Rudolph Kipling's Dialogue Concerning Human Magic Use was located on the second shelf from the floor, three rows into Hogwarts' Magical Theory section.
It was the first book about magic that Harry had ever found himself nodding along to.
The tome—for it was far to thick to be considered anything else—was a bit of a slog to get through, admittedly, but none of the words were overly complicated, most pages had definitions of words with multiple interpretations explained in the margins, and Kipling seemed to particularly favor using between three and four metaphors to try to explain any one concept.
It felt a bit like the written version of over-enunciating, but at least Harry didn't have to worry about misinterpreting Kipling's interpretations.
As for the man's actual opinions on magic?
The book began with all but a complete and utter dismissal of every theory of magic that had come before.
Rudolph Kipling did this by first explaining the muggle interpretation of atoms, and how it had changed over time, before relating it to magic: the modern understanding of the subject was doubtless far more advanced than it had been before, but it was far from perfect, and sometimes understanding went backwards, not forwards.
He then said the exact same thing using four other metaphors.
He'd then admitted that he would be borrowing from several contemporary prevailing magical theories, the ones that were either significantly backed up by prior work or that which he could test himself; while magical theory in general was far less rigorous than its non-magical counterpart, and far more error prone due to that, he had to start somewhere.
It was at this point that Harry began to seriously consider that the book might be misnamed.
Dialogues, or at least Harry's understanding of the term, were written stories of several characters talking to each other.
Rudolph Kipling's work seemed to be more or less just him talking to the reader.
Monologue would work better, or even sermon.
Dialogue was just plain inaccurate.
The book itself was pretty good, though—it explained all that which was not known about magic, that which did not seem to be intelligible at all. That which had yet to be disproven, and that which probably would be accepted by muggle scientific standards.
The latter group was the smallest.
Most importantly, and most broadly, the book had one central thesis: all things are possible, but some are more difficult than others.
The Fundamental Laws of Magic, formulated by Adalbert Waffling (a contemporary of Kipling), directly contradicted this view. Given that Adalbert Waffling wrote Magical Theory, one of Harry's textbooks, it was clear which way most of the magical world leaned.
The First Law was that the further someone went towards meddling in the deepest underlying laws of magic, the worse the consequences would be.
Kipling considered that a complete misinterpretation of reality.
While it was true, he admitted, that certain magics seemed to have more substantial side effects than others, Kipling did not find any evidence that it was because there were 'underlying laws' of magic. To assume some sort of moral high ground in the inherent 'being' of magic, he said, was idealistic at best.
He continued going through the rest of the laws in a similar way, pointing out why they had been posited in such a way and the issues he saw with doing so. Gamp's Law—a law that predated both Kipling and Waffling quite a bit—was also put under attack, which was if anything more vicious than Kipling's take on any of Waffling's laws.
Gamp's Law, and its five exceptions, was supposed to explain the limits of transfiguration. Food, for instance, could not be conjured—only duplicated, summoned, transformed…
Kipling wasted little time assuring the reader that he'd done his own studies, and that Gamp's first exception was provably false.
Transfiguration, Harry knew, always came built in with a timer. The more magically powerful you were and the more you understood what you were asking for the longer the transfigured/conjured/what-have-you-ed item would last, but it would never be forever. Kipling argued that it was for this reason that conjured food was 'impossible' to create (or, rather, it was entirely possible—conjuring animals was as well—but actually consuming the food was liable to kill you.) Kipling pointed out that no one within the wizarding world had much of an understanding of how living cells worked—even those in the muggle world were usually not experts—and so they had to rely much more heavily on their magical strength than they would in conjuring, say, a bar of iron (which was only the one element.)
The conjured food was created, sure enough—but only to look and taste right; often significant parts of what made food 'food' were missing. Further, the human body used food, pulling it apart and taking the nutrients hidden within to hundreds of cells all over the body. If the transfiguration reversed before every atom of the conjured food was out of the system…
Well. Gamp's law's exceptions existed for a reason.
Duplication and transfiguration of existing food did not hold such issues—the magic would use the existing base to more directly mimic what was necessary, and the (relative) ease of those transformations gave the food a much higher chance of surviving long enough for its consumer to die—though Kipling did point out that there were several odd deaths reported yearly among the elderly at St. Mungo's whose early exits may very well have been caused by eating same such food decades and decades earlier.
Harry found all of this interesting, sure, but he wasn't really a scientist in either life; his interest was far more practical.
If Kipling was right, then he had an idea—a cruel one, and one that would likely give him nightmares, but an idea nonetheless. He resolved to check Hogwarts: a History as soon as possible, and then went to bed.
It was late.
.
At breakfast the next day his plans had to be put on hold once more.
Harry didn't know if it was because he was acting different or because the world itself had changed that much, but Dumbledore had remained almost entirely invisible from the time of his reintroduction to the world to this December.
He seemed—and he was, given Harry's memories—far more subdued than he had been in Harry's first first year. He communicated less with the other teachers, laughed less, was altogether a much smaller presence in the school Harry called home.
Sometimes Harry wondered if Dumbledore had been called back too, but he always dismissed the thought. If that were true, and Dumbledore hadn't nixed Quirrell already, then…
Well.
He tried not to think of the implications.
It was not until the article came out that the status quo changed.
It was just one day later, and Harry had yet to even finish his breakfast, and he was already being called into the man's office for a meeting that afternoon.
The office of the Headmaster, at least, was unchanged; still the wild array of objects collected over the undeniably eccentric man's life, and Fawkes—the bird that seemed to be fire if you looked at it from any direction but head on—perched contentedly next to the wall near Dumbledore's desk.
Dumbledore himself looked the same, too; wizened eyes, ridiculous amounts of white hair, and the fashion sense of a colorblind toddler.
"Ah, my boy! Come in!"
Harry came in.
"Lemon drop?"
"No, thank you." Harry said. He'd never been one for sour treats—sweet ones were much more appetizing.
"Well, then, let's get down to business."
"I—" Harry still wasn't sure how to play this, wasn't sure what he thought of Dumbledore even after eight years of knowing the man. "I don't think I did anything wrong, sir."
"Oh? Oh, no, you didn't." Dumbledore laughed. "Or at least not that I'm aware. No, I called you up here to talk to you about the article in yesterday's paper."
Harry sat up now, interested despite himself. "Do you know why she wrote that stuff? Those—lies?"
"Well, no, not off the top of my head. I do happen to know the author—she, like most, once went to school here—but I couldn't begin to extrapolate upon… no, unfortunately I have no idea."
Harry leaned back, slightly disappointed. "That's fine, I guess. Maybe it will come out in the lawsuit."
"In the lawsuit?"
"Yeah, Neville penned a barrister to represent me. He's already wrote back that he's accepting the case and will have an outline of his strategy to me sometime next week."
"That's excellent, my boy!" Dumbledore said, looking genuinely happy. Then his face saddened. "I must warn you, though, there might be little even an accomplished barrister can do. You should be prepared to lose."
"He said the same thing, but still, I think I have to try." Harry was, if anything, more certain of his future failure than Dumbledore, but that wasn't why he'd pushed to have the case go forward—in fame he had an ace up his sleeve most others didn't, and in the court of popular opinion laws rarely mattered.
"Well, I wish you the best of luck in that." Dumbledore said. He smiled.
Harry nodded.
They sat for a few seconds in silence, and Harry wondered idly why it was this meeting that was so necessary.
"That, however, is not why I called you in."
Harry hoped he looked appropriately curious.
"Harry, is there a reason why you haven't elaborated over your home life?"
What?
"I, um, have, Headmaster. I've explained many times that I was raised by muggles."
"While that is true, it is not what I was referring to. I believe that if you explain to your peers about the… ordinariness, shall we say, of your childhood, then any potential backlash to the article will be much smaller."
"But… there hasn't been any 'backlash' to the article, at least not in Hogwarts." Harry said. Dumbledore conceded the point, but before he could speak again Harry kept talking. "Plus, my childhood wasn't particularly ordinary."
"It wasn't?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Does Hogwarts not communicate with the state?"
"I am sorry to say we don't. It is quite an oversight, I will admit, however it is one that is unlikely to change anytime soon— delayed in committee, you could say."
"Oh. Well, anyway. My life wasn't ordinary because I have a social service worker. I wonder where she thinks I've gone?" He said, a true afterthought (but one that made Dumbledore's face pull back even more than it had from the statement preceding it.)
"I was under the impression that both your aunt and uncle were alive and well?"
"They are! Well, mostly, anyway—Uncle Vernon's heart isn't doing so great. But… I don't know if you know this, Headmaster, but apparently my mother and aunt didn't get along very well, so when I appeared on the doorstep my aunt didn't really see much reason to treat me well. It was only when other people noticed and the government got involved that my treatment improved, and even then they still check in regularly to make sure everything is alright."
"Well, it couldn't have been too bad—your aunt loves you, after all. And I'm sure any familial spats went away with your mother's passing."
Harry stared at Dumbledore. "My aunt does not love me." He said at last. "She has grown to tolerate me, at least, and feeds and clothes me and lets me go to school, but she does not love me. The only reason she didn't give me up was because she thought it would look bad.
As for the second…
My aunt told me a bit about magic, you know, just before my letter arrived. Except the entire time she was talking she was terrified." Dumbledore made to interrupt, so Harry talked a bit louder. "She wasn't scared because she didn't understand it, sir. She was terrified of it. Terrified of what it could do—of what, I'm nearly sure—it did do, to her or in front of her.
My mother was a witch, sir, and I am a wizard.
My aunt was so badly hurt by one or both of those nouns that she could barely talk about the mere existence of magic over a decade later.
That level of emotion, sir, does not disappear just because someone else's heart stops beating."
It was cold, and callous, of Harry to speak that way, and he was also exaggerating more than a little about how sure he was that his aunt had been directly effected by magic and wasn't just reacting to the mere idea of it, but Harry knew Dumbledore. Harry knew that Dumbledore put family first, and thought that everyone else did the same, no matter what evidence there was to the contrary. Harry did not want his pain—no matter how diminished in comparison to his first life—to be written off because of that.
"Well, surely it couldn't have been too bad," Dumbledore said, "or they would have sent you to an orphanage."
"They don't really do orphanages nowadays." Harry said. "Foster homes are done instead." (Actually, he didn't know, but that matched what he'd heard on the news.) "And the reason I wasn't taken away was because, again, my aunt and uncle didn't like the image of that, and the only thing they care about more than their personal safety is how people look at them."
"Surely your lack of… malice, convinced them that magic wasn't as bad as they'd imagined." Dumbledore said.
"For me specifically, sure." Harry agreed. "Again, my aunt and I—and my cousin and uncle besides—get along fine nowadays, and thankfully I'm self-sufficient enough to not need much of the love they are incapable of giving me. But for the magical world as a whole? One not-outright-bad untrained wizard isn't exactly enough to change anyone's minds about anything, is it?"
"Not outright bad?"
Harry rolled his eyes at what Dumbledore decided to focus on. "I threw tantrums sometimes." He said instead (a lie.) "I lied about brushing my teeth. I didn't study for tests, I got into arguments with Dudley over whose turn it was to use the telly. Sometimes I'd forget to clean my room, or I'd not listen when they told me to stop doing something." (All lies. Harry knew better than to antagonize the Dursleys, and he was adult enough not to, but Dumbledore wouldn't know that.) "I was a kid, sir, so I wasn't exactly an angel, but I was well-behaved enough."
Dumbledore stared at him.
He stared at Dumbledore.
"Well, you probably have no small amount of schoolwork to do, so I'll let you go now."
Harry nodded.
"Have a good evening, my boy."
"And you as well, headmaster."
Harry left, and Dumbledore sat in his office.
Both, independently, wondered what good had come out of their first official meeting.