I knew she preferred me over the others. She thought that If She did it they would be safe forever. I can’t blame her, she thinks of them as her children.
But I can’t live like this. Staying at this school and having everyone stare at me with awe. I wanted to become a professor to help. This isn’t that. It didn’t even happen after I “proved my worth” or something. She just decided that my intuition and feelings made me the best candidate.
I’ve never been able to talk to her. I honestly don’t know where those rumours came from. She just sends me vague feelings and gets upset when I can’t tell what she wants me to do.
She isn't human. She isn’t capable of having emotions. Sure, She can show them, but after you know her for enough time, it just looks like pale attemptions at trying to manipulate you. It gets to be insulting.
As far as I know I’m the only one She has taken from their life. I had to put space between me and my remaining family, I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through that.
My hair has stayed the same vibrant red, my skin as smooth as it ever was, my body hair never grows unless I take a potion for it. All of my injuries heal in a short amount of time. Well, the small ones do. I go into a magically healing coma when my head gets detached, and she has to reattach it.
Never say she isn’t possessive. She knows all of my thoughts. If I try to leave, She apparates me back into my office. If someone tries to hurt me… They get killed.
I have seen way too many people be decapitated, killed, and straight up just split in half. She means well. I think. She doesn’t let kids get hurt badly. No one has ever fallen off the staircases.
Except me.
But that’s just because I tried to leave. I should know better by now. She will never let me leave.
There are times that children get sorted that remind me a bit too much of a younger me. I hope and pray and threaten Her to leave them alone. I realized that she would just pick someone else to take over if I die. I know because the one time I tried to kill myself, she showed me images. Images of past kids that I’ve taught having to go through the same things that I have.
I saw them yell at Her. Start hexing the walls, and cursing, and I got to watch them all have total breakdowns. And then she showed me the potential of them killing themselves.
I got to watch them bleed out slowly and painfully.
Needless to say, I never tried that again.
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The war had been getting worse. I thought I was done with this sort of thing in 1946. With the fall of Grindelwald done and the Ministry mainly not messing with me. And then I thought I was done whenever Young Harry Potter managed to defeat Tom when he was a baby. I researched more into his death, because I didn’t want any loose ends.
Only to realize he wasn’t dead. I first thought She had done it. For the first time in two decades, I went screaming into my office, as it is our primary location to ‘chat’, as soon as I closed the door to it, my illusion fell. All the portraits of the past Headmasters and Mistresses have always looked at me in pity and sadness when they had realized what had happened.
After that, and figuring out that She didn’t, I figured out what happened over some image flashes again. I went into the Restricted Section in the library, took the book out, and put it in my personal bookshelf so that no one else would fall suspect to the information and get the bright idea to create Horcruxes.
Whenever I do anything like this. Something that would restrict the students' knowledge, but ultimately protect them, she gets mad anyways. Even though She can see into my thoughts, even though that She could literally take control of my body if she was so upset with me.
It doesn’t affect me anymore. I’m used to my bones breaking. Nowadays I hope that she ends up killing me. But I always take that thought back when I remember The Images.
She is just doing what she thinks is best. It doesn’t matter that whenever I try to tell Minerva to shut the school down, my mouth is suddenly clamped shut and I feel my organs shutting down one by one. It doesn’t matter the past Heads have seen me break down in my office and try to kill myself. That I am getting to the point that I could probably just kill the current minister myself and take over Wizarding Britain.
When I had first been appointed, I was happy and hopeful and excited at how much I would end up helping the future generations.
But I only ended up outliving everyone I’ve ever known or loved. Except Aberforth, but he hates me, and I have to keep away lest She gets too jealous, and I outlive him too. Hogsmeade is just inside the edge of Hogwarts’ wards.
I should never spend too much time on anything unless it's for the goodwill of the school or the children.
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But I can feel my emotions drifting from their initial morals. My core beliefs left me long ago. I am now just living as a shadow of my original intentions. I can barely muster up enough emotion to not just lay in bed all day and drift through the years.
But I can’t. Especially not this year, or the next seven years. Harry is coming to Hogwarts this year, and as far as I can see. He is the most likely to be her next Victim.
Like always, whenever I badmouth her, in my mind or otherwise, I can feel excruciating pain numb my mind. She probably shouldn’t have been so trigger happy with the physical torture alll those years ago, my pain tolerance is higher than any mortals should be.
Mortals… I’m not one of those now, am I? It has been far too long. She can’t take it back anymore; I am now just as much of this castle as her. She was never as powerful as I thought.
But with how she will remain forever a part of this Earth, I’m afraid that I will too be with her here forever.
I will live with her use of magic to make me regret my life. I have already grown numb to her and her manipulation. The only thing harder than dealing with her, is faking my emotions.
It hurts every time I put on this illusion, the illusion of what I would look like if I wasn’t cursed to stay in this world, the same forever.
I will have to make sure he is prepared to deal with Voldemort, or sorry, Tom. I hate having to pretend that I only feel pity for him, and sadness for all that he has done. I’m supposed to be the ‘forgiving’ old man.
Whenever I think about how he turned out, I just feel a paralyzing pain. A pain harsher than anything she has done. I just want him to be killed in the most painful way. But I’m not at the point of making a child do that sort of work.
Maybe when he gets older my morals will have faded enough from my mind. Maybe by the time he gets older I will have regained my beliefs, my morals, my sympathy, and whatever else. I’d probably actually feel upset at leading like a lamb to slaughter.
It didn’t take that much to realize what he was.
What I didn’t think would happen, was another outburst. She has basically locked down my emotions so that I can do what is best for the school. They sometimes break through. The only thing that happens is me starting to cry, I slide down to the floor wherever I am, the illusion comes off, I have panic attacks, and I cuss her out.
Since my illusion comes off, no one knows who I am, and I have had multiple professors try to help me from the panic attacks. They think I’m a ghost. They have asked my illusion if I’ve confronted me before. It was the only time humour slipped through the wall.
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I’ve literally just tried to get another Horcrux. And this is how Tom decides he wants me to go out? Smart. He must’ve realized she would never allow me to fight back against a student, even if they were trying to kill me.
At Least Harry and his group will be able to get the rest. Maybe she will actually let me die. Thank all those above that I don't have to pretend to care anymore. I still haven’t figured out how She was able to block my emotions from the rest of me, maybe it was the sensory deprivation?
It doesn’t matter. I might not have felt my body crunch as it falls straight onto the grounds of Her, but I can feel that I’m not falling through the air anymore.
Instead, I can hear hundreds of people crying. I can’t open my eyes either. And I can’t feel my heart beating. My skin feels too cold to be normal.
Everything became distanced for a while, and when I came to… I could hear people talking about me like I died, like they were at my funeral. When I’m still alive.
Harry is only in his 6th year. I hope she doesn’t immediately jump to keep him There.
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I can see the Hogwarts Grounds. I can see all of the children being tortured. I can see everything happening. I was aware of Tom when he took the wand. Seeing all of this happening reminds me of why I never let her get rid of me.
I remembered why I became a professor. All of my feelings flood into me, little by little, day by day. I remember everything I did. Everything that happened that I just stood back from.
All that I did and didn’t do. How corrupt the Wizarding World has become. I remembered all of my goals. Everything that I was supposed to make better. I can feel the sadness and despair flowing through me. But I can't process it.
What else was to happen when your emotions get muted? How was I to keep myself prepared for the agony that came with Everything coming back to me? When all is gone, how do you prepare for it all to come back?
What am I to do with the information that sent multiple kids to their deaths? That I manipulated both the first and second war with Voldemort. That I was the cause of thousands dying. That I just let the entire Potter family die.
That I have been blackmailing multiple adults and kids to do the work that She wouldn’t let me do. That She made me play the “perfect” light leader. That I couldn’t just deal with it. She made me prioritize the castle instead of the children.
For Merlin's sake, I let Harry get into SS level danger every year. I can’t just blame her. I let all this happen. I knew how I felt about all this. And yet I let the fact that I couldn’t feel any of this, stop me from holding myself to the highest standard.
The emotions wrap around me until I’m a ball of despair. I can feel Hogwarts cruel amusement all around me. All of her magic surrounds and traps me in a jail that I can’t escape. Even in whatever hell this is.
I went to hell when I died. I’m not surprised. This is for ‘the Greater Good’ after all.
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They can't hear me. But I've at least learned how to project a ghost-like apparition out of my body to get a proper look at things. I am not going to remind myself of what happened, because that would leave me with no way to help anything.
I can’t help anything as it is.
I can feel myself just floating through the school year. Everything faded into the background, and my thoughts all mixed together. They mixed so thoroughly that I couldn’t tell one from another. But most were self-loathing anyway.
I came back, only to realize Riddle and Harry were battling. I saw them raise their wands one final time. I tried to get there to block Harry from his, But She held me back.
The spell hits true. Harry is dead. Riddle won. A cheer went up from his side. I was on my knees, still detained by Her magic, in shock. Tears started flowing through my eyes. I had my first breakdown in about 20 years, one final time.
I don't know how long I stayed in shock. It was long enough that the death eaters got everything under control and were able to bring in a throne for HIM. Anger surged through me for the first time in a while.
I returned to my body. Maybe they will finally let me go. This isn’t reality. Everything that happened couldn’t end in this. I remembered everything She did to keep herself safe, and it all made sense. She made sure this would happen so that she wouldn’t get destroyed.
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I gasped as all my organs and body started working again. Everything felt so bad, it was all stinging. I could feel my body stinging as I started flexing my muscles to make sure I was alive.
I realized that I could only see blackness. That everything was cold, and my magic reacted negatively as I remember that I was supposedly buried.
I aparated out with a loud pop. The first thing I noticed was that I was on the grounds of Hogwarts. The second thing I noticed was that I couldn’t Feel Her anywhere.
I was free. I looked around and noticed that everything was overgrown. That everything was gone. I aparated to Diagon Alley. Everything was gone. I checked everywhere. I eventually found a newspaper. It told me two things.
It was nearly three centuries after the battle, at least it was when the newspaper was printed, it was in horrible condition. Everyone died out. First the muggles due to weaponry, then the wizards due to inbreeding.
I couldn’t believe it. I searched all of the Earth. I searched everywhere. Nothing but animals. I encountered centaurs. But they wouldn’t let me get close enough to talk to them.
Eventually I gave up. And then I realized that I still wasn’t aging. I’m to live until even the world dies. Until the universe explodes into itself.
I had eventually made my way to my brother's inn. All of the magical portraits froze because there was no excess magic to draw from.
Here I found him frozen in time, as well as Ariana, my little sister who died too young. I gave up. I had decided to write a journal in case anyone else had survived. Which would be a shock, but still.
I will go live in Hogwarts. After all, we are connected. I am the castle as much as it is me.
And to anyone else, I hope suicide works for you. It hasn’t for me. I wouldn’t wish this existence on anyone.
Imagine living with your worst sins replaying over and over in your mind. Nothing that you can do as you realize it all happened because of you. Imagine starting with good intentions and living long enough for everything to get skewed.
I sincerely hope they will forgive me when I finally get back from Hell, which is surely where I will go if I ever die.
Albus Dumbledore