Disclaimer: Characters and settings etc all belong elsewhere…
AN: I started this story a few months ago but have since revised the opening chapters and am reposting it here. This story is set after the Goblet of Fire, however it is mostly about the events and circumstances that surrounded the first league against Voldemort, and how the lives of the main characters were affected. Needless to say there will be spoilers for all books.
And the Ants lay where they Fell
Hogwarts School of witchcraft and wizardry had stood for hundreds of years; it had survived the reigns of monarchs, stayed hidden - a safe haven - during various witch hunts, and remained standing throughout civil and world wars.
The school that Albus Dumbledore knew and loved resembled that of the four founders who had built it, however, it had over the decades undergone numerous changes. Wings had been added, passages had been closed, corridors created. Nobody had ever discovered all it's hidden recesses, occasionally like the chamber of secrets they floated up to the surface, only to be buried again under the weight of time, becoming little more than vague myths.
Pupils and teachers came and went, some discovered more of the castle than others but in the end they always departed and only the dust was left to fall on the records of their discoveries and achievements.
In an office in a tower above a twisting staircase the headmaster sat. Outside dusk was beginning to fall, but he lit no candles, he was an old man and he remained sitting quite still. His eyes were on a portrait of four people. Four figures, one in blue, one in yellow, one in green and one in scarlet. Two witches, two wizards. Their eyes shone out of the picture with a strange intensity as if they were looking straight at the viewer. Behind them the walls of a castle stretched away, above them the hot summer sun shone down. .
The painting was as familiar to Dumbledore as every other belonging that cluttered the room, however it always occupied his attention more than the other objects. For one thing it was unusual - the figures never moved - it was perhaps the only non magical painting in the castle, at least as far as he knew, and yet sometimes the picture seemed more real than any of the others. The way the four stood on the canvas made them almost appear alive, maybe it was the fading light, but sometimes their robes seemed to flutter as if in a breeze. The painter had been a muggle, perhaps a famous one. There was no signature, and what he had made of the four sorcerers nobody would ever know.
Every pupil who went to the school was affected by those four figures, for they would be sorted into a house that shared the personality traits of its founder. Gryffindor the brave, Hufflepuff the hardworking, Ravenclaw the wise or Slytherin the ambitious.
It was something that had troubled Dumbledore for a long time now. At first the system had seemed fine, but now the more he looked at it the easier it was to see the inherent weakness of separating the four attributes from each other. The characteristics became too pronounced, instead of encouraging pupils to learn from each other, they were divided, it was almost as if they became one dimensional. The brave became stubborn almost overbearing, the hardworking became unsociable and overly focused, the wise became aloof, and the ambitious ruthless.
Pupils no longer worked together, the house rivalries seemed to have become deeper and more vicious over the years. He could no longer rely on those he most needed to overcome their differences. The dark shadow that had passed across their world fifteen years ago had only just been averted, now there was no one who could predict what would happen with Voldemort back. It was impossible to base a struggle on the luck of a mere child, however fortunate that child might have been in the past. Things were changing now, nothing was going to be the same.
If Voldemort were to be defeated a second time it would require everyone he could muster fighting, and fighting together - united.
However the past could not be undone, there had been needless deaths, deaths of those who had deserved to live and had done no wrong, and Dumbledore knew, as only an old, old man could know, that these deaths would continue unless something could be done to end the divisions and the rivalries which had been festering over hundreds of years. There were so many problems, so many things he didn't want to think about, and the longer he lived the more there were. Sometimes he felt as though he was flying towards the sun and there was nowhere else to go, on some days he almost believed the cause was hopeless. He knew where he would have to start, and yet it was the place he wanted to go back to least of all.
Sighing he stood slowly, he walked over to a tall brown oak cupboard and pulled an object that looked like a small stone basin from the interior. The liquid inside began to swirl even before he had set it on his desk, and as he stared into its depths faces emerged, scenes lingered for a moment before being submerged and replaced by others.
The first image that rose to the surface was not one he expected, that of a blond haired young man, in the image he wasn't much more than twenty years old, but he looked older than his years more poised, and somehow gentler than Dumbledore had allowed himself to remember. The young man stood with his hands in his pockets and beside him a second far more shadowy figure arose. The old wizard sighed, a girl, it always came down to a girl, he knew that she was beautiful, but he wasn't able to make out her features and before he knew it the two figures were slipping away.
They were replaced by a face with a bold smile and black hair, the face winked at him, but just as suddenly it was transformed and a look of agony replaced the smile, the face grew older and ragged, it seemed as though it had turned into someone else altogether before it was sucked from the surface.
Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment, memories like this left him tired, when he opened them again he was staring into a pair of deep brown eyes, for a moment they filled the surface completely but then the figure was pulled back, his face became visible then his torso, and then he could see the wreck of a house that the man was standing in front of. He wore a look of such pure hopeless regret it made the old wizards eyes hurt to look at him.
He knew the two figures who lay beyond those eyes, he could have seen them in a hundred memories, wandering round Hogwarts, watching a quidditch match hand in hand, getting married, dead. The old man did not wish to see them and he forced his mind to draw up something else.
The last figure which came into view seemed distant almost hazy, he was walking up the long path towards the school. He was walking very slowly although it was raining. It was only as he came closer that it was possible to tell that his clothes were ripped and then, halfway up, the figure turned away, he stood still his gaze on the grey sky.
Dumbledore snapped his head up from the liquid.
Shutting his eyes now images came flooding back - long hot summers when the sunlight spread through the high windows of the classroom where they held their meetings. The way the rain lashed against the windows on winter nights, the smell of damp robes drying before a fire. The creaking of wooden chairs, so many empty chairs, and those expectant faces turned towards him. The slightly helpless feeling you learnt to hide. Meetings, celebrations, funerals, so many funerals…
"Come on," he sighed, "Your getting old, you can't always live in the past, the past is gone, isn't that right?" He looked over at a dowdy looking bird that stood perched silently in the corner of the room as if for affirmation. There was a long silence. "But everything always comes back to the past." His voice sounded very old and tired.
In the liquid of the pensive the problem was highlighted; two sides of the same coin in constant conflict; ruthless and brilliant: Gryffindor and Slytherin. They had turned in two different directions and in the years that had passed since Voldemorts downfall nobody had thought to try and draw them together. It had been so much easier to forget the problem, to let life carry on as before, thinly veiled antagonism and mistrust. He'd been happy to forget, he didn't want to have to remember his failures, the ones he'd been unable to save. All those problems had simply festered and simmered, especially in the ones he needed the most.
Now he could see the folly of this, but it was too late, now there was no time to try and undo the damage, they were as divided as they had ever been. He had seen the hate even as they shook hands. The same hate had passed to the next generation, he had to wonder if it was his fault, if he could have changed it then, if he could alter it now?
All of them had been tied together in such an intricate web - it had been impossible to untangle. The four friends of Gryffindor, Lily, who had married James, Jade who had married Peter, and now only two were still with him. Then there were the little knot of Slytherin's, ambitious and intelligent, whose blood ran so thickly together. Two sides diametrically opposed and yet their paths had always been sliding across each other.
Even at the time not every action had been clear, now years had passed and it was as though they had been exiled from what went before, later events clouded the picture. There were many questions that needed to be answered. So many things he hadn't realized. All those secrets and deceptions. How could he hope to separate the threads, did he even want to look at those ruined lives? Sometimes he didn't even feel that the living were better off than the dead.
Unless they overcame the past he knew they would sink, Fudge was not the man for a crisis, he would need everyone and even then he couldn't be sure of victory; he was older now, he was tired; he had seen too much.