#manipulative dumbledore

Sirius crept through the halls of Hogwarts until he meet up with Remus outside of Dumbledore’s office.

They had cast notice-me-not charms and Moffitt so they could whisper without being caught.

“Is he in there?”

“It says so,” Remus said as he checked on the map.

Without thinking, both sets of eyes zoomed to Gryffindor Tower, where they checked Harry was safely tucked in his dorm.

“We really doing this Pads?”

“What choice do we have? You know he won’t stop. He never has. He thinks his is the only way,” Sirius said with a growl.

“Alright love. Just ... this will change everything.”

“Good! I will NOT allow him to become another casualty like we were,” Sirius said as he gave Remus a quick kiss on the lips, lingering there until they had to pull away. “Come on Moony,” he said with a sad sigh before straightening his spine, throwing his head back and marching into Dumbledore’s office, Remus casting privacy spells behind them.

“Boys,” Dumbledore said. Looking as though he had expected them. “What can I do for you?” He asked with that damnable twinkle in his eyes.

Remus had to place a restraining hand on Sirius’ shoulder so he didn’t fly across the room and claw Dumbledore’s eyes out.

“You know why we’re here,” Sirius snarled.

“I assume it has something to do with Harry, no?” Dumbledore said, the picture of calm.

“Of course it’s to do with Harry. What other reason would I have to speak to you?”

“Sirius ...”

“Don’t Sirius me Dumbledore. I’m not your boy any more. I should never have been. You left me to rot. The greatest wizard in the world and you left me to rot, and you ignored Remus until you needed him and you SENT HARRY TO THE MERLIN DAMNED DURSELYS!” Sirius screamed at the man. Panting from the rage he had just unleashed.

“There are reasons Sirius. There have always been reasons. Everything I do has always been for the gre ...”

“The greater good Dumbledore?” Remus asked, venom in his voice. “You know what I found out? I found out he lived in a fucking cupboard and you knew it because it was in his first letter. A cupboard. That boy was treated worse than a house-elf and you knew.”

“Remus, you must understand what we are facing,” Dumbledore said, trying to placate the two men before him.

“Oh, we know. Here,” Sirius said as he threw Ravenclaw’s diadem on Dumbledore’s desk. “That’s the last one. The diary is gone, the cup, the locket, the ring and the diadem. That’s all of them apart from the snake and Harry right?" Sirius asked, glaring at Dumbledore who now looked at them in shock.

“How ....”

“What? Like it was difficult. Lily was amazing, and she protected that boy with everything she had, but that doesn’t mean that Harry should see into Voldemort’s head. That’s dark magic. And when your are looking into dark magic, you find a wizard raised in a dark family with the most extensive library there is. And guess who we have?” Remus said with a raised eyebrow.

“You know about the horcrux’s? Harry?”

“It isn’t difficult to figure out once you have one of the horcrux’s. We had one. We found the others and Bill Weasley is working with Gringott’s to figure out how to get rid of the one in Harry. He will not face his parents’ murderer because you won’t use the resources at your disposal, Dumbledore!” Sirius shouted. Remus’s hand was the only thing restraining him.

“Sirius, my boy ...”

“He is not your boy. None of us should have been. We were children you moulded to fight a war. You should have asked other adults to fight for you. But you didn’t Dumbledore. You used a child army, and you have tried to make Harry the same. He will not die on our watch and he will not become anymore of a murderer than you have already made him!” Remus bit out, pulling Sirius closer.

“I have never made Harry into a murderer. I am not sure what you mean.”

“Of course not. You also know nothing about a door licked with alohamora, which they are taught in their third lesson. You know nothing about a giant fucking snake, or letting dementors lose in the school. And don’t get me started on the Triwizard tournament. You didn’t notice your lifelong friend wasn’t himself? Yeah, ok,” Remus said rolling his eyes, trying not to scream at Dumbledore.

“Well, it seems we are at an impasse, men. I have only ever tried to do what’s right for the greater good. And I shall continue to do so,” Dumbledore declared loftily.

“We know,” Remus said with a sad sigh. “We thought you were great. We worshipped you, trusted you. And I’m sure you cared, but never enough about us as people as opposed to pawns.” Remus then turned from Dumbledore and started walking towards the door.

“Remus, my boy ...” Dumbledore said, trying to placate him.

He hadn’t realised that Sirius had crept up beside him. “He isn’t your boy. He was never your boy. He should never have had to be grateful to be given an education or accepted. Harry will not beg for scraps of affection from you because you isolated him.”

“Sirius, you need to unde ...”

Dumbledore never got to finish his sentence. Sirius stepped over his dead body and grabbed Remus’s hand as they walked out of the headmaster’s office.

They had to get out unseen, which was easy enough for them. Harry would not be a pawn for Dumbledore’s chess board. He may have tried to raise him as a living weapon, but Sirius and Remus were going to show him he was more than that. They were going to show him he was worthy of love and worth the adults around him protecting him for once.

“Moony ...”

Remus grabbed him and pulled him in tight. “It’s alright love, we’re doing this for Harry.”

“Someone wanted you gone quite badly,” a rough male voice said. He blinked himself awake from a light doze at the sound, taking stock of where he was and how he felt as quickly as he could with a potential threat so close. He was sore all over, and his head had a feeling like being stuffed with cotton that sometimes happened when he slept in too late. Everything was blurry, but he had the impression both that this was wrong and that it made sense. The man sitting at his bedside wore a hooded cloak, but was otherwise an unremarkable man of indeterminate age with brown enough hair and a rather boring and forgettable face. The room was small and through the blur of poor vision it was all rather mauve and brown, but clearly intended for medical care given the bed had railings and there was a sharp antiseptic scent over everything. The stiff white sheets fit the overall impression of a medical facility.

“This is the third time you’ve woken up enough for me to try talking to you, so stop me if any of this sounds familiar. You may call me Master Elmwood, as I am a Master of Charms in the employ of the Department of Mysteries as an unspeakable. You appeared quite suddenly during a storm of magic on August the thirty-first that caused quite a lot of temporal flux. Everything about it is now classified, and when you are stable enough you will be taking an oath to protect any and all knowledge of what happened to you.” The man paused, his nose scrunching in distaste as he said the next bit in a hurry.

“There was some consideration for putting you out of your misery, but it was determined that getting you well enough to talk to would likely provide us a lot of answers about how you came to be blasted through the weave of the world as you were. Morally, it would be repugnant to end your life now that you are no longer suffering so severely, especially since we have determined you are an actual child, the effects of the temporal magic aside. The muttering in your sleep that you’ve been doing as well as the divination we have done over your person has made it clear you are no friend of the forces currently attacking the Ministry of Magic. Because of this, my department had decided to provide you with the means to continue your life as best that you can once we have sorted all of this out.” The man stopped there, looking expectantly at him.

“I… I’m not sure,” the boy on the bed tried to say, but it came out in a painful croak. Master Elmwood offered him a cup of water, and instinctively the boy sniffed it twice and let some dribble on his hand and the sheet before he took a drink. Hospital sheets were charmed to react to most potions, or was that just to non-neutral acidity? He couldn’t quite remember, but he didn’t feel any magic in the water and the sheets stayed white so it was probably safe. “Everything’s a bit jumbled. I remember I was fighting, not just once but over and over again for so long, and I… I think I gave up. Just, I remember I walked to where he was and just let him… I let him.” “There was a lot of blood on you that wasn’t yours,” Master Elmwood said, very matter of fact.

“I watched him die. I… I can’t remember his name, and it was all so complicated and I can’t… I don’t understand, but he kept me safe and then he died in so much pain. He bled on me, and he begged me with his last breath, and there wasn’t anything I could do, and then I gave up and let… let Tom kill me,” the boy said, feeling a bit frantic at not being able to remember his own name let alone untangle the mess that were hsi most recent memories. Had there been some kind of contest, or a night at a bar? None of the pieces fit together easily. The person he watched die shifted from an older man with a severe face to a pretty blond boy as he thought about it.

“Unspeakables are sworn not to reveal anything about our work outside the department, so you can tell me anything and it will remain secret,” Master Elmwood soothed. “Take your time, you’ve been through a lot and temporal magic is especially confusing.”

“The names, I, I just can’t, I don’t know my own name, but I know Tom. Tom Marvelo Riddle wanted me dead, and then I went to let him do it after… I think Hogwarts fell. He always wanted me dead, from when I was first born,” the boy said.

“You’ve spoken quite a lot in parseltongue while you were delirious, and we believe you thought you were talking to Tom. By that we mean Tom Riddle, the self-proclaimed Dark Lord that is currently threatening all of Albion.” The boy on the bed nodded. “He has gone to great lengths to destroy all of his family members in one way or another, not that we know his motivations for doing so. It makes sense that a, and forgive me if this isn’t correct, but that a bastard child of his would soon find death or destruction at his wand.” The older man waited for any reaction, but the boy on the bed merely turned the words around in his head silently, trying to fit them into the fragmented shards of who he used to be that flashed and twirled in his mind.

“I suppose I’ll need to jog your memory. We’ve done a number of tests to try and piece together who you are and where you are from. You are of the Peverell line of pure-blood wizards and inherited parseltongue through your mother’s genetics, but we can’t be more specific than that. Perhaps your mother’s blood is not yet registered in a way we can cross-reference, meaning she is a muggle or muggle-born squib descendant, as it would take a couple generations to muddle our scrying. New blood is most commonly registered when marriages are submitted to the ministry, so that may or may not say a great deal about who you are and where you came from. Else, you have been altered somehow through blood magic so we can’t determine which branch of that family tree you hail from. Tom is from one branch of the Peverell tree, but there are others who may have sired you and we are sure it is your mother’s magic that is intertwined with parseltongue.” Master Elmwood refilled the water cup from a pitcher nearby, and the boy tested it again before drinking.

“Blood is a constantly changing potion that tells us much, but mostly about your current condition and not your history. Your scars and bones, however, tell many tales of your past. Additionally, when we found you your body was stuck in a loop aging to about twenty years and then reverting back to infancy in what must have been a traumatic and painful twist of magic. We observed the wounds you experienced through your life in this way, and the… the emaciated state you were in prior to age five. There were fluctuations in weight and health that indicate periodic bouts of child neglect and abuse. You have settled down at age fourteen now that you are free of that curse. Your birthday is July the thirty-first, the current year is nineteen-seventy-four, and it is the seventh of October. You will have a lot of healing to do before you can return to anything resembling a normal life.”

“I was… I was a student at Hogwarts. I had friends,” the boy said. “Are my friends alright? I… a red head boy and… and a girl with curly brown hair, I think?”

“If they are alive, and given the hostility of the attack on you that is unlikely if they were with you at the time you were cursed, then they will not remember you,” the man said, his voice gentle and low. He leaned forward, as if weighed down by the bad news he had to deliver. “The curse you suffered was meant to rip you out of reality itself, to undo your existence as if you had never been born in a destruction so total none would know it even happened. Whoever you were before, we can find no trace. There is no missing person report that matches your case in the last hundred years. There was no attack that had a similar surge of energy to match your appearance, nor was there any trace in the place we found you to indicate you lived nearby as far back as we can tell. We very carefully interviewed and collected the memories of the muggles who saw you in the temporal loop, and none had any idea who you could be.” Master Elmwood shifted in his chair, taking a breath before continuing.

“As far as anyone can tell, the dark magic curse aimed at you was partially successful. You were unmade enough that you were forgotten by all, but the caster was likely also effected and either waited too long to strike a killing blow or lost control of the spell somehow before you could be fully clipped out of the flow of real time. Once your enemy forgot you and stopped casting, the spell started to unravel and left you in that deplorable unstable state. There is a chance you are from the future, but we find it unlikely that you would go back further than your own birth for a spell of that kind. No magical child was born at or around the time you appeared.”

“So, I’m just, from nowhere?”

“Essentially, yes, as far as we can tell. You are fully detached from the flow of causality. That is good for you. If you have come back in time, you won’t cause a dangerous paradox that would necessitate the Department of Mysteries to list you as a threat to life and magic. Since you are a child, we hope we can re-insert you into society without too much trouble.” Master Elmwood smiled, but his words were chilling. The boy in the bed could have been executed twice by these people. First just to end his miserable suffering, and then again in case he was a time-traveler that would cause problems. “Well, I suppose that’s a good thing. I… I really can’t remember much clearly. I’m trying, but I just get little bits of stuff. A face or some words, but nothing that makes sense,” the boy said. “I know I walked to greet my own death, but beyond that it’s just ideas not memories. I like to fly, treacle tart, and owls. I had a snowy owl, and a few friends who helped me with… things. Bullies, maybe, I hate bullies.”

“Don’t force it, not yet. You have a long road of recovery, and the Masters of Thought will certainly want to examine you. Now, for the rules. There is no point in trying to lie to any of us, these rooms have spells to detect lies and we can’t help you unless you cooperate. You are, essentially, an experiment for most of my colleagues. We aren’t without morals, but you are in a secure part of the ministry reserved for the great mysteries of the world. You will be examined, healed, and eventually re-integrated into the outside world. We can’t help you without accurate information, and the possibility of such dark magic as what has been cast on you ever existing must never spread to more devious minds. The very idea of what was done to you is dangerous, and when you leave here we will take that knowledge from you so you will believe whatever life story is devised for you. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” the boy said. “I… I don’t think I could do anything about it.”

“No, you can’t. Compliance is, unfortunately, not a choice we can offer you in this case. You will have plenty of input in the story we’ll give you when you are well enough to be released. It has to be believable and fit well with what you can remember of your old life before it was erased, so your mind never rebells against it as false. You do understand why even the thought that what has been done to you could be possible is a dangerous thing to let out into the world, don’t you?”

“Yes. I… I can’t remember, but there was something. A quest to destroy some magic thing. Not this spell, but another evil magic we were keeping secret. We couldn’t tell anyone what we were doing because nobody could know they existed. For the greater good.” “For the Greater Good,” Master Elmwood parroted, leaning forward, a hint of alarm quickly hidden behind curiosity. “Tell me more about that.”

“The greater good is… it is… death for the sake of others. Sacrifice. So many died, while we were hunting for the way to stop Tom, but we didn’t know what we were doing. Lost in the woods, struggling to survive. The ministry fell, I think. I wasn’t supposed to live through it at the end, but I did,” the boy took a deep breath. “It’s easier to think of the broad strokes rather than the details.”

“That’s expected. Take your time. Anything you can tell us, so long as it is honest, will count in your favor.” Master Elmwood leaned back, looking pleased. After an hour some food was brought for the boy, some simple broth and bread to not tax his system. They spoke of many topics, testing the boy’s knowledge and feeling out what kind of person he was until exhaustion drug him back into sleep.

I would like feedback on if this is an interesting idea or not.

Later on in this draft Snape and Harry are singing along to Queen on the radio, and it has a lot of very old headcanon about Snape from right after HBP was published, some of which was deeply Jossed when the 7th book came out (I said they were old WIPs didn't I?) It's a bit of 'adults are competent' and 'best possible timeline' in that the Department of Mysteries gets to know that Voldemort is making Horcruxes in the 70's and do the responsible adult thing of working to take care of that instead of asking kids to do it. Our hero does fight Death Eaters, but mostly it's him putting together a life without unearned notoriety and fame. If Harry is back in time from the accident that broke all the time turners in the DoM battle, if he came back from the train station near-death experience, or if someone tried to erase him from time intentionally at some point after the year 1999 is all... well, it's all in these notes as alternate ideas. I typed up the above from paper journals and it was more a collection of free-writing than a constructed narrative.