Dumbledore had to chuckle a little as the mist rose in front of him. The Omnicator, intended as a device to finally predict the weather reliably, had been a useful basis for something a little more groundbreaker after Voldemort returned to his body.
He had been sick to his stomach the first time he’d tried using the greatly modified Omnicator to look several years into the future. Would he see the Dark Lord ruling over magical Britain? But no, that didn’t appear to be the case. Which meant that if everything went as planned, it would be ok. He avoided the details though, no man needed to know that much, and carefully avoided anything that could show if he was alive or dead. Dumbledore had no intention of counting the days until his death.
He had almost destroyed the Omnicator, but instead settled for never revealing its secrets to the outside world. This was a power beyond Seers, a power neither wizard nor mankind had ever possessed before. It couldn’t reach Tom, but Dumbledore was unwilling to destroy his creation either.
For weeks, he had pulled the Omnicator out of its warded box every day and contemplated turning its many knobs and dials once more. He wanted to know how many of his children would survive. Dumbledore had long considered any boy or girl who walked the halls of Hogwarts to be his child, it’s why he had so much difficulty fighting any of them. Every day, he would decide that knowledge of who died would be too painful.
But one day he decided he absolutely had to know if he’d fail Harry Potter. To his relief, instead of a corpse, he saw Harry sitting on a couch with his arm around a familiar blonde. Wedding bands glinted on both their hands.
Everyone in Hogwarts knew that Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy hated each other. And everyone knew that Harry Potter and Daphne Greengrass hated each other even more. Daphne was the daughter of prominent purebloods, and afflicted with the same attitudes towards half-bloods that Dumbledore had tried unsuccessfully to teach out of her parents. Harry was afflicted with the same attitude towards Slytherins that Dumbledore was always trying unsuccessfully to teach out of the other three Houses.
Much of the mutual hate stemmed from childish insults and squabbles. If Dumbledore recalled correctly, the first week of school, Harry had accidentally stumbled into Daphne, knocking her books out of her arms. The next day, Daphne had accidentally stepped on Harry’s robes as he walked by. At least, both maintained they were accidents. Dumbledore was inclined to wonder. The situation escalated each year.
The previous year, Daphne had quite loudly declared on multiple occasions she was sure Harry was going to die before each Task, to the point where Dumbledore was forced to tell Severus to give her detentions. After surviving the first and second Tasks, Harry had pointed to Daphne in the crowd and flipped her off. He always seemed to know where she was. Now that he thought about it, whenever Harry was caught she always seemed to be around.
Dumbledore looked at the calendar and smiled. The next term started in only a few weeks. With all the crises piling up in his life, some classic teenage romance would be a welcome and entertaining distraction. He sucked on a lemon pop and leaned back. He knew his lecturing about eliminating predetermined notions towards Slytherins would pay off eventually.