Chapter Text
September 1st, 1995
9 Months and 8 Days After the First Task
The sky over Hogwarts had turned the color of old bruises, dark lavender smeared with the ash of dying summer. The first years were being shepherded across the lake in tiny boats. Candles lit themselves along the Great Hall rafters. The castle stirred awake with laughter and noise.
But in the highest tower, far from the Sorting Hat’s song, the mood was quiet and somber.
Minerva McGonagall stood stiffly in front of Albus Dumbledore’s desk, lips pressed thin, shoulders squared as if holding herself together through sheer will. There was a chair open across the desk, but Minerva chose to stand behind it instead. She was too full of anxiety and grief to settle.
“She should be here,” she said finally, voice trembling at the edges. “Fifteen now. Sitting at the Gryffindor table. Eating too much food or laughing with her friends or…anything. She should be here, Albus.”
“I know,” Dumbledore said gently.
“She wasn’t even supposed to be in that damn tournament,” McGonagall went on. “You knew it. We all knew it. She was fourteen, for Merlin’s sake. Fourteen and terrified. I saw it in her eyes. And you…you could have done something.”
Dumbledore did not flinch. But he did not meet her eyes, either.
“I tried, Minerva. You know that. Once the Goblet gave her name–”
“You hid behind the rules!” Her voice cracked like a whip. “You let bureaucratic nonsense outweigh a child’s safety. Our child, Albus. We raised her here, watched her grow. She trusted us. We were supposed to keep her safe inside these walls and instead you threw her to dragons!”
He closed his eyes for a moment, the weight of a century of decisions pressing deep into the lines on his face.
“I sought every legal and magical avenue,” he said quietly. “The Goblet’s magic is ancient…binding.”
“And yet, you of all people couldn’t break it?” she snapped. “You, who’s bested death, and time, and dark lords, and worse?”
Silence met her words. He had nothing to say. Nothing that wasn’t a lie, at least.
“If she’s truly dead,” she whispered, “her blood is on your hands.”
Dumbledore exhaled slowly, painfully. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
McGonagall turned away from him, one hand to her mouth as though she might be sick. The fire in the hearth gave no comfort. Its light made her look carved from stone. Her face a statue of regret and mourning.
“They’ve changed the textbooks, you know,” she said bitterly. “Revised editions. ‘The Tragedy of Hadriana Potter,’ they’re calling it. She’s in history books, Albus. They’re teaching it to eleven-year-olds as if it were settled fact.”
“I received one of the new editions last week,” Dumbledore murmured.
“Have you told them?” she asked. “The rest of the staff?”
“Not all of it. Only that I remain…unconvinced.”
“You still believe she’s alive.”
“I believe she vanished from Hogwarts without a trace. That the Horntail’s body held no remains. That the wards flickered when no magic should have tampered with them. And that Voldemort – however spectral – was already stirring.”
Minerva’s eyes narrowed. “Then why close the investigation?”
“Because the Ministry demands closure. Because they threatened expulsion from the tournament if we pushed. Because they declared her ‘eaten’ and wouldn’t hear another word. And if I fought them harder, Minerva, I’d lose what little influence I have left.”
“Maybe we should have been expelled from that damnable tournament,” Minerva hissed at him as he rose slowly and moved to stand next to her. “Look at how much it took from us.”
They were staring out the window, overlooking the Black Lake. The boats were nearing the castle’s undercroft. Owls swept in from the towers. All was normal for the start of the new school year. Except nothing about this year felt normal.
“What do we tell the students?” She asked after a long moment of silence. Minerva touched the glass with withered fingers as if she could halt the progress of the first-years with mere thought.
“We tell the students she died bravely,” he said. “But that’s a lie. She didn’t die in glory. She disappeared. And if someone made her disappear, I will not stop looking.”
“I’ve checked the reports,” her voice was low now, tired. “Quietly with my contact in the Department of Mysteries. Not a single known spell matches the magical residue left in the arena. It wasn’t a portkey. It wasn’t apparition. It wasn’t anything.”
Dumbledore nodded. “Which means it was something new. Or something very old.”
“You still think he took her.”
“I think he wanted her,” he said. “Whether he succeeded…I do not yet know. But there are stirrings of his reemergence.”
The bell in the North Tower began to toll. Students were starting to gather in the Great Hall below. And soon they would both have to go down and pretend like everything was okay.
“She had a place here,” McGonagall whispered. “She was meant to become something…someone.”
Dumbledore turned to look at her, eyes heavy with grief. “She already was.”
The words felt like ash in his mouth. As true as he meant them, he knew that they fell so terribly short. Hadriana Potter was meant to be so much more than what the papers wrote about her. Her greatest accomplishment was defeating the Dark Lord before she was even old enough to speak a full sentence…and her death a footnote in history books.
They stood like that for a moment, two old professors watching the ghosts of the future pass them by.
“I want to leave her name in the Book of Admittance,” McGonagall said, voice barely a breath. “Let the quill write her age as fifteen. Let the castle remember her.”
Dumbledore inclined his head. “It will. So will I.”
She hesitated at the door. “And if she ever comes back?”
“She’ll have a place here, a safe place,” Dumbledore said, trying to sound reassuring as one of his oldest friend’s turned and left without another word. He got the bitter impression that she didn’t believe him…he wasn’t sure if he believed himself either.
McGonagall’s footsteps faded down the spiral staircase, swallowed by stone. Dumbledore remained where he stood, facing the window, though the view now blurred – an indistinct smear of lanterns and robes and misted glass. The castle below carried on as it always had…as if the world hadn’t shifted.
He pressed his hand against the glass.
Fifteen, he thought. She would have been fifteen.
The age Tom Riddle was when he first began to truly understand what he was. The age when power bloomed faster than sense. When fear set roots. When the heart choose its path.
And now she was gone.
Not dead. Dumbledore had seen death too many times to mistake its absence. But gone…ripped from their world by hands still unseen. Hidden, erased, claimed, perhaps.
And Voldemort was stirring again.
The signs were there. Whispers in Knockturn, disappearances across the continent, forbidden magics surfacing like sharks in bloodied waters. Dumbledore had hoped for more time. Hoped that the darkness would gather slowly, like the tide. That he could prepare.
But now the girl he had watched grow – the girl who bore the lightning-shaped scar, the girl who might have been hope itself, the girl who was needed to end a monster – was missing.
And he was old…tired. More tired than he had ever dared admit.
What do I have left to fight him with, if not her?
He had allies, yes. Friends weathered by war. Children growing into warriors. But none who shone like she did, fierce and strange and full of questions that bent the world around her.
He had thought she would be the counterweight to Tom. A second thread, pulled tight against fate. But now her story had unraveled.
He returned to his desk and opened the drawer with a heavy hand. Inside, lying alone, was the pieces of Haddie’s broom – recovered days after the First Task, scorched and broken into splinters. They said it had been trampled. Crushed beneath dragon claws as it consumed the girl.
He had not believed that either.
“You were supposed to live,” he said aloud, his voice echoing too loudly in the empty room. “And now I do not know how to stop him without you.”
A soft rustle came from the rafters – Fawkes watching him with silent, golden eyes filled with something like grief. Or warning.
The old wizard closed his fingers around a broom fragment. He stared into the fire until it guttered low and shadows crept long across the floor. In that silence, for the first time in many years, Albus Dumbledore felt afraid.
On his desk lay the Daily Prophet, the front page filled with Haddie’s scared face as she swooped for the golden egg and missed, the Horntail close behind her.
◇ ◆ ◇
TRIWIZARD TOURNAMENT CLAIMS SECOND STUDENT — THE-GIRL-WHO-LIVED OFFICIALLY DECLARED DECEASED
In a formal statement released this morning, the Ministry of Magic has officially declared Hadriana Potter deceased, following her disappearance during the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament nearly a year ago.
Despite extensive magical investigation, no remains were recovered from the stomach of the Hungarian Horntail that had been assigned to Miss Potter, a Fourth-Year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The Ministry cites "sufficient magical evidence of lethal incident" to support the closure of the case.
This marks the second student death attributed to the controversial Tournament, following the tragic loss of Cedric Diggory, who perished during the Third Task under still-contested circumstances.
In the words of Acting Department Head Amos Holmes, “We grieve the loss of two promising young wixen, and vow to re-examine the safety of all interschool magical events moving forward.”
Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore has declined to comment.