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The Daring Win	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 8178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Eighteen—Past Murder, Present Pain
Dolores waited patiently until Sirius left for the Ministry. Then she went and confronted Lupin.
He had his own room at the top of the house now, because it was unrealistic for him to leave all the time when he spent meals with them and lectured Harry so often through the week. He still started a little when he opened the door and saw her. “Miss Umbridge,” he said, and stood back to bow her in.
Dolores deliberately didn’t look around when she went in. She knew she would see a mixture of her own furniture and Lupin’s old things, and the effect would be upsetting. She concentrated on looking him in the eye instead. “I want to know what Sirius went to the Ministry for this afternoon.”
Lupin didn’t blink. “I think he went to see Moody.”
Dolores paused, then smiled a little, accepting the check. She sat down on a chair that didn’t wobble too badly beneath her. “Perhaps I should ask you what that letter he got at breakfast the other day was about, then.”
“You would be better off asking Sirius about that.”
“Who would be better off?” Dolores watched Lupin out of the corner of her eye as he walked restlessly around the room, touching his dusty things as if he had never seen them before. Not as cool as he pretends. “Me? You? Sirius? Certainly not Harry.”
Lupin hunched his shoulders. “It had nothing to do with Harry.”
“I don’t think he would have rushed off like that if it had nothing to do with Harry. At the very least, it had to do with a matter of the Black inheritance, and that concerns Harry, since Sirius plans to leave everything to him.”
Lupin’s shoulders dropped again. “If you already know what the letter is about, why are you asking me?”
“I know what he told me the letter is about. I thought I might learn something else by talking with you.”
“Such as?”
“The truth.”
Lupin actually swayed. Swayed. Dolores had to wonder how he’d survived before he entered the sheltered environment of her house. “I don’t think I can help you,” he whispered, his eyes darting away from her while he licked his lips as if he had something delicious on them. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry you can’t help, or sorry that you can help and choose not to?”
Lupin’s gaze snapped back to her as if pulled, and then he immediately avoided her eyes again. “I—you don’t need to say that.”
“Perhaps not. If you will speak to me of your own free will.”
“I’m—late to my lesson with Harry.”
Dolores let Lupin bustle around picking up the books and maps and parchments that he considered indispensable to his class with Harry, and then stood up and got in the way with a leisurely motion when Lupin tried to leave the room. As she had thought would happen, Lupin froze in place, breathing harshly through his nose, rather than try to shove her aside.
“Please,” Lupin whispered.
“I wouldn’t have to do this if you and Sirius weren’t keeping secrets from me,” Dolores said reasonably. “Anything that touches on my custody of Harry, or the ways that I can keep him safe, impacts his future severely. I’d think that you would want to keep him safe, instead of me ignorant.”
Lupin gave a whimper and stared at her as if he had never heard anyone speak to him sternly. Dolores kept standing there. When he had first come to tutor Harry, he had been so thin that he’d looked as if a strong wind would knock him over. Now she wondered if his thinness had only been the outer sign of his inner weakness.
“Please, Miss Umbridge.”
“No, Mr. Lupin. I need to know what it was.”
Lupin shivered and finally set the books down. “When I was in Hogwarts,” he said, still trembling at the floor, “I did something that nearly got another student killed. Dumbledore covered it up for me. It was partially because I was a Gryffindor and this other student was a Slytherin, and, well, Albus has always been biased towards his own House.” He gave her another flickering glance.
Dolores fought not to curl her lip. She hoped that Harry would end up in Ravenclaw if it turned out that he wasn’t suited well for Slytherin—though, at the moment, she couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t be. Anything but a House that loudly proclaimed themselves to be above rivalry and revenge, then did things like this.
“It’s possible that I could still be arrested if that information were to come out.” Lupin swallowed in a way that made his throat bob. “For attempted murder. And yes, maybe it would make Dumbledore look bad for keeping it a secret, but it was privately handled between me and him and the Slytherin student. The former Slytherin is—not well-regarded. It would be essentially my word against Dumbledore’s, and there are still a lot of people who would believe him over me.”
Dolores nodded, lost in wonder at Dumbledore’s cunning for a moment. Well, and his audacity. “And he made a threat to Sirius to reveal this information?”
“Yes.” Lupin clenched his hand in his hair. “He went to meet with Moody because he thought that, maybe, he could persuade Moody to make Dumbledore keep quiet.”
“How?”
“Moody has been Dumbledore’s friend for a long time. He knows some things about him that aren’t—common knowledge. And he’s a respected Auror. His word would have more weight than mine or Sirius’s.”
“Blackmail against blackmail.” Dolores had to laugh. “Sirius is more practical than I ever thought he was.”
Lupin gave her a glance that was perilously close to being one of dislike. “Of course you would think that.”
“Why me?”
“You were a Slytherin.”
Dolores snorted. It was one thing to think constantly of Hogwarts Houses in relation to Harry, who hadn’t gone through the school yet. But it was another entirely for Lupin to think of them in relation to her. “When Sirius says something like that, I assume it was because he was in Azkaban. But what is your excuse? The same one you had for nearly murdering a Slytherin student when you were both teenagers?”
Lupin turned as pale as rice. He had to stagger sideways and sit down in a chair. “What—you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know that you’ve confessed to attempted murder, and this is something that means Dumbledore may be able to blackmail you.” Dolores turned in a slow half-circle, eyes locked on Lupin’s. “So tell me why I should trust you around the child I’m raising.”
Lupin gulped and raked his thin brown hair so that it stood up almost like Harry’s. “It was a mistake. I would never do something like that now.”
“Not even around a Slytherin?”
“Of course not.” Lupin’s face was taut with anguish that, frankly, Dolores didn’t understand. If this attempted murder was something he hadn’t wanted to do, or that he regretted, then he shouldn’t have done it. “For one thing, I acknowledge that you are—something good that has happened to Harry, if not the guardian I would have chosen for him.”
Dolores inclined her head graciously.
“For another, I’m not blind. Sirius still doubts it, but—even apart from the way you’re raising him, there’re Slytherin traits in Harry. That’s where he’ll end up unless he changes drastically in the next four years.”
“Very good, Lupin,” Dolores said softly. “So. Do you think Sirius’s blackmail, Moody’s blackmail, will work?”
“It should. If Moody agrees to help. I don’t know if he will. Sirius hasn’t spoken to him at all in the past seven years, of course. And even though he’s been declared innocent now, Moody has those bloody Auror instincts. He tends to distrust people who have got into trouble once.”
“Then I won’t worry about it for now.” Dolores trailed her hand down the railing of a chair that was, frankly, too heavy and dark to fit with the rest of the room. Then again, it was Lupin’s problem if he wanted to show off his lack of taste for every visitor he had. “But if Dumbledore threatens Harry again, I will take care of it.”
“How? You don’t have the blackmail on Dumbledore that Moody does, and I know you’ve quarreled with Lucius Malfoy. He’s the only one who could convincingly argue with Dumbledore now.”
Dolores smiled a little. “How limited your knowledge of politics is, Mr. Lupin,” she said, and opened the door, and slipped downstairs.
*
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
Dolores nodded encouragingly to Harry. He took more notes during her lessons on recent wizarding history than he did when he was in Lupin’s lessons, and talked less. All questions were to be encouraged. “What is that?”
“How did everyone get to know what happened to me that night?” Harry pulled his fringe up with a yank that made Dolores look at him chidingly. But Harry didn’t recognize the glance, instead fuming privately along. “My scar, and how I supposedly defeated Voldemort, and the rest of it. How?”
“Some of it came out around the time of Sirius’s arrest, I imagine.” Dolores paused and thought back to her memories of the night after that Halloween one. “But you are right, before that was the news that you were the Boy-Who-Lived. I don’t know who first called you that. But I have only one good guess who would have told other people about the shape of your scar and the supposed destruction of You-Know-Who.”
Harry’s eyes darkened. “Dumbledore.”
“He was one of the first on the scene after the death of your parents and the destruction of the house,” said Dolores delicately. “That much I discovered when looking up the records of why Sirius never had a trial.”
“I hate him.”
Dolores came over and crouched down in front of Harry at the small desk he used in the schoolroom. Harry stared at her. Dolores gently stroked his hair and told him, “It’s all right to dislike him all you want. But hating him is dangerous without the power to strike back at him. And you don’t have that right now.”
“I thought you said I had that power because of my name. And we drove him away when he came and tried to tell you you weren’t doing a good job as my guardian.”
“That is rather different,” Dolores said. Perhaps she could see his faith in her as a touching thing rather than a sign of weakness. Yes, the more she thought about it, the more she decided she could. “We managed to keep him from taking control of you again, yes. But that is not the same as really driving him away and making him give up. You sound like you want to do that.”
“I only said I hated him.”
“But when you hate someone, you have to be prepared to go against them with all your heart. Are you ready to do that yet?”
Harry paused, his hand twitching a little. He stared at Dolores, and then at her hands, as if they would explain something. “You said that you hate him.”
“I hate what he stands for more than I hate him,” Dolores admitted with a small shrug. “He’s interfered with the passage of completely relevant and mild legislation in the Wizengamot because it didn’t suit his ideals. Mostly having to do with introducing Muggleborns to the wizarding world early.”
“But that sounds like a…good thing.”
“Yes, but it would shorten the time they spend with their Muggle family without a sense of estrangement between them. Dumbledore, as I believe you have noticed, is a huge proponent of blood family. He was unwilling to, as he said, ‘increase their sense of strangeness without cause.’” Dolores examined her nails for a moment, but also watched Harry closely out of the corner of her eye. What she had said, including Dumbledore’s objection to the legislation, was completely true.
But how Harry reacted to it would be a combination of his own feelings and how well Dolores had explained the situation.
“So he thinks that there’s always going to be a difference between a Muggleborn and their family once they learn about magic,” Harry summarized, his face blank.
Dolores nodded.
“Then why—why did he have so much trouble believing me when I told him about the way the Dursleys treated me?”
Dolores reached out and gently laid a hand on the back of Harry’s neck. He was close to shouting, and that was never a good role for anyone, but worse for a future leader of the wizarding world. “Likely because he knew the Dursleys knew about magic already. He thought you wouldn’t ever suffer that estrangement.”
“And that was more important to him than checking on me. Or checking that they hadn’t started hating magic before he placed me there.”
Dolores shook her head. “I don’t think it would ever have occurred to him that they could have started hating magic. To him, magic is a wondrous thing except when it’s used to hurt Muggles. They might have envied you—he could understand that—or feared you. But not magic itself. And not hatred.”
Harry was silent for a second, his eyes on the floor. Dolores waited. It wouldn’t be long until he spoke, and a lot depended on the question he would ask next.
To her surprise, though, it wasn’t one of the questions on her long list of possible ones. He tilted his head back and stared her fiercely in the face. “You said I shouldn’t hate Dumbledore because hating someone means you have to be prepared to go against them with all your heart. Do you think the Dursleys—hated me that way?”
Dolores blinked, but the answer was obvious, and true beyond any reach of manipulation, like the facts about the legislation that Dumbledore had opposed. “Yes, I do.”
Harry nodded slowly. His fingers tapped on the table next to him. He stilled them before Dolores could reach over to do that for him. He breathed shallowly, but not in a way that would make him faint. So Dolores simply sat back and watched.
“I don’t want to hate anyone like that. But I think I might hate Dumbledore like that anyway.”
“Then you work long-term. You work yourself into a position where you can show everyone how stupid it is to only think of blood family all the time. You show everyone that you’re a family with me, and Sirius, and Mr. Lupin.” Dolores would probably never think of Lupin as part of the family, not with how weak he was, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t part of Harry’s.
“You think that will convince people?”
“Maybe not everyone will be able to see it. But you have the power of your name on your side, and the power of someone who was placed with abusive Muggles and is recovering nicely. You’re the living counterexample of everything Dumbledore wants to support or prove.”
Harry smiled a little. “Then I want to do that.”
“Be a living counterexample?”
“And learn what I need to. Do I need to learn about blood family and the Muggleborn children who are abused? And do I need to learn about law and history? Then let me do that.” Harry was staring at Dolores as if he thought she might stand in his way along with Dumbledore.
“All right,” said Dolores. “But it will take years longer and much more studying than you might be picturing right now.”
“I can do that. I know that I’m never going back to the Dursleys’ again, so the years don’t seem so long anymore.”
Dolores blinked, and then asked, “Were you looking forward to a certain age when you planned to leave them?”
Harry bobbed his head, his eyes glittering with fervor. “When I was eighteen, I was going to walk out the door and never look back. I didn’t care if I had to leave with the clothes on my back. I didn’t even care if I had to leave naked.”
And, of course, since he didn’t know about Hogwarts, he had no idea that salvation might be much closer than that, when he turned eleven…
Once again, Dolores was left in slight shock over what might have been, the way that Dumbledore’s love of blood family raising blood children would have interfered with Harry’s life if she’d left him there. Perhaps it would have been permissible for someone else, some Muggleborn with no fame, but this was Harry Potter.
“You’ll never have to leave like that here,” she said, and touched Harry’s shoulder.
Harry smiled at her, and his eyes shone with determination enough to drive him on to the heights of politics. “I know, Miss Dolores.”
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The Daring Win