Dumbledore appeared with a small pop of displaced air, disturbing the stillness of dusk. He had apparated to just outside the grounds of an old colleague's manor house, surrounded by carefully shaped hedges and wrought iron fencing. The elderly man walked towards the main gate a few feet before him, before tapping it with his wand and imparting a sense of who he was. As he waited to be received, he straightened his beard and clasped his hands behind his back. After a few minutes, a rather overweight man walked out and came to stand a distance from the gate, leaving it closed.
"Horace." Dumbledore finally spoke, after letting a silence trail on. The man flushed, before moving forward and opening the gate with a touch of his wand.
"Albus." The man smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes, and it faltered when Dumbledore only returned it momentarily. Dumbledore slowly stepped onto the property as the gate swung open. "I'm not coming back to teach, Albus. I'm retired. Retired!" The man was emphatic in that fact, his forehead shining as sweat broke out in the humid summer air.
"I don't expect you to, Horace. Professor Snape has been performing satisfactorily." Dumbledore gave another small, fake smile. Slughorn wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, frowning.
"Don't think I've not spoken to Griselda, Albus. Or that the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers hasn't been talking." Horace turned and started walking towards the manor. "Potion OWLs are down a full grade and Potion NEWT graduate classes have shrunk from around fifteen to about eight - mostly Slytherin, mind you." Dumbledore didn't say anything, but followed along, a step behind the corpulent man.
"Snape was a potions prodigy, for sure! I was proud to have taught him. But he is not a teacher, Albus. And after his falling out with Lily…" They approached the door without further comment.
"I did not visit to discuss my staffing, or even Hogwarts. Professor Snape has my full confidence, and I have other matters to discuss with you." Albus finally replied as Slughorn held the door open for him.
"Don't try and feed me dragonshit, Dumbledore. The man is costing the country healers, aurors, and -"
"Enough." And the grandfatherly facade that Dumbledore often adopted was left to the side, as he took control of the conversation. "I have come to discuss your failings, not mine. It's time for us to finally discuss a young Tom Riddle." The man cowered slightly, Dumbledore's magical presence asserting itself and pressing Slughorn back.
"I have independently verified that Tom was making horcruxes. I believe I know how many. But now I must find them. And so you will tell me everything you know of the subject. And then you will tell me everything you didn't realize you knew." Dumbledore unclasped his hands, revealing his drawn wand, and directed the retired potions professor to a rather comfy looking chair.
"Now how do the muggle police dramas put it?" Dumbledore frowned for a moment before smiling with his eyes for the first time that night. "We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. Your choice."
Sirius strode forward along an overgrown path through a dense thicket of a forest, confidently brushing aside branches that crossed into his way. He had made this walk many times before, though a pang of loss hit him as he realized that this was the first time he had done so without James.
He broke through into a clearing, within which was a house that looked only marginally more habitable than the shrieking shack. Calling it a house was generous, even in the past when he had visited, but now, with nearly a decade of disrepair… Sirius strode up, and yanked open the door, only to find a wand in his face.
"Good to see you too, Remus." Sirius's smile was infectious, though the werewolf in front of him was so sodden in drink it failed to catch. Sirius pushed the wand away from his nose with a fingertip, before moving past the man who's already dulled mind was struggling to catch up with the arrival of his traitorous ex-best-friend.
"I know that you lost James and Lily, Moony, but little Harry needed you. Have you been drunk for the last eight years?" Sirius said this lightly, but inside he was rather pissed at the man. Remus had been the only one left from their friend group free to be the parental figure Harry needed, though while Remus had drowned himself in liquor, Sirius had already resolved not to judge him too harshly - Sirius was also at fault, Pettigrew's framing notwithstanding, for flying off the handle and falling for the trap.
"Bllck!" Remus slurred as he tried to turn rapidly to track the grim animagus with his wand, but it was a lazy movement and he struggled to bring his arm up to bear on the wizard who had decided to casually sit on his couch.
"Remus, you do know you and your house reek of liquor, right? When was the last time you were sober?"
"Trrraitr!" Remus fired off a blasting hex that destroyed the lamp in the corner of the room. Sirius jumped a bit, and dodged as a second blasting hex came much closer to hitting him, ripping open a gash in the couch and setting fire to the liquor that had soaked in. Sirius quickly cast a stunner at the man, who shrugged it off, due to both being a werewolf and being incredibly inebriated. Sirius cast a couple more, also ineffectively, as he dodged another blasting hex and a cutting curse. He finally gave up and overpowered an incarcerous, tying the werewolf down with inch-thick ropes.
Sirius sighed, taking a breath before stepping forward and pulling the wand from his friend's hand, and ignored his continued slurring deprecations of his character. He casually repaired the damage done to the house, before slouching back on the couch, looking at Remus, who continued vilifying his name, before sighing and leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. Eventually, Remus quieted, and Sirius looked back down at him, making eye contact.
"Are you done?" Sirius asked. "I'm going to spell a sobriety potion into your stomach, and then we can talk. But I'm not untying you or giving you your wand back."
Slughorn was hunched over, his elbows upon his knees, holding his head in his hands. Dumbledore lifted his head from the pensieve he had brought, unaffected by his previous potions professor's groaning.
"This isn't terribly helpful, Horace." Dumbledore had just finished reviewing every private interaction between Slughorn and Riddle, after forcibly extracting them with legilimens. "I need anything else you have. Who was in his close circle, in his sixth and seventh years?" He turned to face the seated man. "Did he claim any connection to an ancestral family?"
Slughorn looked up. "You didn't know? He claimed to be Slytherin's Heir." Dumbledore narrowed his gaze.
"I was under the impression that Tom affected that, using his parseltongue to prove it." Slughorn nodded.
"He didn't affect that without more proof. He also wore the Gaunt ring." Dumbledore's eyes widened at that, he wasn't aware it was possible for there to be a link to the Gaunts.
"But Marvolo and Morfin were the last of that line?" Dumbledore asked, almost to himself.
"I don't know Albus, but the ring accepted him. There must be a link." Slughorn stood and made his way to the kitchen, Albus absent-mindedly following him, thinking as the man found a pain potion and downed it.
"I'll need to check the ministry records about the Gaunt family then." Dumbledore looked back up at the retired professor. "Do you know of anyone who was in that close circle around Tom but who is not dead or incarcerated? Ideally who diverged politically and would be at least somewhat approachable."
Slughorn shook his head sharply, his jowls quivering. "Only Rosier Sr." Dumbledore sighed, knowing that would be an uphill battle. Maybe they would be best off just pulling it from his mind and then obliviating him. Dumbledore was all about second chances, but Rosier Sr. had made his bed decades ago, it wouldn't weigh too heavily on his mind.
"Well Horace, thank you for forgiving my tresspasses. I needed this information." Dumbledore began to exit the manor when the potions master spoke up.
"Well hold up, Albus, you legilimensed me. Let's not be too hasty talking of forgiveness." He followed Dumbledore to the door, frowning. Albus paused, and straightened his beard, before turning back to Slughorn.
"Then I'm sorry, Horace. Obliviate."
Pandora Lovegood sat in the guest chair of the office and entertained herself with reading files that had been left out on the desk before her. It was a bit slow going to do so upside-down, but it was good practice for the rune puzzles her husband put together.
Andromeda Tonks re-entered her office carrying a rather thick file, thoroughly preoccupied by it.
"Hello Pandora." She continued on to her desk without registering the presence of her visitor. She set the file down on her desk, sat, and continued to focus upon it. Pandora frowned at her covering up the article on conjuration that she had been looking at, but began reading the file on time research that Andromeda had just brought in.
It was another five minutes or so until Andromeda looked around for a quill to take notes with, that she noticed the visitor sitting across from her. She was slightly startled but her training as a daughter of the blacks allowed her to keep her cool.
"Pandora, it's good to see you. What brings you to my office?" Andromeda frowned. "Also, how did you get in here?" The security systems should have prevented her from getting into her office.
"It's good to see you too, Andy. And I walked in." She looked up from the conjecture that time travel was just hopping between alternate universes slightly out of sync. "And are you aware of any other seers than my Luna? Without a warning from this young man in Diagon Alley, I would probably have died last week." Andromeda took a deep breath to try and avoid screaming in frustration, but only partially succeeded, a small amount leaking through her clenched teeth.
"Oh is that why you're looking at time research? Is he displaced?" Andromeda put her head in her hands, sighing.
"Sometimes, Pans, you're far too clever." Andromeda sat back in her chair and slouched. "I can't tell you about this. And you especially can't tell your daughter about this, that you've survived is already a change to the timeline and I'm trying to figure out if it was a big change or a small change."
Pandora frowned in thought, her brow furrowing.
"Well, considering my latest experiment has violently deconstructed itself, I don't currently have a project. Would you like some help with this?" Andromeda brightened at that.
"It's about time! I can get you added as a consultant to the DoM." Andy was excited, the young blonde mother needed some oversight to not risk herself with experiments, and she was one of the most extraordinary out-of-the-box thinkers that had come out of Hogwarts in decades, even more than Lily Evans, who while brilliant, was more regimented. At that exclamation, Pandora cringed a bit, but nodded regardless.
"So Peter was the one to sell out James and Lily?"
"Yes."
"And then framed you."
"Yes."
"And then Harry was sent to Petunia?"
"Yes."
"Shit."
"Yes."