Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Let's Try That Again, Shall We?
Interlude, Albus Dumbledore
3 reviewsA bit of Dumbledore's thinking. Short. Author's notes at the end.
5Original
The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.
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Chapter 8: Interlude, Albus Dumbledore
Thursday, July 26, 1990.
Albus Dumbledore absentmindedly drummed his fingers on his desk, pondering the letter he had received the day before. It was an odd time for a supporter of Voldemort's to decide to defect, and they hadn't given any satisfying clues as to their motivations. The only event that could have precipitated it was that terrible mess with Harry, and that worried him. If someone were plotting against Harry, he would hope the note writer would have said so.
The second half of the letter—a list of suspected Death Eaters—had contained no surprises, and could have come from any number of people unconnected to Voldemort's inner circle. The details about the horcruxes, however, could only have come from an insider—upon learning that Regulus had stolen the locket, it was easy enough for Dumbledore to get into the Black place and look for it. The ancient-looking house elf had been only too happy to get rid of it, and it was now sitting locked in a desk drawer. For all the note-writer's warnings about curses, it seemed innocuous enough so far—he was actually a little insulted by the implication he would be reckless with dark artifacts. Not that he could get the blasted thing to open or anything. Ah, well.
Seven horcuxes was a simply mind-blowing number. No wonder Voldemort had become so inhuman! He mentally went over the rest of the list again: Lucius had the diary and would probably try to pass it off to a student eventually. Well, keeping an eye open for any student with a diary was easy enough; he was good at doing things like that covertly. The note writer seemed confident Albus could somehow get the cup out of the Lestranges vault, but he honestly had no idea how to go about that yet. The writer also seemed confident about their ability to retrieve the diadem and again intimated that it was for his own good to not do it personally—foolishness. The snake would be a pain to find and destroy, but knowing about it was still an enormous secret weapon for him. Assuming it was all true. As to the seventh, the writer had no idea, but Albus had an awful suspicion about that one which he hoped would turn out to be unfounded. All in all, though, just getting the locket was excellent progress, given that only the day before he had been unaware of the horcruxes.
It did, however, confirm his suspicion that Voldemort was still around. Possibly a weakened spirit, but still dangerous, and quite capable of regaining a body via any number of methods. It made him all the more worried about Harry.
He had been stunned to watch Augusta Longbottom gather political support in her efforts to be named Harry's guardian. In the face of the incontrovertable evidence of Harry's abuse at the hands of the Dursleys, nothing Albus could say about blood wards seemed to influence anyone. He felt awful for not checking up on Harry, of course, but he could easily enough have compelled the Dursleys to behave themselves. Things had gotten out of hand too quickly for him to fix anything himself, and now no one seemed very happy with him.
Ultimately, he had to admit that the Longbottoms were a logical choice once the Dursleys were out of the picture. Yes, maybe having Harry make friends with Neville now would be fitting.
And on the bright side, a few things had gone right -- no one had leaked the photos of the bruises to the Prophet, although he was sure Augusta would do that in a heartbeat before letting Harry go back to his family. She had also allowed him to inspect and augment the wards around Longbottom Manor. That is, after several howlers and an hour of screaming at him in his office, which he endured for Harry's sake.
Most reassuring, though, was her willingness to consult Albus about invitees to Harry and Neville's joint birthday party on the upcoming Saturday. He had made several suggestions, and promised to round up some Order members to discreetly provide security. Albus was impressed with Augusta's ability to hold that discussion with him while making clear that he was not himself invited.
He watched the ward monitors on 4 Privet continue to spin their warnings. It would only be a few more weeks before the wards fell completely -- apparently Harry had quickly stopped thinking of it as "home". He was still not sure how Augusta had gotten ahold of Harry—whenever he asked anyone about that they just yelled at him about wanting to cover things up. Well, the whole world now knew Harry Potter was living at Longbottom Manor, and he would have to work from there.
He supposed he should go put up new wards for the Dursleys, to keep the whole wizarding world from coming down on them once their location was known. Yes, better do that tonight—no need to tell the Dursleys anything about it. They had surprised him when he had come around to explain the situation, actually seeming eager to have Harry live elsewhere. Apparently Harry had disappeared while they were on a camping trip and they had not gone looking for him. "The little freak always seemed to find his way back before whenever we thought we'd lost him." Dumbledore hadn't bothered getting angry at them, or even looking into their memories to verify anything—he just wished them good day and left.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Author's note:
I hope to minimize my use of author's notes and other extraneous material, but this is the simplest chapter for a while, so hopefully this won't be too aesthetically disruptive.
I guess I should be using the "alternate universe" tag from here on out. This is my first attempt at fanfiction, and I have some really hard-to-categorize stuff coming up, so I'd appreciate a heads-up if anyone thinks my warnings or content ratings are off. And genre labels? Those are thoroughly confusing, and I'm almost picking things randomly.
I hadn't planned for Tonks to rescue Harry at the outset like this; she just went ahead and did it anyway. I think what authors mean when they say their characters surprise them is that in order to write them—that is, when you are actually putting words down about them—you have to get into their heads a quite a bit, and you take aspects of their personality into account that you might not have when you were outlining your plot.
In any case, Tonks is just too fundamentally good to leave Harry with the Dursleys once she has a complete picture of things, and me-the-author in my strategic planning just wasn't as compassionate as she was. As a result of this I am keeping a fairly large buffer of material that is already written—at the moment I think I have more written than posted—so that I can adjust things if anything else goes off the rails. And I'm also doing things in chronological order, too, with the exception of character studies of other main characters which are set in the original timeline (these are almost entirely written, although we won't see some of them for a very long time).
Finally, a bit of a caution when interpreting the plot: This is not Methods of Rationality, where "no one is left holding the idiot ball". Characters can do stupid or irrational things, just like in real life, and the Harry Potter universe already has plenty of people "holding the crazy ball". Because so much of the story I'm telling here involves scheming and manipulation rather than action sequences, I have to write a lot of dialogue and a lot of text representing the thoughts of characters. They are not necessarily reliable narrators. Mostly, though, people here are not stupid, nor do I intend to engage in what other fanfic authors call "bashing". So my Dumbledore is supposed to be nuanced -- competent and good and manipulative and crazy all at the same time.
Also, I don't like separating sections with single asterisks, so if anybody knows a better way that works in Ficwad, please tell me (automatic filters have eaten everything I've tried; this is one of the reasons I am using unusually short chapters). I don't know anyone here and don't have any beta readers. Should I just dig around for some Unicode dingbats and be done with it? On another punctuation note, do the em-dashes work in this context, or should I ditch the Chicago Manual of Style here and pretend I'm still in an emacs buffer? Or something else?
UPDATE: My solution, for now, is these things: ❖ ❖
❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖
Chapter 8: Interlude, Albus Dumbledore
Thursday, July 26, 1990.
Albus Dumbledore absentmindedly drummed his fingers on his desk, pondering the letter he had received the day before. It was an odd time for a supporter of Voldemort's to decide to defect, and they hadn't given any satisfying clues as to their motivations. The only event that could have precipitated it was that terrible mess with Harry, and that worried him. If someone were plotting against Harry, he would hope the note writer would have said so.
The second half of the letter—a list of suspected Death Eaters—had contained no surprises, and could have come from any number of people unconnected to Voldemort's inner circle. The details about the horcruxes, however, could only have come from an insider—upon learning that Regulus had stolen the locket, it was easy enough for Dumbledore to get into the Black place and look for it. The ancient-looking house elf had been only too happy to get rid of it, and it was now sitting locked in a desk drawer. For all the note-writer's warnings about curses, it seemed innocuous enough so far—he was actually a little insulted by the implication he would be reckless with dark artifacts. Not that he could get the blasted thing to open or anything. Ah, well.
Seven horcuxes was a simply mind-blowing number. No wonder Voldemort had become so inhuman! He mentally went over the rest of the list again: Lucius had the diary and would probably try to pass it off to a student eventually. Well, keeping an eye open for any student with a diary was easy enough; he was good at doing things like that covertly. The note writer seemed confident Albus could somehow get the cup out of the Lestranges vault, but he honestly had no idea how to go about that yet. The writer also seemed confident about their ability to retrieve the diadem and again intimated that it was for his own good to not do it personally—foolishness. The snake would be a pain to find and destroy, but knowing about it was still an enormous secret weapon for him. Assuming it was all true. As to the seventh, the writer had no idea, but Albus had an awful suspicion about that one which he hoped would turn out to be unfounded. All in all, though, just getting the locket was excellent progress, given that only the day before he had been unaware of the horcruxes.
It did, however, confirm his suspicion that Voldemort was still around. Possibly a weakened spirit, but still dangerous, and quite capable of regaining a body via any number of methods. It made him all the more worried about Harry.
He had been stunned to watch Augusta Longbottom gather political support in her efforts to be named Harry's guardian. In the face of the incontrovertable evidence of Harry's abuse at the hands of the Dursleys, nothing Albus could say about blood wards seemed to influence anyone. He felt awful for not checking up on Harry, of course, but he could easily enough have compelled the Dursleys to behave themselves. Things had gotten out of hand too quickly for him to fix anything himself, and now no one seemed very happy with him.
Ultimately, he had to admit that the Longbottoms were a logical choice once the Dursleys were out of the picture. Yes, maybe having Harry make friends with Neville now would be fitting.
And on the bright side, a few things had gone right -- no one had leaked the photos of the bruises to the Prophet, although he was sure Augusta would do that in a heartbeat before letting Harry go back to his family. She had also allowed him to inspect and augment the wards around Longbottom Manor. That is, after several howlers and an hour of screaming at him in his office, which he endured for Harry's sake.
Most reassuring, though, was her willingness to consult Albus about invitees to Harry and Neville's joint birthday party on the upcoming Saturday. He had made several suggestions, and promised to round up some Order members to discreetly provide security. Albus was impressed with Augusta's ability to hold that discussion with him while making clear that he was not himself invited.
He watched the ward monitors on 4 Privet continue to spin their warnings. It would only be a few more weeks before the wards fell completely -- apparently Harry had quickly stopped thinking of it as "home". He was still not sure how Augusta had gotten ahold of Harry—whenever he asked anyone about that they just yelled at him about wanting to cover things up. Well, the whole world now knew Harry Potter was living at Longbottom Manor, and he would have to work from there.
He supposed he should go put up new wards for the Dursleys, to keep the whole wizarding world from coming down on them once their location was known. Yes, better do that tonight—no need to tell the Dursleys anything about it. They had surprised him when he had come around to explain the situation, actually seeming eager to have Harry live elsewhere. Apparently Harry had disappeared while they were on a camping trip and they had not gone looking for him. "The little freak always seemed to find his way back before whenever we thought we'd lost him." Dumbledore hadn't bothered getting angry at them, or even looking into their memories to verify anything—he just wished them good day and left.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Author's note:
I hope to minimize my use of author's notes and other extraneous material, but this is the simplest chapter for a while, so hopefully this won't be too aesthetically disruptive.
I guess I should be using the "alternate universe" tag from here on out. This is my first attempt at fanfiction, and I have some really hard-to-categorize stuff coming up, so I'd appreciate a heads-up if anyone thinks my warnings or content ratings are off. And genre labels? Those are thoroughly confusing, and I'm almost picking things randomly.
I hadn't planned for Tonks to rescue Harry at the outset like this; she just went ahead and did it anyway. I think what authors mean when they say their characters surprise them is that in order to write them—that is, when you are actually putting words down about them—you have to get into their heads a quite a bit, and you take aspects of their personality into account that you might not have when you were outlining your plot.
In any case, Tonks is just too fundamentally good to leave Harry with the Dursleys once she has a complete picture of things, and me-the-author in my strategic planning just wasn't as compassionate as she was. As a result of this I am keeping a fairly large buffer of material that is already written—at the moment I think I have more written than posted—so that I can adjust things if anything else goes off the rails. And I'm also doing things in chronological order, too, with the exception of character studies of other main characters which are set in the original timeline (these are almost entirely written, although we won't see some of them for a very long time).
Finally, a bit of a caution when interpreting the plot: This is not Methods of Rationality, where "no one is left holding the idiot ball". Characters can do stupid or irrational things, just like in real life, and the Harry Potter universe already has plenty of people "holding the crazy ball". Because so much of the story I'm telling here involves scheming and manipulation rather than action sequences, I have to write a lot of dialogue and a lot of text representing the thoughts of characters. They are not necessarily reliable narrators. Mostly, though, people here are not stupid, nor do I intend to engage in what other fanfic authors call "bashing". So my Dumbledore is supposed to be nuanced -- competent and good and manipulative and crazy all at the same time.
Also, I don't like separating sections with single asterisks, so if anybody knows a better way that works in Ficwad, please tell me (automatic filters have eaten everything I've tried; this is one of the reasons I am using unusually short chapters). I don't know anyone here and don't have any beta readers. Should I just dig around for some Unicode dingbats and be done with it? On another punctuation note, do the em-dashes work in this context, or should I ditch the Chicago Manual of Style here and pretend I'm still in an emacs buffer? Or something else?
UPDATE: My solution, for now, is these things: ❖ ❖
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