Invictus [Tom Riddle / Tomione]

The Bitter Song of Albus

Albus Dumbledore sat in his office, nursing a splitting headache. For several hours he'd relived, examined, mourned, and poured over the memories the young Granger girl had given him so eagerly. He had not quite trusted her at first, but he'd learned early in life not to show distrust until it had been fully and heartily earned.

He found himself almost bewitched by the young woman's trust. In him , no less. He was quite fascinated by the girl's memories; only mildly so by the events of the future, and much more so by the emotional quality of her memories. This girl had held him in the highest regard, she and her two friends. This wasn't so abnormal in itself; he was quite used to the celebrity of being a wizard who singlehandedly brought down the dark wizard Grindelwald. By then, it seems, the events of the Global Wizarding War had been overshadowed, and he'd lived to see the rise of yet another dark lord. Would he ever be free of these twisted megalomaniacs? They seemed to be multiplying like rabbits.

Albus sighed.

No, the girl didn't seem to hold him in the same type of esteem as his colleagues. To her, he was not merely a famous duellist or a skilled wizard, but a hero of some sorts. A savior; some sort of symbolic figure of higher morality...

Goodness, embodied.

The Light, incarnate.

This frightened him. For he truly thought himself incapable of this kind of leadership. It was the sole reason he'd rejected the role of Minister for Magic, despite countless calls upon him to accept.

Fear overtook him, causing a thousand tiny goosebumps to raise on his arms.

He began to sweat as he stood and paced back and forth in his office.

The girl's appearance was dangerous, indeed.

For not only did he have to contend with another threat to the wizarding world at large, a rising dark lord who was already capable of seemingly impossible feats of magic...

But he held in his hands the fate of this young woman.

And she held in her thoughts, the future...

A disastrous temptation for Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.

She had said she hoped to change the future for the better.

Such was a temptation too great for Albus to conceive. But how could he live up to this young woman's standard for him?

He had always battled some terrible version of himself. Power was his greatest desire, and also, his greatest fear. His weakness . He was not the man this young woman imagined him to be.

But he desperately wanted to be.

He had always striven to think of the greater good. To put the world at large above himself and the few people he loved dearly.

It made him cold at times. It forced him to be rational.

For some reason only known by his future self, that green-eyed boy named Harry was sentenced to die. It infuriated him, not to know why . Not to see everything.

Who was this evil wizard? The dark void of ignorance threatened his very sanity.

And for this girl and her two friends, he felt only grief.

The grief of Mother Mary, sacrificing her son for the sake of the world.

Albus breathed heavily as he wiped at the sweat beading on his forehead.

Was he still alive, out there, in the future? He had not been able to see his fate clearly. Perhaps she had concealed it on purpose.

He paced, and he paced.

No .

He was not the hero of this story.

He would leave it to Miss Granger.

He stared at the vials. This girl had imagined him, unwittingly, as a kind of father figure.

Albus was disgusted with himself, with his own selfish desire to use her for her knowledge of the future. His own secret weapon. He had thought this from the very moment she opened her mouth.

But to see the pedestal upon which Hermione Granger had placed him left him feeling ashamed. Unworthy. Filthy.

Albus suddenly ached with resounding loneliness.

He felt it crawling up and out of him like a starving creature housed within his chest.

He collapsed, knees buckling as he sank low into his chair.

His head split. His chest ached. The weight of the world pressed in on him until he choked on the bile of despair.

With a wave of his wand, a photo appeared on his desk, which he'd kept hidden from sight for many years.

He gazed at the more youthful version of himself, his arm linked with a handsome young blonde man. The photo moved, and the two young men smiled at one another, then laughed in tandem as the photo was taken.

Albus dragged his eyes away from the frame to gaze blankly at the wand in his hand. Then, in a fit of something he would rather not acknowledge, he flung the wand violently across the room. It clattered against his bookshelf and fell to the floor.

He hung his head between his knees, and tragically, he wept.