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“Are you sure that you are doing the right thing here, Albus?” Minerva looked over her shoulder at two of her most difficult students. “Severus could have been…”
“Severus is fine now, Minnie. And James even saved him! So, we couldn’t very well…”
“Fine, let James go unpunished if you must. But Severus would not have needed saving in the first place if Sirius hadn’t tried to bait him to his death!”
“Oh, nonsense. Sirius is just – impulsive! Exuberant! He had no notion of Severus actually dying. In any case, if we turned him out from Hogwarts, where would he go? To whom would he turn? He is not on the best terms with his parents, and he is not of age.”
“What do you expect him to do when he graduates? He needs to learn responsibility. We need to be preparing him for…”
“Yes, yes. Excellent point, Minnie. I know that, in the coming years, you will do all that is necessary to prepare him for the future!”
The Headmaster took down the silencing charm and smiled at James and Sirius. “I would have Professor McGonagall take you boys to your dormitory, but I imagine you would sneak right back out again, wouldn’t you?” He winked at them. “Instead, she will take you to the infirmary. Remus will be there shortly. Good night, boys! Good night, Minerva!”
Minerva pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, but she nodded at Albus, and followed the boys out of the room, cuffing them both on the back of the head.
When he heard the door close downstairs, Albus took off his glasses and put his face in his hands.
“That was poorly done, boy. Poorly done indeed.”
“What would you have had me do, Phineas?”
“You know what I would have done, Albus. I expelled Scamander for far less.”
“For something which you now know he did not do.”
“He took responsibility.”
“The Lestrange girl tried to take responsibility instead.”
“That only demonstrates that I should have expelled her as well.”
Albus groaned. He went to the couch and laid down.
Phineas continued, “Sirius is not Gellert.”
Albus grabbed a pillow, jammed it under his head, and rolled over with his back to Phineas’s portrait. “Not now, Phineas.” Even muffled, his tone of voice betrayed his exhaustion. He had been woken at 2am to deal with the boys, and it had taken three hours to get it all sorted.
Albus drifted off.
He woke two hours later, shouting, covered in sweat, and too terrified to open his eyes.
‘More than 90 years old, and still undone by dreams,’ he thought, derisively.
He lay perfectly still with his eyes still closed, reliving his dream:
He was lying in bed with Gellert, that summer in Godric’s Hollow, the early morning sun filtering through the gauze curtains in Gellert’s window. Albus had his head on Gellert’s chest, listening to his heartbeat.
“Tell me – why were you expelled?”
As the question left his mouth, the room became dark and unfamiliar, and tree branches were reaching through the window towards the bed. Somehow, Albus was now standing beside the bed, watching Gellert transform into a werewolf. He leapt on Albus, and tore into his shoulder with his teeth, and into his chest with his claws.
Bathilda came into the room carrying a book of Muggle Fairytales (or had it been his Ariana, carrying flowers?), and Albus felt a wave of relief, that he was about to be saved, but instead she (who was she?) turned to Gellert and said, “Aren’t you clever, Dogstar.”
And then Albus noticed that he was back in bed, but Gellert was gone. Instead, Sirius was with him, wearing his Quidditch robes and plucking the wings off of disgruntled fairies. The Board of Governors was standing around the bed – all of them werewolves, except for young Florian Fortescue, who was plying them with ‘Carrion Caramel Swirl.’ They fell upon poor Mr. Fortescue, and then looked up at Albus, with glowing golden eyes that promised he would be next.
Phineas waited until Albus opened his eyes.
“Bad dreams? I won’t say that you don’t deserve them. I wonder what the Snape boy dreamt of this morning? I suppose no one will ever know that answer to that, since he isn’t allowed to share what he saw last night with anyone. But what harm could that possibly do?”
“Phineas –“
“After all, I understand that pushing one’s bad experiences deep down inside and resenting your inability to tell anyone has never hurt a soul. Not that you would know anything about that.”
Headmaster Derwent’s portrait intervened. “That’s quite enough, Phineas.”
Albus’s gratitude to Dilys would not last long.
“Headmaster, have you spoken with Grindelwald recently?”
She was clearly not any happier with him than Phineas was.
“He’s in prison. On the Continent. Obviously not.”
“You’ve not even sent a letter, have you?”
“What would there possibly be to say?”
Phineas could not restrain himself any longer.
“Oh, indeed. It’s a good thing you have nothing left to say to Gellert. Such as ‘instead of blaming myself, I blame Durmstrang for expelling you.’ Or, ‘I try to save everyone who resembles you in the least way – I apologize for never bothering to try doing that for you.’“
Albus pulled out his wand and pointed it towards Phineas’s portrait, but before he could threaten to cast anything, Phineas disappeared.
“Put your wand away, dear,” said Dilys, “You know very well that he can just retreat to his other portrait – there’s no way to hurt him, and he is of use sometimes, when he’s not being difficult.”
“Difficult?! More like slanderous! If I’m such a pushover for students who are like Gellert, why didn’t I side with Tom Riddle more often?”
“More often? Albus, you never took Tom’s side.”
“Exactly!”
“But you must know that Tom was nothing like Grindelwald. He was not a pureblood, for starters, he didn’t have a family, he was not wealthy. Tom was casually and indiscriminately cruel, without any motive beyond enjoying having power over another. He was dishonest…
“Honestly, Albus, it’s a shame that you didn’t make anything like an attempt to save young Mr. Riddle, because if you had, who knows... well, it is too late for that now. It is not too late, however, for Mr. Snape. He is no more similar to Tom than he is to Grindelwald, and yet he may need saving more than Mr. Black.”
“Dilys, surely you can see that Sirius, with his background and his connections, could do a lot more damage than Severus could.”
“Could he? The two boys seem to me to be fairly well matched when it comes to anger – and intelligence as well. Though I will concede that Black seems to be winning at the moment in the charisma department. But I wonder - who could do more damage than someone who believes trust exists only to be betrayed?”
“The decision is made. Severus has already agreed to stay silent – he has made a magically binding vow.”
“Yes, this particular opportunity has passed, but you have several more years left in which to make more even-handed choices. ”
“You don’t agree with Phineas?! You wouldn’t have expelled Sirius, would you have?”
“No, I’ve never thought that expulsion does much good. But surely he deserved some sort of consequence, or even a lecture – you practically gave him a fond pat on the head, Albus.”
“But you can’t think that it has anything to do with – Dilys, he doesn’t look a thing like Gellert!”
“Oh no? I will admit his colouring is different… But whether he and Grindelwald could be mistaken for cousins is not the point, Albus. You need to get in touch with Grindelwald or find some other way to get over the guilt you feel about him – or you need to step down as Headmaster.”
“There’s nothing more I can do for Gellert.”
“Oh? And what did you do for him, Albus?”
Albus didn’t answer, instead exiting his office through the door to his private quarters.
As he rinsed off, and changed his clothes, Albus fumed. Dilys and Phineas had it all wrong. He had never been meant to meet Gellert in the first place. If Gellert had never been expelled, he would not have come to Godric’s Hollow, and Ariana would not have… Gellert was not Albus’s responsibility. But Sirius – he was Sirius’s headmaster. Sirius he could save.
As he walked down to the Great Hall for breakfast, Albus told himself that his conscience was clear.