Chapter 53

Harry was walking around Grimmauld Place once more, twenty minutes after leaving Fleur to her adventure in dabbling with domination, when he was accosted by a panicking McGonagall. "Where were you?" she gasped as she grabbed his arm, dragging him toward the fireplace.

Harry couldn't help but frown at her presumption. If it was anyone else that dared to drag him around like that, he would have blasted them, teacher or no teacher. However, McGonagall's expression, a combination of total panic and deep sadness.

It was the first time he had seen her that emotive. Even the fit of anger she had displayed against Umbridge, a person that was annoying enough to drive a saint to murder her gleefully, was nothing compared to the intensity she currently had.

He decided to play along.

As McGonagall dragged him through the living room, toward the fireplace, he looked around, only to notice there were very few people around, and these were the ones that were relatively unimportant ones. It seemed that there was an emergency going on.

Pity that he couldn't risk peeking through McGonagall's mind to understand.

"Hogwarts, Deputy Headmistress Office," she said as she threw a handful of Floo powder and pushed him through, making him stumble through the cold flames. She stepped in a moment later.

"What's going on, professor," Harry said, doing his best to keep his annoyance suppressed, but starting to fail horribly even with the account he was giving to her unusual mood.

"Professor Dumbledore needs to talk to you," McGonagall answered. Harry couldn't help but feel a chill. What if Dumbledore actually learned he was responsible for Snape's death. It was certainly not something he wanted to explain to Dumbledore, not when he

One might argue that Dumbledore had actually no right to ask something like that, and it needed to be handled by the Department of Magical Law —which wouldn't have worried him even a bit, considering the location Snape decided to target with his black-wearing buddies— but he was also realistic enough to know that things seldom worked as they supposed to in the magical world. Power had a tendency to make unusual legal.

And Dumbledore had a lot of power, both the metaphorical kind and the real kind, to a point that Harry certainly didn't want to risk facing him after he had lost his pet death eater.

The only thing that kept him from actually fleeing away was the attitude of McGonagall's emotions, her sadness in particular. She certainly lacked the sympathy toward Snape to feel such a sense of deep sadness when learning about that.

He decided to risk following her further rather than committing the dangerous action of running away and burning all the bridges. It wasn't like Dumbledore could make him disappear after he had saved the life of Amanda Bones.

However, his fear slowly reduced, replaced by worry, as he noticed their direction. Infirmary.

Then, they reached the entrance, When he noticed Remus at the entrance, along with Tonks, Mrs. and Mr. Weasley, Tonks, and the rest of the inner circle of the Order, minus one specific person, he started to fear. The absent one was Sirius.

His first fear was that something happened to him. Yes, they were just together hours ago, but Sirius was just reckless enough to make such a thing feasible, and it wasn't like the old residence of the Blacks was completely devoid of danger.

Then, before he could ask anything, the door of the infirmary opened, and Sirius walked out with a stony face, his anger noticeable despite his attempts to keep it hidden. "Pup," he said as he walked toward him, but before that, McGonagall gestured him to stay away, as she continued to drag him toward the infirmary.

Then, he understood the panic and sadness of McGonagall. Dumbledore was laying on a bed, his face with almost no hint of color, drinking another bottle of potion.

"Harry," he whispered in a sullen tone. "How good that you're able to reach before I took the next step of my great adventure."

"Professor," Harry stammered, feeling a sense of true shock the first time in a long while. It wasn't pure sadness, as especially during last year, he had started to suspect Dumbledore's general intentions and his endgame —things were too inconsistent with his genial old man attitude. But even with that suspicions, he had always assumed that, Dumbledore would be there, whether as a helpful ally or a domineering obstacle.

Finding him in his death bed was not something he could ever imagine.

"Don't be sad, Harry," Dumbledore murmured genially. "Death is an inevitable part of life, to be embraced, not to be avoided," he said.

"I understand, professor," Harry murmured even as he pushed a relatively sad expression to his face to replace his shock. Still, he recognized the potion bottles as pain relievers, and was glad that they put him out of his mind enough to leave him unable to decipher his emotions. "What happened?"

"Unfortunately, a moment of recklessness," Dumbledore spoke, his attitude so mysterious that it was impossible to be unintentional. Along with his earlier wording, for some reason, warning bells started to ring in Harry's mind.

It reminded him of the first year, where Dumbledore was speaking with a similar casualness about the Mirror of Erised, a perfectly innocent talk that somehow played a vital role as Harry faced Voldemort's shade possessing his defense teacher.

And considering his adventures following that, each tightly interwoven with Voldemort, all happening in Hogwarts, Harry wasn't stupid enough to write those off as accidental. All of those combined, Harry could feel that Dumbledore was spending his last breath to set up one last ploy.

"Was it Voldemort?" Harry asked, taking the bait intentionally even as he looked intentionally disgusted. Luckily, it wasn't a particularly hard emotion to display when remembering the mad wizard who decided to waste his time hunting him.

"In a way, certainly," Dumbledore answered before stopping, proving that even on the edge of death, he was not willing to abandon his mysterious manner of speaking, even as Harry could feel the life draining off his body as his magic tried to fight with some kind of corruption spreading in his arm. Harry didn't need to see his arm —which was hidden behind a thick wrapping— to feel the disgusting power of a dark curse invading his body.

Harry said nothing, waiting for him to continue, focused on suppressing the sensation of frustration that filled his being. Even on his deathbed, Dumbledore was still playing with him.

"Have I ever told you, why Voldemort tried to kill you all those years ago?" Dumbledore asked.

"No, professor," Harry answered, barely biting a scathing reply about forgetting it because it wasn't that important. "You haven't told me?"

"There was a prophecy…" he started, before spending the next ten minutes giving a detailed story of how Teleawney had delivered a weirdly-worded prophecy that was delivered in Hog's Head, heard by a passerby to be delivered by Voldemort, making him hunt his family.

Many weird details jumped to him in that story, but Harry knew Dumbledore enough to trying to poke those points would yield nothing. Dumbledore would not tell a single thing that he didn't want to, and while Harry was proud of his mind arts, he certainly didn't trust them enough to actually peek into Dumbledore's mind.

There was a reason Dumbledore was known as the greatest wizard alive, and Harry had no intention of testing that reason. Instead, he silently listened as Dumbledore explained how he was destined to fight against Voldemort with an increasing frown.

Honestly, the weird magical obligation to fight against him wasn't really shocking to Harry. After all, since he was a little kid, fighting against Voldemort had been a fixture of his life, and with the single-minded focus of the dark wizard was displaying, he had no illusion of it stopping halfway.

No, what annoyed him was the numerous subtle references Dumbledore had made to self-sacrifice during the discussion, like his death was somehow inevitable in the process, and not the kind that was obvious because he was just a young man going against a scary wizard. For some reason, Harry could feel that Dumbledore's conviction about its inevitability. Maybe he had convinced that after his death, there was no way the ministry could defend against Voldemort.

But, as he watched Dumbledore slowly fade into sleep he wouldn't wake up, he couldn't help but think it was something else…