Disclaimer- I don't HP, learn to deal, you blood-thirsty lawyers…
Note- please count all hyphenated words as one word.
Written for a Third floor corridor under 500 contest.
Summary- Just basically my thoughts on what Dumbledore was thinking the day that he decided to leave Harry with the Dursleys. Set the day after Lily and James die, the day before Harry is left to the Dursleys. Rated T for mentions of suicide.
Word count- 499
When one door closes…
Albus Dumbledore was not his usual eye-twinkling, lemon-drop-popping self today. Why was he so somber, you may very well ask? He had every right to be jumping for joy like a silly school-girl, to emit a high-pitched scream of joy and snog Minerva McGonagall like there was no tomorrow (and then get slapped silly for his efforts). Why? He should be doing this because, for the first time in a very long time, the wizarding world could be assured that there was going to be a tomorrow.
Why, you may yet again ask?
The Dark Lord, Voldemort, a man so feared that only the bravest (or the most foolhardy) felt it safe to speak his name, had met his downfall at the hands of one, Harry Potter, aged one year two months and one day.
But this most joyous occasion had not come without it's losses, most recently, weighing down on the old wizard's heart than most, the loss of Lily Potter and James Potter, both barely twenty. Two great young people who had died trying to save their son from the one man who would stop at nothing to kill him.
Albus sighed as he walked along the pristine green grass of the Hogwarts grounds, it was really a sanctuary, a place untouched by the war, with the exception of each time one of the children got one of the dreaded Ministry owls, informing them of the death of one or both of their parents or guardians. He shook his head his head in a genuinely mournful way as he remembered the first one to get a notice that her entire family had been slaughtered in a Death Eater raid.
She had been a cheerful Hufflepuff, Deirdre MacCorthin. He remembered how her face had gone completely blank as the shock set in, at the time no one had known that her whole family had been slaughtered like that. Deirdre had calmly excused herself from the table and taken the note with her up to her room. Her friends had grown worried when she didn't show up for their first two classes and wasn't in the hospital wing. So they banded together a search party to find her.
Two hours later they found her slit-wrist body in an unused potions classroom with a bloodied knife from breakfast and a suicide note on her pillow in the dorm.
Dumbledore had then instituted a rule that all letters of such a nature were to be sent to the students head of house before reaching the student themselves.
Albus raised his head and looked into Rubeus Hagrid's window at the young Potter. He then realized, that this generation was the future, while many were war-scared, that these young children were not, and that they would rebuild the wizarding world.
Maybe he was a senile old fool, but he was certain about one thing, when one door closes, two doors open, and he hoped to Merlin that the children chose the right door.