Chapter Nine: The Rising Dark
He had been to Azkaban too many times.
The fortress prison was old, older than most people seemed to realize, and his father had been imprisoned here over a century ago. Not, of course, that they had visited his father. At the time there had been too many other problems to face, too many other burdens to bear. A new home, new friends… and a half-mad, perpetually scared sister.
But he had read about the place, and been horrified. And intrigued. It was an odd idea, a prison that kept its prisoners locked within their own insanity. And a terrifying one, too, because those who were finally released from the cold and unforgiving stone prison were far more dangerous and far more wild at their time of departure than they had been upon arrival.
He had been there in the course of his years as Transfiguration Professor, though. There had been a few students who had caused him concern, and one of them had ended up in Azkaban for a few days before he’d been able to secure the child’s release. Of course, it hadn’t been the boy’s fault, he’d done nothing at all but be a scapegoat for a much smarter, much more ruthless student.
It had been his first visit to Azkaban, and his mind had been filled with his own fears and insecurities, and it had taken all his strength to fight off the cold that seeped into his bones as he stepped through the grim doorway into the dismal place.
Then there had been the war. It was fought mostly on the Continent, but some of those skirmishes had overflowed, trickling into England. He had locked himself in Hogwarts, refusing to face the inevitable until it could no longer be denied. He’d seen the prison of Nurmengard, and it was nothing compared to Azkaban. Inescapable, perhaps, but still different, still so much better, at least on a relative scale. No prison was ideal, but Azkaban…
There was the cold and the gray and the dismal, unavoidable despair that clung to everything like heavy smoke, like mold, like a virus.
He had been forced to accompany a prisoner there, one of Grindelwald’s followers who had attempted to attack Hogwarts “ and he claimed not to know the reason, but wasn’t it obvious what Grindelwald had wanted? “ and he had taken the man to Azkaban and listened to his maddened pleas and cries for mercy as the heavy door to his cell clanged shut, trapping him forever within.
He had been to Azkaban later, too. In his years as Headmaster, when a rush of violence had gripped the wizarding community. He had seen war before, back in 1945, and some part of him had recognized those attacks for what they were, the beginning of a battle. More than one of his recent graduates had ended up imprisoned, and he had visited each, desperate to find out how he had failed them.
It was always a hard lesson to learn, that sometimes he could not change the actions of others, not with kind words and not with bitter threats. Sometimes things were out of his control.
And he hated it.
But the last few years had brought an uneasy peace. The battle he had feared had been postponed, and the wizarding world had barely even noticed. In fact, he was almost positive that those not directly involved “ as victim or perpetrator “ in the attacks had missed them all together.
For all their talk of how blind Muggles were, witches and wizards were hardly any better.
And now he was back in Azkaban.
Back visiting one of the few people he had hoped would never end up in this place.
It was easy to get in, he still held enough influence over the Ministry and obtain permission without much trouble, and the Auror who had accompanied him to this particular cell now stood back, looking supremely bored.
The witch in the cell looked up at him, green eyes widening ever so slightly as they caught sight of his features. Red hair tumbled over pale skin, a thin smile pulled at the corners of her lips, and there was nothing at all warm in her expression.
“Headmaster,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“Miss Evans,” he replied.
She moved closer to the bars on the door of her cell, and he looked past her, his eyes scrutinizing everything. It was exactly how he had remembered it, filled with the scent of mildew and decay and the repetitive drip of water sliding down the stone walls.
Azkaban had not changed.
“I am sorry,” he said gravely.
She frowned, fingers curling around the bars as she moved closer. In a low voice, she said, “It was always what he wanted, Headmaster.”
“You are no longer at Hogwarts,” he chided, “there is no need to call me Headmaster. Albus in fine.”
She shrugged. “Albus, then,” she said, sounding a little unsure about the use of his name. He smiled encouragingly, but then sighed as her own expression fell.
“I never wanted to cause a rift between you and Mr. Lupin,” he said. “Our strength lies in our relationships, in that which holds all together. Our weaknesses become so much more momentous when we allow ourselves to be torn apart.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line. “I never wanted to fight with Remus, either. But he…” She paused, searching for the right words. “He believed in this, in what he was doing. He believed in you and everything you said we could accomplish if we worked together.”
“I know,” he replied heavily. He wasn’t sure if there was an accusation in her words of the sting he felt was his own conscience.
She turned away from him. “Was he at least helpful to you?” she asked, a sort of pleading in her tone. He had seen that look before on the faces of the family members of people who had died during the 1945 war, a desperate need to know that at least their loved ones had accomplished something. That at least they had made a difference.
“He was.” The old wizard sighed and reached up to pinch the bridge of his crooked nose between his thumb and forefinger. He was getting too old for this. And yet if his suspicions were correct, Remus’ death meant things were going to get more complicated, not less.
Another war was starting.
“Did he say anything to you when he returned?”
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “You think his death was related to the mission you sent him on?” she asked, although it was really more of a statement than a question. It was clear, too, that she believed the same, and he wondered, again, if there was an accusation beneath her civil demeanor.
He didn’t bother answering, there wasn’t a point. She didn’t want to hear his suspicions, not when they were exactly the same as hers. Not when it was so obvious that she hadn’t killed him, and yet she was still the one trapped behind the stone walls of this wretched prison.
“James Potter is going to be my counsel for the defense,” she said after a long pause.
“He is very good at what he does,” was the reply.
She laughed cynically. “Perhaps. He keeps asking me the same questions, though. He wants to know the exact details of where Remus was and what he was doing. And I can’t tell him that.” She sat down on the edge of the small metal cot that must have served as a bed and gazed at him thoughtfully. “But I did see Remus when he returned.”
“He came to visit you?”
She nodded. “I hadn’t seen him in three years, hadn’t heard a single word from him, and then he shows up completely unannounced, standing outside my door… He said… he said he thought he was in trouble, but he wouldn’t say much beyond that. He kept looking around… he said he was being followed. I asked him why, I asked him what he had been doing, where he had been…” She stopped abruptly and chewed her lip for a moment. “He wouldn’t tell me,” she finished at last. “He was scared.”
“What did he say?” the older wizard asked, leaning forward until he was nearly pressed up against the door.
“He had found something. Something important. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what it was.” If she found it at all odd that he was asking her for information when it was his mission that Remus had taken, she did not show it. She looked suddenly weary and exhausted as she sat there, staring down blankly at the floor.
There were tears in her green eyes.
“He said he was being followed and he didn’t want to stay in my home for very long, he didn’t want to lead them to me. I told him I’d meet up with him later, asked him where he was staying. He wrote down his address and he left and then… then when I went to see him that night…”
“He was dead,” he finished for her.
She nodded again. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Did you tell Mr. Potter any of this?”
She gave him a startled look, then shook her head uneasily. “I told him that Remus had sent me an owl asking me to visit him.”
He didn’t bother asking why she lied. He doubted she would have told him anyway.
The wind suddenly howled, loud enough to be heard through the thick stone walls. A Dementor slid closer along the floor, sucking the happiness out of the air ,and exhaling ice and chill and despair. The young witch and the old wizard both shivered, neither immune to the effects of this place.
“Oh, Merlin, mate! Will you stop moping?”
James glanced up from his desk to see Sirius standing in the doorway to the small office, arms folded over his chest, dark eyes filled with something akin to mocking laughter. It was clear he had been standing there for a while, but James had been so lost in his own thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed.
He looked down at the roll of parchment open on his desk, the one he was supposedly reading. Pushing it aside with ill-concealed frustration, he said, “What makes you think I’m moping?”
“You’ve been staring glumly at that parchment for the last five minutes, and I don’t think you’ve read a single word,” Sirius answered. “What’s gotten into you? I was the one who had to brave the horrors of the Mafloy household on your account. Shouldn’t I be the one seeing doom and despair everywhere?”
Marlene, who had been organizing files on the other side of the room, looked up cheerfully and said, “He’s been like this since his meeting with Evans.”
“What happened? Did she try to hex you?” Sirius asked with a roll of his eyes.
James frowned. “No,” he said shortly, moodily. Sirius raised an eyebrow at him, then turned a curious look to Marlene, who simply shrugged. James scowled and mussed up his hair, unsure how to explain what was bothering him.
“Hm… well, what it is?” Sirius prodded. “If she didn’t hex you…”
“I think I might be a bit of an arrogant prat,” James said after a moment. “Or, at least, I can see how Muggleborns might think I am.”
“Oh. Okay,” Sirius drawled, sarcasm laced through his words. “Well, that clears it up.”
“You know I don’t really have any friends who aren’t purebloods? I’ve never dated a Muggleborn. I didn’t take Muggle Studies, I don’t know anything at all about them. Muggles, I mean,” James continued. Sirius was staring at him blankly, and Marlene had set aside her files and was giving him a critical look.
Clearly, neither understood why this bothered him.
“James, I’ve never taken Muggle Studies, either,” Sirius pointed out at last. “Who cares?”
“Lily cares,” James answered automatically.
Sirius’ eyebrows rose even higher, nearly blending into his hairline. “You’re calling her Lily now? What happened to probable murderer?”
“I don’t know,” James defended himself. “I can’t tell if she’s guilty. I mean, I know the evidence doesn’t look good, but I… I don’t think she is guitly. I don’t want her to be.”
“It isn’t your job to want,” Marlene interrupted softly. “All you should care about is getting her acquitted, regardless of whether or not she’s guilty.”
“She thinks I should care about more than that,” James protested. “She thinks I should care about who killed Remus Lupin. Why don’t I care about that? I mean… do I only care about something if I have to? If it is my job?”
“You and your parents let me stay with you after I ran away from home,” Sirius said pointedly, speaking slowly and enunciating his words as though he wasn’t sure if James would be able to understand otherwise. “You took me in even though I was a persona non grata in the pureblood community. You’ve opposed almost every single anti-Muggleborn, anti-part-human, anti-nonhuman legislation the Ministry has attempted to draft. The entire reason you took this case in the first place was to stop Lestrange from gaining even more power and shoving his twisted ideals down everyone’s throat. You don’t like the Dark Arts and you don’t like bigotry. If Evans thinks you’re anything like my family…” He trailed off with a disgusted sneer.
“But I don’t know what it is like to be a Muggleborn,” James said. “I don’t know what it is like to be like her. I’ve never even really thought about it.”
“And she doesn’t know what it is like to be a pureblood trying to go against the normal social mores our society believes in,” Sirius snapped back. “She doesn’t know what pressures you’ve got to deal with, she doesn’t know that sometimes to do the right thing you have to turn your back on your family. She doesn’t get what it’s like, and it seems to me that if she thinks all purebloods are prejudiced, she’s got some prejudice of her own.”
“You’re taking Narcissa Malfoy’s side?” James demanded, incredulous as he realized just how similar Sirius’ words had sounded to those he had repeated from his cousin.
“What? No! Merlin, no!” Sirius retorted, flushed. “But… come on, mate. Do you really think you’re a bad person just because you happened to have two pureblooded parents? So you don’t know what her life is like. She doesn’t know what your life is like. We all only know about our own lives and our own situations and she doesn’t have any right to say that you’re one of them.”
He spat out the last word, his eyes narrowed furiously. It was clear he was thinking of his own family and what it had taken for him to walk away from his brother and from all the people that he might have once cared about. It was easy to know that there was a right choice and a lot harder to actually make the right choice when it meant giving up so much.
And, of course, Sirius despised being compared to his parents or the rest of his family.
Lily’s words, James mused, had clearly upset them both.
“He’s right,” Marlene said softly, as usual far more calm and collected than Sirius even if she was echoing the same sentiment. “Does Evans think the only way to prove that you’re not some pureblood idealist is to not be friends with other purebloods? To break off your friendship with Black and stop talking to me? What kind of sense does that make?”
“You know, darling,” Sirius said with a suddenly lascivious grin, “there’s no need to keep calling me Black. Sirius is quite appropriate, love.” And he gave the nonplussed Marlene a wink.
“Oh, you two should start going together,” James muttered, dropping his head onto the desk. “Maybe then Marlene’s mother will stop trying to force us both down the wedding aisle.”
“My mother is always going to prefer you to Black,” Marlene said frostily, giving Sirius a disdainful look.
“Oh, now that hurts,” Sirius cried, clutching his chest in mock pain and stumbling about the office.
“Don’t take it personally, Sirius,” Marlene said with a light laugh, “it isn’t you she doesn’t like. It’s the fact that you have no common sense, could hardly be considered responsible or dependable, and have yet to grow up.”
James choked back a laugh at the look of outrage on Sirius’ face. The laugh turned into real choking, however, as the door to his office suddenly swung open and he found himself gasping in surprise at the wizard who stood there.
Marlene rose quickly to her feet and Sirius spun around, mouth falling open.
“Headmaster,” James said.
“Albus,” the Headmaster corrected with a smile. “It seems I am going to be repeating myself today. You are out of Hogwarts, there is no need to call me Headmaster.”
“I… oh… well, alright,” James said, momentarily at a loss for words. Although he was not one of the Ministry sycophants who fawned over the Headmaster, he still did recognize the fact that the older wizard was probably the most powerful man who had ever lived. Furthermore, while he had crossed paths with the Headmaster at Ministry functions, he had never once been visited at his office by the venerable wizard.
He had no idea what to say.
“May I come in?” the Headmaster prompted.
Marlene was the first to recover her wits, something James was quite thankful for, and she stepped forward quickly, conjuring a chair with a wave of her wand. “May I take your traveling cloak?” she asked politely, hands outstretched to accept his heavy black cloak.
“Ah, thank you,” Dumbledore said, shrugging off his cloak and pressing it into her arms. “I was just at Azkaban and it is so much colder there than in your charming office.”
Sirius snorted at the word charming, but James ignored him and said instead, “Azkaban?”
“Yes. I was visiting your client.”
“You know Evans?” Sirius demanded, looking surprised.
“Well, she did go to Hogwarts,” Marlene murmured, shooting Sirius a slightly bemused glance. He glowered at her.
Dumbledore settled himself into the chair Marlene had conjured, and Sirius eagerly came forward as well, sitting on the edge of Marlene’s desk. The witch looked so intrigued by the conversation that was about to happen that she didn’t even push Sirius away, something she certainly would have done at any other point.
Dumbledore didn’t seem at all surprised that Sirius knew what was going on as well, and simply pulled his chair back enough to make sure Sirius was included in the circle.
“I know Miss Evans has not been entirely truthful with you about Remus Lupin’s activities as of late. Although I fear some of it may be my fault.”
James leaned forward. “What do you mean, sir?” he asked.
“There’s no need to call me sir, either,” Dumbledore said with a smile. Then he continued seriously, “I believe you know that for the past four years, Remus has been working… freelance, I think is how Miss Evans explained it.”
“Yes, that’s what Lily said,” James agreed. “And that’s what Longbotton said, too. That Lupin was working against the Dark Arts.”
“He was,” Dumbledore said grimly. “But he was not working on his own. He was working for me.”
“What was he doing?” Sirius asked.
Dumbledore pushed his half-moon spectacles a bit further up on his nose and said, “I am going to have to start at the beginning, aren’t I? Well, let’s see…” He was silent for a moment, clearly thinking, and then he said, “Do you know anything about the Dark activity that occurred a few years ago?”
James nodded and slanted a quick look at Marlene. “Mr. McKinnon told me about it,” he said. Marlene turned to him, startled, and he made a mental note to apologize for not telling her this earlier. But keeping his attention on Dumbledore, he said, “There was a rise in this activity, but most witches and wizards didn’t notice. You recruited several people to fight it.”
“Alastor Moody and I did,” Dumbledore confirmed with a nod. “I was worried, you see. It seemed as though… someone… was recruiting followers. I was concerned that, if it wasn’t stopped, these people would create a force strong enough to start a war.”
“A war?” Marlene repeated. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?”
Dumbledore gave her a very serious look and said, “Yes, war is always extreme. But it often does not take much to start one. This person who was doing the recruiting… well, he seemed quite powerful.”
“Do you know who it was? Who was behind this?” Sirius questioned, rubbing his hands together eagerly.
“Sirius, we’re not going off on some crazy adventure to hunt down a Dark wizard,” James said with a roll of his eyes.
“You’re taking all the excitement out of life, mate,” Sirius retorted.
But Dumbledore wasn’t smiling. He had a far away look in his eyes, and then he said, “While the rest of the England ignored what was happening, Alastor and I tried to fight it. And we had some successes, although not many. But then, about seven years ago, everything changed. The Dark activity stopped. The recruiting… it seemed like it was all over. It seemed as though we had won.”
“Why did it stop?” James asked.
“We don’t know,” Dumbledore said honestly, “although I have my suspicions. But the point is, many of us thought it was safe. But Alastar and I… we still had our doubts. There was nothing we could do for a while… and then, four years ago, Alice Longbottom was killed.”
“Frank Longbottom said it was a Dark curse that had killed her but they never found the culprit,” James murmured. “Was it related?”
“We believed so,” Dumbledore answered, “although, again, it was only suspicions.”
“But what does this have to do with Lupin?” Sirius demanded impatiently.
“After Alice was killed, we heard rumors of recruitment. Werewolves, goblins, giants… even centaurs, although I have no idea how any wizard at all would manage that given how much they despise us.” Dumbledore paused, looking at each of the other three in turn. “Do you see the connection between these groups?”
“They’re all party-humans and nonhumans,” Marlene answered immediately. “Ones who are often discriminated against, deprived of rights and liberties that witches and wizards take for granted.”
“Exactly,” Dumbledore said. “Twenty points to Gryffindor.”
“I thought we weren’t at Hogwarts anymore,” Sirius grumbled. “Why does she get points?”
“Black, it’s still your House, too,” Marlene snapped.
James ignored them, and it appeared that Dumbledore had decided to do that, too, because he did not comment on their bickering. Instead, he said, “It seemed likely that whoever was recruiting them would use the simple tactic of promising these creatures the rights they have been denied for so long, and perhaps even a chance to be part of the society, to be respected and included.” He stopped, his expression dark, “And maybe even revenge for all the past wrongs.”
“They were recruiting an army,” James breathed, aghast. “An army to attack the Ministry, the rest of the wizarding world.”
“Indeed. It’s why I sent Remus to make contact with the various werewolf clans in Britain. For one full year, he was working with them. He’d make contact, try to convince them that this wasn’t the way, that it would not work out well for them.” Dumbledore leaned forward and tapped his fingers idly on James’ desk. “You understand, of course, that the Dark wizards recruiting these part-humans and nonhumans didn’t actually want to offer them rights. It was all a ruse, it had to be. There was no way that these pureblood elitists would actually be willing to recognize… say, a werewolf… as an equal.”
“And Lupin was trying to convince the werewolves of that?”
“He was, but it became dangerous. The Dark wizards attacked him once or twice, once they realized who he was. And some of the werewolves weren’t pleased by his presence, either. Some of them wanted to live separately from the rest of the world, wanted to believe that their animal side was their true nature and not just a beast that broke free once per month. To them, a werewolf who lived among wizards like Remus did… well, he was the worst kind of traitor.”
James clenched his hands into fists. He knew it was wrong to think of all werewolves as Dark Creatures when so many of them were decent human beings who did their best to avoid hurting others, even during those few nights when they lost control. But it was hard to separate out the good werewolf from the bad one, and every time he heard stories of people who took pleasure in their own horrific transformations and the panic and havoc they could cause… it made him sick.
But Lupin had been a good person. Better than most, it seemed, if he was so willing to risk his own life to convince others that they did not need to become monsters just because they were cursed with lycanthropy.
Lily certainly thought he was a good person, that much was clear.
James glanced over at Sirius, who was listening to all of this with a dark expression on his face. James recognized it immediately, knew it was the look he wore whenever he thought about his brother, and he wondered immediately if perhaps Regulus was somehow involved in this mess.
He certainly would not have put it past Regulus to join with a group of Dark wizards in an attempt to start a war.
Marlene spoke up softly, “James said that Lupin was gone for three years.”
Dumbledore nodded gravely. “The last mission I sent him on, the one that lasted all this time, was too settle down with a werewolf clan. To join in with them, to live with them… to hopefully gain their trust. I needed to know who was recruiting them, and the only way I could do that…”
“Was to have someone on the inside,” Sirius finished.
Again, the Headmaster nodded.
“Headmaster… I mean, um… Albus… who did you suspect of being behind this? Who was recruiting, who was raising the army?” James questioned impatiently. He couldn’t help but believe that Dumbledore knew quite a bit more than he was saying.
The ancient wizard let out a slow breath. “He is a very powerful, very dangerous man, one who has consorted with the Dark Arts so much that he has become barely recognizable as human. He calls himself Lord Voldemort.”
It was at exactly that moment that the door was shoved open and Frank Longbottom entered. He paused on the threshold, eyes sweeping over the room once, before looking at James.
“I’m sorry, Potter, I didn’t realize you had company.”
James rose to his feet, giving Longbottom a quick once over. He looked worn and tired, and part of his body was covered in crisp white bandages wrapped over some sort of thick yellow concoction. He grimaced slightly as he placed a hand out to rest against the door, as though a phantom pain from some recent injury still lingered in his arm.
“What happened to you?” Sirius demanded before James could say anything.
“They already patched me up fairly well at St. Mungo’s,” Longbottom answered with a shrug that brought a momentary wince to his eyes. “And the burns will heal, too. The Healer said burns from Fiendfyre just take a while to…”
“Fiendfyre?” Marlene breathed, horrified.
“What happened?” Dumbledore cut in, his voice sharp, even as he rose and moved quickly to Longbottom’s side, surveying the damage with a calculating gaze.
Longbottom looked from Dumbledore to James and then back. “I was at Remus’ house, finishing up a few things for Auror Moody,” he explained grimly, “and I was attacked.”