"I'm afraid I have some other information to discuss with you," Dumbledore started, once Harry had a few moments to stew after his friends had left the room. "It regards how you must be more cognizant of danger with Sirius Black on the loose."
"Oh, I'm not worried about that," Harry heaved a sigh of relief. He was worried that he might be getting in trouble for using his new powers.
"You aren't?" the old man gave him a perplexed, yet piercing look, and then blinked in confusion.
MENTAL FORTRESS ACTIVATED
Harry responded with a similar confused look, wondering what the game system was trying to tell him about, but managed to carry on with what he'd meant to say, "I think Sirius is innocent."
"How have you come to such a conclusion?" the headmaster asked, still wrong-footed by his wandless legilimency probe being so easily thwarted. Certainly it was a bit harder than most when he'd passively skimmed Harry's thoughts in the past, but now it was like he was hitting a brick wall. He'd have to consult with Severus to discuss what might have changed. Could defeating a basilisk somehow afford such protection?
Harry had been working on his explanation for what he knew about Sirius, so said, "I've talked with Remus Lupin about it," hopefully implying that they'd exchanged letters, "and if anyone was the spy, it would make more sense for it to be Pettigrew."
"I was unaware that you two had become acquainted," Dumbledore boggled. How much was going on in the young man's life that he was unaware of? "While, indeed, of your father's close friends, Sirius Black seemed the least likely to turn traitor, there is nonetheless the evidence to consider…"
"What evidence, sir?" Harry pushed back. In his continuing talks with Sirius, he was growing concerned with the fact that his godfather had never had a trial, and seemed to have been locked away on what Hermione referred to as highly circumstantial evidence. "Did he get a trial? Did anyone check his wand with that spell that Auror Dawlish used on Lockhart's wand to see if he'd blown up the street? Did they even interview him?"
The white beard puckered as the old man pursed his lips, considering, "I… I'm not actually sure of any of that, but I'm guessing you've been doing some additional reading?" He furiously wracked his brain and couldn't actually remember there being a trial. At the time, he'd been exhausted from the war and less willing to question it, since the silver lining of Black's arrest was that he wouldn't be taking his godson and making them both a target.
"We have the papers in the library, sir," Harry nodded. Hermione had demanded to see them, until she was sure that Sirius wasn't playing them. "Why would you think he wanted to kill me? Didn't he take me from our house as a baby and give me and his motorcycle to Hagrid?" Harry had finally figured out why that transportation quest goal had already come checked, after asking Sirius about it.
The headmaster removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. How had he missed that? He tried to explain, "You see, your family was protected by a powerful charm. Voldemort wouldn't have been able to find you without the secret keeper willingly giving you up."
"Remus mentioned that," Harry nodded. He sort of had, when questioned about why he'd believed Sirius was the traitor for so long. "I think they switched. Told the world it was Sirius, and then chose someone else they thought wouldn't be as much of a target." Obviously, Sirius had explained as much, but Harry wasn't ready to reveal that, so he chanced a lie, "You know, I think I have some memories of Uncle Peter coming over when I was little, all by himself."
DECEPTION CHECK SUCCEEDED
While Albus Dumbledore was perhaps one of the most insightful people on the planet, he notably boosted that talent with near-constant wandless legilimency and also had no reason to expect Harry Potter to lie to him. And the story made sense. "But Sirius Black killed Peter Pettigrew," he grasped at the final straw he had left.
"Hit him with a blasting curse so powerful that it disintegrated him with nothing left but a single finger that looked like it had been cut off," Harry paraphrased from the articles. "Or… Peter cut his finger off and ran away."
The spectacles were just lying upside down on the desk now, as the headmaster had his face fully in his hands in shock, blocking out visual stimulus to call up his occlumency and wrack his brain for any further evidence. There was none. Regarded with even a child's simple reading of the news articles, Occam's Razor would, in fact, suggest that Sirius Black had been framed. And he'd allowed it to happen to one of his best students and most reliable agents of the last twenty years. Because he needed control of Harry Potter.
He still needed control of Harry Potter: more than ever with the shade of Tom Riddle possessing professors and the Malfoys unleashing plots to continue their dark lord's work as a student. But could he consign an innocent man to the dementors to get it? Perhaps there was some way to square that circle. After all, even if Sirius was innocent, after so many years in prison he was probably not fit to be a guardian for a child.
"I believe you may be correct, Harry," he finally admitted, removing his hands with an absent fluff of his beard and carefully placing his spectacles on his face. "I'm sorry that you saw me in such a state: it is not like me to come to such a flawed conclusion, and I needed a moment to think through the details. If Sirius is, indeed, innocent, then we do not need to worry about you being threatened by him. Though I suppose we should worry about where Peter Pettigrew has gone these years past."
Harry didn't feel like opening the can of worms that was explaining they were all illegal animagi and that Pettigrew had been living as the Weasley pet rat, until he recently ran away. Wormtail was quite likely out of reach even for the headmaster, anyway. Instead, Harry reminded him, "We still have to worry about the Heir of Slytherin, sir." After all, the proof of that was still staring at him out of his quest log. "Someone else that could speak to snakes had to call it up that first night I heard it."
"Why, dear boy, that was Tom Riddle himself," Dumbledore absently explained. "I think it likely that he was, through a bit of a circuitous route, descended from Salazar, and that's how he came by being a Parselmouth. As far as I know, there are no other living descendants."
"The Malfoys must have found one," Harry shrugged. "Or is the wraith from last year still somewhere in the castle?" He shivered involuntarily at that, flashing back to the night when he'd found the dead unicorn.
"Or some other method," the headmaster admitted. Yet what kind of magic could allow Lucius to duplicate Parseltongue? "I shall look into it. Please, inform me if you find any evidence as to who or what it could be."
Harry nodded. They weren't seriously considering Ginny anymore, so he didn't mention that. Otherwise, they'd been very focused on killing the snake, and hadn't planned to then have to deal with a hidden boss controlling it. "So should I…" he began to intimate that he'd like to go back to the dorms.
"Ah, yes, I think–" but before Dumbledore could dismiss him, his fireplace flared green and a three-dimensional representation of Dawlish's head appeared.
"Can I come back through?" the auror's voice asked. Harry was impressed by how the fire moved along with the man's face, while still looking like fire.
The headmaster waved his wand at the fireplace and said, "Yes, John, the connection is open again."
With a flare of green flames, John Dawlish appeared in the office. What Harry had taken to be some kind of weird decoration made of red feathers suddenly moved, poking a head from beneath what was a wing as the old bird peered in annoyance at his sleep being disrupted. The auror clocked that Harry was in the room and nodded, "Good. I have follow-up for Potter."
"I've already interviewed him, and will recount what he and his friends told me. You can schedule anything else for after he has gotten his sleep and with myself or Minerva present," Dumbledore corrected.
"Fine," Dawlish shrugged. "I caught Lockhart in the act, so we won't need him to testify. Follow-up is for clarity." A fully political policeman, he knew not to alienate the Chief Warlock or the Boy-Who-Lived until he absolutely had to. He was a little suspicious that this posting was the Minister playing some kind of game, with John Dawlish as one of the pieces, so it was when, not if.
"That reminds me!" the old man gave him a grandfatherly smile. "You have the first years for the two morning periods tomorrow, and I'll assist you with the NEWT classes either side of lunchtime until you get your feet under you."
"What?" the auror asked, completely nonplussed.
Making a face like it was obvious, Dumbledore explained, "Well you've just arrested my defense professor, John. And I know you're more than qualified, given the marks you had in school and what you must have learned as an auror."
"I'm not here to teach students, I'm here to protect the school from convicts and manage the dementors," Dawlish argued.
"That surely won't take much of your time, with Sirius Black not spotted anywhere near here? And what better way to protect the students than to teach them how to defend themselves?" the headmaster said. "And I'm sure the extra wages won't go amiss. I'll clear it with Cornelius in the morning."
Dawlish frowned. The extra pay would be nice, with as strapped as the auror department had been for raises recently, and being a teacher would embed him fully into the school the way that Fudge and Umbridge clearly wanted. But… "I'm not putting myself in front of that curse."
Waving it away like it was not a concern, Dumbledore explained, "If there even is such a thing, I could argue it has already struck for the year, with Gilderoy under arrest. And those that take the assignment on with an intention of it being temporary seem to have no difficulties. In fact, it may be very temporary, as Mr. Potter has just reminded me of another former student that I believe was working on his defense mastery. I'm just trying to handle the difficulty tonight's unfortunateness has caused me in a way that helps everyone."
"Fine. If the Minister clears it," the younger man relented, knowing that it was probably a foregone conclusion. "I'll walk Potter back to his dorm?"
"A capital idea. See you at the staff table for breakfast, John. Minerva will have your schedule," he waved the both of them out of the room.
They rode the staircase down in silence and began walking towards Gryffindor tower. "Be careful with that one," Dawlish cautioned Harry, as they walked past the tapestry of the dancing trolls. Notably, that stretch contained no portraits to report back to the Headmaster, just a long section of oddly-blank wall (and the large unmapped space beyond that still taunted Harry every time he walked past). "Not as daft as he makes out."
Still wondering about the Mental Fortress warning while he'd been talking to the headmaster, Harry asked, "What do you mean?" Meanwhile, he found it in the Special Abilities section of his character sheet, where it was described as, "Your willpower is so absolute, none can enter your mind without your permission." Well that was worrying.
He also glanced at Effortless Dodge, which explained, "Your great agility allows you to dodge attacks tirelessly." He had noticed that dodging spells when practicing with Fred and George drained his endurance as he got tired of all the jumping around, eventually letting him get hit. If he could do that without wearing down…
Unaware of why the kid was distracted, but cognizant of the secondary objective to have the Boy-Who-Lived on the Minister's side if it ever became a political fight with the Chief Warlock, he said, "Man makes plans. Not always sure who he's making them to benefit, is all. I've been wondering why he didn't do more investigating of Lockhart before putting him in charge of kids."
"He really was a terrible teacher," Harry agreed. "But everyone who reads his books thinks he's great, so we just figured he convinced the school."
"Maybe. Folded like a soggy fish-and-chips wrapper as soon as we got him into an interrogation room, though. Just in the five minutes I was there before coming back. We didn't even have to put any potions into him. Who knows what he's giving up to the team right now?" Dawlish realized somewhere deep down that he probably wasn't a paragon of justice and righteousness, but he was cop enough to be profoundly offended that a man that was probably only not a dark wizard for lack of talent and ambition had been given oversight of children. "Just seems like someone as insightful as Albus Dumbledore should have noticed that in the job interview."
Harry nodded, still rattled by the idea that Dumbledore had done something that activated his Mental Fortress. He wondered if maybe he was actually immune to obliviation now that he had it? And what other magic went into your mind? "I guess the last one was also a terrible teacher and was possessed by Lord Voldemort, and nobody figured that out either until I got him."
"True enough, the curse on the position means anyone sane won't take the job, so… what?" Dawlish finally parsed that statement the right way. "We'd heard that Quirrell was probably a wannabe Death Eater and died trying some particularly-dark magic in the basement going after whatever the old man had hidden down there… but possessed?"
"Yeah. Face on the back of his head. Why he wore the turban," Harry explained, honestly assuming that everyone basically knew about it. After all, Dumbledore had said that the whole school knew before he'd even woken up after the adventure with the stone. But how could the whole school know, unless Dumbledore had told them? It wasn't like Ron and Hermione were gossips, and even they didn't know what happened in the room with the Mirror.
"Awful," Dawlish hedged, suddenly profoundly worried. Someone was pushing Fudge's buttons to get him assigned to the school to keep an eye on Dumbledore. Basilisks were coming up out of sinks, professors were using illegal mind magic on students, and other professors were walking around possessed—if the kid was to be believed (and if anyone would know, the Boy-Who-Lived would, right?), by the ghost of You-Know-Who himself. He'd known this was political when he agreed to come. But this simple job spying on Albus Dumbledore's little fiefdom might wind up being more than political. It might wind up being apocalyptic.
And John Dawlish would do whatever it took to make sure his head did not get cursed off his shoulders. One unexpected dead basilisk and the kid talking like he'd driven off the wraith of the worst dark lord of the age as if it weren't a big deal made the man wonder if the best way to look out for himself was to make sure that the Boy-Who-Lived was on his side.
"Night kid. I'll probably see you in class," he allowed as he dropped Potter off at the portrait of the Fat Lady. He barely registered the sleepy nod and password as the boy went inside, as fast as his brain was going.
You-Know-Who's shade had possessed Quirinus Quirrell for a whole year, Dumbledore hadn't noticed or stopped it, and Harry Potter had probably banished him. Why didn't everyone know about this?