AN: For the QFL, I was given the prompt Scorpio:"Scorpios are constantly plotting several steps ahead in order to orchestrate an eventual checkmate. This doesn't mean their intentions are necessarily nefarious. Write about a character(s) that seems conniving and manipulative but aren't bad people OR write about a character(s) that manipulate others for their own agendas, whether good or bad."
1,030 words.
Albus Dumbledore never meant for this to happen. Well. . . Not quite. It was complicated. It always was.
When he was a young boy, he remembered playing Wizard's Chess with his father. It was before the business with the muggle boys in Godric's Hollow, before Ariana and the Obscurus.
He was barely able to reach most of the pieces, barely being tall enough to see over the end of the table. But that did not matter. What mattered was that that he and his father were doing something together. Something they would never be able to do again.
His father's voice was low and patient with Albus. He went easy on him, making deliberate mistakes and talking through everything with Albus. Teaching him how to play, how to make every move count. Teaching him, most of all, the value of every single piece.
"Even a pawn has its use," his father told him, holding up the piece. "Not every pawn can become a queen, but even if they never become queens, they will always be important to the game because they can do something."
As Albus became a student at Hogwarts, those words resonated with him. Every class was a tool, a resource at his disposal. He was a pawn, the son of a man in Azkaban with a mad sister, from the gentry that was considered degraded after his American mother married into the family. But Albus was determined to be a queen someday. The most important piece of the board.
But not because he felt the need to be merciless, or cruel. His ambition was about more than that. After Ariana, he saw cracks in his world. The magical world did not have the support his sister needed, and neither did the muggle world, for that matter. Kendra informed them thusly. So many, he'd realized, were slipping through the cracks. And the men who were bigoted, who hated the muggles— they were no better than those stupid, idiotic, cruel boys who did what they did with no regard for consequences.
Albus wanted to change that. He knew that he would be important someday. It was in the way he excelled in his classes, the way that everyone took notice of his magic, of his skill.
He knew that was a resource, a resource to be used. He kept his correspondences with all the journals and experts of his day. It was proof that he was special. It was a series of connections that could tie to where he wanted to go. So many roads to the end goal— all ripe for the picking.
Everything was in pursuit of changing the world for the better. Making a world that his sister could live in. Preventing an obscurus from ever being born again. Not that he ever shared that word, mind you, with anyone else in the family, or anyone else at all.
Bathilda was the one who told him about obscuruses and obscurials, when he helped her clean out a room for her nephew, who would be coming sometime. Her nephew, she claimed, would be a good friend to Albus. They would be kindred spirits.
Oh, but they were so much more, in those dark days, when the future was severed by the scissors of the Fates.
He never meant for Ariana to die, to wake up from Gellert's illusions and delusions. But he would plan, he would scheme, and he would make up for lost time in achieving his dreams.
Aberforth called him heartless— but that was a misunderstanding. Ambition and altruism were friends, in Albus's mind. Yes, he was pursuing that greatness that caring for Ariana had prevented him from finding. But he was still going to change the world, still going to prevent her case from happening again.
The Deathly Hallows were still on his mind when he befriended and worked with Nicolas Flamel. He'd hoped for a way to reverse death, to bring back his sister, his parents.
But that string of fate was clipped cruelly as well.
He meant for Newt to find Credence, he'd meant to defeat Grindelwald himself.
But at the same time, he'd never wanted things to actually end up this way. Whenever he wanted his plans to be interrupted by a happier ending, it wasn't. Instead, he was stuck on the dark path, doing everything he could to save the world.
He was tired of the 'buts,' the contradictions. How, as he grew older, he would have given everything to give up his plans, his schemes, his ambitions and greatness, all for what could have been.
Ariana, alive and well.
Him and Gellert, together and happy— not fated for tragedy, like they were now.
He wanted it, he saw that alternate history in the Mirror of Erised. He and Gellert stood together, growing old and with adopted young witches and wizards, once abused and now saved from Ariana's fate.
No matter who or what he manipulated, Albus could never make that future happen. He couldn't win the games without losing pawns, without losing so many pieces to the board.
"In chess, the ends justify the means."
Another piece of advice from his father, for what it was worth. Albus had always been gifted with foresight, as a child making famous and powerful friends, as a student excelling in his classes, as an adult forming the first structure of heroes, of a resistance against the darkness. And then again, when he formed the first Order of the Phoenix, named for his brother's phoenix, Fawkes, that he'd come to care for after all that had happened.
He could see the ends now, with what little Harry Potter would need to do in sixteen years. He suspected, but did not know. He was not a Seer. But he could guess. So he had to play the game, even as Harry grew up, as he loved the child like the son he might've raised.
Harry was his child, in his mind. He never wanted to give him up this way, never wanted it to happen.
But it had to. He had to plan and plot and scheme. Because he never was able to manipulate a happy ending.