Author's Note: Written for…
Fanfiction Tournaments Competition. Theme: Hogwarts Professors (Dumbledore)
Amateur Divination Challenge. Prompt: Prisoner of Azkaban
PayDay Competition. Prompt: Elder Wand
Guess Who? Challenge. Prompt: Order
Pacing
He'd been pacing for what felt like days, but it'd only been an hour since he'd locked himself in his office after dinner. The portraits were silent tonight: some sleeping, others joining him in anxious thought.
There was always something wrong. It was never easy – not for a year, not even for a term. Albus couldn't say he wasn't warned. Armando had made it very clear when he announced his retirement that it was a difficult, thankless job. At the time, Albus hadn't understood. Myrtle Glenbrook's death was an isolated incident; preventable, of course, but not likely to ever happen again.
He'd been stupid and naïve to believe it, but it was too late to go back on it now. He'd been headmaster for more that forty years and had seen countless students through their training. He wasn't going to let one little problem scare him off.
"A little problem?" he questioned the moment it popped into his head. That was certainly an odd way to describe having dementors roaming that ground and a escaped prisoner sneaking into his castle.
He should've grown worried a year, two years ago. Hadn't he always known trouble would follow the Boy-Who-Lived? Hadn't he anticipated Voldemort trying to come back?
How was he to know that Quirinus would be persuaded, or that Tom's old diary was still in circulation? Things had been pretty bleak the last few years, but he'd made the best of things. Even being fired hadn't dampened his spirits.
But this year was different. The dementors were a constant danger to his students, and a death eater was something entirely separate from an unseen petrifying monster. He didn't feel as he had before: he couldn't see the silver lining or imagine how this could all end well.
Fawkes let out a soft squawk from his perch and Albus looked to him and smiled.
"Perhaps the dementors are affecting me more than I thought, hmm?" he asked the bird, gently running a hand along its feathers.
He glanced at his wand, lying atop his desk where he'd left it. Once his prized possession, it now served as a bad reminder of the things and people he'd sacrificed to acquire it. How much more was he willing to lose?
Inside the only drawer of his desk that he ever bothered to lock was a small stack of photos taken over a dozen years previously. Though it was not by any means Albus' fondest era, the pictures showed people who he had at one time been the proudest to call his students. They were the people he expected to excel at whatever they did, and to live long and healthy lives.
Then he recruited them, named them Order members, sent them off to war. He shortened their lives by decades. All those smiling faces, and only a handful were left.
He would not make the same mistake twice. He refused to let any more harm come to the people he loved – not while he was still headmaster.