A/N: All right, quite a short chapter but honestly I couldn't separate the big part easily. This is sort of a lull. Enjoy the hints of happiness that will probably be gone after this one and won't come back for quite a few more chapters. I can't believe it. Under a thousand words! *gasp* I've written poems longer than this. Oh well. Onward and so forth!
Chapter 2
Albus Dumbledore stood beside Harry Potter on the morning of July 30th. Aurors were patting his shoulders and trying to relax him, but it wasn't working. He simply wasn't responding to anything.
"Harry," Dumbledore said. The young man looked up. "Why did you choose to do this now, of all times?" The blue eyes pierced into his like shards of morning light through Venetian blinds. "Do you have some sort of plan?"
Harry simply cocked his head to the side, looking up at him, appearing almost exactly like one forlorn eleven year old nearly ten years ago. "Don't you know, Dumbledore?"
Dumbledore watched him. The old man eventually spoke. "There is one way. But it hasn't been proven."
"We'll see." Could two words convey that sort of sorrow, carry the true feeling into the heart of the listener?
Albus Dumbledore always took the sensible route, always did exactly what he had to do. If the boy had to sacrifice himself to save the world, he had to do it.
It didn't mean that Dumbledore had to be happy about it.
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The owl flew into Hermione's room on the eve of July 29th. It fluttered onto her paper-cluttered desk and settled in the middle of her "in box."
"I can't believe it," she said to the owl, for lack of anyone else to speak to. "Another one?" She cleared a small spot, and the owl dropped the paper from its beak. She didn't recognize the owl. It might have been business. Maybe.
Hermione sat in her office chair in her study, her traditional dark blue robes of the Unspeakables flopping over the sides. They were a size too big. She'd get around to fixing them one of these days.
She unrolled the parchment and peered at it sharply. " 'If you don't help me, you'll regret it. Trust me. Everyone'.. Harry?" she thought out loud. After a few moments she slammed it down, stood up and started rummaging through books.
"You idiot, you moron, Harry, dear God, I don't know why you do such things to me.."
Eventually she let out a small squeal and yanked a book from the shelf. "This is it, this is it.." She scanned a moment longer and pulled another from the shelf.
The covers proclaimed respectively, Wand Cores and Regarding Them, by Maximilia McDougal, and Priori Incantatem: The Key to the Core, by Charles Spiegel.
