Chapter 8: Al
It hadn't gone well.
Sure, the boy had shouted and screamed and destroyed a fair bit of his office. If he had not done then Albus would have been very surprised.
But he was sure that it hadn't gone well.
Actually, that wasn't true.
It wasn't that it hadn't gone well.
It was that he had handled it poorly.
That greatly puzzled the silver bearded Headmaster of Hogwarts. He generally handled issues fairly well, but in this case he didn't feel like he had done a good enough job.
Perhaps the years of keeping secrets and trusting nobody but himself with the information and to come through at the right time was taking its toll on him.
He didn't need to think very much to realize when was the last time he had trusted anyone completely.
Of a time when he had not kept any secrets.
He couldn't decide if he wanted to forget the episode to relieve him of the pain it had caused or if he wanted to keep remembering it so that it would always serve as a lesson for him to never make a mistake of that size.
Sharing those secrets had literally costed the lives of numerous people.
True, they didn't die by the hand of Albus Dumbledore. In fact, he would never condone killing people, perhaps not even in self-defence. But he still felt that he had blood on his hands. Blood that no matter how hard he tried, he would not be able to wash off his hands.
Unlike some of his other memories which he extracted from his mind and placed them in vials, this particular memory and the ones related to it where always within his brain and surrounded by the strongest Occlumency shields and defences that he could muster.
While he had confidence that no one would and no one would be able to break into his trusted vaults at Hogwarts, it was not a chance he was willing to take. If it was something he had learned over the years, and particularly from Tom (especially his follies) it was that one should never assume to be the only one who knows it all.
No, Albus would not make that mistake.
He sat back in his chair and reclined the seat, thinking deeply on the events that had recently unfolded. The death of Sirius was a tragedy and a disaster.
And Albus felt responsible for it.
He should have tried harder to convince Harry about the need to take the Occlumency classes with more seriousness.
He should have arranged for an alternative to Severus to teach Harry the class in the first place. Having put the two together given their history was just asking for trouble and zero progress. Which was exactly what had happened.
He should have spoken to Harry and told him the reason why he had been avoiding him the whole year.
He should have tried to let Sirius be free at times instead of caging him up worse than a wild animal.
He should have spoken more to Sirius to understand the man's psyche. Having spent a dozen years in captivity with just dementors for company was bound to have affected him than he was letting on and Albus had just let him be without getting him checked.
The irony was not lost on Albus that while he hated dementors, he had done absolutely nothing to recuperate people who had been exposed to their influence for extended periods of time.
There were so many things that he should have done, but he hadn't.
He had the blood of yet another innocent soul on his hands.
He was sure that he had lost the confidence of young Harry as well. It didn't seem so at the moment, but he knew that very soon hard questions would be asked of him and it could fall either way.
In his race to always have the big picture in mind, he had forgotten that what he was dealing with were actual people with emotions, thoughts and dreams of their own.
Fawkes trilled softly in the corner, his song helping to massage some of the heaviness that seemed to have settled on the Headmaster. Dumbledore said nothing, but he mentally thanked the phoenix.
Unlike what was the common belief, a phoenix was a symbol of eternity, not a symbol of eternal purity. Like their birth and death cycles, the phoenix too was involved at some level in construction and destruction. At least that was what Dumbledore told himself. He could see no other reason as to why Tom should have gotten a wand that contained Fawkes' tail feather if phoenixes were truly the creatures of the light.
Nevertheless, Fawkes had proven himself to be quite adept at discerning the moods of the people around him and singing accordingly to lift up their spirits. Albus too needed the song of the phoenix at the moment to pull himself together.
The question that kept running through his mind though was whether this would be the last time he needed such a help from Fawkes.
Or if this was merely one of many in the near future.
Shaking away that line of thought, the silver bearded Headmaster focused on one of his students, a particularly difficult one he had had to deal with and one he was sure he would have greater problems with the coming school year.
Young Mr. Malfoy had been brought to the school with an air of everything being handed to him on a silver platter which had not happened as far as the lad would have liked. Snape had further pandered to him, which had only served to increase the boy's ego and sense of entitlement. And now the unchecked actions would lead to a heavy price.
The price that Tom would demand of young Draco for the failure of his father, Lucius.
His death.