Dumbledore looked as haggard as had been promised, but that was not something he could take as a good sign. Harry sat down opposite him, but it appeared he preferred to stand.

"I would not have come if it were not urgent," he said. "I realize that's probably... I should also be coming to you when we have time to fix things, but I'll get on with it. I've been getting trapped in dreams lately. I can only think that Voldemort is somehow getting through my defenses-"

"It's more likely he's managed to activate the Horcrux within your own mind."

"I... guess I shouldn't be surprised you know, Sir."

"You were right in supposing that your friends had already come to me, but there was nothing to be gained before you could be brought to my office."

It was stretching terms to call it an office, but sure enough, it was full of a bunch of random odds and ends; magical devices with purposes he could scarcely imagine. He received a portkey straight to it from the owl that his former Headmaster returned with Hedwig. Though he had left her with the Weasleys, it seemed she had not forgotten him, and for a moment he was not sure why that was what he had expected.

"I thought he had already managed to use our mental connection to his advantage, and that by breaking that with Occlumency... what do you mean 'activate'?"

"Each one of those Horcruces had the potential to bring its creator back from the dead, Harry. They were not simply anchors for his soul until he could make a new body for himself; a soul fragment that manages to attach itself to a human, as we saw with Miss Weasley, can turn its host into a suitable container for the main soul. Feathers of a fallen angel, I suspect there is nothing that any of them wants more. Nagini, as you may have suspected, is something of a compromise. She cannot truly think for herself, but if Voldemort were to assume control of her, he would be severely limited in that form, until he could take control of something else. The most likely reason he chose to use the Pair Dadeni ritual to return was because he had hidden his own Horcruces so well that retrieving them would be more challenging, and he was certain he needed some of your blood in his system in order to kill you."

"The ones we've hidden-"

"-are perfectly safe, as Mister Weasley assured me. I'm almost certain that his snake is the only one he knows how to locate at the moment."

"That's why he's using these dreams. It's a way of finding me."

"While he is, originally, responsible for the fact that you are having these dreams, by killing your parents, the manner in which I believe he has activated the soul fragment within you is by forcing you into this conflict, and the use of dark magic. Are you aware of how many people you killed in the last battle in which you fought?"

"I... no, Sir. I have no idea."

"I did not caution against this because I share the view that there was effectively no way of avoiding it." He sighed. "As long as you were a considerate leader, you would insist on taking the same risks as your subordinates, and that was a large part of what motivated them. I could not have recommended anything better for your protection, and here we are, dealing with the consequences."

"What exactly is the problem?" he asked.

"There is a story, a parable, that the muggles cannot conclusively attribute to any group of people. Commonly, they assume it came from Native Americans, even though the earliest written records that bear any resemblance came from Christian missionaries. They have no idea where it originates because it comes from the Phoenix Script. The twin forces that fight within you can only see any conclusion to their conflict at your discretion. A behavior is nothing more than what you practice. Your choices in killing Death Eaters have been, in my best understanding of the text, justified. Killing people, however, puts you at something of a risk. The more lives you take, the easier it becomes, and the dark arts continue to tempt you. It seems that it was forced upon you to choose between the least of the evils available, but I do not for a moment believe that you came here to be pitied."

"If I swear off using dark magic long enough, am I still going to have a problem with this?"

"Harry, you have given me a summary of what happened in each dream, but may I ask how exactly you killed those people?"

"I... they were figments of my own imagination," he said.

"I would have thought that your difficulty with waking up should have clued you into the fact that it was no normal dream."

"They still can't have been real people."

"No, they could not. And yet, at least the first time, you could not have known. You were rather quick to kill Quirinus Quirrell, relying on your memory that he was a willing host. Did you not for a moment consider that he could have been in over his head?"

"When he was in the room with the mirror, he was using the term 'master' with Voldemort, Sir," he said. "He was doing whatever he commanded."

"Of that I have no doubt. When what makes you worse from within can speak to you, you may begin to understand what exactly it is." He took a breath. "Harry, years ago you would have at least tried to think of some way of getting him and his master to separate. You've said that you killed him in self-defense, but the truth is that you killed him by accident, when, coincidentally, he would have otherwise killed you." He frowned. "Please, Harry. It is not a sign of weakness to be innocent. You touched him, burning him, without expecting to harm him, only trying to keep him from the Stone."

"I... that's correct, but what does it matter?"

"It's a sign of how much you've changed. The fact of the matter is that you are no longer innocent. You know have knowledge of how certain things work, and you cannot go back to how things were before. I wonder if your soul is damaged... or rather, how badly."

"What should I do about it?"

"Voldemort has the unique privilege of recovering, should he so choose, broken off fragments of his soul, because he used dark magic to preserve them. Everyone else loses those fragments forever. I cannot tell you exactly what sins would do what exactly to your soul, but I can tell you that the state of your soul is not what it was."

"What is wrong with using dark magic?" he asked after a while. "That sounds like a stupid question, I know, but if it's just something we don't really understand, then how, morally speaking, use line references if you have to-"

"It is because of the motivation of your heart," the old warlock said after a moment. "Any action becomes wrong with an ill motivation. There has never been an assassin who becomes a better person by killing the worst of tyrants. I trust you understand that the consequences of your actions, unknown to you until long after the fact, cannot determine-"

"Of course," he said. "I thought I was... faking it. I thought I was just doing it because I had to in order to help my friends."

"Harry, you cannot trick a spell into thinking that you understand it; they cannot think." He sighed. "At the risk of being interrupted again, and I confess I have done so myself- the heart is deceptive. You would not believe the things that I myself believed that I was doing for love, when I never understood the concept. It was not until the loss of my younger sister that I realized what was missing, and not until then that I understood the dark wizard Grindelwald was so terrible that I had to stop him because the accident of her intervention in our high-minded arguments cause me to suffer more than him, and that was the only difference between us."

"I... I never knew that."

"It was decades before your birth. Even after bringing him in alive and trapping him in his own castle, from which I demonstrated that he could never escape, there were those who demanded that he should be executed for his crimes. You would not believe how much time I wasted pleading for his cause, that he was misguided, suffering from a massive superiority over his peers, leading him to think that he should decide the policy of the entire magical world, ignoring the obvious that people would realize that everything I said about him applied to me as well. It was as if I made the case that I was better than he, but I could not blame him, not without knowing he was responsible, for killing Ariana, and..." He shook his head. "Eventually, people moved on to other things. For once I had the news cycle to thank."

It was all he could do not to repeat himself. He had heard some bits and pieces about Dumbledore when some members of the DA had been interested in where he might have gone, so he knew the names being brought up. The accounts of what had happened when he was young were nothing if not inconsistent; he had no idea whether old Elphias Doge was really the best source on the subject or what; there were a few of his old teachers who seemed to dislike him, at least in their commentaries when he was first applying for a job at Hogwarts. If anything, he would have thought they would have a more objective perspective on the subject.

"Allow me to continue with what I meant to establish on dark magic. In the same way that you cannot trick an understood spell into believing that you also understand it, you cannot trick a curse into thinking that you summon the correct emotion to bridge the gap in your understanding. The motivation in your heart is truly represented by your ability to perform the spell, not in the reason that you may provide for yourself. Have you any idea how many Death Eaters started out that way?"

"No," he confessed.

"The true nature of what separates us from our enemies has nothing to do with uniforms or positions. It also has nothing to do with rhetoric. Since the dawn of time itself, every war has been fought with some form of argument on either side as to why one should be supported and not the other. You cannot except by the unlikeliest and least repeatable accidents do the right thing while being wrongly motivated, unless you have made yourself an unquestioning servant of someone substantially better than you."

He could, of course, object that he had not come for a lecture, but for help, and yet it was increasingly clear that he had not begun to understand the nature of the problem. Had Dumbledore not believed he could make any progress talking to his friends because they would not believe he was as far gone as he truly was? Had their respect for him clouded their judgement.

"You have seen, by your own admission, if I am to believe the transcripts from the Order meetings, what has become of Miss Weasley. Do you believe yourself to be less corruptible than she is?"

"No." He shook his head. "She was only exposed to the diary longer."

"For a moment I had thought that you intended to make her the kind of servant described earlier. Perhaps you had not thought so far ahead as to realize what you would accomplish, and what that would mean for her. In your resistance to heeding the instruction of my own organization, I can only think that it would not be a fate you would wish upon yourself."

There was no point in saying that it was different; it was, but it was worse. Insisting that Ginny be his servant because she could not be trusted to do the right thing, because she was using dark magic heavily, not that he forced it on her, and the condition of her soul was steadily deteriorating to where she could do nothing else. His command was inexperienced and for a time allowed for no one else to take the burden from her, even as Blaise and Terry cycled off. Though she had not explicitly said anything, he should have thought it would become more of an issue.

"I thought taking it upon myself would at least spare her part of it," he said after a moment.

"That much is most likely true. I have no doubt that Miss Weasley would have cast somewhat fewer dark spells after you decided to start doing it yourself, and yet, it had a substantially worse consequence."

"Should I have never touched it myself, then?"

"No, no, even if you had an exception, whatever is right for you to do to your soul is right for anyone else, and you see to have learned your lesson, with what I have heard about the Time Turners."

"Sir, could that be playing a role?" he asked. "The dreams, they started first, but that's not conclusive- in all of them I'm going back years and years."

"No, in this case I think that the perfectly natural explanation is more likely. You find yourself wondering where it all went wrong, with no idea of how complicated things were at the time."

"I know they were," he said. "They just weren't complicated for me. I can't believe I was mainly thinking about Quidditch and whatever was right in front of me. It wasn't even strictly academic things that I wasn't really learning; I couldn't even seem to get my animus against Slytherins under control. I couldn't separate the actions of just a few of them from the rest. I couldn't tell myself that I wouldn't turn out the same way if what they were saying was true about me." He sighed. "Now, I don't need to remind you that it's our choices that determine who we are."

"Even when I said it I had no idea the extent to which it would seem to explain your entire life. Perhaps I give myself too little credit for being insightful." He shrugged. "I was only referencing an interpretation of the text, as I'm sure you have realized by now."

"I have. Terry's become more interested in being a chaplain for the DA. It's not even the DA anymore, though; it's just the highest few ranks in the resistance and the resistance is just everyone opposed to the Ministry that hasn't out of some sort of stubbornness not joined the Order."

"That much I cannot fault," Dumbledore said. "I had never intended for my own group to scale up. In organizational matters, my main regret, at least in the last few years, has been my absence from that meeting in which you hammered out a compromise about the use of dark magic."

"Should we not have used it at all?" he asked. "Is that the point here?"

"That would be the ideal. It may sound strange, but we have an entire class of magic that we cannot use without doing something that we know is wrong, and for that reason it is better not to use it at all. I am sure that it sounds like we would have far fewer powers at our disposal without dark magic, but if we were to consciously choose not to use it, out of faith, not out of fear, not avoiding decisiveness or violence, but greed for power and greater certainty in our victory, a crutch to take the place of genuine courage- then I believe that we will prevail."

"Is there a prophecy?"

"No. And yet, that is always the way it turns out in the stories in the Phoenix Script." He sighed deeply. "There are those who would say that it is colossally selfish to ask everyone under me... I can only ask; there is only so much I can do- to refrain from using Unforgivable Curses, even if only whenever possible, based only on a theory to which I subscribe. I can see how it looks gruesome, perhaps indecisive, to use a severing charm to the back of the neck, but perhaps there are those who use killing curse not because it spares the target from pain but because it spares them from a spray of blood."

"It's off-putting," he said. "I can't imagine a sane human being who would say 'I want blood in my eyes'. At the same time, I can't imagine anyone who would want to do most of what I've done."

"We all make sacrifices, except for those who believe they have found a way to avoid that sacrifice. There is nothing novel or clever about these methods. Hiding behind neutrality when there is a genuine reason to intervene is one, and dark magic is one of many others. Warriors all over the world, frequently at war due to forces beyond their control, have often turned to hating their enemies as a way to keep killing them. We are born with a resistance to it, but do not mistake that for kindness- no species would long endure being born with an insatiable bloodlust. Men tell themselves that their enemies do not have families, do not suffer, or have no place in moral calculation due to choices they have already made. Dark magic is by its own practitioners portrayed as a frontier of magic, a field for explorers, but they can make no maps of what they discover; they can blaze no trails for others to follow. I expect that your friend Mr Zabini has already told you about his experiments with the Imperius Curse as a form of interrogation."

"I understand where you're going with this, Sir," he said. "Dark magic is more misunderstood than I ever would have guessed."

"I notice that you have become more practiced, and less awkward in your speech, Harry, and I think it suits you. I think you have started to do yourself credit in many ways. Forgive me if I criticize you so much that you lose sight of what you have accomplished." He took a breath. "It is quite common to make the argument that you can kill people with many different spells, even apparently harmless charms that we taught in first year, but that presumes that the morality of an action is entirely determined by its result, and I am afraid I cannot agree with that. Someone who develops cold feet out of cowardice and never shows up to a murder cannot be called morally different from someone with a shred of conviction, and I would argue that the second person would in almost all cases be more respectable and more capable of seeing the error of his ways, and put to use to productive causes."

"I am starting to think the question that I should be asking is... how can I not hate Voldemort? How can I undo the damage?"

"That is exactly the question that you should be asking. Allow me, in turn, to ask you something. Have you ever feared to lose to him because of how he might glory in your defeat?"

"He'd kill all of my friends."

"That much is true, and that would make you feel rather helpless."

"Don't make this about-" He stopped himself. It was true that he had a good reason to want his friends to live, but he had been asking about himself. "I... I'm not sure."

"There are times it can be hard to know our true motivations, as you have learned. You have seen, also that the Death Eaters hate those who escaped Azkaban, more than anyone else, even you. They care nothing that they have valuable allies who spent years making connections and getting themselves into position, which has made things substantially easier for their master."

"Even if they say they're loyal to him, then, they really don't want him to have resources as much as they want to kill those who didn't suffer like they did."

"Don't make the same mistake, Harry. Waking or sleeping, that is the best advice that I can give you. Regarding your dreams specifically, I can only say that you are not done with them, and there is nothing we can do at this point. It is only from within that truly turning around can begin."