Author's Note: This chapter is largely copied from chapter 85 in the original (HPMoR). This is because, when the same things happen in this spinoff as in the original, it seems to make more sense to reuse the original text (with some adaptations for different histories) than to reformulate it in my own words. Hence also why in some chapters (like the previous one) you will occasionally see some very familiar paragraphs. :)
If you don't want to reread (a slightly adapted version of) a partial chapter you've read before, skip to the last horizontal line and read on from there.
CHAPTER 87: PERSPECTIVE, PT 1 – DISTANCE
Slow and hard, the long stairway that led to the peak of Ravenclaw. From the inside, the stairway seemed like a straight upward slope, though from the outside you could see that it logically had to be a spiral. You could only get to the top of the Ravenclaw tower by making that long climb without shortcuts, stone step by stone step; passing beneath Harry's shoes, pushed down by his wearying legs.
The circular platform at the top of the Ravenclaw tower wasn't the tallest place in Hogwarts, but the Ravenclaw tower jutted out from the main body of the castle, so you couldn't see down into the top platform from the Astronomy tower. A quiet place to think, if you had an awful lot to think about. A place where few other students ever came – there were easier niches of privacy, if privacy was all you wanted. He had used the last spin of his Time-Turner, as he was still on a thirty-hour sleeping cycle, so he had hours before he had to be seen in his dormitory.
The night-lit torches of Hogwarts were far below. The platform itself offered few obstructions; the stairs emerged from an uncovered gap in the floor, rather than an upright door. From this place, then, the stars were as visible as they ever were on Earth.
The boy lay down in the center of the platform, heedless of his robes that might be dirtied, dropping his head to rest upon the rock-tiled floor; so that, except for a few half-seen crenellations of stone at vision's edge, and a sliver of crescent moon, reality became starlight.
The pinpoints of light in dark velvet twinkled, wavering and returning, a different kind of beauty from their steady brilliance in the Silent Night.
Harry gazed out abstractly, his mind on other things.
This day your war against Voldemort has begun...
Dumbledore had said that, after the Incident with Rescuing Bellatrix from Azkaban. That had been a false alarm, but the phrase expressed the sentiment well.
Two nights ago his war had begun, and Harry didn't know with who.
Dumbledore thought it was Lord Voldemort, returned from the dead, making his first move against the boy who had defeated him last time.
Professor Quirrell had put detection wards on Draco, fearing that Hogwarts's mad Headmaster would try to frame Harry for the death of Lucius's son.
Or Professor Quirrell had set up the entire thing, and that was how he'd known where to find Draco. Severus Snape thought the Hogwarts Defense Professor was an obvious suspect, even the obvious suspect.
And Severus Snape himself might or might not be even remotely trustworthy.
Someone had declared war against Harry; their first strike had been meant to take out Draco and Hermione both, and even if they were both still alive, that strike had been successful. You couldn't call it even a partial victory. Draco was back in his father's power, and if that wasn't death, it wasn't clear how it could be undone, or what shape Draco might be in when he returned. Hermione was stuck in Azkaban, where she might not be suffering like the other prisoners, but it was still a prison, she still wasn't free, and she was no longer available to him. Besides, if anything went wrong – which he had absolutely no control over – he could still lose both her and his father's cloak.
Some unknown power had struck at him, and even if that blow had been partially deflected, it had still hit really hard.
At least his dark side hadn't asked anything of him in exchange for trying to save Hermione. Admittedly, he had found himself executing the alternative, absolutely evil plan his dark side had offered, but that had been his own choice. That was the most twisted part; his dark side had offered the suggestion, but had turned it aside for impracticality. It had been the only half-dark Harry who had taken it. Was that the price for using his dark side? That every time he called upon it, it chipped away a little more at his boundaries, making his self more dark? Or was the price of using his dark side merely that it gave suggestions that would seem like wonderful ideas when he was losing control?
Harry stared up at the random stars, the scattered twinkling lights that human brains couldn't help but pattern-match into imaginary constellations.
And then there was that promise Harry had sworn.
Draco to help Harry reform Slytherin House. And Harry to take as an enemy whomever Harry believed, in his best judgment as a rationalist, to have killed Narcissa Malfoy. If Narcissa had never gotten her own hands dirty, if indeed she'd been burned alive, if the killer hadn't been tricked – those were all the conditions Harry could remember making. He probably should've written it down, or better yet, never made a promise requiring that many caveats in the first place.
Tonight, Harry had worked together with Dumbledore like an ally. That wasn't the sort of thing you would do with a sworn enemy, no matter how convenient it was. Had he already broken his promise?
There were plausible outs, for the sort of person who'd let themselves rationalize an out. Dumbledore hadn't actually confessed. He hadn't come right out and said he'd done it. There were plausible reasons for an actually-guilty Dumbledore to behave that way. But it was also what you'd expect to see if someone else had burned Narcissa, and Dumbledore had taken credit.
Harry shook his head, flattening one side of his hair and then another against the stone-tiled floor. There was still a final out, Draco could release him from the oath at any time. He could, at least, describe the situation to Draco, and talk about options with him, when they met again. It didn't seem like a very likely prospect for release – but the idea of talking something over honestly was enough to satisfy the part of himself that demanded adherence to oaths. Even if it only meant delaying, it was better than taking a good man as an enemy.
But is Dumbledore a good man? asked the voice of Hufflepuff. If Dumbledore burned someone alive – wasn't the whole point that good people may kill, but never kill with suffering?
Maybe he killed her instantly, said Slytherin, and then lied to Lucius about the burning-alive part. But... if there was any possibility of the Death Eaters magically verifying how Narcissa died... and if being caught in a lie would've endangered Light-side families...
Be careful what we cleverly rationalize, warned Gryffindor.
You have to expect reputational effects on how other people treat you, said Hufflepuff. If you decide there's sufficient reason to burn a woman alive, one of the predictable side effects is that good people decide you've crossed the line and have to be stopped. Dumbledore should've expected that. He's got no right to complain.
Or maybe he expects us to be smarter, said Slytherin. Now that we know this much of the truth – no matter the exact details of the full story – can we really believe that Dumbledore is a terrible, terrible person who ought to be our enemy? In the middle of a horrible bloody war, Dumbledore set one enemy civilian on fire? That's only bad by the standards of comic books, not by any sort of realistic historical standard.
Harry stared up at the night sky, remembering history.
In real life, in real wars...
During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium.
The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths.
The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro.
Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program.
Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never been close to getting nuclear weapons after all.
And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.
That was war in real life. In terms of total damage and who'd gotten hit, what Haukelid had done was considerably worse than what Dumbledore might have done to Narcissa Malfoy, or what Dumbledore had possibly done to leak the prophecy to Lord Voldemort to get him to attack Harry's parents.
If Haukelid had been a comic-book superhero, he'd have somehow gotten all the civilians off the ferry, he would've attacked the German soldiers directly...
...rather than let a single innocent person die...
...but Knut Haukelid hadn't been a superhero.
And neither had been Albus Dumbledore.
Harry closed his eyes, swallowing hard a few times against the sudden choking sensation. It was abruptly very clear that while Harry was going around trying to live the ideals of the Enlightenment, Dumbledore was the one who'd actually fought in a war. Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a scientist, living inside the Protego bubble cast by the police officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question.
"You must not blame Professor Dumbledore," that was what Professor McGonagall had said, when he pointed out that he wasn't asking Dumbledore for help because he didn't believe that the old wizard would put Hermione's interests first. "A hundred thousand Galleons is exactly the random Lord Voldemort asked for his brother Aberforth. I don't know the details, but ever since he had to refuse that ransom Albus hasn't been the same. He used to be so much like you. But after that choice, he has grown more... cold, calculating."
And Harry could easily believe it. Dumbledore had fought a war against an evil wizard who seemed to have deliberately set out to break him. There had been complete certainty in his tone when he had said that this will not be the first time such choices will be required of you. How many had he had to sacrifice? Albus Dumbledore seemed to have started out with ideals at least as strong as Harry's own, if not stronger; and Dumbledore hadn't gotten through his war without killing enemies and sacrificing friends.
Are you so much better than Haukelid and Dumbledore, Harry Potter, that you'll be able to fight without a single casualty? Even in the world of comic books, the only reason a superhero like Batman even looks successful is that the comic-book readers only notice when Important Named Characters die, not when the Joker shoots some random nameless bystander to show off his villainy. Batman is a murderer no less than the Joker, for all the lives the Joker took that Batman could've saved by killing him. Are you really going to try to follow the path of the superhero, and never sacrifice a single piece or kill a single enemy?
Fatigued, Harry turned his attention away from the dilemma for a moment, opened his eyes again to regard the hemisphere of night, which required no decisions from him.
Near the edge of his vision, the pale white crescent of the Moon, the light from which had left one-and-a-quarter seconds ago, around 375,000 kilometers of distance in Earth's space of simultaneity.
Above and to the side, Polaris, the North Star; the first star Harry had learned to identify in the sky, by following the edge of the Big Dipper. That was actually a five-star system with a brilliant central supergiant, 434 light-years from Earth. It was the first 'star' whose name Harry had ever learned from his father, so long ago that he couldn't have guessed how old he'd been.
The dim fog that was the Milky Way, so many billions of distant stars that they became an indistinct river, the plane of a galaxy that stretched 100,000 light-years across. If Harry had experienced any sense of wonder when he'd first been told that, he'd been too young for him to remember now that first time, across a few years' distance.
In the center of the constellation Andromeda, the star Andromeda, which was really the Andromeda Galaxy. The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, 2.4 million light-years away, containing an estimated trillion stars.
Numbers like those made 'infinity' pale by comparison, because 'infinity' was just featureless and blank. Thinking that the stars were 'infinitely' distant was a lot less scary than trying to work out what 2.4 million light-years amounted to in meters. 2.4 million light-years, times 31 million seconds in a year, times a photon moving at 300,000,000 meters per second...
It was strange to think that such distances might not be unreachably far away. Magic was loose in the universe, things like Time-Turners and broomsticks. Had any wizard ever tried to measure the speed of a portkey, or a phoenix?
And the human understanding of magic couldn't possibly be anywhere near the underlying laws. What would you be able to do with magic if you really understood it?
A year ago, Dad had gone to the Australian National University in Canberra for a conference where he'd been an invited speaker, and he'd taken Mum and Harry along. And they'd all visited the National Museum of Australia, because, it had turned out, there was basically nothing else to do in Canberra. The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines – like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?
Could you have looked up into the sky, at the brilliant light of the Sun, and deduced that the universe contained greater sources of power than mere fire? Would you have realized that if the fundamental physical laws permitted it, someday humans would tap the same energies as the Sun? Even if nothing you could imagine doing with rock-throwers or woven pouches – no pattern of running across the savannah and nothing you could obtain by hunting animals – would accomplish that even in imagination?
It wasn't like modern-day Muggles had gotten anywhere near the limits of what Muggle physics said was possible. And yet like hunter-gatherers conceptually bound to their rock-throwers, most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago. No surprise, then, that the wizarding world lived in a conceptual universe bounded – not by fundamental laws of magic that nobody even knew – but just by the surface rules of known Charms and enchantments. You couldn't observe the way magic was practiced nowadays and not be reminded of the National Museum of Australia, once you realized what you were seeing. And yet even that fumbling grasp of magic was enough to do things that Muggle physics said should be forever impossible: the Time-Turner, water conjured out of nothingness by Aguamenti. What were the ultimate possibilities of invention, if the underlying laws of the universe permitted an eleven-year-old with a stick to violate almost every constraint in the Muggle version of physics?
Like a hunter-gatherer trying to look up at the Sun, and guess that the universe had to be shaped in a way that allowed for nuclear energy...
It made you wonder if maybe twenty thousand million million million meters wasn't so much distance, after all.
There was a step beyond Abstract Reasoning Harry which he could take, given time enough to compose himself and the right surroundings; something beyond Abstract Reasoning Harry, as that was beyond Harry In The Moment. Looking up at the stars, you could try to imagine what the distant descendants of humanity would think of your dilemma – in a hundred million years, when the stars would have spun through great galactic movements into entirely new positions, every constellation scattered. It was an elementary theorem of probability that if you knew what your answer would be after updating on future evidence, you ought to adopt that answer right now. If you knew your destination, you were already there. And by analogy, if not quite by theorem, if you could guess what the descendants of humanity would think of something, you ought to go ahead and take that as your own best guess.
From that vantage point the idea of killing off two-thirds of the Wizengamot seemed a lot less appealing than it had half a day earlier. Even if you had to do it, even if you knew for a solid fact that it would be the best thing for magical Britain and that the complete Story of Time would look worse if you didn't do it... even as a necessity, the deaths of sentient beings would still be a tragedy. One more element of the sorrows of Earth; the Most Ancient Earth from which everything had begun, long ago and far away, ever so long ago.
He is not like Grindelwald. There is nothing human left in him. Him you must destroy. Save your fury for that, and that alone –
Harry shook his head slightly, tilting the stars a little in his vision, as he lay on the stone floor looking upward and outward and forward in time. Even if Dumbledore was right, and the true enemy was utterly mad and evil... in a hundred million years the organic lifeform known as Lord Voldemort probably wouldn't seem much different from all the other bewildered children of Ancient Earth. Whatever Lord Voldemort had done to himself, whatever Dark rituals seemed so horribly irrevocable on a merely human scale, it wouldn't be beyond curing with the technology of a hundred million years. Killing him, even if you had to do it to save the lives of others, would be just one more death for future sentient beings to be sad about. How could you look up at the stars, and believe anything else?
Harry stared up at the twinkling lights of Eternity and wondered what the children's children's children would think of what Dumbledore had maybe-done to Narcissa Malfoy.
But even if you tried framing the question that way, asking what humanity's descendants would think, it still drew only on your own knowledge, not theirs. The answer still came from inside yourself, and it could still be mistaken. If you didn't know the hundredth decimal digit of pi yourself, then you didn't know how the children's children's children would calculate it, for all that the fact was trivial.
Slowly – he'd been lying there, looking at the stars, for longer than he'd planned – Harry sat up from the ground. Pushing himself to his feet, the muscles protesting, he walked over to the edge of the stone platform at the height of the Ravenclaw tower. The stone crenellations surrounding the edge of the tower weren't high, not high enough to be safe. They were markers, clearly, rather than railings. Harry didn't approach too close to the edge; there was no point in taking chances. Looking down at the Hogwarts grounds below, he was predictably feeling a sense of dizziness, the wobbly affliction called vertigo. His brain was alarmed, it seemed, because the ground below was so distant. It might have been fully 50 meters away.
The lesson, it seemed, was that things had to be incredibly close by before your brain could comprehend them well enough to feel fear.
It was a rare brain that could feel strongly about anything, if it wasn't close in space, close in time, near at hand, within easy reach...
Before, Harry had imagined that going to Azkaban would require planning and cooperation from a grownup confederate. Portkeys, broomsticks, invisibility spells. Some way of getting to the bottom levels without the Aurors noticing, so he could carve his way into the central pit where the shadows of Death waited. And that had been enough to put the prospect away, into the future, safely apart from the now. Enough, apparently, to stop thinking about it, even when there were grownup confederates, when he was hovering invisibly on a broomstick over the central pit of Azkaban, when he could have just jumped down and cast his spell, and either Dumbledore or Fawkes would have been sure to catch him before he fell to his death, when he could certainly have succeeded to destroy all Dementors. The exertion might still have killed him afterwards, but even so, it was the best chance he was likely to get in a long, long time.
When good and moral people are done tying themselves up in knots, what they usually do is nothing.
Harry had blamed Dumbledore, after the Bellatrix Black disaster, that he had gone to Azkaban and not torn the whole fortress down. Yet now, he himself had gone back there, and the prison was still standing. He had gone to save Hermione who, it turned out, hadn't needed much saving. The fate of one person, close and loved, could move him far more effectively than the hundreds of other, more distant people, who were suffering out of his sight.
Memories were rising up again, memories that Harry could never manage to forget for long. Though the stones beneath his feet were not smooth like metal, though the moonlit sky stretched all around him, somehow it was very easy to imagine himself trapped in a long metal corridor lit by dim orange light.
The night was quiet, quiet enough for memories to be clearly audible.
No, I didn't mean it, please don't die!
No, I didn't mean it, please don't die!
Don't take it away, don't don't don't –
The world blurred, and Harry wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
It wasn't Hermione, behind that door. Hermione would be alright. But the woman who was behind that door – wasn't there someone, somewhere, to whom she too was precious? Wasn't it only Harry's distance from her life that was preventing his brain from being driven back to Azkaban to save her no matter what? What would it have taken to compel him? Would he have needed to know her face? Her name? Her favorite color? Would he have been driven to Azkaban to save Tracey Davis? Would he have been compelled there to save Professor McGonagall? Mum and Dad – there wasn't even a question. And that woman had said she was someone's mother. How many people had wished for the power to break Azkaban? How many prisoners of Azkaban dreamed nightly of such a miraculous rescue?
None. It's a happy thought. Hermione might have such dreams, but no one else would.
Maybe he should harrow Azkaban. Perhaps all he had to do was find Fawkes and tell him it was time. The phoenix would help, he was sure, even without its master's permission. He could visualize the center of the Dementor's pit as he'd seen it from the broomstick, and let the phoenix take him there. Cast the True Patronus Charm at point-blank range and to hell with what came after.
All he had to do was go find Fawkes.
It might be as simple as thinking of the flame, calling for the fire-bird in his heart –
A star flashed in the night.
By the time Harry's eyes had jumped with a reflex action trained on meteor showers, another part of him was surprised that the astronomical phenomenon was still there; a faint star whose brightness was slowly visibly waxing. There was a startled moment when Harry wondered whether he was seeing, not a meteor, but a nova or supernova – could you see them getting brighter like that? Was the first stage of a nova supposed to be that yellow-orange color?
Then the new star moved again, and seemed to grow as well as brightening. It looked closer suddenly, no longer so far away that distance became moot. Like what you thought was a star, turning out to be an airplane, a lighted form whose shape you could actually see...
...no, not a plane...
The realization seemed to spread out from Harry's chest in a wave of prickling, sweat preparing to break out.
...a bird.
A piercing cry split the night, echoing from the rooftops of Hogwarts.
The approaching creature trailed fire as it flew, shedding golden flames like sparks from its feathers as the mighty wings beat and beat again. Even as it swooped up in a great curve to hover a few paces away from Harry, even as the flames surrounding its passage diminished, the creature seemed no dimmer, no less bright; as though some unseen Sun shone upon it and illuminated it.
Great shining wings red like a sunset, and eyes like incandescent pearls, blazing with golden fire and determination.
The phoenix's beak opened, and let out a great caw that Harry understood as though it had been a spoken word:
Come!
Not even realizing, the boy stumbled back from the edge of the rooftop, eyes still locked on the phoenix, his whole body trembling and tensed, his fists clutching and releasing at his side; stepping back, stepping away.
The phoenix cawed again, a desperate, pleading, sound. It didn't come through in words, this time, but it came through in feelings, an echo of everything that Harry had ever felt about Azkaban and every temptation to action, to just do something about it, the desperate need to do something now and not delay any longer, all spoken in the cry of a bird.
Let's go. It's time. The voice that spoke came from inside Harry, not from the phoenix; from so deep inside it couldn't be given a separate name like 'Gryffindor'.
All he had to do was step forward and touch the phoenix's talons, and it would take him where he needed to be, where he kept thinking he ought to be, down into the central pit of Azkaban. Harry could see the image in his mind, shining with unbearable clarity, the image of himself suddenly smiling with joyous release as he threw all his fears away and chose –
"But I –" Harry whispered, not even aware of what he was saying. Harry lifted his shaking hands to wipe at his eyes from which tears had sprung, as the phoenix hovered before him with great wing-sweeps. "But I – there's other people I also have to save, other things I have to do –" Like getting Hermione out, instead of just safe, dealing with Voldemort or whatever dark force was striking at schoolchildren, destroying Dementors in other countries...
The fire-bird let out a piercing scream, and the boy flinched back as though from a blow. It wasn't a command, it wasn't an objection, it was the knowledge –
The corridors lit by dim orange light.
It felt like a tightening compulsion in Harry's chest, the desire to just do it and get it over with. He might die, but if he didn't die he could feel clean again. Have principles that were more than excuses for inaction. It was his life. His to spend, if he chose. He could do it any time he wanted...
...if he wasn't a good person.
The boy stood there on the rooftop, his own eyes locked with two points of fire. The stars might have had time to shift in their constellations while he stood there, agonizing over the decision...
...that wouldn't...
...change.
The boy's eyes flickered once to the stars above; and then he looked at the phoenix.
"Not yet," the boy said in a voice hardly audible. "Not yet. There's too much else I have to do. Please come back later, when I've found others who can cast the True Patronus – in six months, maybe –"
Without word, without sound, a sphere of fire surrounded the bird's form, crackling and blazing with white and crimson veins as though it meant to consume that which lay within; and when the fire dispersed into grey smoke, no phoenix remained.
There was silence on the top of the Ravenclaw tower. The boy gradually lowered his hands from his ears, pausing only to wipe at his wet cheeks.
Slowly, the boy turned –
Then cried out and leaped back and almost fell off the Ravenclaw tower; though the misstep would hardly have mattered, with that other wizard standing there.
"And so it was done," Albus Dumbledore said, almost in a whisper. "So it was done." Fawkes was on his shoulder, staring at where the other phoenix had been with an indecipherable avian gaze.
"What are you doing here? "
"Ah?" said the ancient man standing on the roof-platform's opposite corner. "I felt the presence of a creature Hogwarts did not know, and came to see, of course." Slowly the old wizard's shaking hand came up to remove the half-moon glasses, his other hand wiped at his eyes and forehead with his robe's sleeve. "I dared – I dared not speak – I knew, I knew this choice above all choices must be your own –"
A strange apprehension was beginning to fill Harry, welling up in him like a sick feeling in his stomach.
"That everything depended on this," Albus Dumbledore said, still in that almost-whisper, "that much I knew. But which choice led into darkness, that I could not guess. At least the choice was your own."
"I don't –" Harry said, and then his voice stopped.
A terrible hypothesis, rising in credibility...
"The phoenix comes," said the old wizard. "To those who would fight, to those would act even at cost of their lives, the phoenix comes. Phoenixes are not wise, Harry, they know no means to judge us, save witnessing the choice. I thought it was to my death I went, when the phoenix took me to fight Grindelwald. I did not know that Fawkes would sustain me, and heal me, and stay by my side –" The old wizard's voice quavered, for a moment. "It is not spoken of – you should realize, Harry, why it is never spoken of – if the one knew, the phoenix could not judge. But to you, Harry, I may say it now, for the phoenix comes only once."
The old wizard walked across the top of the Ravenclaw tower to where a boy stood rooted in dawning horror, in dawning and utter horror.
In my duel with Grindelwald I could not win, only fight him for long hours until he collapsed in exhaustion; and I would have died of it afterward, if not for Fawkes –
Harry didn't even know he was speaking, until the whisper had escaped him –
"Then I could have –"
"Could you have?" said the ancient wizard, his voice sounding far older than his normal tones. "Three times, now, a phoenix has come for my student. One did send hers away, and the grief of it broke her, I think. And the last was cousin to your young friend Lavender Brown, and he –" The old wizard's voice cracked. "He did not return, did poor John, and he saved none of those he meant to save. It is said, among the few scholars of phoenix-lore, that not one in four returns from their ordeal. And even if you did survive – for the life you must lead, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres – the choices you must make and the path you must walk – to always hear the phoenix's cries – who is to say it would not have driven you mad?" The old wizard raised his sleeve again, drawing it once more across his face. "I had more joy of Fawkes's companionship, in the days before I fought Voldemort."
The boy did not seem to be listening, all his eyes were on the red-gold bird on the ancient wizard's shoulder. "Fawkes?" the boy said in shaking voice. "Why won't you look at me, Fawkes?"
Fawkes craned his head to peer at the boy curiously, then turned back and resumed gazing at his master.
"See?" said the old wizard. "He does not reject you. Fawkes may not be interested in you in quite that way, now; and he knows –" the wizard smiled wryly, "– that you are not exactly loyal to his master. But one to whom the phoenix comes at all – cannot be one whom a phoenix would dislike." The wizard's voice fell to a whisper again. "There never was a bird seen on Godric Gryffindor's shoulder. Though it is not written even in his secrets, I think he must have sent his phoenix away, before he chose the red and gold for his colors. Perhaps the guilt of it urged him to greater lengths than he ever would have dared otherwise. Or it might have taught him humility, and respect for human frailty, and failure..." The wizard bowed his head. "I truly do not know if your choice was wise. I truly do not know if it was the right thing, or the wrong thing. If I knew, Harry, I would have spoken. But I –" Dumbledore's voice broke, then. "I am nothing but a foolish young boy who has become a foolish old man, and I have no wisdom."
Harry couldn't breathe, the nausea seeming to fill and overflow his whole body, stomach locked solid. He was suddenly and terribly certain that he had failed, in some final sense failed, failed this very night –
The boy whirled and ran out to the curb of the Ravenclaw rooftop. "Come back!" His voice cracked, rising to a shriek. "Come back!"
In a holding cell of the Ministry of Magic, the Defense Professor lay still on his bed.
He concentrated on the link that existed between him and the boy, the resonance in their magic. He'd never known the boy's thoughts, only his feelings – strong feelings most of all – but that was much the same, in the end. It was harder at a distance, but not too hard, and walls, magic or Occlumency barriers did nothing to block it.
In the afternoon, during the trial, he had also concentrated on that link. He'd sensed a jumble of anger, fear, frustration. He'd felt the boy giving himself over fully to what he had named his "dark side", and the professor had briefly regretted that he had permitted the Aurors to detain him here. But it hadn't lasted. Then he'd sensed feelings of hope, determination, anger, and a deep passionate hate, followed by confusion and guilt. And after that there had been nothing but a powerful surge of guilt and despair, as the boy responded to the loss of a friend. He had known, then, what the outcome of the trial had been, long before they came to tell him.
The boy's emotions had been a jumble, after that. From grief to anger to guilt to pain. And then there'd been hope, and deliberation. The boy must have come up with some cunning plan to break the girl out. It would be an incredibly foolish act, but the Defense Professor had little fear: the boy would never succeed in any such endeavor, for the Headmaster had taken precautions against his leaving Hogwarts that he couldn't know about. And the Headmaster would never help with an Azkaban breakout. He might have been a sentimental fool once, but he had learned. A lesson which he had demonstrated in the trial, for what the Aurors had said. Even if he would be willing to help, the boy would not easily trust him anymore after that particular interference.
The boy's emotions were a jumble again. Either he was in an emotional turmoil, or he was Time-Turned, and the professor was sensing two different instances – that was always hard to tell.
But now, suddenly, he felt the boy sink deeply into despair. A light touch of anger, perhaps, but mostly dismay, grief, and a powerful sense of loss. His plan must have failed. Maybe he had discovered the wards blocking him, or he had gone too far and been imprisoned by them; maybe something else had gone wrong. At any rate, he must have realized that his final hope could not be.
It didn't matter. The boy had failed and lost a friend, through the follies and casual evils of imbeciles. Perhaps he was finally prepared to discard some of his foolish little reluctances. And the Defense Professor would be there to support him.
He severed the connection and let his mind drift off. He'd spent too much energy already. But it had been worth it; he knew, now, how to act.
