Originally, this was a chapter proper. Then I discovered that I didn't have enough information for a full chapter, and determined to give just five scenes, which should tell you what Dumbledore's been up to all this time...

And prime the whole thing for detonation.

Intermission: Five Months

February

It was disrespectful, of course. The boy had faced him in front of everyone and dreamed, for at least a moment, of revealing everything that he had been trained to keep secret. Albus was most astonished and dismayed at that, that Harry could think of betraying them, after all of this, after—everything.

Dismayed, and perhaps a bit frightened, if he were honest with himself. The web was gone, of course it was, and Harry was someone Albus would have to negotiate with, of course he was. But Harry's tendency to silence had saved his mother and Albus's reputation after Christmas. Albus had assumed, perhaps foolishly, that that silence would still hold. To see even the consideration of telling all the truth flash through Harry's eyes, for the scant moment that it had…

Albus needed to write a letter. His first one, summoning James to Hogwarts and telling him that his sons would like to see him there for the Second Task, had failed. James had come, but he'd let Harry pressure him into cringing compliance with his wishes. Albus needed someone who would see the danger Harry presented and have the strength to help.

There was only one person he could think of who might believe the one thing and possess the other, and he was someone Albus had not spoken to in so long that he had given up thought of ever writing to him again.

But this was an emergency. The boy was something worse than an incipient Dark Lord; he was someone who might undo all Albus's careful work by accusing him of child abuse and eating his magic. And then he would try to lead the wizarding world, a task no fourteen-year-old wizard could accomplish, and the last beautiful things in the world Albus had loved and fought for for so long would fall to wrack and ruin.

Albus sat down and wrote the letter. He did not try to conceal any of the truth. He confessed all his mistakes, and all the things that might make his old friend think badly of him, and then included a plea for help. He sealed the letter, and sent it off with a school owl, missing Fawkes sorely. Fawkes could have made the journey in seconds and returned to him with a reply as fast, always assuming that his old friend was in the mood to reply. Albus would have to wait for an answer.

And he feared that in this case, time was of the essence.

March

Albus laid the return letter gently on the table. It had taken his old friend weeks to respond, as Albus had thought it might. He would have had to think, and as old as he was, he no longer moved fast.

It was a good thing the letter had come today. Albus had seen the boy converse with snakes in the Great Hall, the Many, who were free from yet another shattered web. The boy was destroying the wizarding world as Albus watched. The Many could so easily have bitten any of the children in the Great Hall. Of course, Harry, with his misguided ideals, did not care about that, and it had not happened.

But it had nearly happened.

Unable to wait any longer, Albus tore open the letter and read what was printed there.

Old friend:

I am surprised that you have contacted me on a matter of this importance only now. I ought to have been by your side from the beginning, offering you advice and guiding you in your care of this young Lord.

I fear it may already be too late, as you warned me, but I will offer you two suggestions. One is to be subtle. Move as slowly as possible, for all that you fear young Harry will accuse you any day now. If it were truly going to be "any day now," I think he would have done it already. From what you told me of the way you raised him, his forgiving impulse runs deep. He will give you time, because you could still be of use to him in the war that is coming, and he can dismiss any crime against himself, as long as it is only against himself.

For the second suggestion, remember the discipline I once taught you. The bravest, boldest weapons are the ones that look best on a battlefield, but the careful ones are those that insure there need be no battlefield in the first place. You were too light-handed with Tom Riddle, and too heavy-handed with young Harry. Take the middle road now, and court the mist.

With all due affection,

Your old teacher.

Albus sighed and put the letter gently aside. The news was not quite as good as he'd hoped—if it were, his old friend would already be at his side—but he had received sensible advice. Now that he could step back and look at things rationally, he saw that someone else was far more likely than Harry to accuse him of wrongdoing. Harry had let matters go in their course for nearly a month.

Court the mist.

He always did have the best advice, Albus mused, and set about doing it, and being subtle for once in his life.

April

Tonight was a night to mourn old comrades.

Tonight was the night that he knew he had lost Minerva forever.

Albus sat meditatively in front of the hearth and looked at his glass of firewhisky. It shone when he turned it back and forth, and caught the colors of the flames. Albus swallowed a sip of it, and remembered old battlefields, old battles, and the fallen, and those still alive.

Minerva McGonagall had come to Hogwarts a few years ahead of Tom Riddle, eyes bright and shining with the determination of the fiercest of the Light pureblood lines. Albus could remember the proverbs of his youth, and it was true, what they said: one wanted a Starrise for pretty words, a Gloryflower for cleverness, and a McGonagall for sheer bloody-minded stubbornness and refusal to give up.

She'd gone into Gryffindor. She'd belonged there. She'd had natural talent at Transfiguration. She deserved it. There was nothing hidden about her, nothing duplicitous, for all that her Animagus form was a cat, creature of shadows and secrets. She became one of the youngest Animagi ever, before the first echoes of Grindelwald's War were quite dead, and Albus had not been surprised. Minerva McGonagall had always distinguished herself. It was a combination of knowing where she belonged, admiration, and hope for her friendship that made him hire her for the Transfiguration position when that became open, and of course she had to be Head of Gryffindor; no one else would do.

She'd fought like her namesake on the battlefields in Voldemort's War: led charges, organized retreats, saved wounded comrades, and, in a rage, Transfigured more than one Death Eater into a fish far from water. She was the best kind of warrior, Albus thought. She was the kind who never forgot that what they fought for was ultimately peace, and she could gladly let the pomp and noise of war go and embrace that peace when it came around again.

She was the kind of person who would gaze on the tangled nests and knots of the wards that Albus had filled with his own power, so as to have certain areas of the school more firmly under his control, and raise accusing eyes to his, and make him feel, for a moment, small and cowering as a mouse under her paws.

"To absent friends," Albus said quietly. "To fallen ones. And to those whose paths have parted from mine."

He downed the rest of the firewhisky in one gulp, already putting the regrets away and moving to the unwilling position of considering Minerva his enemy.

May

Albus sat in his office, eyes closed, and, carefully, courted the mist.

Most compulsion was a straight-out, forceful blow. That was the way Tom often used it. Or one could wield it like a whip, flaying an order into another mind and then springing out again. Or it could be used unconsciously, as Connor Potter had before he discovered he had the gift, but that usually made the other people around the compeller suspect something.

There were far more subtle practices of it. Albus had usually put his own into his voice. He had felt bad, the first time he made a speech and seen other people fall into line with his own beliefs, but his old friend had taught him better than that. Many so-called Dark gifts were not that Dark, at bottom. Nor were they Light, precisely. What mattered were the motives of the user. Dark might seem all compulsion, at first, but then one became aware of the definitions of wildness, and deception, and solitude. And the world was always more complicated than people had realized.

Thus Albus spread his compulsion like a thin, gentle mist throughout the castle, drifting, mingling with the air, no more noticeable than a brief smell of food from the kitchens would be. People would turn their heads, find their desires inclined in the direction of one particular thought for a few moments, and then shake themselves and hurry on.

Most of the time. When the compulsion had penetrated far enough into the air, became one with it, then each student and staff member would breathe it in all the time. Their hurrying away would only carry them into the midst of it once more. Like the windy sensation of normal compulsion, it would twine with their thoughts, ride in undetectably, and sway them in the direction of Albus's opinion.

It was a risky thing, because it was not true compulsion; it only made people suggestible, not controlled them. That was why Tom had never used his compulsion this way that Albus knew of, for all that he was perfectly capable of it. It took too long, and it wasn't impressive enough for him. He preferred intimidating people with one messy and drastic raid to waiting years for a fragile ascendancy that he might never gain at all.

Albus, though, thought it his best course. He had the time, now that he no longer believed Harry would denounce him any moment. And the compulsion was so soft and thin as to go undetected by someone who wasn't a very watchful compeller himself. And it would not affect those minds strongly set against him—Harry, Severus, Minerva—for a very long time if ever. That made them unlikely to suspect what he was doing.

Albus might have disdained serving the wizarding world by subterfuge, once. But the last fourteen years had accustomed him to sacrifices of all kinds.

June

Albus shaded his eyes with one hand and watched the rising sun. He stood on the Astronomy Tower, and it was the day before the Third Task. Exams had ended a few days ago, but the students remained, eager to see the outcome of the Tournament.

So much else had happened in the past few months that Albus found it hard to believe that he'd once found the Tournament an overriding concern.

He heard a footstep behind him, and turned to see Sybill Trelawney approaching him. She shivered, though it wasn't cold this late in the season, and clutched her shawl around her.

"I'm here as you asked, Headmaster," she said, with the cringing half-defiance that she offered him alone of the staff, and which Albus thought was the truest reflection of her inner self.

He surveyed her kindly. He could afford to be kind to the victims of the world, and Sybill Trelawney was most assuredly among them. He'd thought so ever since he hired her after her first successful prophecy, and he felt even sorrier for her now. It could not be pleasant to have one's gift of Seeing change on one so suddenly.

"The prophecy again, if you please, Sybill," he said, quietly.

The Seer sighed and stared off into the direction of the sunrise, not blinking, though the light must have been stinging her eyes. She had made a prophecy the other day that she was actually able to remember, and she recited it now, her voice going flat and monotonous.

"Three on three the old one coils,

Three in its times, three in its choices,

It bears his rivals to silence and stillness,

And the wild Darkness laughs, and the Light rejoices.

"Two on two the storms that are coming,

Two for the day, and two for the year,

The storm of darkness when no moon will shine,

And the storm of light that will blaze most fiercely here.

"One on one all the prophecies bear down,

One is their center, and one is their heart,

And from my mouth comes no Divination again

Except those prophecies in which he has a part."

Trelawney finished with a pensive sigh. Albus stood in silence for a moment, his head half-bowed.

"Tell me, Sybill," he said at last, "have you ever heard of a storm appearing in a prophecy before?"

"Only as a harbinger of something else, Headmaster." Trelawney's voice had recovered its pomposity. "They are common metaphors for battle, of course. Mere weather events have no place in prophecy."

Albus nodded. He had thought the same thing before she spoke. "And you have no idea what the first stanza of that prophecy means?"

Trelawney shifted uneasily. "I have heard other prophecies in which 'the old one that coils' was mentioned, Headmaster."

"And?"

Trelawney swallowed. "It always refers to a snake in some way. A descendant of Slytherin, often, or the Founder himself; there was one that prophesied a daughter of his line finding his ring in the fifteenth century. Another predicted Lord Golddigger's battle with dragons on the coast of Wales. Something serpentine, at least."

Tom. Albus could not say he was surprised, though he would have to think for some time before he managed to tease out all the secrets of this riddle. He missed the clear prophecy that had told him so exactly what should be done with Connor's and Harry's childhood. The rhyming ones were always harder to figure out.

She may make more useful prophecies in the future, though, if she can see no visions again but those in which Tom has a part.

"Thank you, Sybill," he said, and watched as Trelawney hurried away in relief. Once again, he studied the sunrise.

He would have to move more carefully than he had in the past. He had known that for months now.

But at least he would have the assurance that things were going his way again—in one case because he wielded a weapon too subtle for Harry to suspect, in the other because he had an advantage, in the knowledge of the prophecy, that no one else did.

He started to turn towards the staircase, and then paused, his eyes narrowing. He had seen a dark figure flicker beneath him for a moment, he thought. If he had not known better, he would have said it was a woman in a dark cloak, and that she smelled of smoke and fire.

And surely there was an echo in his ears, like a dragon's wild roar?

But then he touched the wards, and relaxed. He still had his little spies in among the ones that Minerva had supposedly tamed, and those told him that there had been no figure, woman or otherwise, on the side of the Tower.

Albus went on to breakfast, his stride firm and sure. It had cost him some uncertainty and some standing in the eyes of the wizarding world, but he was back in the game.