An Upsetting Day
Albus Dumbledore was having an upsetting day. He’d had a lot of those recently. It wasn’t just seeing Gellert’s influence on the war in every report. It was also a matter of things closer to home.
Armando and the others had been so certain that the petrifications of muggleborn students were pranks. Someone had gotten their hands on a supply of juvenile mandrakes, they’d thought, and was leaving ambush traps for those of low social standing. It was a nasty trick to play on the vulnerable. Mandrakes were expensive, which meant that both the prank and its counter were expensive. None of the victims’ families could afford to simply pay for the restorative. They’d thought there was some rich noble scion perpetrating a minor class war in the corridors. Cruel and disappointing, but something most of Albus’s colleagues were unwilling to do much more than tut over. The students so affected would, after all, be fine as soon as the mandrakes in the greenhouse matured.
But no. It wasn’t strategically placed juvenile mandrakes causing the petrifications. It had been a basilisk, at the behest of Tom Riddle.
Myrtle Warren had no idea how close she had come to death. He’d listened to her cheerfully dramatic telling of the moment, the very instant a phoenix had appeared to prevent Mr. Riddle from making a fatal error. She said that he’d yelled at her not to open the door. She said that the phoenix chick in her hands had tried to go to him. Not to her. No. It couldn’t be that unremarkable, emotionally troubled girl who manifested a phoenix. That would have been far too simple.
Mr. Riddle had run. But one could not run from a phoenix. True, this one was currently a chick and incapable of flame travel. That wouldn’t last very long. Four weeks, perhaps, until it fledged.
Albus had tried to run from Fawkes, once. The wonderful and terrible thing about being the subject of a phoenix’s attention was that there was a creature of wild magic dedicated to bearing witness to one’s worst moments of weakness and despair. It was not always comforting to have such a brilliant light cast on one’s soul.
The great secret about a phoenix’s favor was that it was not bestowed upon heroes. It was bestowed on the lost and the damaged, those balanced most precipitously on the edge of destruction. Those who might, with a bit of prodding, make a different choice at a critical moment.
Gellert, of course, had been far beyond that edge by the time Albus first laid eyes on him. No phoenix had come for him. If only one would.
And now Albus sat at the Head Table and watched in bemusement as a phoenix chick was passed from hand to hand like a kitten. He’d told Miss Warren how to care for it and let her take it with her. It seemed far more likely that Mr. Riddle would go retrieve it from another student than from himself. Still, though. Had Fawkes been handled like that, there would be scorched hands all around the Ravenclaw table by now. Yet that phoenix seemed perfectly content for giggling children to feed it sliced fruit and pet the pinfeathers on top of its head.
He experienced an unsettling moment of wondering what, if anything, the phoenix’s behavior might say about Mr. Riddle’s nature, given that it had manifested for him. On the other hand, perhaps phoenixes were their own individual beings, and their behavior was entirely their own affair regardless of who they tended. There was not a great deal of recorded information on the matter. And, despite what others might think, having his own phoenix did not necessarily mean that Albus had all the answers that were missing from the books.