Chapter One: The Early Years
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was born in the summer of 1881 to Percival and Kendra Dumbledore, and held the status of half-blood. He was followed three years later by the birth of his brother, Aberforth Dumbledore, and his sister Ariana Dumbledore one year after that.
Albus was a very happy child, displaying his stunning intellect at a very young age. His drive to learn was powerful and virtually unmatched by any of his contemporaries. Thanks to his intellectual superiority to virtually everyone he met, he developed a certain degree of arrogance, which he kept hidden and was later in life tempered by his love of learning and his ability to see the goodness in everyone.
Albus fiercely loved his family. His father was a stern pureblood, strict with his children but constantly finding subtle ways to delight or entertain them. Percival Dumbledore was from a reasonable well-respected pureblood family, and was raised according to the customs of polite pureblood society at the time. His family was shocked when he selected a young muggleborn to wed, but she was both attractive and well-mannered and the matter was quietly forgotten.
Kendra Dumbledore was born to and raised by a well-respected family that was moderately wealthy thanks to a series of factories and a successful tea venture that would boom while Kendra attended Hogwarts. As a younger daughter, her family allowed her to marry a man that, though he belonged to a family little known among the non-Magical, was clearly well-bred and respectable. Thanks to her upbringing in a wealthy and upper-class family, Kendra was able to fit in well with the traditional purebloods Percival mingled with, allowing a reluctant acceptance of the marriage among pureblood circles. Percival and Kendra both taught their children, particularly their heir, how to work with upper-class families, match their political skills, and gain their respect, skills that would be invaluable for Albus in a pureblood-dominated society.
The earliest memory Albus could recall was his father creating little whispy shapes to delight them while his mother looked on, smiling as she held Albus's hand against her oversized stomach. Albus had learned that babies often shifted and kicked as they neared the time of delivery, and he was absolutely delighted when he felt the little nudge from his sister. Both boys had giggled in delight as their father looked on, his stern expression slipping into a gentle smile.
Ariana was born three weeks later, and Albus spent long hours curled up with her on the chair in her nursery, cooing to her and reading from a book, years above his age level but fascinating to both the young boy and his infant sister, albeit for different reasons.
He doted on his younger sister and, to a lesser extent, his brother. He was highly protective of his siblings, very defensive of their feelings and well-being and all too willing to fight on their behalf, for all that he usual maintained a somewhat aloof persona. His love for Ariana in particular was one of the only qualities to match, and perhaps exceed, his drive to learn and excel.
As the three children grew, Albus was by far the most scholarly, spending hours reading in his room only to be dragged out with exaggerated reluctance for a game of hide-and-seek with his siblings or for a family picnic at the nearby river. He had few friends in his younger years in the small village, thanks to his intellectual ability and his somewhat-hidden disdain for those less intelligent than himself, but he grew more skillful at interacting with children his own age and by the age of ten had a few friendly acquaintances. He would lose touch with them, however, in the course of his family's abrupt move.
Though Mould-On-The-Wold was largely inhabited by wizards, there were also a number of non-magical families that had no knowledge of the wizarding world or the existence of magic. Several of their children wandered freely through the village, requiring the wizarding population to hide their magic, with somewhat mixed success.
On one fateful day, only a few weeks after Albus' eleventh birthday and the arrival of his Hogwarts letter, Ariana was at play in the backyard, as was usual. She was a happy, lighthearted child, and loved to experiment with her magical abilities while relaxing in the garden.
According to later testimony, she had been creating little golden lights in her palms that she made float around the yard. On this particular day, however, three muggle boys were spying on her through the hedge. Why they were interested in watching a six-year-old is debatable – perhaps because they instinctively felt something was different about her, or perhaps they were jealous because of their somewhat poorer living conditions. Whatever the reason, they spotted Ariana creating the lights, and chose to act.
The three of them clawed through the fence and surrounded her, demanding that she show them how she was creating the lights. Of course, said lights were created because of her happy mood, and surround by three much larger boys she was unable to replicate the feat.
When she couldn't show them, the boys got angry with what they perceived as an abnormality. When Ariana was sufficiently frightened, however, she pushed the boys away with her ability and attempted to run.
Her actions only enraged the three boys, who were in their mid-teens and were enraged by her 'witchcraft.' Like a number of muggles of the time, they viewed witchcraft as a sign of absolute evil, and in fear and rage attacked the young girl. Forcing her to stay quiet out of fear, they inflicted their anger upon her.
What exactly they did is unknown, as her family members refused to speak of it. Whatever it was, when Kendra Dumbledore finally realized what was happening and chased the boys away, young Ariana was injured and severely traumatized. She was taken to a local healer for her physical injuries but was brought home after only a short evaluation, according to local gossip.¹ In hindsight, she was likely rushed home to prevent the healer from observing the mental damage that had been dealt by the attack.
Whatever happened, it horrified the Dumbledore family and enraged Percival. After making sure his daughter was physically healthy and secure, he extracted the identities of the three boys from his wife and left the house to find them.
According to the transcripts from the trial, he set upon all three boys with a vengeance. He used a number of dark spells upon them in his rage; his repertoire including pain, nightmare, and castration curses. However, in the trial he refused to admit why he cursed the boys. Had he explained that the attack had been in vengeance for their assault on his daughter, he would likely had been cleared of all charges and even lauded by pureblood society for defending his family so fiercely.
His refusal to speak was likely due to Ariana's mental state, as from later accounts she would certainly have been confined to St Mungos had the extent of the mental damage been known. However, knowing how that course of action would have devastated his wife, who already suffered from severe guilt that she hadn't noticed Ariana's predicament earlier, he made the perhaps foolhardy decision to remain silent. As a result, for a supposedly unprovoked attack on defenceless muggles, as well as the use of numerous dark curses, he was given a life sentence in Azkaban, where he would die years later.
After Percival Dumbledore's conviction, the rest of the family uprooted and moved to Godric's Hollow, likely to escape the gossip in Mould-On-The-Wold as well as move closer to several close family friends, including Bathilda Bagshot, with whom Kendra Dumbledore was very close.
The family suffered deeply from the whole tragic event. Kendra Dumbledore was beside herself with guilt and self-loathing, horrified with herself for giving the boys a chance to strike at Ariana and full of despair over her daughter's condition. Though she still maintained many of her pureblood connections, she retreated when not around others into her shell, a shadow of depression hanging over her.
Ariana was never the same. She refused to consciously use her powers, and they began to twist and mutate within her, desperate to escape even as she squeezed them tighter with her fear. Her experiences and twisted magic slowly drove her mad, and her periods of familiar, gentle sweetness were jarringly interrupted with maddened rages where her magic would escape and lash out around her before she drove herself even further behind an impassible barrier of fear, rage and helplessness despair.
Aberforth spent as much time around his sister as possible, calming her during her episodes and coddling her with sweet gentleness the rest of the time. While he felt a helpless rage against the boys who had attacked his sister, and those who had sentenced their father to prison and death for taking his vengeance, he chose the simple redirection of his rage to protecting and nurturing his sister to the full extent a young boy could. He was in many ways much simpler than his brother in both intelligence and outlook, but maintained a clarity and focus in love that his brother would lose for a long time.
Albus, for his part, was helplessly enraged. Protective of his sister, he was furious at the boys who had dared harm her, and angry at his father for attacking them so overtly as to be removed from their family forever. He began to dream of a world where such events as the attack on Ariana would be a distant memory, where reasoning and gentle logic would prevail, and where men such as his father would not be sentenced to a lingering death thanks to vengeance for wrongs wrought.
His innocence had been forever shattered by the attack, however, and as he watched his sister and brother interact during one of her fits he understood on some level that his desire would never be truly achieved, and despaired.
And underneath it all lay a burning hatred for the boys who had wronged his sister, wronged Albus, in their ignorance, and a need to stop them from ever hurting him, or anyone else, in such a way again. On some deeper level, he began to wonder if perhaps the hard-liners were correct. Whether muggles were truly beasts, and naught could be done but contain them.
In the midst of his inner struggles and debate, his mother took him to Diagon Alley to complete his shopping list. Albus found his retreat from the burning, uncomfortable thoughts piercing his consciousness; he threw himself into study, desperate to further his knowledge and take comfort in the cold, hard realms of logic and fact. With a brilliant memory, a capacity for logical deduction far beyond his age, and an ability to make intuitive leaps in reasoning, he would arrive at Hogwarts committed, academically minded, and ready to challenge himself in every way possible, to further his own thirst for knowledge and escape the despair that clouded his mind whenever he thought of Ariana.
¹ The notes taken from the healers records, scarce as they may be, can be found in appendix 1.
AN: I stated in the original version of this chapter that I was moving Albus Dumbledore's birthyear from 1881 to another year. However, due to my desire to adhere as closely as possible to canon, I had changed his birthdate back to the canonical year. I apologize for any confusion regarding the change.