FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.


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Chapter 48: A Day in the Life, Albus Dumbledore, Part II


Snotra the Cardiff Dragonhound had, in the several hours Penvro had let her snuffle around the castle, led him to Snape's potions cabinets, Quirrel's iguana, Kettleburn's personal quarters (the Care of Magical Creatures professor had not allowed him in; that was as far as they had gotten), and the entrance to the kitchens (well, he had to admit they smelled much better than the basilisk might have). She had also barked at several dozen roosters, which Penvro had been forced to keep away from her with hover charms. He had dutifully reported all this to Dumbledore.

"Professor," he said, standing uncomfortably before the headmaster's desk, "I really ought to inspect Professor Kettleburn's quarters. My boss won't like it if I don't."

"Hm." Albus stalled for time, thinking. The last time he had been in Kettleburn's quarters had been several decades ago, when Silvanus' patronus (it was corporeal, but Albus had never managed to identify the thing) had arrived in his office, asking Albus for help "with a little problem I'm having in my quarters, not a big deal, but if you could urk." The large, magic-resistant Great Basin reticulated rock python (or so Kettleburn had called it, at any rate) had fortunately not been venomous, but it had managed to break several ribs and render Kettleburn unconscious by the time Albus found him.

Albus had apparated (headmaster's privilege, within the school) both of them straight to the hospital wing, without having taken note of too much else during the search for the accident-prone wizard. He was pretty sure that Silvanus lacked permits for a great many of the occupants of the cages, tanks, and containment charms that filled his suite. Even the various uncaged animals that had greeted him at the door had included some things Albus had never seen before. No doubt Kettleburn spoke to them all in the same characteristic babytalk he lavished on all other monsters. In any case, so long as injuries were kept to a minimum and students got good marks on their tests, Albus was content to look the other way when Ministry regulations weren't precisely followed to the letter. Or, more likely, were egregiously disregarded.

If Penvro pushed the issue, Albus would have to obliviate him. This was not the preferred outcome, of course, but he would do it if necessary.

"Would you settle for Professor Kettleburn swearing an oath that he was not knowingly behind the attacks in any way?"

"Oh. Sure. I think I'd be off the hook, then. Thanks, Professor!"

Albus smiled at him. It was nice to find simple resolutions to things, and just as nice to be reminded that most Ministry employees were former students of his who, more or less, seemed to regard him fondly, and were not in fact trying to make his life difficult.

"Let's see, then," he said, pulling out a notebook and pretending to check a schedule, then pulling out a pocketwatch. "It is now . . . one o'clock. I think Silvanus is in class until 2:45, and then we have a short window to catch him before the next one." Albus could keep all that stuff in his head just fine, but often he found it less jarring for people if he seemed a little more like their idea of a forgetful old man.

In any case, the short delay gained by looking things up gave him a chance to figure out what to do with Penvro in the meantime. He didn't really like having people use his floo, since he didn't want the Ministry getting used to it being the main entrance to Hogwarts and expecting it to be available whenever they pleased. Normally, then, he would just expect a visitor to know how to fend for themselves, but under the circumstances he didn't want anyone wandering aimlessly around the school or waiting by himself somewhere. Irma would have a fit at the idea of a dog in the library, and Albus knew better than to stir her up. The floo it was; fortunately Snotra seemed to know what to do, and he was free for another hour and a half.

Well, sort of free, in that he was free to deal with all the paperwork that for various reasons the Headmaster was required to take care of personally. Hogwarts had a very nice internal mail system for staff to move documents around—the right spell from an authorized wand would banish a piece of paper into whatever the recipient chose to use for an inbox. In Albus' case it was a drawer. His personal mail got rerouted there, too, so it was usually quite full, and would have been unmanageable without extension and sorting charms.

He was ordinarily faced with quite a lot of paperwork each day, but he had put it off two days in a row now in order to deal with the current crisis. Albus Dumbledore believed in—and in fact had a reputation for believing in—the value of preserving normality in the face of crisis. In this case "normality" was pretty tedious, but it would only get more so if he put it off.

He sighed and started in.

Two minor spending requests for items arguably not covered by faculty members' budgets (signed without reading—why can't people learn to fudge the rules and leave him alone?). Nine written disciplinary reports from heads of houses (also signed without really reading, despite the fact that the whole point of getting his signature was to make sure he read them). The daily automated transcript of house points awarded and taken away (same). Fourteen memos various people were required to send him (filed away unread, which was probably all that was required of him).

Three letters from as many different Ministry offices, addressed to the school. Minerva had been able to spare him from dealing with nineteen of the original twenty-two, but this meant he definitely needed to read whatever she sent on to him.

Twenty-six notices from the Wizengamot, which, not being Minerva's responsibility in any way, he had to sift through personally, preferably several times a day, just in case there was something in there he really needed to deal with. People tried to pull fast ones on him all the time, and unfortunately some of them were bound to succeed. It was annoying.

There were thirty-five letters sent to him in his capacity as Supreme Mugwump. Fortunately he had gotten good at guessing which were important, and had a lot more leeway for mistakes than he had with the Wizengamot.

All that took about an hour, and today was so far a remarkably good day. Usually not much happened in January.

Next up was a pile of applications for the custodian job. Albus agreed with the rule that the Headmaster made all hiring decisions personally. He just had no desire to replace Argus right now.

Argus Filch, contrary to popular belief, had been hired for his people skills. He "passed" as being on the side of pureblood traditionalists, giving Hogwarts sorely-needed breathing room whenever scrutiny came. He could handle Peeves and the ghosts without going insane, usually managing to even get their help when he needed it. As custodian, he had an excuse to be in odd places at odd hours, and Argus was extremely observant—infuriatingly so, to the students. He gave them just the right amount of incentive to avoid breaking rules, such that those who he did catch breaking them usually had substantial, if rarely praiseworthy, motivations for doing so. Better still, no one paid very close attention to him because he was a squib, working class, and had no fancy education. Since no one took him too seriously as a real person, even when they were terrified of him, Filch could undertake fairly sophisticated tasks for Dumbledore without anyone realizing what he was up to.

Most importantly, though, Filch enjoyed being cantankerous and intimidating, and he did a spectacular job of drawing students' ire over the enforcement of rules. This left Albus free to play a stern but empathetic grandfatherly role. Not all of the other staff grasped this, but those who did freely exploited it themselves when opportunities arose.

Albus did not want strange people joining the school during a crisis. He did not want to have to watch over them in case they were secretly Death Eaters, he did not want to train them, he did not want to have to ask them to do everything Filch had done without being asked, he didn't want new people scrutinizing disciplinary records or spying for the Prophet or genuinely mistreating students or any one of countless other things he was worried about. Also, he didn't want to give the students anyone else to compare Filch to.

Personally, then, Albus was happy to leave things to the elves until everyone could be un-paralyzed in the spring, but, unfortunately, sooner or later somebody would notice what the elves were up to and complain. 'Merlin knows why,' he thought, but a lot of people had a lot of issues about house elves, and he ignored that at his peril. So he had to at least look like he was evaluating candidates, which was worse than actually doing so, since he had to not only do background checks and conduct interviews, but also had to come up with plausible-sounding reasons to reject them all, even if they really were qualified.

He picked two, nearly at random, and wrote Minerva a note telling her to schedule interviews with them.

Penvro called and flooed over. They found Kettleburn, who had been through this routine many times before and swore a simple oath without acting like anything was out of the ordinary. Penvro thanked them both, and Albus let him floo back to his office.

It was now 3:15, and Albus had not touched any of his personal mail. He had a word for this kind of afternoon: "boring". It was miserable, it was a waste of his abilities, it was stupid and mind-numbing and usually utterly pointless, and it made him genuinely wish for students to get into enough trouble to get sent to his office and interrupt him.

The alternative, though, was to have someone else in his positions of power, and that was simply not an option. Even more frustratingly, anyone he considered qualified and trustworthy enough to be his personal secretary invariably had far better things to do than pre-sort his mail. Albus was constantly being criticised for not having a secretary. He had, in fact, made quite a few offers over the years, and aside from some volunteers during the height of the last war, no one wanted the job.

So on top of his official duties, he had to deal with all of his personal mail on his own. It contained a lot of junk. This, fortunately, could be automatically sorted out. He had the elves burn it periodically. Mail from specific people could be sorted, too. He had even, to his great relief, managed to redirect genuinely anonymous letters (damn them) into the same, high-priority file reserved for people like Nicolas Flamel.

Quite a lot of the rest were letters from people he didn't know, asking for help he was either unable or unwilling to give them. Sometimes it made sense for him to help. Sometimes he picked someone at random and paid them a visit, just for the sake of appearances. Word got around, garnering him political support and even more mail. He had become adept at identifying which of these to open first, and which to put off for another day. He usually put a lot off, and then had to spend an occasional Saturday catching up.

By 4 PM, he found himself staring absentmindedly around the room, unable, or at least unwilling, to concentrate on letters any longer. Today had involved unusually few interruptions—he supposed that herding the students around in groups probably resulted in fewer opportunities for trouble.

He hovered the pieces of his latest project—trashed by the rooster—back onto his desk. Originally it had been a sort of stylized map of Hogwarts, on which little lights would appear should various linked snake-detection charms (yet to be cast) go off. He had made this sort of thing before, trying to represent multiple bits of information in terms of their real-life spatial relationships. Real maps of Hogwarts were usually impractical, as were scale models. Somewhere, though, he had a little wooden plaque showing the location of the Hogwarts Express in the style of a London Underground map, which he had been very pleased with himself for thinking of. It had inspired several other little gadgets which had delighted muggleborn students and baffled almost everyone else.

He had not heard anything from the house elves yet, which by now meant they had searched insanely thoroughly and fruitlessly for any signs of the basilisk, but were too embarrassed to say anything to him about it. He would have to give up on detecting it directly, and come up with something else. Maybe he could detect paralysis victims themselves, instead, so that he could at least find any new ones promptly? That seemed worth a try.

It would look good if he visited the hospital wing, too, and trying to find a detection charm would require some nice, public episodes of standing around casting spells no one recognized, muttering to himself, and generally being inscrutable. That sort of plan was usually a good one, in his experience.


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It was a good plan, too, except for the part where Madam Pomfrey came with him when he left for dinner.

"Albus, do you really think Mr. Malfoy is behind Sybill's . . . new-found interests?"

"I couldn't say," he answered, trying not to look too frustrated. "Before our meeting in the greenhouse, I would never have expected it of her. Lucius can be very charming when he wants to, though. It is not unthinkable. Be assured I will speak to her about it."

"When? You really ought to know what else she has planned. Severus might not care whether he poisons his students, but at least he is competent enough to know he is doing it and avoid going too far!"

Albus wondered if, by that, she meant that Snape was adequately intimidated by her, and that presumably Sybill was somehow beyond her influence. He chose not to ask.

"I will pay her a visit within the next week. I am, of course, as curious as you are, if not more so!"

"Well, as long as you can find the time, then, I suppose that's okay." This was said rather bitterly and followed by awkward silence the rest of the way. Albus knew Poppy didn't like how much time Albus spent on concerns external to the school, but she would never outright suggest he resign his other positions. He was confident that she understood the need to keep their opponents at bay, and that the current arrangement was for the best.


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He made some announcements at dinner—a few platitudes about staying calm in the face of uncertainty and the value of getting along, followed by a reminder of the current safety rules. He had been planning on pointing out that enchantments on domestic, non-magical animals were regulated by the Ministry, but decided against it at the last moment. Not only would it be "nose beans", as Arthur would put it, but it brought up embarrassing memories of his brother's trial.

The relevant Ministry regulations could be summarized as "don't do things that risk violating the Statute of Secrecy." Animals, which could move about on their own power and volition, were considered especially perilous subjects for enchantment, and there was a legal presumption that they were good at escaping from ordinary confines. Thus, while Hogwarts might be considered adequately secure, his brother's rickety goat pens in Hogsmeade most definitely were not. Aberforth's indignant insistence that his were "good goats, who wouldn't ever try to escape" was deemed legally irrelevant.

No, that was all best forgotten. He did, however, decide to ask Filius to put up some wards keeping chickens from getting in or out of the castle without permission; this kind of spell was trivial, even if some people never bothered to use it. It would have been nice, of course, to generalize whatever wards Filius used, as an additional layer of protection, but too many strange things came in and out of Hogwarts as part of its day-to-day operations—owls, cats, toads, anything the professors were working with, and Merlin knows what-all that made up the ecosystem of the castle grounds and roosted somewhere inaccessible. If they were too enthusiastic with the wards, dealing with the unintended consequences might take up weeks of his time.


A few minutes after he had finished his announcements and food had appeared, he made some casual remarks to Erasmus that led to everyone giving advice to everyone else concerning what they ought to be teaching in their classes to deal with the basilisk. Albus didn't pay very close attention once he had gotten them all adequately worked up, but it had seemed like an effective brainstorming session. He hoped his staff would have the good sense to get over their irritation at each other enough to implement what their colleagues had come up with. It was not, in his experience, a very well-founded hope, but stirring up the conversation had been the right thing to do nevertheless.


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Albus got back to his office around 7. It seemed very quiet in here. The only sounds were a few ticking devices and the wind outside the window. Fawkes was gone, which was unremarkable. There was no need to let a phoenix out to hunt when it could just teleport. He doubted Fawkes ever joined the owls in catching mice, though—it was more likely he went straight to the kitchens and got fussed over by the elves. At least, that what Albus would probably do, in his familiar's position.

He considered the portraits of former headmasters. There were over fifty of them in here, and they took up most of the wall space, but that didn't mean their personalities were a constant presence. Most were absent, off in some other part of the castle or in the frames of other portraits of themselves. Others were asleep or preoccupied with some activity.

For the most part, all of the headmasters of Hogwarts were dead brilliant, pun intended, even as portraits, so if they could ever be questioned calmly, and ideally alone, they were an invaluable resource. Albus couldn't usually do that from his office, though. If he started a conversation with one, the others would soon notice, and in minutes they would all be trickling back in. This invariably led to a cacophonous, pointless argument over some trivial event from before his time, forcing him to either silence the lot or leave the room.

It was a remarkable collection, really. Some of the most inflated egos in the history of British wizardry were concentrated here in one gallery, which unfortunately was also the office of their current successor. At least he could escape easily if he had to, just by going upstairs. Most wizards avoided hanging portraits in their own bedrooms; Albus was no exception.

He sat down and flipped through the latest Ministry notices. Nothing required his involvement.

A bell went 'ding!'.

This was the monitoring charm on the wards on Gryffindor tower. Its activation meant that either someone was trying to get in from the outside, or, more likely, that a student was trying to get out (probably through a window, since otherwise the Fat Lady would be able to report them). It dinged again, and then commenced a rapid series of repetitions. This stopped for a moment, and then was followed by a 'shave and a haircut, two bits' pattern, making it clear that some wise-ass was sending pulses of energy into the wards with the sole purpose of bugging him. Well, not necessarily just to bug him, but certainly to see if he was paying attention. This kind of thing was often the equivalent of throwing a hamburger over the fence to see if there was a guard dog on the other side.

If he reacted now, he'd reveal the existence of his monitoring charms, and the students would know they had to be more careful. Not that he thought they were capable of the kind of spell-work necessary to get past both the wards and monitors, but so long as they had nothing better to do than try, they could (and probably would) keep at it indefinitely. He waited to see if anything else would happen—two minutes passed, and he went back to his mail. Five minutes; still nothing.

This was ridiculous—he could either go there now and give everyone a lecture about the importance of good wards, and hope that had some effect, or silence the damn monitor chime so that he wasn't waiting anxiously for someone to try taunting him again. Lecturing Gryffindors about the importance of following safety rules was, in his experience, rarely productive. He silenced the charm, vowing to personally check up on the wards every so often, just to be sure.

He looked out the window. It was quite dark out—the moon wasn't up—but he could see flakes of snow falling, illuminated briefly on their way down by the light from his office. He wondered if he should warn the centaurs and merfolk about the basilisk. Would it make any difference? Or would they just live more fearfully for a while, to no end, while the basilisk hid somewhere for another century. He should at least ask Hagrid to patrol the grounds, looking for the signs of a large snake slithering through the snow. Tom was good with wards, but he or his servants might not be so good about mundane things like tracks in snow. He wondered how well the basilisk could manage in the cold, and laughed at the image of Salazar Slytherin leaving behind a giant heat lamp and basking stone in the Chamber of Secrets.

He was tired.

He had been awoken early this morning, and had never caught up on the sleep he had lost earlier in the week. He felt like he had accomplished very little today, too, all things considered, and hated the idea of going to bed.

He owned a time-turner. Oh, it was illegal, and the Ministry would have a fit if they knew about it, but Albus Dumbledore was very hard to catch at that sort of thing. When you were skilled enough to make your own international portkeys and use them without detection, and when you had friends around the globe who owed you favors, and when you had managed to keep at it until the ripe old age of one hundred and ten, you could get your hands on a time-turner if you wanted one badly enough.

He had obtained it in the late Fifties, after thinking too much about everything he could have done differently in that mess with Gellert. It had been very, very useful a few times, but after a few years the drawbacks became more and more obvious. Too many times after using it, he had simply been unable to pull off what he wanted. Avoiding paradox required a truly exasperating level of meticulousness, and it was heartbreaking to keep it up when it seemed so simple to just reach out and mess with time. Using it in emergencies was rarely wise—the risk of going insane was too high, and seemed especially so when you had a full understanding of everything that could go wrong if you botched things up.

So he had stuck to using it in situations like tonight, where he just wished for a longer day, or more sleep. Really, he had probably used it for napping more than for any other purpose. Those were some very productive years, and during them he had cemented much of the influence that later got him the Chief Warlock and Supreme Mugwump posts. Eventually, though, he realized he was aging faster than the world around him, and felt he had grown too dependent on the extra hours each day. He put the device in his vault at Gringotts, out of immediate reach should he be tempted, but available just in case. He had never removed it again, not even in the last war with Voldemort.

No one alive knew he possessed it. If they did, he wasn't sure he could endure their recriminations over every single event that he might have interfered with. Time travel was complicated. The most compelling situations for its use were also the most dangerous. He was just as likely to find himself causing anything he set out to prevent, but this was very hard to convince other people (let alone himself) of when they were desperate.

But there were still times when he thought about it—contemplated the difficulty of getting the goblins to take him to his vault at night, just to take it home and turn it all the way that one time, then put it back in the morning. It would never work that way, though. It wouldn't hurt to have one more night of getting enough sleep, and then it would do him a world of good to really catch up on everything for once. Clear out his mail drawer. Finish all the little projects he had been putting off. Do research again—maybe owl Nicholas and have him dust off the lab. Visit all the libraries he had rushed through over the years when he needed something specific, and just go back to browse aimlessly for once. Go on vacation.

He could just go, of course. Dig out his old tent, make an international portkey, leave some instructions for Minerva. It would be summer in the Southern Hemisphere. There were some incredibly remote places in the Andes he had once used for unusually dangerous experiments—it would be nice to go back when he wasn't worried about anything blowing up. No one would pester him there. And, if no one realized he was gone, they couldn't try to take advantage of his absence, right?

It wouldn't matter, with the time turner. He could take as much vacation as he liked, go wherever he liked, just so long as he also put in his hours at Hogwarts. The house elves would be happy to feed him more than three meals a day.

He was one hundred and ten years old. When would he ever get to do these things if he didn't make time now?

He was one hundred and ten years old, as far as the world was concerned. His body was many months older.

Unlike Tom, he had made no special efforts to evade his own mortality. Tom could simply wait him out, come back when he was gone, or do nothing for a few decades. Did it matter if Albus lived long enough to see young Harry fulfill his prophecy? That, too, could be decades from now. There could be another war brewing. What would happen without him there? His actual lifetime mattered—his lifetime as measured against the real, primary, one-second-per-second timeline of the world and everybody in it—not his subjective time, made up of moments he had stolen away with magic, letting himself "live fast" for short-term benefits.

No. He could take time off when the crisis was over and he was done doing everything he had to do. No, that was also terrible thinking. Some day he would die when he was in the middle of a hundred projects, and he wanted it no other way. He would take a weekend off, regardless. Just maybe not this next one.

For now, he would go to bed early.






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Author's notes:


That was enough Dumbledore for a while, I think.


This chapter was kind of a downer to write, and I imagine reading it will be similar. I feel bad about leaving things on that note until the next update, but it's bound to happen sometimes, and anyway the chapter was ready to go and I had no reason to hoard it.


As to the expriment of telling the story from a single perspective for a continuous day, I have learned that it is very hard to do if it isn't strictly demanded by the plot. I have already dug into Dumbledore's character way further than I had ever planned to. Sure, he is in the middle of a lot of subplots, and canon sources give us lots of material to work with, but this isn't supposed to be his story. I guess this is how a lot of other characters must feel -- "why does Albus Dumbledore always involve himself in everything I try to do?"

In any case, it's one thing to do a short character study, like I did with Kettleburn and Sinistra, setting out my vision of them and making them usable characters. But a 14k one should not be undertaken on a whim. In my defense, though, I had no idea it would take so long to cover everything I had planned for the day. Still, I won't try this again anytime soon.