Protection: The Sword and the Shield

Is This The Darkness

THIS IS THE FIRST CHAPTER OF BOOK 4 (YEAR 4)

...House of Dumbledore Offices, Wizengamot, Ministry of Magic, London

Justin Dumbledore held himself responsible. It had been he who had kept encouraging his father to escalate things with the Potter group. His father had spent the majority of his later years operating from the shadows, but Justin knew that his father was the greatest light lord the world had ever seen and thought that it would be better for him to act in the open rather than continue to try and pull strings from the darkness.

Justin believed in his father and believed that his father had earned the right to dictate the direction of the magical Britain. After all it had been him who saved it. The man had won in some of the greatest magical duels that had ever occurred. He had beaten back the Dark Lord Grindelwald and held the line against the Dark Lord Voldemort. If not for his father, Justin believed, the magical world would have fallen long ago.

The younger man had even witnessed his father's greatness firsthand. On the night his mother had died, Albus Dumbledore had arrived like an inferno and saved him from Voldemort personally. He had watched his father meet wands with the Dark Lord and send him running. The magics he had witnessed that night still brought awe and wonder to him. To Justin, his father had every right to steer the world and he believed it was time the world was reminded of that fact.

His eagerness to see his father standing victorious over the enemies of their family and the wizarding world had created a blind spot for him. Albus Dumbledore was a man of the previous generation. He had an outdated notion of how people would behave and react. Justin thought it was his responsibility to understand and prepare for the new powers in the wizarding world and he had been caught flat footed. He had failed his father.

If they were in the muggle world where decisions made about the welfare of an underage heir to a fortune were done by a group of people who normally operated in a cesspool of politics, money and governmental interference, then Albus Dumbledore would already be Harry Potter's guardian. All done "in the best interest of the child", of course.

But they were in the magical world. A world where magic had an opinion of its own and one that rarely could be manipulated. In addition, magical Britain was far closer to a monarchy than a republic and governmental interference in the business of noble families was near impossible. Not only did magic work against it but the culture of the people opposed such things as well.

For a short time, Albus Dumbledore had managed to do it anyway. If only on paper. But the system of favors and lax attentions he had cultivated to accomplish such things had almost completely collapsed with the re-emergence of the Prima Potentia. Now, getting guardianship of Harry Potter required the boy to voluntarily hand it to him and that required leverage.

Neither Dumbledore was surprised that the initial offer had been rejected. Threatening to put someone on trial was not real leverage. They needed to put Harry's "muggle" on trial. Justin believed that with his father's political control of the Judiciary that the trial alone would cause Potter to negotiate. Albus believed that "the boy" would force a verdict.

The problem was that they could not get the woman arrested. It was a flaw in the plan and was the failure that Justin blamed himself most for. Before the reforms, having someone arrested was the easiest thing in the world. The Auror force was not perfect and arresting someone was a relatively benign thing to do, since the courts and the MOP had the real power. In the days of Minister Fudge, having someone arrested for no reason was such a minor corruption that most did not even lie about it.

That was a thing of the past. The minister of magic had made it clear that such things would result in severe consequences if discovered. For the few "bad apples" that remained on the Auror force, it might have still been worth it, especially as with the "arrest" being organized by Albus Dumbledore. An officer may have felt protected doing the bidding of a powerful wizard like him.