The shallow metal basin cast a mottled silvery-grey light on the smooth walls around him that faded to blue at the furthest corners of the tiny cell-like compartment. It often gave the heavily scarred auror the impression he was sitting underwater, but Moody barely saw it. If there was one spot in the entire country better protected than his home or office it was where he was, and now he could finally let himself take a moment to think things through.
'You'll want to look into that, discreetly, ' Lichfield had said.
Alastor thought he had readied himself for all the possibilities, but that had been before he dove into the memory. He had expected to see another facet of his case against Dumbledore, some sort of character assassination, as if his old friend had any character left to kill. How could you defend someone, even in your own head, when everything makes you realize just how little you actually knew about them?
He hadn't ruled out seeing something to show Albus had knowingly sanctioned the mistreatment the boy suffered at his relatives' hands but Alastor had never expected the retirement-killing scene which played out before him. It wasn't the final nail in Dumbledore's coffin, the crucial bit of evidence to show he had intended to abandon the boy the entire time, but it did give his reasons for doing so a slightly more positive interpretation: for the boy's own good.
He knew; Dumbledore knew Voldemort wasn't dead, but how long he knew Alastor couldn't say. If he had known - or at least suspected - the entire time then hiding the boy away somewhere no one in their world would look would've been a very prudent idea. Sticking him with those relatives would've given things a chance to die down, for full criminal inquiries to take place, and for as many Death Eaters to be rounded up and thrown into Azkaban as possible.
That rationale wouldn't survive long though, not beyond the first few months, at most. It certainly wasn't enough to keep him there for more than ten years; not with muggles like them. A few days, a week or two at most, then you take the kid, change his hair, change his eyes, change his name, hide the scar, and give him to a family you can trust to raise him as their own. Nymphadora and her family were the right sort, and distant relatives besides.
But if Albus hadn't known, if you gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he only learned the mad man survived when looking into the Defense professor's death two months gone, then why had he stuck the boy with those people for so long in the first place? Was it really just to steal the kid's money? And even if it was, then why hadn't he reached out to him with this information yet and leave that bit out? Why hadn't Albus sought him out, reformed the Order of the Phoenix and had him start recruiting members within the Auror Office?
All of the answers Alastor came up with troubled him greatly. Either Albus didn't think there was a problem, he didn't trust him, or he was waiting for something to happen. But what was the man waiting for, for Voldemort to return to a flesh-and-blood body? For him to kill the boy so he could use him as a convenient symbol to rally the country around? Or was he mad enough to think the child could take him on himself?
He and Albus hadn't seen eye-to-eye on everything back then but at least the man had given a rationale for his positions, flawed as they were. For a man as smart and proud as Albus he wouldn't like being proven wrong, and every time you turned around you saw signs he had been wrong time and again these last ten years. Being generous with Dumbledore's motivations still left him in a very petty state. Pouting in his lofty high office and stubbornly refusing to admit the truth was hardly the way for the most revered statesman in the country to start countering the looming threat of Voldemort.
The Order had been prohibited from using lethal means of taking down Death Eaters for purely political reasons during the war. If they used lethal force to kill their enemies, while they might remove some from the battlefield permanently, it might provoke others to join the pureblood cause or to lend them political support. And if they couldn't show themselves to be different than the Death Eaters - and some might say better - then how could the Order gain the support they'd need to sway the Ministry to their side?
There had been another baffling reason Dumbledore had given to him in private once the Ministry had finally entered the fight and passed measures giving aurors the power to kill rather than capture.
'The wizarding world is a beautiful and delicate thing, ' Albus had said. 'Any slight change, some hint of compassion, might be enough to give those who fight against us pause to consider the weight of their actions. Who are we to deny them that chance at redemption?'
His response had been terse. 'We're the ones those assholes are trying to kill. '
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