like confessing to killing God. I was back home in less than a week."

"And Johnny?"

Albus shrugged. "The Agents had the place surrounded the entire time it burned down, but there was no body found inside. I don't know how it could have possibly been managed, but if anyone could escape that situation it would be Johnny. The Americans, though, the Americans don't have my faith. They announced him to be dead, burnt to ashes, and buried the entire embarrassing affair with them. Either way though, alive or dead, I never saw him again."

Severus gazed at Dumbledore, seeing him differently than he'd ever seen the old man before. He'd always taken it for granted that Dumbledore was this perfect rock upon which the defense of the Light was founded upon. Severus had always thought Dumbledore a saint, and now, knowing that he'd made mistakes, horrible mistakes, just like everyone else made him seem more human. Severus wasn't sure if that was a good thing.

"Now do you believe that I can understand what you are going through?" asked Dumbledore, smiling grimly, interrupting Severus' thoughts.

Severus nodded, but stayed silent.

"Good," said Albus, his smile losing a little bit of its grimness, "then maybe you'd like to tell me of your nightmares, now that I've told you of mine?"

Severus hesitated for a few seconds, but finally nodded his assent. For almost a minute, Severus stayed silent, organizing his thoughts, wondering where to begin. During this time Dumbledore didn't push him, knowing how difficult it was to begin a confession.

When he was ready Severus opened his mouth and haltingly began.

"It started with Lucius Malfoy…"

To Be Continued…