set at the end of HP&OotP.
Point of View of Albus Dumbledore.
anybody that you recognize as well as the Wizarding world belong to JK Rowling.
rated about T.
written in an effort to see Dumbledore as the well-intentiond good wizard that JKR insists that he is/was. Consider it a personal writing challenge.
Order..of..the..Phoenix..- belongs..to..JK Rowling...
Albus Dumbledore sighed, looking at the quiet boy standing in his office. Harry Potter had been fighting at the Ministry of Magic, some sort of running battle with Death Eaters, aided at first only by some other students. Albus wasn't even certain how the students had managed to get to the Ministry to begin with, but he'd Port-key'd Harry to his office after Voldemort had fled the Ministry, having been seen by Aurors and Fudge, having failed his attempt to steal the prophecy, having failed to possess Harry. Harry had scrapes and bruises, his clothing had been torn and scorched, and the boy looked dreadfully pale.
If someone had told him that the boy was only twelve or thirteen instead of the fifteen that he knew to be the truth, he could have believed it. He looked young, so very young... Too young to know. But the time when ignorance could keep him safe had slipped away.
"I think it is time for you to have some answers, Harry. Answers about why..." Albus began, explaining to the boy about a prophecy unexpectedly given during an interview during dark times. About how those words gave hope that a terrible wizard could be defeated. He even showed Harry the memory of the Prophecy in his Pensieve.
Harry's mouth opened a few times, closing before speaking as he tried to offer something. What finally emerged was, "People have been risking their lives to keep secret something that Trelawney said a couple decades ago? Why?"
"Voldemort is a terrible wizard," Albus paused as Harry flinched. Surely Harry was not afraid of the name, not Harry. "A terrible wizard, one who relished in doing unspeakable, terrible deeds. Nobody survived when he wanted them to die. And the prophecy was given fourteen years ago, not a couple decades."
"Apart from the fact that she's a fraud, the prophecy's worthless. There had to have been a lot of people who defied him, even if a lot of them were killed. Others weren't, and they probably had families too. Lots of people are born in the end of July. What makes you so certain that it's me?"
"Ahh, Harry, but Voldemort marked you. When he gave you that scar," Albus nodded, his eyes falling to Harry's scar, which looked rather red, almost fresh.
"And by attacking my parents that night, he set things into motion. If he'd never heard it, never attacked us, then he wouldn't have been defeated. Maybe that was the 'vanquish' that it talked about. I have no idea what this weird power is, and it doesn't even say that I'll win - if I'm the one that it means - only that I might be able to. Might." Harry snorted, sinking into a chair.
"I believe the Power is Love," Albus smiled at Harry, expecting to see the boy smile back, even if he was confused.
"Why?" Harry looked at him, but he wasn't smiling. His eyes looked dull, darker than usual.
"I believe that your mother's sacrifice caused his downfall fourteen years ago. Because of that, I was able to construct protections for you, based on the shared blood, that will keep you safe so long as you call your aunt's house 'home.' It was for that reason that I gave you into their keeping. Perhaps you have not been quite as happy as you might have been elsewhere," Albus paused, remembering his carefree youth. Back when he was only a young lad, chasing frogs and butterflies, exploring the woods around his home, laughing and playing tag and Aurors and other nonsensical games with Aberforth and Ector and Gawain Weasley from down the lane. He remembered the tiny treats that the old witch near the stream used to make, cookies with fruit, miniature pies with birds that flew away. He'd been a rather spoiled child, as were most wizarding children. How much more would a hero have been spoiled?
"Not as happy?" Harry snorted, his expression hurt and almost mocking. "And that place isn't home. I've never thought of it as home."
"But my dear boy..." Albus reached towards Harry, wondering what youthful frustrations could cause such words. "They are your family."
Harry looked at him, green eyes catching his own. The memories - Harry's memories - battered at him. Closed into a small, dark space, stomach aching with hunger, back hot and sore from his uncle's belt, pushing at the cupboard door softly, lest he make noise and get another five stripes. Starting Primary School and waiting for the teacher to call for Freak or perhaps Boy. Preparing a fine ham dinner and being sent back to his cupboard with only a few pieces of bread that had been rubbed in the ham grease for his supper. "Your miserable drunken parents didn't work, they were too lazy to have real jobs.' Peeking at the neighbor boy's birthday party through the fence as he struggled to push the heavy lawn mower, knowing that freaks like him didn't get birthdays, didn't get presents. "That ugly scar is from the car crash that killed your parents when your father took it into his drunken head to go for a drive. Puzzlement at a parchment letter with green ink, addressed to Harry Potter, the Cupboard under the Stairs.
The words were almost unnecessary after those awful memories. "I was far from happy. That isn't a home, that isn't what family should mean. How will that help me against Voldemort?"
"But... I wanted you to have time to enjoy your youth before you needed to worry about fighting Voldemort," Albus protested. Those memories... how could the Dursleys have acted in such a manner? Harry was their kin, had been a helpless child. To lie about his parents, lie about their deaths? To have told him nothing? While he hadn't wanted Harry to be given his every whim, he should have enjoyed his birthdays, spent time playing and running and enjoying just being alive and young and in good health. Those memories... had his time with the Dursleys been nothing but various forms of misery? "I didn't want to spoil your childhood with such grim thoughts."
"So, I'm supposed to die getting rid of him? I haven't been taught..." Harry paused, perhaps thinking back to earlier that night. When he continued, Harry's words were low, resigned. "I haven't been taught how to fight an evil wizard. A Dementor I could handle, and I could run from a dragon. But a dark wizard? Am I just supposed to hope that I can take him with me when he kills me?"
Albus flinched. This wasn't how things were supposed to go, not how Harry should be reacting. No fifteen year old boy should be speaking about when a dark wizard would kill him. Not how he should have spent his younger years either... "Harry, I am not asking you to handle everything yourself."
"They will be soon. People will want me to make him go away, never mind that I don't have the first idea how. They'll want me to make it all right in their world again, no matter that it isn't just Voldemort, it's the MacNairs and the Malfoys and the Greybacks who help him become so terrible to begin with," Harry shuddered, and his hand rubbed at his arm as if there was an old ache.
Harry was too young to have old aches.
But those green eyes that stared out of the boy's face looked ancient, weighed down by pain and ugly memories. "Even if it kills me, they'll want me to make them safe again."
"Nobody is asking such a thing of you..." Albus watched Harry, feeling as if his bones were turning to ice and his stomach to a stone, or perhaps one of Hagrid's rock cakes.
"Yet," the single word wasn't angry, wasn't fearful. If anything, Harry sounded tired. "They'll want me to die for them, to save them. Like my parents did."
"Harry," Albus tried to find the words, to find some way to make Harry understand that there had to be another solution. That he wasn't supposed to die, that it wouldn't be him against the whole of Voldemort's forces.
"I think I can manage that," the words were a faint whisper.
"What?" Albus yelped.
"Dying will be easy. The tricky part will be making sure he goes with me," Harry paused, his ancient eyes loosing focus on anything that Albus could see. "I almost did a few years ago, though Fawkes brought me back. I suspect that the grown up not dead anymore version of Tom Riddle will have something nastier than a great big basilisk."
"You can't mean that," Albus protested.
"Why not?" Harry's expression changed to a bitter, mocking smile, the sort of expression that he would have expected from Severus. "What do I have to live for?"
"My dear boy..." Albus didn't know where to begin. How had things become such an awful, tangled mess? This was a nightmare! Yes, perhaps he'd just wake up oh, perhaps now, and discover that the whole students out of the castle, battle at the Ministry, broken Harry was just a nightmare brought on by trying some of that Haggais that Minerva had offered him after dinner... "What about your friends? Miss Weasley? Miss Chang? Quidditch? What about your family..."
"Everyone says that Ron and Hermione have been dancing around getting together since at least the Yule Ball last year. Since I never had the chance to learn about how real people think and feel, I'll take their word for it. I can't be that important to them if they forget about me over the summer. Ginny wants the Boy-Who-Lived, the hero, the Quidditch star. She doesn't know Harry, the confused boy who didn't know about magic, the one who was the freak. Cho wants someone to replace Cedric. Umbridge banned me from Quidditch for the rest of my life. The only family I had was... was Sirius..." Harry closed his eyes, his shoulders shaking as he sat there.
"Banned from Quidditch?" Albus blinked, wondering just what Harry meant. The Undersecretary to the Minister couldn't ban someone from Quidditch! While the woman had taken over as Headmistress, even the Headmaster or Headmistress could only ban someone from Quidditch at Hogwarts.
One of Harry's hands waved, as if dismissing the matter as unimportant. For a moment, it looked as if the boy had a scar over the back of his hand. "The Ministry doesn't care about fair. That point's been made painfully clear to me. They don't seem to care that much about truth either. The Boy-Who-Lived-To-Save-Them will die heroically, and nobody'll miss Harry."
Questions fought with each other, demanding to be asked now. About the maybe scar on Harry's hand. About the Quidditch banning. Why he thought that Miss Weasley didn't know the real Harry. About what else that toad-woman had been doing in his school.
"I'll try to take Voldemort with me when he kills me," Harry spoke softly, as if attempting to reassure him of his sincerity. "It isn't as if I have anything to live for now anyways."
With those words, Harry turned and walked out of the office. Albus could hear the staircase grating against the walls as it turned.
Albus put his hands over his face, feeling tears covering his cheeks.
"This isn't how it was supposed to be..."
end Albus OotP fragment.