Albus Dumbledore did not often hate the quiet.
Tonight, it pressed on his ears.
The portraits in his office slept, or feigned sleep. Fawkes was a warm weight of gold and scarlet on his perch, head tucked beneath a wing. The silver instruments on the side tables ticked and whirred and puffed in their usual soft chorus, a mechanical lullaby he normally found soothing.
He signed his name at the bottom of yet another form—permission for experimental warding on the third-floor corridor, Committee for Magical Education approval requested—and let the quill hover for a moment above the parchment.
A faint chiming sounded to his left.
Albus's head snapped up.
Along the far wall, above a narrow shelf, three items glowed with a gentle, steady light: a slender glass column filled with pale blue mist, a silver disc etched with runes and a single moving hand, and a framed parchment that updated itself in neat, tiny writing.
The instruments he had made—personally, secretly—to track one very specific child.
Harry James Potter.
The chime came from the glass column. Its mist had darkened, turning from its usual soft blue to an uneasy, swirling green. Gold sparks popped in its depths like distant lightning.
Albus set his quill down carefully and rose, joints protesting. Fawkes lifted his head, dark eyes gleaming as he watched.
"That is…unusual," Albus murmured, crossing the room.
The column measured magical stability and physical health in one simple scale. Clear blue for well, grey for ill, black for death, crimson for immediate danger. It had been a solid, unremarkable blue for seven years, with only the occasional faint swirl when accidental magic flared.
Now it flickered.
The mist pulsed blue–green–blue–green in quick succession, as if it couldn't decide what it ought to be. Gold sparks crackled and jumped, striking the glass and sinking with a hiss.
"Hmm."
He checked the silver disc next.
Its single black hand pointed to one of several etched words: ASLEEP, AWAKE, INJURED, UNCONSCIOUS, UNKNOWN. Around the edge of the disc, tiny symbols represented various possible causes—mundane illness, magical illness, hex, curse, shock.
The hand twitched.
It jerked from ASLEEP to INJURED, then back, then to UNKNOWN in less than a second. A sliver of red light burned briefly along the rim, then snapped off as if bitten.
"Impossible," Albus said under his breath.
He leaned in, muttering a diagnostic charm. The runes glowed obligingly, reporting no flaws in the enchantments. The connection to the blood ward anchor at Privet Drive was intact. Harry's magical signature, faint but distinct, was present.
"Then why," Albus murmured, "are you undecided, my boy?"
He turned to the parchment.
Across the top, in his own handwriting, were the words:
Potter, Harry James – Guardian Household & Condition Log
Below, neat lines of ink recorded data in a steady trickle, time-stamped and tagged by magic.
Age 1–7: Location – 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.Blood wards stable. Basic health within acceptable Muggle range. Magical core dormant/asleep.
He had told himself, many times, that those words meant Harry was safe. Not happy—perhaps that was too much to expect—but safe. Fed, housed, unremarkable enough not to draw unwanted attention before he came to Hogwarts.
His eyes slid down to the most recent lines.
07:12 – Subject woke. Ward stability: normal. Condition: physical fatigue, minor pain (old). Magical core: dormant.07:31 – Spike in heart rate. Adrenal response elevated. Condition: stressed.07:33 – Magical disturbance (local). Accidental magic suspected. Ward stability: flutter.
Then, the quill that wrote the log began to move on its own, ink scratching furiously across the parchment.
07:34 – Condition: critical. Magical core: awakening.07:34 – Condition: stable. Magical core: dormant/asleep.07:34 – Condition: critical. Magical core: unknown.
The words flickered as he watched, appearing and then being struck through, rewritten, overwritten again, so fast they blurred. The parchment's surface shimmered, like heat rising from stone.
Albus felt the hair on his arms stand up.
Fawkes gave a soft, uneasy trill behind him.
The glass column's chime became a frantic ringing, the mist inside now a whirlpool of blue and green and streaks of harsh white.
"What are you doing, Harry?" Albus whispered.
He reached for the column, fingers hovering over the smooth glass just short of touching. The magic in it strained like a tether pulled too tight.
Then the world tilted.
A tug yanked at Albus's magical senses, as if someone had grabbed hold of the line that connected his monitoring charms to the wards at Privet Drive and given it a furious, wrenching twist.
He'd felt that sort of thing before—when Voldemort's Killing Curse had rebounded, tearing the Dark Lord's soul and annihilating half his protections in a burst of wild magic. This was smaller, more distant, but the quality of it—
Raw. Unfiltered. Uncontrolled.
His instruments reacted as if struck by a storm.
The glass column flared blinding white. The silver disc spun madly, its hand whirling round and round. The parchment crinkled, its edges curling under an invisible heat.
Albus shielded his eyes just as the column shattered from within.
Light exploded outward—not the sickly green of a curse, nor the golden wash of a Patronus, but a hard, white brilliance that filled the office in a rushing wave. It wasn't a spell he recognized; it wasn't a spell at all.
It felt like someone tearing down a curtain.
Albus staggered back, arm thrown up to protect his face. Fawkes cried out, wings spreading wide as motes of the light hit his feathers and slid off like rain.
The portraits around the walls jolted awake, squawking and shouting as the wave of radiance washed through their frames.
"What in Merlin's name—?"
"Headmaster, your instruments—!"
The light did not burn.
It washed through him, and for a moment he felt the faintest echo of whatever it was tangled with: a young, wild magic surging in pain and fury, breaking something foul apart from the inside.
Then it was gone.
Silence crashed back down.
Albus blinked away afterimages. The glass column stood whole again on its shelf, but its mist was entirely changed—no longer blue, green, or any color he'd assigned it. It was clear now, but shot through with fine golden threads that moved of their own accord, knitting and unknitting in restless patterns.
The silver disc lay on the floor, knocked from its bracket. Its hand had snapped clean off.
The parchment—
He looked and felt his stomach drop.
The neat log had been overwritten.
Where there had been tidy entries, there were now layers of ink, as if the quill had gone mad. Words crowded on top of each other, fighting for space.
He took a step closer.
The top half still listed the essentials: name, location, blood wards. But underneath, new lines had been scrawled in rough, urgent strokes that looked nothing like his careful script.
Recalibration in process. Removing obfuscation.
Albus's mouth went dry.
"I did not program that," he said softly.
More lines formed.
Subject: Potter, Harry James. True condition – compiling…
The parchment quivered.
Then the ink bled outward, rising from the page like smoke. It curled and thickened, shaping itself into flickering images in the air above his desk.
He saw a cupboard door. Tiny, grimy fingers gripping the edge as it closed from the outside. Darkness.
He saw a much smaller Harry, no more than three, curled on a thin mattress on the floor of that cupboard, clutching a broken toy soldier with no head. His knees were drawn up, his too-thin legs peppered with fading bruises.
Another image. Petunia, pinched and furious, yanking a plate away from a small hand.
"No meals for freaks who ruin my kitchen," the echo of her voice carried.
On the parchment, words wrote themselves in jagged lines:
Age 3: weight – below expected Muggle norm. Multiple contusions. Fractured radius (unhealed by Muggle means; magically sealed, misaligned).
Albus felt something in his chest twist.
"Stop," he rasped, even as he stared.
The visions did not stop.
Vernon's shadow, looming in the cupboard doorway. The belt in his hand. Harry's flinch, practiced and silent.
Age 5: repeated punishment. Old injuries aggravated. Magical core suppressing instinctive defenses to preserve host.
The images sped up, overlapping:
Harry weeding gardens in too-big clothes while Dudley watched cartoons.Harry scrubbing floors while Petunia and Vernon sat down to a full roast.Harry huddled in the dark, listening to footsteps above and trying not to cough.
With each scene, new writing slashed across the parchment.
Malnutrition: chronic. Sleep deprivation: chronic. Emotional harm: severe.
Albus's hands curled into fists.
"I placed him there to be safe," he whispered. His voice sounded thin and old to his own ears. "Lily's blood—her sister…they were to protect him, not—"
He cut himself off. Justification tasted like ash.
His eyes stung.
For years, he had read "basic health within acceptable range" and let that be enough. He had trusted the smoothing algorithms he'd woven into the tracking spells—charms that rounded off minor fluctuations, that reported an average instead of every bruise, every fever, every slight.
He had chosen not to look deeper. He'd told himself that it would interfere too much, that watching every moment of the boy's life would be a violation, that it was kinder—for both of them—to trust that Muggle normalcy would be less dangerous than fame.
And now some external force—Harry's own awakening magic, he guessed, with a hollow certainty—had ripped those blinders away.
The parchment shuddered.
The airborne ink flared once more, showing him one last scene: Harry in the kitchen just minutes ago, small and stiff, hands dripping dishwater while Vernon unthreaded his belt, eyes cold.
Then the image fractured in a burst of unseen force and vanished.
A final line burned itself into the page.
Current state: magical core – violently awakened. Foreign soul fragment: destroyed. Physical condition: severe magical exhaustion, acute blood loss (cranial laceration), compounded by long-term neglect and abuse. Location: 4 Privet Drive – structural integrity: compromised. Event: catastrophic magical discharge.
Albus stared at the words foreign soul fragment: destroyed until they blurred.
Voldemort.
He had suspected. He had known there was something in that scar. A tether, a mark, some remnant of the fiend he'd spent half a lifetime fighting. He had planned to address it when Harry was older, stronger, better prepared.
Harry, apparently, had not waited.
Anger surged through him—not cold, calculated anger, but something he hadn't allowed himself to feel for a very long time. It was not directed at Harry, nor even primarily at Voldemort.
It was aimed squarely at himself.
At his arrogance in thinking he could place a child in a house and check on him through numbers on a page and call that care.
At the Dursleys, for daring to take Lily's gift—her son—and turn him into…this.
Fawkes let out a low, keening trill, the sound thick with distress. The phoenix spread his wings and hopped closer along the perch, feathers puffed.
Albus closed his eyes for one brief, steadying breath.
No more quills. No more parchment.
Action.
"Fawkes," he said, voice quiet but iron-hard. "Take me to him."
The phoenix did not hesitate.
In one powerful wingbeat, Fawkes launched himself from the perch, soaring across the room. He flared, mid-air, into an inferno of golden flame.
Albus stepped forward into the fire.
The world folded.
For an instant, there was nothing but light and heat and the pure, fierce magic of a phoenix's travel. Then the flames vanished, and the smell of parchment and lemon drops was replaced by smoke, dust, and the faint, sharp tang of electricity.
He stood at the edge of a crowd of Muggles on a neat suburban street.
Little Whinging, Surrey.
Number four Privet Drive was gone.
In its place yawned a raw crater of shattered brick and twisted metal, ringed by splintered wood and the skeletal remains of what had been walls. The neighboring houses bore the scars—windows shattered, tiles shed, curtains flapping through broken panes. A car alarm wailed shrilly, unanswered.
People clustered in dressing gowns and hastily thrown-on clothes, some crying, some shouting, all staring.
"Did you see—?"
"—just blew up! I swear, it just—"
"—gas leak, must be—"
No, Albus thought grimly, taking in the faint shimmer that still hung in the air above the crater, the way certain pieces of debris had landed in patterns no mundane explosion would produce. Not gas.
Magic.
Wild, unshaped, still crackling in the very stones of the foundations.
He felt Fawkes settle heavily on his shoulder, the phoenix's talons careful but urgent. The bird's golden eyes were wide, fixed on the ruins.
Albus's own gaze searched the wreckage, heart thudding with a mixture of fear and something almost like hope.
Harry had done this.
Harry had destroyed a piece of Voldemort's soul.
Harry was—had to be—somewhere in that ruin.
"Stay calm," he whispered, more to himself than to the panicking Muggles around him. His fingers tightened around his wand inside his sleeve. "I am coming, my boy."
He stepped forward, into the chaos.