.o0O0o.
"I WANT HIS HEAD ON A PIKE ON HOG'S HEAD HILL FOR WHAT HE'S DONE!" the irate Overseer cried, practically foaming at the mouth in his anger.
"And you'll get it," Lichfield answered him. "Maybe not the head, or the pike, or Hog's Head Hill since his brother bloody well owns it, but we'll get him."
"NOT SOON ENOUGH!" the Overseer's words rattled the windows as spittle flew from his thin lips.
Lester knew when it started that Barchoke would be incensed but this gave a new definition to goblin rage. The man – no, the goblin – was ready to lead a march on Hogwarts itself and damn the consequences for everyone in what came after. There was only one thing he could do.
"What is the failing of your race?" Lichfield demanded.
"You dare say ther–?" Barchoke fumed.
"You've said it yourself, you damn fool!" the Litigator interrupted, his own voice rising to match the Overseer's. "Now what is the failing of your race!"
Barchoke stared at him, his eyes hard and full of malice, breath coming in great huffs, and body positioned wide to make a more intimidating target – looking every inch the goblin warrior the banker might have been had history unfolded differently. After several tense seconds the goblin's breathing slowed and his body relaxed a bit so the fine suit he wore no longer looked at risk of bursting at the seams.
"Patience," Barchoke said, the anger in his voice turning to bitterness at having to wait. "Goblins have no patience."
"And repeating what happened three hundred and eighty years ago doesn't seem a particularly wise course of action," Lichfield pressed, if only to put an end to any such thought. "That didn't turn out too well last time, did it?"
The Overseer flumped back into his seat and stared out of his row of office windows.
"It got the Ministry to stop minting their own Galleons," Barchoke said, taking up the opportunity to speak about something else.
"And how many goblins died, only to get what you had in the first place?" Lichfield asked. "You never got the representation in the Wizengamot you were looking for."
"Bah!" Barchoke waved the issue off. Now was not the time to settle old scores, it was time to find out how to settle new ones. "You'll get him?" the goblin asked roughly.
"We'll get him," Lester replied. "Not sure exactly how yet, but we'll get him. If all else fails, you'll have to settle for him rotting in Azkaban for the rest of his life, but we'll get him."
"No," Barchoke said. "I want him. He's mine. I will make his life a living Hell the likes of which you humans have never imagined, and after I'm satisfied that vengeance has been served, maybe then I'll let him die."
Lichfield ran his gnarled hands over his equally gnarled face and sat back down in his chair. There'd be no budging the goblin on this, he'd known that since the day Barchoke had come to his house – back when he had still had the house – and begged him to make Gringotts look after his father for what'd been done to him. And to think it'd been an idle comment, a flimsy guess tossed out about a possible cause that had lit the fire in the goblin in front of him and led him to shave his head and swear vengeance against a hypothetical someone who might not have existed.
The goblin race does not forget, nor do they forgive, it's what has made relations between the two peoples prickly at best. The fact that individual members also carried these traits to varying degrees made friendships tricky to navigate, but in Lichfield's mind they were worth it just the same. It made for implacable enemies and stalwart allies. To beat them you had to be just as implacable as they were, but when it came to being allies, you had to do things the goblin way when they demanded it and they'd do the same for you. It was the price you paid for friendship.
"The boy's just a start," the Overseer said. "A good start, but we'll never get our hands on him with that. They'll do anything they can to keep him away from me once they catch hint of goblin involvement. We need something else, something big. There has to be something in his past we're not seeing."
Lester gave his head a good scratch to give himself a moment to get his thoughts together.
"What's the situation with Gropegold?" he asked when he was done.
"Cracked like an egg as soon as we showed him the Keys we got from Dumbledore," Barchoke said. "He's spilling everything now, but the fool still thinks he'll be set free. I doubt even he knows why the old man wanted what he did. Auditor Axegrind will probably have damages assessed by the time the boy gets here on – When was it?"
"Wednesday."
Barchoke nodded curtly.
"I've got a few things we can check up on," Lester said. "It might come to nothing more than more information to knock the old man off the pedestal he sits on and drag his name through the mud, but it's something."
"What is it?" the goblin asked.
"I have to warn you though," Lester said, trying to hide his smile. "It'll involve a lot of reading and digging for information. You sure you're up for it?" he asked with feigned sensitivity for their previous discussion.
"You leave it to me, I'll handle it. You just tell me what it is," the goblin said, now thoroughly hooked.
"This is one of several, or so it seems," Lichfield said, placing an odd book beside the globe of salsa dancers and smoky vials on the Overseer's desk. "I recognize the name of the press but you'll probably need to find and read all of them to see if there are any clues to what the old man might be up to."
Lichfield smiled as a disgusted look crossed Barchoke's face.
"Have fun! I'm off to kidnap some old helpless woman. Tata!"
"Wait – What?" the confused goblin asked.
As he closed the door behind him, Lester couldn't help but laugh. This was turning out to be fun.
.o0O0o.
Hermione. Was. Stunned. As she looked down at the letter she held in her hands, the bit of her brain still functioning after the information overload was unsure precisely how to classify what she felt at the moment, but thought stunned was a bit of an understatement.
Block by logical block Harry had built up his case against the headmaster. He had taken her seriously when she said she wanted every minute detail; the letter had gone on for ages outlining where his information came from, what he'd seen first-hand, what he suspected, what different individuals had told him, and what Dumbledore himself had corroborated. It must have taken him most of the day to write it.
"Hermione, are you alright?" her father asked from his customary seat at the circular dinner table.
"What?" she asked, not really rousing from the mental surprise attack. She had been so desperate for information she'd ripped open Harry's letter as soon as it arrived. Why had she done it at dinner? Oh, right. She had been so desperate for infor– She shook her head to stop herself from repeating herself.
"Is there something wrong?" her father coaxed, the absence of any joke noting the seriousness with which he was taking this.
She quickly thought back to see if Harry had written anything relationship-like in it before sliding the letter over to him. How could she explain something like what it said when she could barely wrap her head around it? Better to let him read it himself.
As her father's eyebrows sunk lower and lower one thing became absolutely clear: Harry had no excuse for doing shoddy homework anymore. While there was virtually nothing in the way of an introduction, conclusion, or even transition from when he outlined his current legal issues to explaining the longstanding connections between his family, the Weasleys, and Dumbledore but she supposed those could be disregarded since it was a letter and not an essay for school.
And while there were still gaps in what he alleges, and there was still a need for secondary independent sources to support the evidence he already had and to flesh out precisely what went on, and he was still holding things back, particularly with respect to his mysterious 'new friend' that'd somehow led him to Gringotts to uncover all of this, what he had was already pretty damning.
Her mind properly back in gear, Hermione assigned it to do what it had been trained to do: analyze the claim to determine its validity and see what information, if any, she had to refute it. Underlying Harry's allegation was a set of concrete legal assertions that must each be tested in turn and those were what she had to focus on.
One: Harry was born in the magical world to magical parents. According to every credible source and all the available evidence, this statement was undeniably true. Only sources so biased so as to not be credible would point to his mother's nonmagical origin and heritage in an attempt to invalidate this claim, and that was a case of Moving the Goalposts, a logical fallacy which had no place in determining the truth of an argument. The truth remained that Harry's parents were able to perform magic, and had lived in, fought for, and died in the magical world; anything else is immaterial.
Two: Harry never should have been taken to the nonmagical world to live with the Dursleys. This assertion was particularly troublesome since it encompassed so much of everything else and dealt with two areas she knew precious little about: magical law and customs. That this assertion came from Lichfield, a professional and practicing wizarding lawyer who's well versed in both areas, lent credibility to the argument, but Dumbledore, an equally prominent – if not more prominent – member of the legal community obviously had a differing opinion.
On the cultural side of things, Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts did specifically mention it being common practice to send orphans to live with their closest relative during the time in question and implied this had always been the case. Though it was by no means an authoritative legal text, she would feel better after reviewing that section for the specific wording involved to see if there was any implication nonmagical family members were barred from the process.
Knowing now how biased some legal issues were in favor of the "longstanding members of the wizarding community" she thought this might be an application of the lack of Standing nonmagical people had when it came to Inheritance. On their first visit to Gringotts her father had wanted to give her additional money for any mementos she might want to have, as if their trip to Diagon Alley were to some sort of an amusement park. Their teller had made the off-color comment that her parents had better keep the money on them or if she happened to die any money she had on her would simply be lost since they'd be unable to inherit anything she had.
The fact that Harry did go to the nonmagical world logically pointed to some sort of arbitration and official judgment being made. This also seemed to be corroborated by what both Lichfield and Dumbledore said about the issue so it was a pretty safe assumption to make that this probably was the case. Professor Dumbledore said, according to Harry, he'd been appointed by the Minister of Magic. Whether this appointment was the same guardianship, and carried the same legal weight, Harry and Lichfield allege was still unclear.
The appointment could simply mean that Professor Dumbledore, in his role as the head of the Wizengamot, was authorized to determine who should have parental rights to him. If this was the case, and the legal determination was his to make, then he very well could've found in the Dursleys' favor. The fact the Dursleys had never seemed to want him, at least in Harry's account of them, seemed to belie they would've wanted Dumbledore to act on their behalf at all though.
Hermione supposed it was possible the Dursleys had, at first, actually wanted Harry, even if only to access his parents' supposedly considerable wealth, and only later came to resent taking him in once the determination had been made and they'd learned they'd never be able to touch the Potter estate, and therefore treated him poorly because of it. This seemed a logical assumption to make, but only because Professor Dumbledore had used the specific legal term 'Magical Guardian' in his discussion with Harry.
During her visit to inform her family about the magical world in general, and about Hogwarts in particular, Professor McGonagall had explained some of the legal complexities involved with teaching students of nonmagical backgrounds. Though Hogwarts had a long history of acknowledging the authority and role that nonmagical parents had in the lives of their children, a tradition they continued through the issuance of permission slips before special trips or functions, the Ministry of Magic had no such tradition.
The fact remained that, by law, legal authority over an underage person's affairs in the magical world defaulted to the member of the family with the most knowledge of the magical world itself. Since both parent and child are presumed to have the same amount of magical knowledge when a nonmagical family is approached with the truth of the magical world, the appropriate legal authority still rested with the parents themselves. Professor McGonagall had warned this would change though once magical education had begun unless a specific legal fix was adopted: the use of a magical guardian.
By signing their parental authority in magical affairs over to someone with even greater magical knowledge, particularly one in an institution like Hogwarts with their history of deferring to the wishes of nonmagical parents, then as long as their wishes didn't conflict with the best interests of the child those same parents could retain as much authority over their underage children as possible.
So if Professor Dumbledore had granted the Dursleys legal rights to Harry, it's possible they could have signed the remaining magical authority back over to Dumbledore. If that's the case then she was hard pressed to see whether he'd done anything illegal. Hermione wished she could say he'd done nothing wrong but at the very least the headmaster was negligent in his responsibility to ensure that Harry's nonmagical guardians had been treating him properly, and she couldn't see how keeping him ignorant of his wizarding heritage or draining his inheritance was in Harry's best interest when continued contact and good financial stewardship was possible.
The downside of this was that, as far as she knew, magical guardians were only used in cases where the child in question was of nonmagical parents. She supposed it could equally apply here and while all this made logical sense to her she had to acknowledge she lacked the specific grounding to know if it made any legal sense. She simply didn't have enough information to make a determination one way or the other.
While she'd love for Harry to be free to enjoy his life in the manner he saw fit and to reclaim everything he was entitled to, she didn't want to think so poorly of Professor Dumbledore. Well-meaning but negligent, or perhaps unintentionally ignorant of any "mismanagement" on behalf of the Dursleys or this Gropegold, either due to overwork or spreading himself too thin, was one thing but intentional nefarious intent was something completely different.
"Enough processing," her father said, rousing her from her thoughts.
Hermione felt her stomach tighten as she saw her mother perusing the letter herself, though she noticed she set it aside when it switched from Dumbledore to Harry's family's past. After all, why should she care, the boy was only important to her daughter. She wished she'd had the presence of mind to wait until she'd been alone to read the letter as she had all the other ones so her mother wouldn't have been involved.
"What do you think of this Dumbledore?" her mother asked.
"Despite being a surprisingly silly old man who looks like Merlin from that Disney cartoon," Hermione started, hoping to somewhat irk her mother with the nonsensical reference before shifting to regurgitate facts at her. "He's supposed to be quite the accomplished academic and lawmaker, having risen to prominence after his defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945."
"His track record when it comes to children leaves much to be desired, if this is any indication," her mother continued. "Perhaps we should review the options?"
"No," Hermione said quickly, glad once again she'd kept the entire Sorcerer's Stone and Halloween incidents to herself. "This is nothing more than a private legal dispute between Harry and Professor Dumbledore. Aside from this massive donation to a scholarship program, Harry didn't indicate this had anything to do with the school. I've only been told about it as a friend so I don't see how any reviewing is necessary."
"And yet," her father added, "this is the person who's being trusted to oversee the health and well-being of – what, a thousand students or more? Perhaps we should consider a review."
Hermione stood abruptly, so scared she was close to shaking. They were not going to take her from Hogwarts!
"If I say no review is necessary then no review is necessary. Need I remind you that you sat at this very table and said – and I quote – 'Professor McGonagall, we don't believe that a magical guardian is necessary. We know Hermione better than anyone you can name and know her to be very level-headed and trust in her judgment.'? If you could say that when I was ten, I don't see what could've happened in two years to change your mind, especially when this issue has nothing to do with me, doesn't affect me, and the man in question has yet to say a dozen words to me. And since my magical education clearly falls into the realm of the magical world, it means the decision of where to go to school is mine to make."
Her tirade had her father's eyebrows bouncing back up to his oddly frizzy hair, as if he was amused it had happened. It washed by her mother like a river around a boulder though, leaving her completely unfazed as she waited for it to end.
"It's not your critical thinking or decision-making ability we're calling into question," her mother said. "Rather, it's your bias."
"Bias?" Hermione asked affronted. "How am I biased?"
"Everyone has their bias," her mother said. "The trick is finding it."
"And you have to admit," her father added, "you do have a rather large reason now to want to think of this as an isolated incident."
What followed wasn't a particularly enjoyable conversation, especially since it had her trying to mitigate any wrongdoing by Professor Dumbledore, which for some reason she found particularly irksome. While she could freely say that if Harry's allegations against Dumbledore were true then he certainly wasn't fit to be anywhere near children, she then had to go back and poke the very same holes in their arguments she'd privately done to Harry's assertions before, and remind her mother it's not their job to ascertain the truth of the issue – Harry had a lawyer for that.
As she was released to go back to her room, her mind still firmly set on 'leave me alone, you don't know what you're talking about,' she was all the more glad her parents had opted not to designate a magical guardian when Professor McGonagall suggested it. If they had, the school would've been forced to notify her parents about what had really happened last Halloween. And even if they had chosen not to withdraw her after the run-in with the troll, she doubted all the rule-breaking and death-defying ordeals surrounding the Sorcerer's Stone would've given her any chance to see the inside of Hogwarts again.
Despite everything she'd said to her parents, what was going on at Hogwarts troubled her greatly. Abandonment, embezzlement, systematic neglect and abuse, giant three-headed dogs and possessed teachers – these did not sound like things the great Albus Dumbledore, head muckety-muck of all he surveyed, should've been a part of. Harry's 'new friend' had warned things were going to be bad at Hogwarts but it seemed the warning had come several years too late.
Rather more harshly than she intended, Hermione pulled out and flipped through the books she had which made any mention of Albus Dumbledore – only to quickly realize they were the same four she'd gotten for background reading, the three which mentioned Harry plus Hogwarts, a History.
Everyone has their bias, her mother had said. The trick was to find it.
Hogwarts, a History had a rather glowing review of Dumbledore's time as Headmaster, and even held him up as the single shining point of light in the school's administration by Armando Dippet. Angry at her younger self for being so deluded as to buy all that without a second thought, even to the extent of wanting to go into Gryffindor simply because it claimed both him and Professor McGonagall as members, she shoved the once-beloved book aside to check the next.
Modern Magical History, The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century were all full of glowing praise as well. If someone didn't know any better you'd think Magical Britain was gearing up to either crown him as their King or kneel to him as their god. It was disgusting.
Slamming the last book on top of the others, she noticed it; the way the wording lined up made it impossible to ignore.
'Of course,' she thought, 'a book is only as biased as its author.'
On the spine of the books one word was repeated: Bagshot, Bagshot, Bagshot, BAGSHOT.
As quickly as that her mind was made up. Hermione grabbed the offensive texts, marched over to the trash bin by her door and stuffed them roughly inside before burying them under other trash. After a second's thought she stuffed A History of Magic down there too, the preface said the woman had been editing editions of it for decades.
She didn't know who this Bathilda Bagshot was, or how she knew Dumbledore, but her bias was obvious. Hermione knew Harry though, and even if she had her own reservations about things, she trusted him.
If Harry Potter was her bias, it was one Hermione Granger had every intention of keeping.
.o0O0o.
The Headmaster's Office was strangely quiet for the Headmaster's Office, the stillness of the moment only broken by the occasional puffs, hoots, or whirring of Albus's strange silver contraptions people had given him over the years. Any other time she would have wondered if he even knew what they all did – or if they did anything at all.
Minerva looked over at the others that shared the room with her. Severus looked pale, though with his sallow skin it was hard to tell; the man always looked sickly. Hagrid was already sitting on the floor, a hand to his mouth and head slightly shaking. He was staring off into space and had been that way almost from the beginning. She didn't know how she looked but thought she must be somewhere between the two.
"Abandonment?" she asked, completely at a loss as to what to think. Surely it couldn't be.
"That's what they claim," Albus said in the strange nebulous way of his, as if what they were discussing didn't matter at all. "It's nonsense, of course–," the headmaster said as she began to breathe again. "I've always intended to have a relationship with the boy, once the messiness of youth was behind him," Albus smiled.
Albus smiled? Albus smiled? How could he smile at an allegation of abandoning the most famous child the country has ever known – or any child for that matter? The very thought should have smiling beyond the realm of possibility for the foreseeable future. How he should look is concerned.
And if that weren't enough, goblins were involved and they were alleging bank fraud, which would've been enough to keep her awake nights. Someone in the Ministry had her personal account at Gringotts audited when she left – she'd always thought she must have stepped on the wrong toes during her time in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement – and the goblins had raked her over the coals for weeks, leaving her nothing to live on until they were satisfied nothing untoward was going on. Even then, some of them still looked at her strangely for years after that.
Albus knew all this, he'd been there and it was only by chance she was able to take up residence in the castle and teach so she'd be able to eat again. Something in what he said ticked in the back of her mind.
"You intended to have a relationship with him – once the mess was behind him?" she asked scandalized. "That's all life is, Albus, one mess after another. When precisely were you planning on talking to the boy, after you were both dead?"
"We actually had two very nice conversations just last year," Albus said jovially.
"And what of the ten years before that?" she asked. "How could you have left them with those people? I told you they were the worst sort of muggles imaginable."
"And yet," Albus said with his arms spread joyfully wide, "you agreed with me that there was where he should be."
"I thought I had no choice!" the deputy headmistress explained. "I went there to beg the person from the Ministry to reconsider, no matter what the law might say. I thought that was you. How was I supposed to know you were his guardian?"
"His magical gua–" Albus smiled.
"You can't have it both ways!" the deputy headmistress fumed. "You can't be his guardian when you help yourself to his account and then only his magical guardian when it comes to raising him."
The old fool looked at her like she had suddenly grown gills and spouted mermish at him.
"N-no," poor Hagrid mumbled, still shaking his head in response to Merlin alone knew what. "We didna."
"You should have told me you didn't want him," she pressed. "I would've taken him straight back to the Ministry and arrange to raise him myself."
"Which would've put you in the same position as I," Albus said. "With our obligations to the school–"
"–We have house-elves," she countered immediately. "They would've loved the extra work of looking after him during my classes, and I couldn't imagine better friends for him. He would've been in a good environment, with an entire generation of witches and wizards able to meet him, which would have completely demystified him, and he'd able to learn everything he'd need from an early age."
"And it would have put all of us at great risk," the headmaster said sorrowfully. "I'm sure we all recall what happened to poor Frank and Alice."
That chilled her to the bone like a dip in the lake in the middle of a Scottish February. How could he expect her to forget friends and former students who had been tortured into insanity? They weren't like the ones who attracted no notice in class and simply slipped by, like she was sure Severus had been. For the life of her she couldn't recall anything about him from when he was younger.
"Even at his height, You-Know-Who never dared to attack Hogwarts," she reminded him. "With him gone, the Death Eaters wouldn't have stood a chance. The only way they could've hoped to breach the castle would've been if you'd let them."
She looked at her old professor with a sense of loss. What had happened to the powerful man who'd so captivated the minds of young people and amazed them with the dazzling heights of spell work they could only hope to achieve through hard work and nearly constant practice? Where had the brave defender of freedom gone after Grindelwald's defeat? What had happened the principled person who had stood in the halls of the Wizengamot and so bravely declared: 'If you allow such discriminatory laws against our brothers and sisters to take effect, simply because they happen to love the same sex as themselves, not only are you condemning some of the most prominent names in magical history to the realm of second class citizenry but you'll be condemning me to live so as well.'?
He looked like such a poor and diminished man now; the goblins would tear him apart. And worse, he had left Hogwarts itself open to their ravenous ruin.
"I cannot begin to say how disappointed I am in you, Albus," she said as she started to help Hagrid to his feet; the poor man had suffered quite a shock. "Come along, Hagrid, let's see you home."
Minerva took one last look at Albus as she left. Where had her hero gone?
As the gentle giant made his way down the tightly curved staircase in front of her all the things she should've said came to her mind. James and Lily had put their trust in him, they had followed him, believed in him, and this was how he repaid their trust? By stealing from their orphan son and abandoning him? He might as well have taken him into the forest to be raised by centaurs.
Anger rising within her again, she turned back to give him another piece of her mind.
"I risked my life–," she heard Severus say from the other side of the door as she inched closer. "–To give her and her son a chance to survive, to make up for what I'd done. Did you even warn them what was going to happen or was this all a part of your plan?"
Minerva felt her stomach plummet. Surely Albus couldn't have changed so much as to engineer the Potters' deaths. It was unthinkable, but so was him abandoning and stealing from a child. She only heard a muffled response as she pressed her ear closer to the door, not even daring to pull her wand in case she was discovered.
Albus had been secreted away with Severus so often these last several years she'd once thought them pillow friends before the younger man's surly attitude and occasional lingering glances at some of the older female students put an end to the thought. Now though seemed a perfect time to catch a glimpse of what was really going on between them.
"He's her son!" she heard Severus say. "As much as I wish he weren't, he is, and you leave him with Petunia? Tell me again how indulgent a mother Potter has."
'Petunia?' Minerva wondered. Albus had never said what the family's name was. She'd found them all those years ago but now couldn't remember the surname for the life of her, so how could Severus know them so casually? 'It's almost as if–'
Suddenly it made sense.
James Potter she clearly recalled from her class, usually in the company of Sirius Black. They were always causing a disruption of some sort – sword fighting with haddocks, changing the color of their hair, growing antlers or tails – while his eventual wife, Lily Evans, was best known for rolling her eyes, telling them to be quiet, and hanging around the thin, pale little male friend of hers Minerva had always referred to as Lily's Shadow. Lily's sallow-skinned, hooked-nose, greasy-haired Slytherin shadow.
That's where Minerva knew him from. It was Severus Snape. How could she have missed it? Then again, a Slytherin being friends of any sort with one of her Gryffindors was just the latest in a long line of unthinkable things to be true tonight. "House differences" on the question of Blood Purity must have pulled them apart at some point, it usually did.
"You made me think he was some pampered little prince," Severus continued. "But he's the kind of prince no boy should have to be," he finished curiously.
"And I've always said that you saw only what you wished to see," Albus said in return, sounding as if he were speaking to a distraught child.
'Apparently we all did,' Minerva thought as she went down the spiral staircase. There was nothing more to say to Albus, nothing that'd make a difference anyway. The die had been cast. With goblins involved there'd be nothing they could do short of all-out war that'd stop them from tearing Hogwarts down brick-by-brick. She only wished Albus hadn't done anything else so colossally stupid.
It was only when she heard the stone gargoyle behind her move again Minerva realized she had spent the last several moments staring down at Hagrid's hut. Merlin alone knew what the man was feeling tonight. He treasured his friendship with Harry, to know he'd been some unwitting pawn in his abandonment – it'd be devastating.
She turned to see the shadow that was Severus Snape still standing at the opening to the Headmaster's Tower.
"What are we to do, Severus?" Minerva asked. "He's put Hogwarts itself at risk, and goblins do not stop."
"Some of us are more mired in it than others," he said cryptically. "And there is only one thing we can do: look after what is most important to us. That's the only chance we have."
.o0O0o.
Albus could have wept as he saw the Heads of two rival Houses part ways as the gargoyle closed again. What loyal and loving friends he had! Even after their disagreement, after taking the news the wrong way, they had so quickly realized their mistake and was even now moving to support him. Not that he needed the support, of course. He was Albus Dumbledore. He was always right, everyone would see that in time. And after all, what would they do without him? Surely the world would collapse around them.
.o0O0o.
AN: Thanks for reading.