In which Druella refuses to lie, accidentally terrifies Dumbledore (again), and the Headmaster is entirely fed up with his Deputy.
"Might I ask a question, sir?" Druella asked, copying out the line Unquestioning obedience is for soldiers and dogs, for the thirtieth time.
She had been assigned to write I will obey my professors, but she refused to knowingly lie or be coerced into making promises that she had no desire to keep. So long as she was here, wasting her time, she couldn't see what difference it ought to make what she wrote — she presumed that he didn't know that she would feel compelled to conform to her word if she were to write his sentence (most people wouldn't, she knew), so presumably he had only intended to flatter his sense of superiority whilst wasting her time — and while she suspected that he might give her another detention for this (incredibly minor from his perspective, but vitally important from hers) act of defiance, she couldn't see that it particularly mattered. She wasn't going to bow to his imagined authority, and the more he continued to escalate their disagreement over the matter, the more ridiculous he would look when she eventually took the matter of his persecution of her to the Headmaster or the Board.
"Does it pertain to your detention?"
"Tangentially."
He looked up from the essay he was marking to glare at her. "What is it?"
"Why did you become a professor? And of transfiguration, of all subjects?"
"That, Miss Rosier, is none of your business," he snapped.
Perhaps not directly, but she did rather think an argument could be made that it affected her, therefore she had reason to ask. "I'm only curious because I've read your alchemical publications. The theory underlying the discovery of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth uses of Dragon's Blood is absolutely brilliant, and you could easily have spent two or three decades working through the implications of that method of arithmantically predicting potential applications throughout the various subfields. And while I admittedly have very little experience with the classroom environment, your performance this past week has done little to convince me that you actually enjoy teaching. Nor are you very good at it."
He'd spent their third lesson ignoring her completely, which did allow him more time to focus on the other students, but so far she had yet to see him offer any useful advice to those who were struggling, while instead giving his attention to those like Miss McGonagall and Mister Leach who had mastered the basics of the spell, giving them tips on improving their visualisation and tightening up their casting. He did encourage the muggleborns, or at least told them not to be discouraged and to keep trying, but that was hardly helpful.
Dru was beginning to feel very sorry for Betty and Rodney, neither of whom had yet managed the spell. Betty had clearly been on the verge of tears after their last lesson, whether out of sheer frustration or because she'd overheard Cosette and Enid giggling over the muggleborns' "pathetic" attempts to do magic (as though theirs were much better). Not sorry enough to try to teach them herself, but certainly enough to wonder why Dumbledore had volunteered to teach them when he clearly had no intention of actually doing so.
"Hold your tongue, Miss Rosier, and attend to your lines. The longer you dally, the longer you will be here."
"I'm not dallying, sir. Writing whilst speaking is considerably less taxing than transfiguring needles whilst speaking, and I suspect that if I better understood you as a person, I might better be able to understand why on Earth you are so terribly determined to fight a battle you categorically cannot win.
"It cannot be a matter of pride. I know you're not an idiot. Surely you must see that the longer you persist in your campaign to subjugate me, the more ridiculous and impotent you will seem to anyone whose opinions you might consider important as you continue to fail. Even if you were to succeed, you would only have managed to bully an eleven-year-old girl into bowing to your authority, which is hardly impressive, generally speaking. I suppose my mother would be impressed, but most people haven't met me. So far as most of the other adults in this school and beyond its walls are concerned, I'm just a child.
"Similarly, the longer you drag this out, the more obvious it will become to my peers that there are no teeth behind any attempt you might make to intimidate your students into silent compliance with your wishes, so if you fear that failing to make an example of me will encourage my peers to similarly disregard your so-called authority, refusing to yield gracefully will only further encourage them to recognise that you hold only exactly as much authority as we allow you to hold.
"There is no rational reason for you to continue engaging in this battle of wills, especially publically, and you clearly aren't enjoying this little contest, which leads me to believe that it must be a matter of principle of some sort. What principle, I cannot fathom, but I thought it might be somehow related to the principle which I imagine must have prompted you to abandon a promising career as a research alchemist in favour of teaching elementary transfiguration."
She paused expectantly, neatly numbering sentence thirty-nine. She was halfway through sentence forty before Dumbledore looked up from his own work with an entirely false expression of vague interest. "I'm sorry, my dear. Did you say something?"
"Very mature." She was certain he'd heard every word, because he hadn't made a single note on the essay he was ostensibly correcting for the entire two minutes she'd been speaking. He'd just tapped the point of the quill on the page distractedly, his countenance growing darker with every point she made. "'Pretending not to hear the truth does not make it untrue, or unheard,'" according to Adam Parker, the founder of the Daily Prophet.
That annoyed the so-called professor enough to push himself to his feet and check on her progress. Checking on her progress annoyed him even more. "Was I unclear about your assignment, Miss Rosier?"
"No, sir — but I do not lie, and I do not make promises I am not prepared to keep. I will waste an hour of my life writing pointless lines if you insist, but I have no intention of writing the line 'I will obey my professors' once, much less two-hundred times."
"In that case, Miss Rosier, you will be wasting far more than an hour. Your detention will continue until you complete the lines you've been assigned," he claimed, sneering at her as he drew his wand and vanished the forty-two sentences she had already written.
Had he actually not been paying attention to her a moment ago? She drew her own wand and conjured a replacement. Rather annoyed with his behaviour, she reified it as well before she began sentence forty-three. So quick on the heels of the vanishment of a near-identical real object, it hardly made a ripple in the magic around them. The concept was nearly identical to shifting the realness from one under-blouse to another, albeit temporally inverted. It was fine. (It's fine, Dru, don't start second-guessing yourself, it's not breaking the rules, just bending them a little. In the fourth dimension.) She made it through Unquestioning obedience before he attempted to disrupt the (former) conjuration, frowning in consternation when it failed to unravel.
She mostly managed not to smirk. "I'm sorry, sir. Did you cast something?"
"But...what?" He tried to disrupt the 'conjuration' again. When it continued to exist, he looked at his wand as though there might be something wrong with it.
"If you insist that I remain here until I have written a false statement two-hundred times, it will be the very definition of a spiteful action, given that you have far more commitments and claims on your time than I do. Moreover, you cannot keep me captive here. Would you care to place a wager on the Headmaster's reaction should I choose to walk out and appeal this punishment on the grounds that I consider it morally abhorrent?" Dru suspected that he would think she was being overly dramatic, but also that Dumbledore was making a fool of himself, insisting on punishing her for "insubordination" in the first place.
She wasn't being overly dramatic. She could lie, but it made her deeply uncomfortable, in the same way as the idea of embracing human imperfection in order to meet social expectations — she was technically capable of doing it, but it would be well within I'm willing to hurt myself to get out of this situation territory.
If she were to spend an entire hour repeatedly claiming that she would obey her professors, she would almost certainly feel compelled to do so because it was wrong for there to be discontinuities between the world as it was and the world as she defined it, especially if she was the problem and it was within the scope of her power to reconcile the two realities. Setting a student to waste an hour of their free time was arguably reasonable retaliation for embarrassing a professor in front of the other students. (She didn't think it was, but she understood that the school authorities disagreed, and unless she wanted to simply walk away, she had to play along with their policies, at least to some extent.) Forcing a student to all but enslave herself to her professors' whims (or suffer a neurotic breakdown every time she refused an order) absolutely wasn't.
If the Headmaster insisted that she do so, she would be well within her rights to simply walk out and never return. Aunt Caelia would absolutely support her decision to do so. She didn't want to. Not when she had just decided that there were enough reasons for her to stick it out here for at least the next few months. But there would be no other reasonable alternative.
She was, however, fairly confident that if she explained that to Headmaster Dippet, he would consider not attempting to coerce her into making promises which would compromise her autonomy to be a fairly minor and entirely reasonable accommodation.
"What did you just—?"
"I'm afraid you will have to be more specific, sir. What did I do when?"
The logical next step, of course, was to try casting some other spell to ensure that his wand was still working. He chose to attempt to vanish her work again. Dru, expecting it this time and with her hand already resting on the page, pushed something like an un-transfiguration into it, reasserting the identity she had imbued it with a moment before in order to resist his spell.
"Taking my property and vanishing it is only an effective demonstration of the power you hold over me if I try to stop you, and you manage to do it anyway," she noted.
The wizard, clearly rather shaken, immediately snapped, "Get up!"
"I beg your pardon?"
He snatched the page off the desk in front of her. "Stand up! We're going to speak to the Headmaster, right now!"
Dru blinked at him. Had he honestly not been listening when she said she suspected that the Headmaster would be on her side, just a moment ago? "Very well, if you insist..."
She followed him as he strode through the corridors, hot, furious light magic not flooding the space, but crackling around him, not quite confined to his person, and stormed into Madam Phelps's antechamber.
"Might I help you with something, Albus?" the old witch asked. "Armando is taking tea with his great niece, and has asked—
The professor waved her off. "I don't care whether he's asked you not to disturb him, I need to speak to him. The matter is of the utmost urgency." He didn't wait for a response, throwing the door to the Headmaster's office open to reveal Jane, looking very uncomfortable (and also somewhat startled by his abrupt entrance) and Headmaster Dippet, who also looked somewhat uncomfortable, and, as the identity of his intruders registered, very annoyed. They were indeed taking tea. Jane had frozen in the midst of raising a chocolate biscuit to her mouth, though she set it down when she realised that this might be an opportune moment to make her escape.
She was, in fact, the first to speak, as Dumbledore seemed to have realised from the look on his employer's face that he'd overstepped, and the Headmaster was clearly trying to refrain from shouting at him in front of students. "Er. Thank you for the tea, Uncle, but this seems important, so perhaps I should just...go?"
"What? Yes, very well," her great-uncle said, his tone sharp in spite of his efforts not to snap. "We will finish our conversation another day. You may go."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," Jane muttered, practically scuttling past Dru (giving her a curious look as she passed) and out the door almost before the words left her lips.
The Headmaster slammed it behind her with a wave of wandless magic — somewhat less overwhelmingly light than Dumbledore's, but no less agitated. "What in seven bloody hells was so important you felt the need to interrupt my time with my great-niece, Albus?" he bit out. "I'm warning you now, it had better be good..."
"I— I'm sorry, Armando, but we need to get to the bottom of this, right now, once and for all."
"Get to the bottom of what?"
"Her," he said, pointing dramatically at Dru. "I don't know what she is, but she's gone too far, Armando!"
"Good afternoon, Headmaster."
"Good afternoon, Miss Rosier. What have you done to poor Albus now?"
"I refused to copy the line 'I will obey my professors' two-hundred times, and asked him why he became a professor."
"She un-vanished this paper," Dumbledore said somewhat hysterically, waving it at the Headmaster. "And when I attempted to vanish it again, she somehow prevented me from using magic!"
...Well, that would explain his overreaction, she supposed.
"I didn't prevent you from using magic, I prevented your spell from taking effect." There was a difference, namely that the professor had cast the spell just fine. She hadn't done anything to him.
"She is completely incorrigible, and I demand that she be removed from this school for the safety of the other students, and perhaps even the staff!"
Druella glared at him. "In what way could you possibly consider me to be a danger to others?" Even if he did find her intimidating, she hadn't jinxed Cosette until she'd been subjected to days of provocation at every turn, and she'd warned her to stop, multiple times! She hated resorting to violence! She probably wouldn't even have sent that hexed letter to Draco if she hadn't been so very sleep-deprived and out of sorts, and she'd arguably warned him, too — she felt she'd made it very clear that he had no right to comment on who she interacted with, much less threaten people to keep them from interacting with her. It was hardly as though she'd actually hurt either of them! The Trunk Incident also hadn't actually hurt anyone, and moreover was not even her fault!
"She poses an inherent threat, as she is clearly some sort of demonic entity or a metamorph masquerading as a child for reasons unknown, and she has already put two of her classmates in hospital!" he insisted, answering her question, while still managing to pretend she wasn't standing right there.
Headmaster Dippet gave his deputy an exasperated sigh. "Miss Rosier, are you a demonic entity?"
That was actually a more difficult question than it really ought to be, given that she wasn't entirely certain what she was, herself. "I'm certain that Healer Turner will be happy to assure you that I am in fact human."
He nodded, shooting a look at the professor which said he thought the other wizard was being completely ridiculous. "And are you a metamorph masquerading as a child?"
It would be nice if she were. She could look like an adult, and not be subject to humiliating interactions such as this. "Headmaster, with all possible respect, if I were a metamorph, I would never choose to subject myself to being treated as a child."
"How did you prevent Albus's spell from taking effect?" This one he actually seemed genuinely curious about.
"His Unravelling Charms failed because I reified the page I conjured to replace the one he initially vanished — it was no longer conjured, therefore it could not simply be destabilised — and I used a freeform expression transmitted via direct contact to stimulate the object's fundamental identity in order to resist his second Vanishing Spell," she explained. Really, it was hardly anything nefarious, even if it was a bit...much. She had been keeping her ability to reify conjurations to herself for years, but both wizards were already well aware that she was a freak and she really had had quite enough of Albus Dumbledore snatching and vanishing her work.
"You reified it?" Dumbledore echoed, sounding every bit as shocked as he had been upon witnessing her conjure a handkerchief. "And we're supposed to believe that this girl is human?" he added, the absolute boor.
"You apparently expect people to believe that you're anything other than a petty tyrant, despite—"
"Please, Miss Rosier," the Headmaster said, cutting her off before turning to his deputy. "We have no reason to believe that she's not human, Albus. Casually reifying a conjured object is admittedly...disturbing, especially when the witch responsible is a young child, but conceptually no more impossible than designing and reifying a specific conjuration spell on the spot."
...Professor Marshall had said something similar to that, hadn't he? She'd been a bit distracted by the revelation that she was in fact intimidating and hadn't found an opportunity to ask him what he meant, but she really ought to, because if her handkerchief wasn't free conjuration, she apparently had no idea what free conjuration was supposed to be. This clearly wasn't the time or place, but—
"That shouldn't have been possible either!"
Headmaster Dippet gave his professor an annoyed, exasperated sigh. "Well, I don't know what to tell you, Albus. Go ask William yourself if you want a three hour lecture on the potential applications of a talent for Aradian magic."
Dumbledore scowled harder at the mention of Professor Marshall. If he didn't want a three hour lecture on this talent it sounded very much like Professor Marshall had told the Headmaster Dru had, she would take it. She'd never heard of Aradian magic. Obviously she'd heard of the fourteenth-century sorceress Aradia, but so far as she was aware, the cult which had formed around her in Tuscany (and later spread throughout the entire Adriatic region) hadn't practised magic any differently than anyone else at the time. She certainly hadn't been mentioned in the books on magical talents Dru had skimmed through looking for information on omniglottalism. "Can we please discuss the issue of Miss Rosier's blatant refusal to fulfil the assignment I set for her detention? Human or not, her insolence must be addressed!"
Dru glared at him. "I told you, I don't lie, and I don't make promises I'm not going to keep. You cannot compel me to promise to obey you unconditionally, and quite frankly, I find it absolutely repugnant that you think it remotely reasonable to attempt to do so."
"What?" he spat back, furious and taken aback, as though she were attempting to accuse him of something he hadn't done. Even if he didn't expect her to abide by her word (and she could believe that he hadn't really expected her to), it was still repugnant to demand that she deliberately write untrue things after having been told that she didn't lie and found the idea of doing so morally abhorrent. "I never—"
"Lines written in detention aren't exactly a binding magical vow, Miss Rosier," the Headmaster cut across his deputy, drily amused. "I daresay no student who has ever copied the line 'I must obey my professors' has actually gone on to follow through on the statement."
"I daresay most students aren't neurotic spastics—" Or changelings of some sort — she wasn't entirely certain anymore how much of her personality and which of her affectations could be attributed to simply being peculiar, and what ought to be attributed to being a seer, or that she apparently wasn't metaphysically human (even if this awful flesh-prison clearly was). "—who will suffer extreme emotional distress if they willingly fail to fulfil their commitments. I don't lie, Headmaster. If I repeatedly state that I will do a thing, I will feel compelled to follow through on it in order to make it true. I absolutely refuse to put myself in a position where I must either compromise my autonomy by obeying my professors without question or suffer a mental breakdown for refusing to do so."
Dumbledore scoffed, but as she had expected, Headmaster Dippet clearly understood that in that light, demanding that she write that particular line was unreasonable. "You know as well as I do how...peculiar the Rosiers can be, Albus."
"If she's peculiar enough that she can't handle the requirements of normal schooling, she shouldn't be here, Armando! Even if she is not a danger to other students, I will not have her creating problems and detracting from her classmates' education, then using peculiarity as an excuse to avoid any consequences or disciplinary measures, and indeed justify further cheek! Either she can sit the detention I've assigned, or she can go home!"
"The detention you assigned was unreasonable! And I haven't been creating problems and detracting from my classmates'—"
"Children do not get to decide for themselves what disciplinary measures they ought to face for their insolence!" he snapped, interrupting what would have been a reminder that he was the one who had derailed their first lesson when she wasn't distracting anyone, and had utterly failed to so much as try to teach anything in their third lesson (or, presumably, the second).
Now, though, it was going to be, "No, apparently that authority lies with adults who have personal vendettas against said children. Has Lady Margolotta spoken to you yet regarding Tom Riddle, sir?" she asked the Headmaster, driving Dumbledore to new levels of red-faced fury.
"Lyntz agreed that Riddle's punishment was fair, in light of his demonstrated habit of ignoring rules as it suits him!"
"She agreed that it was unfair in light of the fact that you clearly have some bias against him, and it's dishonest to claim that he ignores the rules when you didn't tell him the rules!"
Neither of the wizards responded to her rebuttal because Headmaster Dippet had one of his own: "Rules like, the Deputy Headmaster is to provide a copy of the Handbook and the Muggle-Worthy Excuses informational packet to the muggle parents or guardians of prospective students, Albus?" he asked, with a forbidding frown.
Dumbledore's red-faced self-righteousness became an ill-looking puce of rue and fear as he realised that he might very well have put his position in jeopardy by having failed to execute one of his primary duties as the Deputy Headmaster. "Ah...perhaps this is something we should discuss in private...?" he suggested awkwardly, eyes darting over toward Dru.
"Oh, we will. At length, I'm certain. I've already questioned Mister Riddle about the situation. Right now, however, we are going to discuss the fact that I explicitly instructed you to cancel Miss Rosier's detention, because I will not have my Deputy engaging in a petty feud with a bloody first-year! Especially not a petty feud you're almost certainly going to lose. Engaging in such a farce is embarrassing to the institution as a whole, and the fact that you, the purported adult in the conflict, have been the one escalating it at every turn even more so! This ends right now! What the hell have you got against Miss Rosier?"
Dumbledore's nostrils flared as he glowered at his employer, taking a deep breath and clearly trying to master his anger. "She's a disrespectful, disobedient child who believes herself above the rules of my classroom! She's a show-off who clearly thinks she has nothing to gain from actually paying attention in lessons, attempts to make a mockery of me at every opportunity, and now she's trying to claim that she ought to be exempted from a mild, standard punishment simply because it will make her feel bad?! That's the entire point!"
"I respect people who respect me, Professor, and I am not a show-off. I prefer not to draw attention to myself, in fact — you may recall, I was sketching quietly and bothering no one when you decided to take my work and vanish it — and quite frankly I doubt anyone has anything to gain from one of your lessons. Which is a shame, because most of them couldn't take a Competency exam in your subject today."
"You see, Armando! You see the degree of utter insolence I am forced to—"
The Headmaster snorted. "Honestly, Albus? What I see is you, about fifty years ago. Except as I recall, you actually were always trying to show your peers how it was done and interrupting my lectures as though you wanted to teach the lesson yourself. Convinced you were the next bloody Merlin, you were." Dumbledore had the good grace to at least look a bit embarrassed to have his own childhood brought up. Dru wondered what subject Headmaster Dippet had taught at the time. "I might have to ask Alice and Wilbur, actually, but I suspect they'll agree with me that Miss Rosier is considerably more respectful and obedient than you were at her age. Or now, for that matter. None of the other first year professors have complained about her behaviour in lessons, and you were, by your own admission, the one who instigated the conflict by attempting to make an example of Miss Rosier's doodling."
"I think, Armando, that you will find that literally every professor in this school has at one time or another made an example of a student in order to discourage rule-breaking! And that they have also punished students who give back-chat when they're scolded for whatever reason! If she had shut up and accepted my confiscating her doodles, as any well-behaved child would have, that could have been the end of it, but instead she chose to mock me, to my face, in front of the rest of her class!"
"You were wrong, and you were doing a disservice to my classmates by trying to teach them that conjuration is only an extension of transfiguration! And when you ran out of arguments, you gave me detention and vanished my sketches, watching me as though you hoped to see me hurt by your churlishness, and then declared me to be cheeky for choosing to perform useless transfigurations rather than hinder my classmates' attempts to learn the spell themselves — I was unaware, you see, that wandering around the classroom and giving tips to the students who have already accomplished the spell, while doing little more than offering the occasional keep trying, Miss Carson, don't be discouraged, I'm sure you'll get it eventually to those who haven't, would be considered helping them to master the exercise."
"She accused me of disrespecting her!" he said triumphantly, giving her the impression that he was refraining from interrupting her because he thought that the more she spoke, the more insolent she would sound. She was quite certain that strategy was going to result in a painful backlash, however, because she was absolutely in the right!
"You did disrespect me, by confiscating and destroying my property, demanding that I repeatedly perform an introductory spell to no purpose other than your own gratification, and suggesting that I ought to do your job for you. You could have used your words to tell me that you do not allow students to work on anything other than the topic of the lesson in class. You could have suggested that we discuss conjuration in your office hours, or even allowed me to return to my harmless doodling after I replicated Allegheny's demonstration, incidentally demonstrating that I had, in fact, mastered the subject of the day's lesson. But you chose to destroy my work, clearly hoping to get some reaction from me other than utter disdain — despite the fact that it was an action as petty and inconsequential as refusing to speak directly to me, here and now."
"She has a point, Albus."
"She does not!" Dumbledore objected. It was hard to say whether he was more shocked — because how could his employer not side with him? she presumed — or furious.
"I do, and it's that you're acting like a petulant child."
"Armando! I refuse to be talked down to by a student!"
"You might, then, consider trying to act like an adult," Dru suggested. She continued speaking over his attempts to interrupt her, pretending that he wasn't there in much the same way he had been pretending she wasn't there for some time. "Also, consider treating me as an adult, since you seem not to believe that children are persons in their own right, admit that you are not going to win our contest of wills, and refrain from further attempting to prove your non-existent superiority over me. I have no investment in the game beyond the fact that I find verbal sparring mildly entertaining. If you don't wish to play with me, you needn't do so, but I owe you no favours, and you've shown yourself to be a complete boor, so I will happily continue to make you look like a fool as long as you persist in your asinine attempts to subjugate me."
"Alright, alright, that's enough," the Headmaster cut in. "Albus, I know this might be painful for you, but you're going to have to swallow your damn pride and let this go."
"If you think I'm going to apologise for treating this freakish little changeling like any other child and expecting a reasonable degree of respect—"
"Just because she's better at magic than you doesn't mean she's not human, Albus," Headmaster Dippet said sternly. "And to be perfectly honest, I find myself rather doubting whether a professor who engages in petty feuds with students and resorts to calling them by cruel names in order to degrade them ought to be teaching at all."
Dumbledore, who had grown red-faced again over the course of their argument, blanched. "Armando! You can't seriously mean—!"
"That I'm sacking you? No. Not yet, at least," he added, positively glowering. "It still remains to be seen whether you have any justification for your treatment of the Riddle boy beyond baby legilimens scare me. Simply noting that you are hardly behaving with the professionalism I expect my professors to maintain, much less demonstrating that you are — as you assured me when you took the post of Deputy Headmaster — sufficiently impartial as to administer discipline throughout the school, or mature enough to watch over Gryffindor House."
Dumbledore apparently realised that it was in his best interest to keep quiet and look contrite — there were a few faint potential futures where he attempted to defend himself hovering at the edge of Dru's awareness, but the Headmaster slapped him down in every one of them. Now that she was aware that these were actually potentialities, not simply an ongoing, compulsive analysis of the people and situations around her, she was making an effort to focus on them more clearly rather than letting them be background noise, at least in relatively restricted interactions. In settings like the Great Hall, where there was so much going on that the background noise was loud enough to be overwhelming even when she wasn't paying attention to it, she didn't dare attempt to focus on anything other than exactly what was actually happening.
"And that's to say nothing of your decision to ignore my instruction to dismiss Miss Rosier's detention in the first place. I certainly will not uphold your ridiculous insistence that she swear to obey her professors — I have no doubt that she was telling the truth when she claimed that she would feel obligated to fulfil such a statement as though it were a binding promise, and in that light, yes, it is unreasonable to insist that she do so, and no, being unable to complete the assignment you set for her does not mean that she is too peculiar to be here in the first place."
In a relatively likely potentiality, the Headmaster went on a short tangent reminding Dumbledore that maintaining the good will between the school and the House was certainly worth making a concession as small as not forcing Druella to lie or make promises she couldn't keep. House Rosier might not make the sort of significant financial donations to the school that the Lestranges or Blacks occasionally did, but they did make a modest annual donation to the Library, and more importantly, at least five members of the Board of Governors were closely related to the House.
If Auntie and Father agreed that it was expedient (the Headmaster would have just said Auntie, but for a political play which would affect the relationships between the House and the rest of the Nobility in the Wizengamot, like actually using blackmail to pressure their peers on the Board, she would have to coordinate with Father), they held more than enough compromising information on the other British Noble Houses to force through any Governing Resolution they liked, including decreeing that one could not be the Head of a House as well as the Deputy Headmaster, or even that one could not hold either position while also holding a teaching post (which proposal had already been raised twice in the past three years, apparently), but before the Headmaster might have gotten so far as to mention that, Dumbledore would almost certainly have cut him off with a bitter remark about kowtowing to the whims of the nobility.
It was probably just as well that Headmaster Dippet chose instead to say, "If necessary, I will happily set an appointment to watch Lady Rosier correct that assumption — I don't believe you've had the pleasure of her acquaintance, but I can assure you, she is no easier to cow than her niece, and a good deal more willing to go for the throat in a philosophical disagreement. Especially when the future and general wellbeing of one of her odd little ducklings is on the line."
"I'm sure Auntie would be very flattered," Dru offered, when Dumbledore continued to keep up his act of silent contrition. "I will be certain to remember you to her in my next letter."
"Very kind of you, Miss Rosier. You may also inform her that I will be removing you from Albus's lessons, and that any disciplinary matters in which you are involved will be handled by Professor Sanchez or myself from now on, given Albus's apparent inability to be fair and objective with regard to you."
Dru nodded, not surprised — this had been the most likely path for the conversation to take. And now she was going to ask, what about Tom? because he was far more vulnerable to any retaliation that Dumbledore might attempt, given that he didn't have a House behind him, and the professor would object to the implication that he would retaliate against Tom simply because Dru had decided to drag him into their petty feud, but the Headmaster would assure her that he would be giving Tom the option to study transfiguration independently as well (which Tom would, of course, take in a heartbeat), and on that note dismiss her so that he and Dumbledore could discuss Dumbledore's petty feud with Tom.
They did still have to go through the motions of the conversation, though, because Headmaster Dippet didn't know that, yet.
Perhaps she shouldn't try too hard to examine the potentialities around herself after all, she reflected as they did so. This could easily get annoyingly repetitive...
There are two more chapters of this written, so Wednesday and Friday, and then there's a new chapter of the Plan for Sunday, and after that I'm going to start putting up a story provisionally called "Speed Run", which is sort of a fix-it fic involving Lily and Sirius's daughter from an alternate timeline crashing canon DH to warn anyone who will listen that there's going to be an alien invasion in three weeks. Except, there's no New Avalon here; everyone she was planning on warning is either dead or insane; the Black Family Magic is completely dormant; the Death Eaters are exterminating muggleborns and the entire government is in a general state of disarray, definitely NOT in a position to repel an alien invasion; Dumbledore has just died, leaving Alternate-Henry and a couple of other teenagers with a mission to Save the World from Parody-Thom and no actual guidance on how to do that; and the BIGGEST difference is that Lily had fucking TERRIBLE taste in men. So now she has three weeks to force Britain to get its shite together as much as possible before the fucking existential threat to the entire universe shows up. This isn't as daunting a prospect as one might expect, given we're talking about a mind-mage of Tom's calibre, with all the swagger one might expect from the child of Lily Evans and Sirius Black. And if no one dares ask the Dark Lord whether this girl is a Secret Death Eater Internal Affairs Auditrix spying on them on his behalf, well then, she sort of CAN just claim to be working for him and give orders in his name, actually.
Teaser quote:
Hermione: Mira! You can't claim to— Who would even have the authority to audit the Senior Undersecretary?!
Mira: ...Me? Obviously?
I haven't broken it up into chapters yet, so I'm not certain of the posting schedule, but it will probably be M/W/F as well.