Capítulo 28: Harry Potter : Chapter 28: Committed to Change II
By november there would already be heads looking forwards to the Winter Hols, while January was characterized by a sharp increase in the partecipation during lessons, which would stabilize only to be balanced by a furious study in sight of the end of year examinations, condition that was only exasperated for O.W.L. and N.E.W.T. students.
...
Albus smiled faintly at the empty corridoors, his eyes roaming through the windows over the school's Grounds, brimming with students that chose to study under the sun, trying to bleed off the tension with some easy games and casual use of magic.
Actions were easy to foretell, easy to prepare for, motivations, on the other hand, were not. He sighed while he walked the long corridors of Hogwarts, the dying sun of the afternoon slashing long cuts of warm light on the otherwise cold stone.
Be it winter or summer, some areas of the castle proved themselves singularly stubborn about following the reasonable temperatures of the environment.
Albus Wulfric Percival Brian Dumbledore had been a precocious child, a brilliant student, a bright scholar, a great professor, and generally speaking, a wizard that the world could scarcely believe existed, given his eclectic mind and the excellence that tended to follow any given direction that his curiosity offered him.
Big dreams, big head. The genius reproached himslef with the distracted habit that he had enforced every day on himself since the death of his sister.
Never again would he allow himself to fall to the temptation of power, never again would he allow himself to try and lead a movement to better the world, given the extraordinarly disastrous consequences of his last and thankfully only attempt.
Truly, falibility wasn't something he had ever considered before Ariana's demise. It wasn't like failure ever happened to him. Oh, sure, there had been difficulties, even pitfalls, in his studies and projects, but those had merely been the interesting aspects that only stoked his curiosity more and more.
The same curiosity that brought him to look around for the Hallows, that brought him to join hands with Gellert for the first time, that pushed him and raised his ambition so much that he actually managed to study both under and as an equal of Flamel himself, eventually discovering how to coerce dragon's blood in many uses beyond the ones generally accepted.
Unbound curiosity and foolish pride, how ill had they served him.
Oh, how he despised his boundless mind. Wouldn't it have been better for everyone, if he had been just another Dumbledore? Surely, it would have been better for Ariana.
The powerful wizard sighed as he crossed the corridors of Hogwarts, smiling gently at the recently returned students that roamed the castle, his quiet turmoil hidden deep under countless other thoughts that spanned from his lessons to his years since he realized that his quest for power could only bring ruin to all.
Given his undeniable skill, in more or less whatever field he choose, he had to consider carefully, even gifted as he was with an extraordinary brain, each and every course of action.
Given the consequences of his actions back when he was just out of Hogwarts, he simply couldn't bring himself to lead people. There was just... no. He could not.
Given the magnitude of his influence as a scholar, and the span of friendships he had somehow grown over the years, finding bright and good people that he could only admire, were he to take action, he would drag the whole of Magical Britain to war.
Naturally, he understood that war wasn't decided by individuals, but by great tactics and minimal deploy of forces, just enough to stop the enemy, but even so... he couldn't.
Oh, Gellert was a peerless wizard, there was no doubt that in battle he could take on dozens of mages without risking himself, but he was only a man, and the conflict that he had initiated, exacerbated by the recent explosion of WWII among the muggle population, spanned in all of the magical world.
It was an ideologic battle that Gellert couldn't win until his movement took over enough members of the ICW.
Wizards were not prone to large scale conflicts. Oh, there were countless bloody feuds, among families and clans, and even frosty relationships between countries, but that was born by the natural tendence of wizardkind to hoard knowledge, not from outright malice.
The Statute had worked for a long count of years, and challenging what amounted to the greatest legal conquest of wizardking wasn't something that could ever gain enough traction to move the masses through simple rethoric.
The Statute had been the last 'nail in the coffin', so to speak, that forced wizardkind to band together.
People were comfortable in their routine. A shift of the paradigm so vast and outlandish as the one proposed by Gellert could be something appreciated around a pint in a tavern, as a whimsical dream, but not something that wizards would normally risk their lives for.
After all, hiding from the muggles was infinitely easier than actually attempting to take them over. What would be the point? Yeah, wizardkind could then use magic openly... but for the most part, they already did. Wizards and witches spent most of their time in magical settlements, following their careers and forging ahead their lives much like any muggle did.
Few outlandish personas researched out int the wild this or that, walking sections of the jungle that were cordoned off from muggles, or in hidden towers that granted both privacy from the no-mag, as they were called by the MACUSA, and safety from snoopy colleagues.
And yet, between Gellert's charisma and the natural propensity of wizardkind to follow powerful mages, his old companion's side had grown considerably in the past decade, partially feeding off the situation in the muggle world.
Albus sighed as he took yet another turn, his mind processing his thoughts faster than most could follow, idly wondering about the whys and the hows that had birthed the current climate worldwide.
Did he dare seek out a confrontation with his old companion? No, he couldn't, victory or failure would nevertheless bring War to Britain, and he simply couldn't bring himself to make that step. Could he nudge things so that many people would be saved? Yes, the young Scamander was a good example about how he could do so.
The Transfiguration Professor sighed to himself once more as he squarely refused the ever-so-tempting option of trying to take the lead. It would be for the good of many, but the Greater Good was something that he now saw as the poisoned snake it was. He couldn't. I must not.
Teaching was all he could do. It was a genuinely good thing, an innocent thing, one that allowed him to stay away from the so sickly sweet power that awaited him beyond Hogwart's walls. Teaching allowed him to hope.
To have faith in the next generations, and to try and bring that hope and faith out in those rare souls that were receptive to it even in their teens.
Teaching also allowed him to spot other students like himself or Gellert had once been. Timely intervention could save countless people after all, and steering those particular students away from the pitfalls that had costed him Ariana, even if only by making sure they knew he was keeping an eye on them: that too was a good action.
And one that allowed him to feel like he was doing his part to help without putting others at risk.
That line of self-reflection brought him to think of one Tom Riddle, and the confusing presence in his life of one Rubeus Hagrid. Far too scatterbrained and generally obsessed with magic, he was an element that brought a positive note, at least in Albus' opinion, into young Riddle's life.
The general carelessness about rules would have squarely placed him in Gryffindor, his tendence towards study into Ravenclaw.
Yet, he ended up in Slytherin, and by his quickly becoming one of Horace favourites, despite his young age, it was abvious that he possessed a cunning mind, while his general temperament made him well suited to break off the walls that Tom Riddle had built around himself.
Or at least to barrel through them ignoring Riddle's protests.
Truly, it was a good thing that Tom had been forced to accept the company of Rubeus, who was so singularly talented in potions that he managed to keep his interactions with Riddle engaging, so wild in his approach to any given rule that it kept the young parselmouth from growing bored.
Oh, Albus was keeping an eye on Rubeus, that was for sure, it was his job as an educator, and while he would have preferred to see the younger Slytherin more inclined to the regular kind of friendships that Albus had observed during the years, he couldn't truly complain.
Mr. Hagrid was, with the exceptions he occasionally made for singularly talented other students, extremely withdrawn.
There was no malice to it, no hidden ploy to come out on top, simply... the unusually tall wizard did not care. The disinterest was concerning in a way, but he had proved himself more than capable of interacting with his peers, even if he tended to be either curt or dismissive.
The singularly tall student had taken the habit of disappearing for hours on end during the weekends, suspiciously matching the sortings into Hogsmeade of Tom Riddle, but since Hagrid hadn't been seen into the village, there had been no reason to investigate, even if he tended to appear to class with heavy bags under his eyes more often than not.
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