What if Harry Potter Saved Dumbledore

Darth Theorist:    / @darththeorist   Three Eyed Theorist:    / @threeeyedtheorist   Discord:   / discord   Voice Acting & Narration: Steven Waters ⁨@bobablackfly602⁩ Writing: Myself, @nicholasmartin6526, @khuz377 , @WatashiNoKuraiTenshi, and @PathofDragonsRadio The summer after his fifth year is the worst of Harry's life. Sirius is dead, lost through the veil in the Ministry only weeks before, and Harry sits in his room at Privet Drive with the grief pressing on him like a stone. Then, one evening, Albus Dumbledore knocks on the door of number four. He has come to collect Harry early. At the end of the last year he made the boy a promise, that he would stop keeping secrets from him, and tonight he means to fulfil that promise. Dumbledore tells Harry there are two errands ahead of them. The first is simple. They will visit an old colleague and try to coax him back to teach at Hogwarts. The second is something Dumbledore has never asked of anyone before. He has spent years hunting the hidden pieces of Voldemort's power, and he has traced one of them to a ruined shack on the Yorkshire moors. It once belonged to the Gaunt family, an ancient line of wizards descended from Salazar Slytherin himself. The Gaunts were Parselmouths, snake-speakers, and Dumbledore believes some of the protections on the shack will answer to nothing but Parseltongue. He needs a snake-speaker he can trust, and there is only one in the world he would bring. Harry agrees to come. They travel together to the moors. The shack waits, half collapsed, at the end of a tangle of dead nettles, its single door nailed shut with the dried skeleton of a snake. Harry steps up to the threshold and hisses the open sound at the bone, and the ward parts with a shudder. Inside, the air is thick with old dark magic. Dumbledore works through the curses laid over the floorboards for a long hour, peeling them back one at a time with slow, careful sweeps of his wand. At last a loose plank lifts free. Beneath it sits a small golden box, and inside the box rests a heavy ring set with a cracked black stone. Dumbledore lifts the ring with a fold of cloth and goes very still. His eyes fix on the black stone at its centre. Something behind his face changes, softens, opens, as if he is looking at a thing he has wanted his whole life and never let himself want aloud. The cloth slips in his fingers. His bare hand turns the ring toward his own, and he begins, slowly, to move it onto his finger. The stone is more than a Horcrux. A second curse is woven into it, a compulsion that reaches into the deepest wish of whoever holds it, and it has found the one longing even Albus Dumbledore has never been able to bury. He does not see the shack any more. He sees the dead he has loved. Harry sees the look on his face, and something in it terrifies him. He drops everything in his hands and lunges, catching Dumbledore's wrist with both of his own and forcing it back with all his weight. The old man is far stronger than he looks, and for a moment they strain against each other in the dark. Then the ring slips loose and falls to the floorboards with a small dead sound. It never touches Dumbledore's skin. Dumbledore comes back to himself slowly, shaking, his breath ragged in the silence. He looks down at the ring on the floor, then up at the boy still gripping his wrist. Dumbledore (quiet): "You have just done a great service for me, Harry." Harry (Sixteen, shaken): "I didn't think. I just saw your face change and grabbed you. What was that thing showing you?" Dumbledore (quiet): "Old ghosts. Old mistakes. The one wish I have never been strong enough to put down." Harry (Sixteen, shaken): "Then it nearly used that to kill you." Dumbledore (quiet): "It did. And I will explain all of it. Everything. You have earned that much and far more." They carry the ring back to Hogwarts wrapped in many folds of cloth, and neither of them touches it again. That evening, in his office, Dumbledore lays it on the stone floor and brings the Sword of Gryffindor down through the gold band. The Horcrux dies with a scream and a curl of smoke. The curse never reaches him. The ring is gone, but it leaves a harder problem behind it. That same week, Snape comes to the office after dark, and the door seals itself behind him. There is a thing the two of them have never spoken aloud, and it can wait no longer. Snape (low): "There is a Vow you do not know about. I swore it to Narcissa Malfoy this summer, in front of her sister.