FicWad

The next nine and three-quarters years were fairly uneventful, both for Dumbledore and most of the rest of the British wizarding world. Harry's placement with the Dursleys seemed to be working out even better than Dumbledore had hoped. With Arabella Figg keeping an eye on Harry, Dumbledore happened to know, for a fact, that, although the boy seemed quite miserable with his Muggle relatives and was apparently thoroughly disliked by the Dursleys, there were never any signs of actual, outright abuse, and, since the modified blood-wards were holding, odds were good that this meant the boy wasn't actually suffering unduly. Mrs. Figg seemed worried that the child was suffering from mental and emotional abuse and neglect, but Dumbledore was certain that she was fretting over nothing, making mountains out of molehills like Minerva did every time she was driven to demand to know how Harry was doing. Though the circumstances in which young Harry lived were undoubtably unpleasant, since his situation wasn't actively dangerous and a less-than-perfect childhood would, frankly, be good training for the troubles Harry was certain to face when Voldemort resumed his rise to power, the Dursleys were actually proving to be the best thing for Harry. His conscience still occasionally bothered him, of course. But then, whether he held an official title to that effect or not, Dumbledore was essentially the leader of the Light in the wizarding UK, and he quite frankly felt that it was his job to make the hard decisions for the greater good and shoulder the burdens that others were unwilling or simply unable to carry. Others might not be able to see the stains on his soul or the blood on his hands, but Dumbledore knew what he was and how much he'd sacrificed - and how much of what he'd given up had not been his to sacrifice. He took on the burden of shame for those sacrifices and those hard decisions willingly, to spare others from having to bear them. He might've played the part of the amiable, eccentric grandfather-figure and enjoyed every moment of it, reveling in his ability to be both batty and beloved, but that was not who he was.

It took him years to perfect the blithe twinkle in his eyes, hours and hours spent standing in front of the mirror trying to capture a look of easy merriment, building up a mask that he could safely hide the truth of himself behind and so avoid frightening the public. The fact that no one had apparently yet realized that the face he turned to the world was largely an artificial one was the greatest mark of success he ever could have asked for, short of the Dark Lord's actual defeat and destruction. Dumbledore /needed /his mask. He was playing a game of chess against an insane sociopath of an opponent with living, breathing, and sometimes dying pieces, and he knew it. He pretended to be a genial, all-knowing watcher and protector and even benefactor when he was, in fact, playing blindly with others' lives on a chessboard set up mostly in the shadows. His moves were made largely on intuition, not wisdom or specific knowledge, and, thank Merlin, he mostly he managed to choose right. But he feared the day when he would fatally misstep, as he knew he eventually must, if he played the game too long, and so he could only hope that he would be the only one who'd pay for that mistake, when the day finally came. He couldn't let it be the boy: for the sake the world - not just the wizarding world, but the world at large - he could not fail Harry Potter. If he failed the boy, if he destroyed the child or, worse, caused something to come to pass that stripped the boy of his ability to love (a talent that Dumbledore was certain was the power spoken of in the prophecy as the power the Dark Lord knew not, the thing that would let Harry defeat Voldemort), then he would become no better than his opponent, and, on that day, the Dark Lord would have won, whether he realized it or not. All of the logical reasons and justifications in the world wouldn't matter if he did or countenanced something that broke this child's ability to love. He risked it, though, because he didn't know what else he could do.. He balanced the boy upon a razor's edge, risking the child's soul for the fate of a world. He hated himself for it, but he would not stop. Not until he either knew beyond doubt that he had failed beyond recovery or else Voldemort was gone forever. If being raised by the Dursleys would teach Harry how precious the ability to love truly was, then Dumbledore would make it so, no matter how much his conscience might bother him or how much those involved might have wanted the boy to be raised elsewhere.

The Sorting Hat had told an eleven-year-old Albus Dumbledore that he had the cunning of a true Slytherin, the tenacious loyalty of a Hufflepuff, the brilliance of a Ravenclaw, and what appeared to be a good start on the suicidal, self-martyring bravery of a Gryffindor. It had wanted to place him in Slytherin or, if not there, Hufflepuff or, failing that, in Ravenclaw. Dumbledore, however, had chosen the one house the Sorting Hat did not wish to place him in because even then he'd felt that a person's choices were what most defined that person in life. The Sorting Hat had muttered that Dumbledore was the truest Slytherin he had seen in over five hundred years of sorting and been forced to give in and declare him a Gryffindor. Dumbledore had set out for his chosen table with his jaw clenched tight in determination, absolutely convinced that he would prove the Sorting Hat wrong, and, as far as he was concerned, his life since that moment was a testament to that determination. He would be brave and make the hard choices that would end up saving the world, and no one but him (and, eventually, Harry Potter) would ever even know the full extent of what he had done and what he had given up in order to do what he felt he must.

Thus, as Harry's eleventh birthday drew ever closer and his Muggle somehow managed to keep even one copy of his Hogwarts acceptance letter from reaching him, Dumbledore decided that Rubeus Hagrid would be the perfect person to send to deliver a copy of that letter and take Harry for a day of shopping in Diagon Alley. Not only would Hagrid almost certainly reinforce and add to the Dursleys' already negative opinion of the wizarding world (and as much as it may have weighed heavily on his conscience, Dumbledore couldn't ignore the fact that he needed them to maintain their loathing of everything magical so that they wouldn't go too easy on the boy over the next few summers and so provide him with the idea that he could run from his destiny by hiding out in the Muggle world), Dumbledore knew he could indubitably count on Hagrid's bias against Slytherins and the Dark Lord coming into play as he explained the basics of Hogwarts and the wizarding world to Harry (and, after all, no one, except possibly for the Dark Lord's followers, wanted a Slytherin Boy-Who-Lived. Moreover, hopefully, poor and blatantly unfair treatment from the Slytherin head of house, Severus Snape, combined with an eventual revelation of Severus' status as a former Death Eater turned spy and the person who'd brought the fragment of Trelawney's prophecy about Harry to the Dark Lord's attention - thus setting into motion the chain of events that ended with James and Lily Potter dead, Harry marked as the Dark Lord's equal, and Voldemort reduced to a disembodied spirit - would further fuel Harry's determination to defeat Voldemort and all of his servants. Dumbledore, though, couldn't count on Severus to be as vindictive as he was capable of being if Harry for some reason ended up in his house - something that was, without Harry's determination to avoid such a sate, a very real possibility, considering the fact that Harry had literally absorbed some of Voldemort's abilities and powers during that fateful Halloween confrontation). Sending Hagrid was a perfect solution for what was needed. It should have worked like a charm.

The fact that it apparently hadn't worked at all as he'd planned and that Dumbledore was currently not only locked out of an emergency meeting of the Wizengamot called for the express purpose of hearing testimony about the severe abuse and neglect that Harry Potter had suffered while in the care of his Muggle relatives from the actual (main) perpetrators (the three Dursley family members) but in danger of being brought up before the Wizengamot himself on charges of knowing complicity in the abuse and neglect the Dursley family had inflicted on Harry Potter was simply so mind-boggling that, for the first time in decades, Dumbledore quite simply just didn't know what to do. The feeling of helplessness was very unfamiliar and wholly disagreeable and he couldn't figure out a single/ blessed thing he could do to make it go away./

Indeed, before all was said and done, 31 July 1991 might very well become the very worst day Dumbledore had suffered through since the day he'd realized that Tom Marvolo Riddle had embraced the persona of Lord Voldemort and had no intention of ever letting it go again.

***

Cedric Diggory was having the most wonderful and terrible day of his life.

When he'd arranged to meet Scott Summers, one of his good friends from Hogwarts, to go shopping for school supplies for the upcoming year and check out all of the new Quidditch gear and latest brooms, he'd never for a moment suspected that he would end up meeting /Harry Potter/, instead. It was a running joke among the Hufflepuffs that Scott could've organized and run an entire school all by himself . . . so long as he had someone else with him to help him keep track of little things, like the days of the week. Scott had been sure that the end of July was on a Tuesday, and so it was Tuesday when he planned to meet Cedric at the Leaky Cauldron, so they could go to Diagon Alley together. Unfortunately, it just so happened that 31 July 1991 fell on a /Wednesday/, not a /Tuesday/, and so Cedric cleared the shopping trip with his parents /for the wrong ruddy day/. Scott showed up at the Leaky Cauldron on a day when Cedric was out with his mum, attending an art showing in Muggle London that she was interested in and hadn't been able to get Amos to agree to take off of work to go to along with her. And so Scott, unable to reach Cedric and having bumped into some other friends from school while he was trying to figure out where Cedric was, had eventually gone ahead and done his shopping that Tuesday, since he was already there and it'd seemed silly to waste the trip. Since Cedric's parents had already said that he could go to Diagon Alley with his friend on Wednesday and they trusted Cedric enough that they'd been willing to trust him there by himself, as long as he had a friend with him to watch his back, neither one of them was really able to drop things at the last minute to go along with him. Cedric hadn't wanted to try to reschedule the trip for another day, on the off chance that somebody else from his house might not have already gotten his or her books and things and might be willing to go with him, so Blinky had been proposed as a sort of compromise. She'd follow him invisibly and only show herself if called or needed, so his parents wouldn't have to worry about something happening to him, and he could go to Diagon Alley and do his shopping essentially alone.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, so Cedric agreed to the plan. Since he was essentially going to be shopping by himself, he'd decided to get all of the dull but necessary stuff out of the way first, so he could enjoy a good long afternoon split between Flourish and Blotts and Quality Quidditch Supplies. Of all the things in the world he disliked shopping for, clothes were at the top of the list. He needed some new handkerchiefs and whatnot, though, so he ended up heading for Madam Malkin's first. He happened to arrive just as a party of girls looking for wizarding dress robes swarmed the place, monopolizing the closest assistant and causing her to shoot a frantic look of longing in the direction of the back room. Cedric, smiling, had offered to go back and fetch Madam Malkin for her, and the frazzled looking young witch had accepted his offer with profuse thanks. When he'd caught sight of the terribly small and extremely lost and rather uncomfortable looking dark-haired boy waiting to have his robes pinned and fitted to him properly and being talked down to by the pale-faced Malfoy brat he remembered with something far less than fondness from a Ministry party earlier in the year, Cedric's first instinct had been to rescue the poor kid. That instinct had started screaming at him that he needed to do more than just save the poor boy from Malfoy when he'd started speaking to the kid and seen the way the boy's wary green eyes kept track of his every shift of weight (as thought waiting for Cedric to take a swing at him), an unconscious little frown of puzzlement marring the otherwise weirdly smooth blankness of his face as Cedric tried, with ever-increasing obviousness, to be as nice and friendly and unthreatening as possible. Cedric could tell that this boy, this (no last name offered) Harry, was in a bad situation and desperately needed help from someone to get out of it. He'd been relieved when he learned that Harry had apparently been sent Rubeus Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundskeeper, to help him shop for his school books and things. But the relief was short-lived. Hagrid didn't seem to notice that anything was wrong with Harry. That meant it was up to Cedric to figure out a way to get Harry to trust him enough to let Cedric help him.

Cedric felt like he'd been punched in the gut, when Madam Malkin finally finished fitting Harry's robes to him and the finished product had come off, revealing just how thin and ragged and badly dressed the young boy was. He'd instantly found a way to turn the conversation from away from Hogwarts and to the wizarding world at large, after which he'd started hinting, not so subtly, that his dad worked for the Ministry for Magic and that the wizarding world had laws and people to enforce them and everything, rather like the Muggles did. Strangely enough, the more information about Hogwarts and the wizarding world in general Cedric babbled at him, the more Harry's wary nervousness seemed to fade into a sort of perpetually bemused look of something that looked very much like shock or awe. By the time they were finished shopping at Madam Malkin's, Harry was staring at him with the kind of fascination and not quite disbelief that Cedric had seem before . . . on the face of art patrons coming face to face, for the first time, with works of art either so uniquely beautiful or so magical that those looking upon them could hardly bring themselves to believe that what they were looking at was actually real. Even though that look gave him hope (for surely Harry wouldn't be looking at him like that, as if Cedric were not only the first truly decent person around his own age that Harry had ever met before but also a kind of person that Harry had given up belief in a long time ago, if he weren't starting to trust Cedric), it made him feel distinctly queasy, too (because what kind of home life could Harry have had, if Cedric were the first just plain old friendly, nonthreatening kid he'd ever met before?) and a bit worried that he might be out of his league. He was trying to figure out how to convince Harry to come home with him, so he could meet his dad, when Harry happened to tilt his head sideways in a certain way, and his rather messy hair slid away from the right side of his forehead, revealing a flash of what looked like a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt.

Cedric almost panicked as the pieces all clicked together, nearly choking on his lunch as he realized that this pale little slip of a boy was actually Harry Potter/, The-Boy-Who-Lived, the child who'd somehow broken He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's power and so become the hope of wizarding Britain. But then his heart broke within him as he realized that the famous Harry Potter had evidently been abandoned by the supposedly adoring wizarding public of Britain to a family who (from all the signs Cedric could see) neglected and abused their ward, and he felt the first stirring of a righteous anger that quickly moved his Hufflepuff heart to silently swear that he would see to it, /personally/, that Harry received all of the help and support that he could ever possibly need. If Harry's family didn't want him, then Cedric was sure that his family would gladly take Harry off of their hands. His mother and father had never really quite gotten over the loss of their other children, during the war against the Dark Lord, and Cedric knew his mum still mourned over her inability to bear any more children of her own, thanks to the filthy, cowardly Death Eaters who'd attacked and so nearly managed to kill her (and probably would have succeeded, too, if not for the intervention of James Potter and - of all people! - Sirius Black). And Cedric had always wanted a little brother, so as far as he was concerned it all worked out perfectly. His parents would gain a second son, Cedric would gain a little brother, Harry would get a family with people who actually loved him and cared about him and wanted him to be safe and happy and well, and, as far as Cedric was concerned, the rest of the wizarding world could bloody well go hang, if anyone thought that the alternative of letting Harry stay in a household that had made him like /this - small even for an eight-year-old and so pale and thin that he looked almost more like a ghost like a real live boy, not to mention nervous and twitchy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs when he wasn't being coldly blank-faced and empty-eyed and patently untrusting of others - was in any way better than letting the Diggorys take care of him. It was a perfect solution, or so he thought.

He just hadn't counted on the reality of just how bad the Dursleys had actually been.

Even after seeing the memories himself, he still couldn't quite believe it. Abuse was very rare in the wizarding world, not just because there were so few witches and wizards that every single magical child was precious, but because magic tended to protect those who could wield it, especially those who were too little or too unlearned to be able to or even know how to protect themselves in other ways, and accidental magic was called "accidental" primarily because those who summoned it did so instinctively, meaning that they had little to no control over what the magic did once it had been raised. Since the immediate result of abusing a child (especially a very young one) included the very real possibility of death, dismemberment, or at the very least permanent disfigurement in the wizarding world, it was, understandably, a very rare occurrence. Some of the larger and older families might occasionally raise their children in an atmosphere of benign neglect, and families attached to the service of Dark Lords and Ladies were historically infamous for brainwashing their children into warped, malicious, sadistic and/or masochistic copies of themselves rather than raising them, but actual physical or even mental and emotional abuse was practically unheard of in the wizarding world, outside of the occasional nasty reaction within a mixed marriage when the Muggle in the marriage hadn't known that he or she was marrying a witch or wizard and didn't take the eventual revelation or the knowledge that his or her offspring were magical very well. Sometimes magical children who were born to Muggle or Squib parents needed to be rescued from their homes and placed with a wizarding family, either because the particular religion or prejudices of the Muggle parents made them react badly to the knowledge that their offspring were different than they or else because the Squibs were so jealous of their children that their homes were no longer safe and loving environments, but for Merlin's sake! Harry Potter's adult Muggle relatives knew about the wizarding world, knew that both of his parents were magical and that he very likely was going to be an extremely powerful wizard when he grew up, had taken him in anyway/, and yet /still treated him so badly that Cedric was pretty sure that professional torturers could've taken lessons from the Dursleys?!

Cedric might have laughed at the lunacy of it all if he hadn't been afraid of bursting into tears and scaring or discomfiting Harry. It was just such a miracle that Harry was still alive and as whole as he was - not just in body, but in mind and spirit - that Cedric would've rather died than do anything that risked hurting or upsetting him. He wanted to save Harry from the Dursleys and protect him from people like that (people who were really no different or better than the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters) and Dumbledore, who'd actually had the gall to claim that he was placing Harry with the Dursleys for his own good (and Merlin, but Cedric couldn't believe he'd ever thought the Headmaster worthy of admiration or loyalty or respect, not after all of this), and all the other people who didn't or couldn't see past the title of The-Boy-Who-Lived to find Harry and so would just end up using him, if left to their own devices. It sickened him that the man who was widely reputed to be the greatest living wizard in all the world had actually chosen to give Harry to people like the Dursleys. Either Dumbledore knew how bad they really were and had left Harry with them anyway, in which case he was a sadistic bastard and should be brought up on charges before the Wizengamot, or else he was too blind or too busy or too stupid to see that the Dursleys were just animals and monsters in human form, pretending to be Muggles instead of the savage beasts that they were, and had placed Harry with them in actual confidence that they would care for Harry as if he were their own child and simply never bothered to take the time to follow up and make sure that they really were treating Harry well, afterwards, in which case what in Merlin's name was he doing running a school for magical children, much less presiding over the International Confederation of Wizards and the Wizengamot, when he was so clearly losing what few wits he'd ever had to senility? So many people loved and trusted Dumbledore that just thinking about it made Cedric feel sick. If Dumbledore decided to fight them, he might be able to gather enough support to keep the Diggorys from fostering or adopting Harry, even with Harry's memories to prove just how badly he was in need of rescuing.

The blood brother ritual was the only thing Cedric could think of that had enough weight (being very old magic, back from before the advent of wands, and impossible to ever reverse or completely undo, even with the most powerful of disowning rituals) and tradition and just plain old-fashioned awe attached to it that it would be able to stand against any protests or attempted legal actions that might be brought against the Diggorys - whether by Dumbledore himself or by someone else who was powerful and dangerous to Harry (like the former Death Eater and far too rich and influential Lucius Malfoy, for example - for removing Harry from the Dursleys house to their own home. He knew how it was done: prior to his enrollment at Hogwarts, his parents had insisted on a full classical education for him, one heavy on magical history, magical theory, and magical law, and ancient binding spells like the blood brother (or blood sister or blood sibling, not to mention the more basic blood bindings that allowed a family to make a child not of their blood literally their own) ritual and their status and legality under current magical law had been covered in detail right before his eighth birthday. It wasn't even a hard spell. The two involved simply had to be absolutely sure that they wanted what the ritual offered . . . and willing to live with the consequences of it, afterwards. Harry, unsurprisingly, had leapt at the chance to become his brother, when Cedric offered, and Cedric could tell, just from looking into his eyes, that it wasn't just because Harry was so desperate to get away from the Dursleys that he would've taken any offer from anybody who seemed to promise him a way to get out from under the control of those monsters. Harry was both smarter and prouder than that. He wouldn't take help from just anyone. No. He wanted to accept Cedric's offer because Cedric was the first truly good person he could ever remember meeting who'd been perceptive enough to notice that Harry needed help, and Cedric had proven both his loyalty and his friendship and his worth to Harry in the process of helping him. Harry understood him enough to realize that Cedric just wanted to protect him, and he trusted Cedric enough to want to become his blood brother so that Cedric could do that.

The shock of feeling the true extent Harry's power, as they completed the ritual and the magic bonded them, nearly bowled him over, and reinforced his suspicion that the Dursleys either all had secret death wishes or else were all just too incredibly stupid to believe and, thus, quite possibly suffering under some kind of magical "suggestion" to make them behave towards Harry the way that they did. He didn't have a lot of time to think about either possibility, though, because Harry's reaction to the ritual was (understandably, in Cedric's opinion) a mixture relief and happiness so profound that he burst into tears, and then Cedric's dad descended triumphantly on them, and then Hagrid finally showed up and started trying to fuss about Dumbledore's orders and Harry needing to be with his Muggle relatives to be safe from the former Death Eaters and celebrity-hounds who'd try to use the boy's fame for their own purposes and Merlin only knows how many other kinds of nonsense. The adults were so busy with Hagrid and then with Minerva McGonagall and Cedric was so busy trying to calm Harry back down (and keep him that way, so he wouldn't be inclined to panic over Hagrid's hysterics) and reassure him that everything really was going to be alright that the issue of Harry's phenomenal magical power and the even crazier light that his strength cast on the Dursleys and their behavior towards him ended up falling by the wayside. He made a mental note to say something about it later, but by the time he got a chance to bring it up, Healer Rona (Sirona Finn, one of his mum's best friends) had accidentally seen to it that Harry was down for the count and was rather grouchily running several diagnostic spells on him to find out just how much damage the Dursleys' horrible treatment of Harry had managed to inflict on his body. Cedric had barely gotten to start voicing his suspicions about the Dursleys, based on Harry's quite considerable strength and their apparent lack of fear as to ever being truly hurt by his magic, before he was cut off by Rona's rather stunned sounding declaration that the only bones Harry had that didn't show signs of having been damaged (either badly cracked or broken outright) and then either healed or else entirely reformed with magic appeared to be those in his spine. He was still trying to process that when the Healer's eyes suddenly flew wide with shock and horror, her entire body recoiling as if from the presence of pure poison.

"This child has a block on his magical powers!" she cried out, clearly horrified.

And then yet another round of hell began to break loose.

There may have only been three curses classified as Unforgivable according to the British Ministry, but that was just because blocking and/or diverting (what amounted to stealing) another wizard or witch's power was considered so abhorrent and unnatural by the magical community that the entire wizarding world - not just in the UK but the whole worldwide magical community - regarded that kind of activity as the only justifiable grounds for draining a person's magic prior to that criminal's incarceration or death. Deliberate, knowing tampering with another wizard or witch's core of magical power was an ancient taboo - quite possibly the oldest (and perhaps the only consistently true) taboo in all of the wizarding world. Truly evil Dark Lords and Ladies were sometimes rumored to drain the magical power from the victims, to gather enough power to cast certain otherwise impossibly difficult and draining rituals or enchantments, but only twenty in all of recorded history were known to have purposefully drained victims of their power in order to add that magical strength to their own, and all twenty had eventually been hunted down, drained of their power, and slain like incurably rabid beasts. The last one had been Grindelwald, a Dark Lord of such evil repute that he'd terrorized the wizarding world for over a decade, around the time of the Muggle's Second World War, almost managing to subjugate all of wizarding Europe and Asia, before a certain Hogwarts professor had finally managed to tip the scales against him and bring him down in single combat. The fact that the block on Harry's power almost had to be the handiwork of Albus Dumbledore - the wizard who'd defeated the last person evil enough to knowingly inflict magical blocking and/or draining on another witch or wizard - wasn't just ironic. It was mind-bogglingly perverse, in a way that almost succeeded in making the way that the Dursleys had treated Harry seem normal. Cedric almost fainted from shock, and was so stunned that he couldn't even try to move out of the way when the Healer rushed past him to a dustbin in the corner of the room to be violently sick to her stomach.

If that particular revelation stunned him, though, his mother's sick sounding question of, "Longbottom too, do you think?" was so unexpected and outrageous that it shocked Cedric back into paying attention.

"Dumbledore was obsessed about the safety of the Potters and the Longbottoms both that whole last year before the Dark Lord's demise," Amos replied, looking as sickened as his wife sounded. "There was a rumor, at the Ministry, that there was a prophecy about the Dark Lord's defeat that involved one or the other or both families, including their new sons. If Dumbledore did this to Harry, he might have done it to the Longbottom boy, too. And there have been . . . rumors . . . about the Longbottom boy's magical ability."

"I'm firecalling Augusta. Go and firecall Minerva McGonagall and ask her to bring the other heads of houses and as many of the staff as she can. We're going to want witnesses, and we're going to want to see if we can get the Hogwarts faculty to agree to replace Dumbledore as Headmaster before the board of governors for the school can get involved and Malfoy can try to turn this to his advantage. Cedric?"

"Yes, mum?" he asked, a little fearfully, automatically shifting a bit closer to Harry.

"I know you don't want to leave your brother, Cedric, but I need you to go and firecall your friend, Scott Summers. Both of his parents are on the school's board of governors, and I know they've been trying to organize the honest members of the board into a coalition against Malfoy and his ilk. I need for you to get Scott to find his parents and send them both over here. Please. It's very important," his mother explained.

Thinking quickly, he offered, "I'll go. Just don't ask me to leave when everyone's here and you start discussing all of this."

"Cedric - "

"I'm the one who found him and I'm the one who saw that he needed help. He's my blood brother now and that makes him my responsibility. You can't ask me to leave him here when you're going to be talking about things that bear directly on his safety. You can't. I won't agree to go," Cedric insisted.

"Cedric - "

"Let him stay," his father abruptly broke in, his voice having taken on a rare hardness of tone that meant he would not be swayed. "Cedric will be fourteen in a little less than two months and he's proven himself exceptionally mature for his age today. If he wants to stay, I trust he can restrain himself to sitting quietly with Harry and Neville Longbottom and speak only when invited or if he thinks of something important that the rest of us haven't quite realized yet."

His mother's mouth tightened with displeasure, but she knew the meaning of that tone of voice as well as Cedric did. Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she told him, "All right. You heard your father, Cedric. You may stay. But only if you agree to behave yourself."

"I will," he instantly promised, nodding, before either one of them could change their minds. "And I'll go get Scott to fetch his parents, too, and be right back," he added before turning and hurrying out of the room before his mother could find a reason to protest.

The rest of the evening quickly passed, in a blur of impassioned and sometimes angry or frightened debate among the crowd of witches and wizards who eventually gathered together in Kirkwold's main living room. There were a few truly memorable moments, probably the worst of them when Professor Snape - the potions instructor at Hogwarts and head of Slytherin house, a dour and forbidding man who constantly wore black robes, had a habit of walking so quietly that his appearances were often likened to the sudden swooping strikes of a giant raven or bat, and whose deathly pale skin, unfathomable dark eyes, and shoulder-length black hair (which, after the school year started, was usually lank or greasy or both, due to its constant saturation by various potion fumes) often prompted first years to wonder if the man might not be a vampire of some sort - stopped and stood by the couch Harry's sleeping form had been laid out on, staring down at him with such intentness that he appeared to be trying to see through Harry's physical form and so discover the shape of his soul. "This is the boy?" he finally asked, his normally powerfully dark and smoothly resonant voice full of such a jumble of pain and confusion and incredulity that it brought Cedric up short just as he was about to go for his wand.

Minerva McGonagall replied in an achingly sorrowful voice, "That's him, Severus."

"Great Merlin! Even I was taller than this boy by age eight, and I - my father - we never - " Snape broke off, shook his head violently, and the abruptly let his face fall forward into his hands in a gesture so full of defeat and pain that Cedric found himself wanting to place a hand on the man's shoulder, even as the Deputy Headmistress did. "This child is his answer to the Dark Lord and the supposed hope of the wizarding world. How could Dumbledore do this to him?" he demanded of everyone and of no one in particular, and though the words were muffled slightly by his hands, the man's anger and anguish were not.

"None of us suspected, Severus," Minerva tried to reassure him.

"But I should have," Snape only insisted with a snarl, jerking his face out of his hands to send a black glare in her direction. "Of all people, Minerva,/ I should have/. I know how Albus can get. He forgets, sometimes, that his chess pieces are alive. That is one thing, entirely, with me, but this - this is unacceptable/. This is /Lily's child/. She sacrificed her life to protect him. /I will not stand by and allow Dumbledore to do this to him! Him or anyone else!" Snape thundered, his voice growing so loud that the other conversations in the room came to a startled halt, the room's other occupants looking on in a mixture of shock and wonder as the man put out a long-fingered hand and gently, carefully brushed the fringe back off the boy's forehead, his fingers straying not to the famous curse scar but rather combing Harry's tangled locks back and then simply resting protectively on the boy's head, the hand curving to the shape of Harry's skull in a gesture almost of benediction.

After seeing that, Cedric wasn't too surprised when the Hogwarts faculty asked Snape to become Deputy Headmaster to Minerva McGonagall's Headmistress. Snape surprised him again, though, by refusing the position. He claimed, quite bluntly, that he would likely have too much on his plate as head of Slytherin house and Potions Professor and the school's unofficial tutor for Defense Against the Dark Arts (to pick up the slack for a Professor Quirrell, who was one of the three members of the main staff and faculty who'd been unavailable when Minerva called them together for this meeting), if he were called upon to spy on the Dark Lord again (something that he thought was looking ever more probable, now that Harry was going to be attending school), to do a proper job of it as Deputy Headmaster, too. Since the board of governors had no preference for the position, McGonagall offered was then forced to offer it to the other two heads of houses. The Charms Professor, Filius Flitwick, demurred as well, claiming he was getting a little bit on in years to be thinking about taking on such a huge responsibility, especially as he was hoping to interest students in starting up a dueling club again, so Professor Sprout, the Hufflepuff head of house, blushed and stammered and eventually accepted the position with a look of steely-eyed determination, though not without getting Flitwick and Snape both to agree that they would take over for any detentions she might have otherwise ended up holding, first. As Dumbledore would no longer be around to block the faculty's request for qualified assistant professors to help with the grading and whatnot, Snape, surprisingly enough, offered to set aside some time to help the new Deputy Headmistress find suitable candidates for all of the professors who taught required courses, as it would doubtlessly fall to her to do it instead of McGonagall since McGonagall was likely to be quite busy for much of the coming year learning all of the wards and various other protections on the castle and surrounding grounds.

If Snape's behavior around Harry and his positively civil overall attitude was shocking, though, then it was almost equally startling to learn that Scott's parents could organize a majority of the Hogwarts board of governors into voting in Minerva McGonagall as the Headmistress and so dismissing Dumbledore as Headmaster without actually having to do any more than send notification of a board meeting to Lucius Malfoy, as well as all of the other governors he had in his pockets, by slow owls extremely prone to flying to places in the most roundabout fashions imaginable. So long as they were all sent word, there was nothing they could do about the vote once it had been taken. The rapidity with which roughly sixty percent of the board of governors were called in, the situation was explained, and a vote was taken was, frankly, astonishing, though the fact that Neville Longbottom turned out to have a block on his magical power, too, and that everyone who knew Dumbledore well agreed that both of the blocks had the distinctive feel and flair of Dumbledore's magic about them might have had something to do with it. Healer Sirona had to call in half a dozen of her most trusted colleagues from St. Mungo's before they were finally convinced that they could safely remove the blocks and, even so, the backlash from having his dismantled knocked poor Neville Longbottom deeply unconscious. When they were done, Pensieves were brought out and recordings of the memories of all present (save for the two patients) were carefully collected and preserved, as evidence of Dumbledore's crimes. Very few present actually believed that there would be a public trial - Dumbledore simply knew too much about the Dark Lord for it to be very likely that the Minister for Magic (who stubbornly insisted that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had been killed, not just disembodied, during on that fateful Halloween) would ever allow that - but they were all determined to see to it that Dumbledore answered for what he'd done, one way or another, and, if all else failed, the memories could be used for leverage, if necessary, to back Dumbledore into a corner and force him to come clean.

There was some rather intense and sometimes nastily worded debate as to whether or not the former members of the Order of the Phoenix (which, of course, had fought against the Dark Lord before) should call for a similar vote to replace Dumbledore as the founding head, in the event that the Order would be needed again in the coming struggle, when the Dark Lord regained enough of his power to rise up again. Most of the witches and wizards present believed that it was only a matter of time, before He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named returned to terrorize their world, and they knew that the Order would be a potent symbol of hope for wizarding Britain when that happened. However, no one could seem to agree as to whether or not the other surviving former members of the Order would be appalled enough by Dumbledore's behavior and his crimes to be willing to overlook the fact that Dumbledore was, still, the most powerful and knowledgeable adult wizard in Britain (barring, perhaps, the Dark Lord himself, now) and that he very likely had information about the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters that no one else possessed. Cedric finally exercised his right to speak up in order to ask why they didn't at least inform the other surviving former members about what was going on so that they'd have accurate information (instead of whatever got leaked to the press or what Dumbledore might choose to try to tell them) and give them a sort of open-ended option as to what action, if any, the Order might take. Professor Sprout beamed at him proudly, the other three heads of houses gave him looks that ranged from gauging to considering to slightly bemused but intrigued, and his parents instantly seconded the plan, so that led to yet another round of firecalls, plus a quick trip (on Amos Diggory's part) back to the Ministry to borrow Auror Scrimgeour's Pensieve copy of Harry's memories of growing up with the Dursleys, so that those among the former members of the Order who answered the call to gather would be able to view those right off the bat.

The evening, needless to say, turned into an extremely late night indeed, after that.

Of course, that was partialy due to the fact that they had to physically restrain Molly Weasley from going after Dumbledore and hexing him immediately for what he'd done to Harry.

Cedric was quite certain, afterwards, that he never wanted to witness a bat-bogey hex cast on someone ever again, as it seemed extremely painful indeed and was none too pleasant to see, either. And it would probably take him ages to fully recover from the shock of learning that mild-mannered Arthur Weasley (who, as far as Cedric had ever known before, had always worked in the Ministry for Magic's Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office) had been a Hit Wizard (just like his wife's late twin brothers, Gideon and Fabian Prewett) during the war against the Dark Lord.

Then again, Arthur's mother had been one of the (in)famous Blacks - Cedrella Black, to be precise, a powerful witch who was disowned and (literally) blasted off of the several centuries old tapestry of the family tree of that supposed "most ancient and noble house" for marrying a Weasley, a member of a wizarding family considered to be "blood traitors" by the "toujours pur" bigoted Blacks on account of the Weasley clan's long-standing support of Muggle rights - so perhaps Cedric shouldn't've been so surprised that there was apparently much more to Arthur Weasley than met the eye. It was just that Mr. Weasley was so - so - so innocuous that Cedric had a hard time making himself believe that there really was more to the man, even when he saw the man quickly dispel his wife's curse with a casual twirling gesture that morphed effortlessly into a restraining spell that managed to catch and bind Molly long enough for the other adults to take some sense in to her - a feat that not even half a dozen fully trained (if retired, in a couple of cases) Aurors had not been able to accomplish.

Still. As discombobulating as it was to have his understanding of Mr. Weasley as a rather harmless and somewhat bumbling good-natured fellow turned upside down, Cedric was glad that Mrs. Weasley had reacted to finding out about the treatment Harry had suffered at the hands of his Muggle relatives, due to Dumbledore's deliberate decision to place Harry with them instead of with a wizarding family, and the blocks he'd placed on both Harry and Neville Longbottom's magical power in such a spectacularly furious fashion. Her obvious condemnation of the now former Headmaster's actions helped to sway some of those who had initially been unsure as to how they should react to the information and whether or not they could actually risk taking a stance against Dumbledore, given the fact that the Dark Lord's disembodied spirit was still out there somewhere and doubtlessly working to regain enough of his former strength (and a new body) to return to power and start the conflict over again. Within surprisingly short order of Mrs. Weasley's initial shriek of rate, though, the Order of the Phoenix had voted to officially reopen the formerly disbanded organization, to begin actively recruiting new members (at which point Mr. and Mrs. Weasley's two oldest sons, Bill and Charlie, were among the first to be nominated as suitable recruits), and to replace the former head of the organization with a more democratic council of seven, which would include among its numbers an elected first, second, and third. To their apparent surprise, Mr. Weasley and Professor Snape were instantly elected first and second, while a man by the name of Remus Lupin - one of the few still living close friends of James and Lily Potter, who had apparently been unable to make the meeting due to the fact that he lived in the United States and was currently acting as a substitute teacher at Salem Institute while their Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher was recovering from a rather nasty accident involving a Muggle automobile - was elected as third. After some debate, Minerva McGongall (who had cited her new position as Headmistress of Hogwarts to convince the others not to try to elect her to one of the new leadership positions), Molly Weasley, Amelia Bones (who, though absent, was considered quite likely to accept the position, given her willingness to help free Harry from the Dursleys), a tall, slender, stunningly beautiful and almost strangely silent brunette witch by the name of Andromeda Black Tonks, and Cedric's mum agreed to make up the rest of the council.

Things went fairly smoothly after that right up until the point when Augusta Longbottom rather acerbically pointed out that if they ever expected to be able to get anything done to keep wizarding Britain safe from You-Know-Who, they were going to need to get that incompetent idiot Cornelius Fudge out of office. If they wanted to do that, then Madam Bones would most likely be their best bet for the new Minister for Magic, and that meant that Amelia was not going to have a great deal of time to spare for the Order, at least not for the first couple of years of her first term in office, which in turn meant that they were going to need someone else as the seventh member of the new Order's council.

That observation led to a rather explosive debate about how they were supposed to get Fudge out of office if they couldn't even be sure of ever being able to see to it that Dumbledore answered for his crimes in an actual court of law.

Cedric's head hurt a great deal by the time his mother impatiently (and loudly enough to make his wince) called for silence and pointed out that even if they couldn't try Dumbledore openly for his crimes, the majority of those crimes had occurred during the Minister's time in office, and he was therefore liable to be called to account for his own negligence in the matter. They wouldn't even have to try to come up with a way to force him to resign. A few decidedly pointed newspaper articles about Fudge's failure to even have the common decency to check up on The-Boy-Who-Lived would easily be able to raise the public's sentiment against Fudge to the point where he would find himself with no choice but to willingly resign if he wanted to avoid being torn to pieces by the public and press alike. They had enough contacts with the press to see to it that the right kind of stories were published - for Merlin's sake, the editor of The Quibbler (and one of the more eccentric members of the school's board of governors) had already agreed to do anything and everything he could, to help keep Harry safe! - so it wasn't like it would be difficult to arrange. Since Harry had expressed his understanding when Minerva McGonagall had told him that it would be impossible to keep others from knowing the circumstances surrounding his adoption by the Dursleys and he had made it quite clear that he was willing to do whatever he could to help the wizarding world, it was entirely possible that he would even agree to publicly declare his distrust of Minister Fudge and his support for Madam Bones as a replacement for Fudge, if they were to ask him. It would be impossible for Fudge's lackeys to hold back the tide of public censure against Fudge, if Harry agreed to give an interview like that, and even if he didn't wish to speak out himself, he would doubtlessly agree to allow Mr. and Mrs. Diggory to speak out in his name. After that, Amelia would indubitably find herself elected in short order. In the meantime, Emmaline Vance - a tall, stately witch with eyes almost as green as Harry's and long, flaxen hair who'd been a good friend of Lily Evans Potter and joined the Order originally with her emerald-eyed, flame-haired friend - could be the seventh council member.

He loved his mum so much in that handful of moments when most of the people in the room were staring at her with their jaws slack with shock, understanding and hope gradually starting to dawn in their wide eyes, that his heart felt like it might actually burst with pride.

He was starting to get tired, though, and hungry again, in spite of all the sandwiches and biscuits and various other finger food that Blinky and the other house-elves had brought out on trays with tea, to offer the guests and help fortify them all for the discussions, by the time things started to wind down. His mind drifted a little, returning to the contents of Harry's memories in that Pensieve, and he shuddered, very glad that his parents were still wary enough of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's remaining supporters that they'd insisted on teaching him Occlumency - the magical defense of the mind against foreign infiltration or tampering, essentially the opposite of Legilimency - the year before he'd first gone away to Hogwarts. The process of ordering and clearing the mind was an excellent defense against nightmares, and Cedric was certain that he'd need all the help he could get (short of a Dreamless Sleep potion) to keep from having terrible dreams about the things those Muggles had done to Harry. Mr. Weasley was fascinated with all things Muggle, and his twin boys, Fred and George, had Muggle-born as well as half Muggle-born friends and acquaintance who were willing to tell them more about the Muggle world and give them bits and pieces of various things for them to give to their father, to keep him happy. A few summers ago, Fred and George had told Cedric about something called a cartoon, a kind of Muggle entertainment (usually but not always involving film) that sort of mimicked the effect of wizarding photographs. These cartoons generally consisted of a series of sequential drawings that were then "animated" either by rapidly flipping through all of the pictures to create an illusion of movement (since most people, including wizards and witches, couldn't process that much visual information quickly enough to isolate the various images as they sped past) or else by capturing them on Muggle film and showing them at a certain amount of frames per second to create the same kind of illusion of movement.

For some reason, Muggles thought it was appropriate to creation children's cartoons for television and for motion pictures where animated people or anthropomorphized animals were portrayed as constantly being the victims of a great deal of stylized violence - thrown off cliffs, exploded with dynamite, run over by trains or buses or automobiles, hit with falling anvils, etc. - which they somehow survived well enough to continue on to the next cartoon as if nothing had ever happened to them. The way those Muggles had treated Harry reminded Cedric sickeningly of the kind of violence those animated cartoon characters were routinely made to survive. It was as though the Dursleys and Dudley's gang of juvenile hooligans had no real concept of Harry as an actual living, breathing human being. They gleefully stomped, kicked, punched, beat, lashed, and otherwise attacked Harry with their feet, fists, or whatever might happen to be at hand as if they fully expected him to be indestructible, as though they assumed that his difference from them automatically meant that he couldn't be killed and could only be hurt for an extremely limited amount of time - time that they felt the need to take advantage of by hurting Harry as often and as extensively as possible. His aunt, Petunia, was the only one who didn't constantly behave as though the world might come to an end if Harry wasn't made to bleed at least a little bit at least once a day. Of course, she seemed to prefer belittling and haranguing her nephew and making him do what should've been impossible amounts of work, instead, and she occasionally grew angry enough with him whenever he was cooking or baking for her that she'd strike Harry with the closest object (even if that happened to be a very large, very heavy, and very hot cast iron skillet), so it wasn't like her behavior was a great deal better than that of her husband or her son. While Petunia was perhaps the least actively violent of the Dursleys, they all (even Dudley, who had evidently only known that Harry was different and that his parents thought Harry was a freak) basically behaved as though they thought that Harry's wizarding power meant that he couldn't be killed - abused and neglected to the point where it would've killed just about anyone else, yes, but not killed. And that just didn't make a whole lot of sense to Cedric, considering the fact that the Dursleys had been given Harry to raise /because his parents had been murdered/.

If the thought hadn't struck him as being a little too paranoid even for the circumstances surrounding Harry's placement with the Dursleys, Cedric might have been tempted to suspect that Dumbledore or someone else had purposefully tampered with the minds of the Dursleys to get them to treat Harry like that so that they would either so thoroughly crush Harry's spirit and heart that he'd become little more than an empty shell, a puppet that could be danced around to another's tune and made to do whatever the person controlling him wanted, or else so that he would turn out exactly like the orphan boy who'd become the Dark Lord had - incapable of love, filled with rage and pain and hatred for those who'd treated him so abominably, and willing to do anything to get enough power to destroy them and those like him and make it so that no one else would ever be able to hurt him like that ever again. Since the war against Grindelwald, though, the Ministry had always been very careful to check Muggles for magical tampering, so he was fairly certain that they would've heard about it by now if a wizard or witch actually had used magic to influence the Dursleys' behavior. Not even Dumbledore would've been able to get away with doing something like that.

Still. The Dursley's irrational and foolishly dangerous behavior (they were, in his opinion, immeasurably lucky that Harry's magic hadn't decided that the best way to protect him would be by removing them from his life) bothered him, and not just because of their inhumane treatment of his blood brother. There was something incredibly sad about the fact that Harry had taken their label of him as a freak as a sign that he was, literally, a freak of nature, a mutant like one of the superheroes in the cartoons and comics his cousin watched and occasionally read. Harry had been so convinced of this that he'd taken to thinking of himself as the real life version of a cartoon and comic book superhero named Logan, code named Wolverine. It was all there in his memories - Harry had actually thought of himself like this many times as he lay in the darkness of his cupboard, healing after yet another encounter with his uncle or his cousin's gang or another of his aunt's violently thrown pots, pans, or cooking utensils. (And the irony of the fact that the wolverine was in the same family as the badger, the animal mascot of Hufflepuff house, didn't escape Cedric.) The whole thing just made Cedric want to cry, though. Or else kill those damned Muggles himself. The Diggorys believed that family was sacrosanct, and the fact that he was in Hufflepuff house - a house that exemplified loyalty and brotherhood and stressed the importance of friendship and family, of sticking together and doing everything possible to help your friends and keep your family safe - only reinforced the fact that Cedric regarded the Dursleys and people like them (people who were willing to deliberately hurt someone in their family like the Dursleys had constantly, consistently hurt Harry) not just as the scum of the earth but as dangerous, rabid animals who needed to be put down before they could harm anyone else. He wasn't a vindictive person, but he believed that there were some things that were just completely unacceptable and wholly unforgivable, and the way the Dursleys had treated Harry fell squarely into that category.

For any other reason but Harry, Cedric might have been concerned or even sickened by his willingness to call for the deaths of others. But this was /Harry/. His new blood brother. A boy of barely eleven who looked like an undersized eight-year-old and had so many memories of pain that it was a miracle he was sane, a miracle he wasn't already as twisted as the Dark Lord, and damned if Cedric was going to let anyone do anything to try to tarnish or negate that miracle.

Some bonds, once made, shouldn't be broken by any and could never be broken by some. Once a Hufflepuff accepted you into the sett, you were one of the cete, essentially family, for life. And Diggorys never held back when they gave their hearts. That was just the way it was. Anyone who ever wanted to hurt Harry would have to get through him first. They'd either have to wait to act when he wasn't there and couldn't get to them in time to stop them or else simply kill Cedric outright, to keep him from stopping them from hurting Harry.

The Dursleys were too dangerous. They'd already caused Harry too much pain. If they weren't sentence to be Kissed by Dementors (and therefore stripped of their souls) or at least sent to Tullianum, if he could, then he'd kill them to keep them away from Harry. It was that simple. The fact that he was agreeing with Hagrid's sentiment only made him consider Hagrid a member of his family sett, through the groundskeeper's connection with Harry, and feel proud that it had been Hagrid - someone worthy of the sett - who'd been the first one from the magical world to have contact with Harry, after nearly a decade of exile among the Muggles. It was good that the adults were going to take care of Cornelius Fudge and get someone competent in office before the Dark Lord managed to make his comeback. It would help make things easier, in the long run, both for Harry and for everyone else, when the war started up again, as it most likely inevitably would at some point, given the Dark Lord's tenacity and his power. It was also good that they were effectively pulling Dumbledore's teeth, taking away his power over both the school and the Order of the Phoenix and at least trying to come up with a way (or ways, if that was what it took) to lessen his influence over the rest of the wizarding world, too, if it turned out that they couldn't just get him thrown into jail outright for all that he'd done and allowed to be done to Harry. It would keep Harry safe from the man's continued interference and also punish him for what he'd allowed the Dursleys to do to Harry, two things that Cedric didn't think could happen soon enough for his peace of mind. But for all the right things that the adults were doing and all the good things that they were trying to do, Cedric understood that there was a whole slew of other things that these adults simply could not do for Harry.






TBC . . .