Disclaimer: These characters belong to JK Rowling and her publishers. I'm not making any money, just exercising a little convoluted imagination.

Honest Mistakes

It troubles you, from time to time, your memory of that night.

You walked into the Hog's Head out of hunger, not intrigue, unwilling to spend another stifling summer evening eating supper out of tins in your parents' old house. Sitting at your dim corner table, you caught sight of Dumbledore moving up the stairs and followed him on impulse. You'd met with him a week before to discuss the prospect of working at Hogwarts, and the man had been unreadable. You hoped that you had been equally so, but doubted that your particular brand of inscrutable competence would be enough to win you a place at Dumbledore's staff table. You thought it best to seize any opportunity to gather information, since you could not expect to find yourself close to the headmaster very often in the days ahead.

As you crouched in the dark on the stairwell's narrow landing, you heard Trelawney's wavering voice and cursed your wretched luck. Dumbledore sounded polite but bored, and Divination staffing was hardly a subject that would interest the Dark Lord.

Then, of course, Trelawney's voice changed, and the world along with it. The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches…Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies...

Then came a confused struggle – a little too confused, perhaps – and you found yourself trapped in the barman's beefy grasp, hauled before Dumbledore like an errant student, mumbling weak excuses while Trelawney, owlish and affronted, gawked at you. "Won't you excuse us for a moment, Sybil?" Dumbledore said, and she fluttered past trailing hairpins and huffy little exclamations. "Caught him peeping at the keyhole," the barman growled, and then – nothing but Dumbledore's eyes, piercing and icy and terrible.

But you had faced many more terrible things in your life, and you calmed your mind automatically. "What did you hear?" Dumbledore demanded, and you met his gaze without fear. "Nothing," you answered, knowing that Dumbledore could look as deeply as he wished and never find the lie in your mind. Dumbledore looked, and let you go.

Looking back on it now, it seems madness. Occlumens or not, you were caught in the act of spying – surely it was hardly a stretch to conclude that you worked for the Dark Lord. Furthermore, Dumbledore knew you at school, knew your reputation and your…chosen associates. Half the school knew where you were headed years before you graduated; how could the headmaster have remained in ignorance? He had known, he must have known – three months later, on a windy hilltop, he greeted you openly as a Death Eater.

Why, then, had he not moved against you that night, before it was too late? The man could have buried you in Azkaban with a few well chosen words. He'd been hailed as the only hope of the Wizarding world in those days, and any accusations from him would have passed completely uncontested.

That's probably what stopped him. His pride-blind conscience hesitated to throw you to the Dementors without the civilized sop of a trial by peers; that would have dirtied his pale, whole hands. He burned them black enough before the end, but not soon enough for you – for her.

He hadn't even had the nerve to obliviate your memory, to bury the fatal words so deep that Voldemort could never have found them without breaking your mind completely. That prophecy could have slept undetected in you for years, maybe forever; or else whatever fate took hold to lead the Dark Lord to her would have led him first through you, razing your mind, and that utter destruction would have freed you from knowledge and guilt and consequences.

But Dumbledore was too good for that; he would not set you on the easy roads to prison or madness or even forgetfulness – he left you to yourself, and let you kill her, and then kept you unbearably alive.

From time to time, when you think about that night, you imagine he planned it all.

Perhaps he did tamper with your mind. Perhaps he decided exactly how much of the prophecy he wished Voldemort to hear, and tailored your memory to fit his specifications. As a war strategy it made a sickening sort of sense: provoke Voldemort into focusing obsessively on one family, and then take personal charge of their protection. It would have been much easier to watch over three people than three thousand or three million.

Perhaps Dumbledore had thought he could control the damage, protect the innocent while allowing the Dark Lord to dig his own grave. Or perhaps those three lives had meant as little to him as they had to the Dark Lord, next to the demands of war. Perhaps when he let you go, he'd known exactly what he was doing.

These thoughts are ridiculous and, more importantly, false; the predictable attempts of your guilty conscience to shift responsibility, to blame someone else. You are quietly horrified to discover that, at some undetected moment, you started to believe in them. The suspicion had been lurking, shame-faced, at the back of your mind for over a decade, but you always dismissed it because you thought you knew Dumbledore's limits. But last year you realized how completely you had misjudged him, how little you really knew him. Last year your theory became a real possibility, and this year it has gradually grown to seem likely.

Not the worst of it – the idea that Dumbledore might have arranged Lily's execution as coldly as he has arranged her son's is simply too unbearable to contemplate. You cannot believe it; for the sake of your sanity you dismiss it out of hand. Dumbledore did his best to protect all of the Potters, he offered himself for their Fidelius Charm, and he was as shocked as anyone when they were betrayed. Of that much, you still feel sure. But you are no longer sure that Dumbledore sent you out of the Hog's Head that night in ignorance of your loyalties or your intentions. In relaying the few prophetic words you remembered to the Dark Lord, you wonder which of your masters you were truly serving.

You need to stop this. You have no desire to spin webs of conjecture where none are required, and you cannot afford to get lost in the past. If the last twenty years have taught you anything, it is that the truth is usually simple; lies are usually complicated. In this case, the truth is clear. When Aberforth burst in with you, Dumbledore had hardly had time to consider the prophecy's importance – he was not yet taking it seriously. You were young then, too young to be taken seriously either. Dumbledore looked into your eyes, sensed no deceit, and sent you away – an honest mistake.

But niggling doubts still trouble you. You remember Dumbledore's words when you came crawling to him in the wind and the dark to beg for Lily's life. "How much did you relay to Lord Voldemort?" he asked. How much did you relay…

And you remember starting out of sleep almost three years ago, suddenly aware that Voldemort had no need to break into the Department of Mysteries to recover the prophecy. On the night it was made, your struggles with Aberforth prevented you from absorbing the whole of it, but the Dark Lord need only enter your memory through a Pensieve, step past your thrashing form into the next room, and listen to Trelawney at his leisure. He would be able to hear every word; you stood within ten feet of the Seer through her entire performance.

Almost three years ago, in the dead of night, you ran to the Headmaster in a panic, amazed that you had never thought of this before, amazed that the Dark Lord had not yet demanded the memory of you.

Dumbledore stared at you in earnest surprise for a few moments, then said, "Thank heaven the Dark Lord does not share your proclivity for logic, Severus. I believe that such an elegantly simple solution is unlikely to occur to him. But if he does approach you, you must claim that you were thrown out of the building the instant that you were discovered, and were thereby carried too far out of range for the full prophecy to be viewed through your memory. Do you think you can convince him of this?"

"Yes, Headmaster," you nodded, immensely relieved. "It is a believable story."

"Excellent. I will rely on you, then, to keep that memory hidden from him, along with so many others." Dumbledore paused, looking soberly at you over his spectacles. "And I must ask, Severus, that you, too, refrain from examining the details of the prophecy in your mind, either through a Pensieve or any other means that may occur to you. For the sake of the war effort, that prophecy must be kept in obscurity."

"Yes, Headmaster," you promised curtly. Though Dumbledore's secrecy always left you ill-tempered, you trusted more easily then.

But now Dumbledore has been dead nearly a year, and in your darker moments you almost defy his orders, almost pour that memory into the Pensieve that sits at your fingertips. If you plunged into it, would you hear the full prophecy, as Dumbledore implied, or would you see instead the misty evidence of tampering? Dumbledore would have wanted to hide the truth in either case. Of course, if you really want explanations, Dumbledore's portrait is available. More than once you think of raising the question outright.

You never do. You don't know when or how it happened, but now it's you who's lost your nerve. You don't want to risk hearing the portrait confess or seeing the milky swirl of interference in the Pensieve. No good can come of it. You have to follow Dumbledore's orders regardless; you've gone too far to turn back. You've lost already, in every way that matters, but you will end this long defeat by ensuring Voldemort's downfall. You trust Dumbledore's orders for that, so to hell with the rest of it.

None of it matters, anyway; your guilt is still your own to bear. The choices you made that night, and all the nights before it, were completely your own. One way or another, Dumbledore left you free, and in that freedom you took the prophecy to the Dark Lord. There was nothing honest about your mistakes, and others' misjudgments won't make your own more pardonable.

So, in the midst of battle, when Aberforth reviles you and revisits the twisted subject, you do not search for the truth in his mind. You don't want to see how Aberforth remembers your meeting; you no longer care whether the old man's recollection confirms or contradicts your own. You walk away. There are some secrets you no longer need to know.

Less than an hour later, you discover that Dumbledore neglected to tell you a few pertinent secrets about wandlore. The old man had a lot on his mind during his last days, and the crisis came sooner than he expected. And in the end, defeating Voldemort required a fiendishly complicated scheme – something was bound to fall through the cracks.

It was an honest mistake.