"The One with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches…Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have the power the Dark Lord knows not….And neither can live while the other survives…The One with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies…"

'How many times have I replayed this memory?' Albus Dumbledore thought to himself as he watched the ghostly visage of Sybil Trelawney hover over his pensieve in the privacy of his office. But the way she was magnified and how she towered over him would give people the impression she was passing judgement on him, or giving him instructions. In truth he had no idea how many times he had been watching and rewatching the prophecy. He yearned for the day when he could either safely destroy the memory once and for all, or just stare at it and just remember some of the hard choices he had made and been forced to carry through. Still, this prophecy had haunted him for years now, and so many lives had been affected as a result of the decisions that he'd made.

A heavy sigh left his mouth, and he waved his wand and banished the image of Sybil, leaving only the light from the pensieve the only light in the office, so he could just think to himself for a change, without any of the tournament judges, the staff helping him to organise the tournament and the headmasters of the foreign schools, and even Minerva, Snape, and the others bothering him.

When he had first met Sybil 15 years ago, Dumbledore had been more than prepared just to do away with Divination. He had never truly had time for it; not only did he not have any kind of knowledge about the subject even when he had taken it as an elective, he had quickly become so bored of it since he was unable to come up with any thing meaningful to predict, so he had gone to his Head of House, and asked to change his elective to something more intellectually stimulating. Divination was extremely rare, and in the past only a small fraction - 1 in every….40, or 50 children, or something along those lines at least, were able actually to predict anything; that was why seers like Cassandra Trelawney was exceptionally rare.

Even Gellert, who was good at predicting some of the future, hadn't learnt much as Durmstrang had never taught the subject as those countries focused on more meaningful topics, and realistically witches and wizards who could predict the future didn't really learn anything that would help them in a classroom setting anyway.

But in the years he had grown up, Dumbledore's opinion didn't change. It didn't help one bit there weren't any real seers, and most of the students who took the topic as an elective in their second years on only went for an easy grade. A really bad thing to go for in a school.

When Sybil applied for the role as Professor of Divination at Hogwarts, Dumbledore had decided to go just to humour the woman even if his decision was preordained anyway, but he had gone because he'd needed the distraction; the war against Voldemort was going really badly, and losses continued to mount. In his heart of hearts, Dumbledore knew a large portion of the blame was his own fault, but since he had wanted to preserve magical lines from dying out because of Voldemort's insane genocide against other families whose crime was to just say no to him, he had ignored the calls to fight fire with fire.

In the meantime, he had done his research on Sybil. What he'd found wasn't good. Even now, Dumbledore was amazed by the number of red flags that cropped up. Sybil was the one to insist on the Hog's Head as the venue for the interview because of the quiet when he made it clear he didn't want to conduct the interview at Hogwarts so she wouldn't mentally try to move in. Oh, the Hog's Head was quiet all right, but it was full of people who had their ears tuned to every other conversation.

The interview went very badly extremely quickly for Sybil. More red flags shot up. She didn't have any experience with children, and when he had asked her to make some easy and simple prophecies, she came out as blank, on top of that she had few other magical talents and needed the job, but she didn't have the skill or gift necessary to make it work.

It failed to get through to her Dumbledore was not going to hire her full stop. In the end he had become tired and very bored, so he had peered into her unprotected mind, discovering she often made little prophecies to give herself an air of mystique. While she was a descendant of Cassandra, and he discovered her undying enmity and jealousy towards her, Sybil was not a seer.

In the end, Dumbledore had become so bored of the meeting he decided enough was enough, and he made his apologies and was already making his plans to disband the Divination class from Hogwarts forever.

And then it happened.

Sybil made the prophecy about Voldemort. She entered a trance and made it. Reeling from the shock of the suddenness of the speaking, Dumbledore barely had time to stop Severus Snape, a confirmed Death Eater, from leaving to warn his master what had just been said. But when he'd had a minute, Dumbledore had begun forming a Plan.

Truthfully, Dumbledore had never really been certain if the prophecy was even genuine or a fake, and Sybil was simply conning him; if she was, she would learn the hard way how little he held such people in regard. But he saw something else. Opportunity. Albus Dumbledore was a manipulator, and if there was just one thing he was good at looking for, it was opportunities. So he planned to make the prophecy real. Everyone knew he was fighting Voldemort, so setting the stage was far from hard, and a little brainwashing and fertility potions had helped Alice and Lily conceive their first children.

It was wrong to depend on children to fight a fully grown adult wizard, but when he learnt Voldemort had heard of the prophecy and was looking for this child, he knew he had to act.

Voldemort was stupid.

But then again, while Tom Riddle was smart, he was, like all Gaunts, a little mad. Tom had never taken Divination during his Hogwarts days, although Dumbledore had no idea if it was because Tom felt it was beneath him or if he had gotten an honest opinion and realised he couldn't buy every single book on the subject there was and discover he didn't have the gift, so it was a shock to Dumbledore that Riddle would actually go after the children with that kind of warning. If he needed any scholarly proof of Horcruxes or anything similar having detrimental effects on the mind, he had it in spades.

There was no way Tom Riddle would have made such a stupid mistake.

But it worked in Dumbledore's favour. He was just relieved Lily and James survived and their twins as well. While Harry was seemingly left a squib, Dumbledore had advised his parents to take him to St. Mungo's for a second opinion as he wasn't a qualified healer, and he told them to protect the boys. Unfortunately, it blew up in his face when he discovered they had just taken the boy to Petunia, Lily's odious muggle sister, and then a few years later, they abandoned Holly, their daughter in the same way. They had become paranoid to the point of recklessness. They never bothered to keep in touch with their abandoned children.

Dumbledore only got the full story when he decided to answer a question that had driven him mad for a long time. While he and everyone else had announced Charlus as the Boy Who Lived, he had done it because of the pressure and since Charlus had magic, he'd seemed the logical choice. But he had always been curious about Harry. He had been horrified when the boy did not come to Hogwarts, and the Potters refused to speak to him and answer his questions, so he had forced the issue.

Dumbledore sighed as he thought, once more, about the things he had needed to do to get Harry Potter into the Triwizard Tournament. He had decided to use blood magic to make it clear to the Potters that they could not live in a bubble now, not with their sons's lives at stake. It had taken a while, but he discovered what happened to Harry and to Holly, whom he had not heard about until the last minute. Albus Dumbledore was a very old, very experienced wizard, but even he was disgusted and shaken by the discovery of what the Potters had done.

For Merlin's sake, he had told them to protect themselves and their children, not to abandon two of them!

Was it any wonder Harry and the youngest, Holly, had run off to the MACUSA?

But right now, his hopes to get the two children to forgive their family had gone up in smoke. Okay, he had been desperate, he admitted that, sending the House Elf off to the American Potter's home to kidnap Holly, being so desperate he had not decided to use someone else as a hostage instead. But it was not Dumbledore who'd put the spells on Harry to ignore his little sister. It was James.

And now it had resulted in a mess Dumbledore could have done without; while he had some supporters and admirers worldwide, there weren't many of them. He had needed to call in valuable favours and burn them up just to stop the pressure of the American Potter's attacks on him for Holly's life being endangered, and some of his more…overzealous followers had called Harry dark for what he'd done in the lake. Dumbledore had done his best to stop it because he needed Harry desperately to answer some very important questions; what really happened that night? Had he made a massive mistake in announcing Charlus as the Boy Who Lived instead of keeping it vague?

But what he hated the most about the mess taking place even now was how all of the attacks against Harry, with the accusations of him being dark, were only alienating any more potential allies. Voldemort was out there, and when he came back, Dumbledore was going to need all the help he could get. Worse still, it was likely only a matter of time before it was discovered what he had done to get the blood of Harry Potter in the first place.

Yes.

That's right, it was Albus Dumbledore who had managed to collect the blood of Harry Potter. It had taken him a long time to track down, using scrying techniques and what was in the records here, at the school. He couldn't believe Lily and James would actually abandon their children with Petunia's odious muggle sister. He remembered Petunia, who was so…pathetic she didn't realise she had skills and talents Lily could only dream of.

Getting the blood was even easier. But he had been horrified by the implied child abuse. Dumbledore had always believed family should stick with family, regardless. But he knew real life was hardly that fair.

When he had looked into the crippled Vernon Dursley's sorry excuse for a brain and what was in Petunia's petty little mind, Dumbledore couldn't even muster the smallest amount of pity for them. Dumbledore still firmly believed muggles were beneath wizards, and if any muggle referred to him or his wand as their property, he would have had far less restraint than Harry had shown. Dumbledore felt they were lucky Harry had been worried about the potential consequences, so he'd ignored the use of dark magic even if it worried him two young children were able to use it.

Okay, he had to admit he had made a mistake in putting spells on the house to prevent investigators from discovering a source of Harry's blood had been found effortlessly, but he had been desperate. In time, he would get his answers and that was all that was keeping him going right now.