Chapter 10

— Gilderoy Lockhart —

October arrived, and with it came the  realization that Gilderoy was tired.

A month of teaching had shown him something none of his books had ever mentioned. Keeping a classroom interested was exhausting work. He had refused to let a single lesson be dull, and the flair did not come for free. Every light show, every demonstration, every carefully timed flourish took planning and effort, and a month of it had worn a groove of fatigue into him that no amount of grooming charms could quite hide.

That was part of why he found himself in the staff room on the first of October, only half listening as the others filed in for the first proper meeting of the year.

He remembered this meeting from before. It had been the only one he was ever invited to. After the impression he had made the first time, talking over everyone and crowing about his own brilliance, the invitations to the meetings that followed had simply stopped arriving. There was a small, petty part of him that was tempted to put on that same performance again, just to be spared the bother of attending the rest. But the meetings were rare enough that he could not be troubled to ruin them. He would sit, he would smile, he would say his piece, and he would go.

Not every professor had been called in. The teachers of the smaller subjects were absent, Muggle Studies and Ancient Runes, Care of Magical Creatures and Arithmancy, none of them counted among the core of the curriculum. Astronomy's professor was missing too, which Gilderoy noted with a flicker of disappointment. Professor Sinistra was a charming dark-skinned woman, and he fully intended to get to know her better once he found the time. That was the trouble of it, of course. He never seemed to find the time. His weekdays disappeared into lessons and his weekends into his own practice, and somewhere between the two, the month had simply slipped past him. Who knew that being a magical educator would be such a great deal of work? He should have.

Still, the work was bearing fruit, and that was the part that mattered. The younger students adored him, hanging on his every word, and the older ones, wary of him at first, had warmed into something like respect. He had, he thought with no small satisfaction, more or less single-handedly raised an entire generation of future adventurers. The feeling that gave him was a difficult one to name. Pride, he supposed, though it was a quieter and stranger sort of pride than the kind he was used to. These children would grow up better than he had ever been. Of that much he was certain.

Dumbledore settled into his seat at the head of the room and let his gaze travel warmly around the gathered professors.

"Well then," he said, his eyes settling first on Pomona Sprout, "how goes the new term for everyone?"

It was a small thing, the order in which people were invited to speak, and it was a thing Gilderoy had been entirely blind to the first time around. He had been too busy waiting for his own turn to notice that the Heads of Houses always went first. This time he held his tongue and let it happen the way it was meant to.

"Oh, well enough," Sprout said, "The new Hufflepuffs are settling in nicely, bless them." She paused, then went on in a more apologetic tone. "Though I'm afraid I do have one small complaint. Young Mr Creevey is an enthusiastic boy, but he has taken to photographing people without asking them first, and it's beginning to ruffle a few feathers."

Minerva let out a short sigh, the sigh of a woman who had fielded a great many complaints of a great many shapes. "I'll have a word with him," she said.

Snape spoke next, in the flat, bored drawl he reserved for occasions he considered beneath him… which was all the time, "They are dunderheads, by and large," he said, not bothering to look up from the table. "As they are every year." He turned a cool eye on Minerva. "Although I will grant that Mr Creevey may possess even less aptitude for the art of Potions than Mr Longbottom, which I had not previously believed to be possible."

"Then teach him better, Severus," Minerva said, without missing a beat.

Snape's lip curled, but he let the matter drop. "The new Slytherins have settled in without trouble," he said, turning back toward Dumbledore.

Flitwick went after him, perched on his usual stack of cushions and beaming at the room. "My Ravenclaws are doing wonderfully," he squeaked happily. "All settled in, keen as you like. We did have one young man come down with a rather nasty fever last week, but Poppy had him put right in no time, and he was back at his desk within two days."

"My Gryffindors have settled in well," Minerva said simply, inclining her head. "Nothing worth raising."

And then, as Gilderoy had known it would, the attention of the room turned to him.

"And how has your first month been, Gilderoy?" Dumbledore asked, his tone pleasant.

Gilderoy smiled, letting it spread wide and easy, the sort of smile that had once sold a great many books. "Just excellent," he said warmly. "I've found the younger students to be delightful, eager little things, soaking up everything I have to offer them. The older ones are rather more wary, but respectful all the same."

"Likely because you set a transfigured animal loose on them," Minerva said dryly.

Gilderoy had to fight to keep the smirk from his face. He had, in fact, landed in a fair bit of trouble over that, though it had all been smoothed over quickly enough.

"Attack is far too strong a word," he protested, spreading his hands as Minerva fixed him with a flat stare. "It was merely a test of their capabilities. They were in no real danger from the lion."

That was not entirely true, and he knew it perfectly well. Several of the older students had managed to throw up shields when the lion came bounding toward them, proper magical ones, and if he had not been watching as closely as he was, if he had not stopped the beast at the moment he did, one or two of them might genuinely have been mauled. But he had been watching, and he had stopped it, and so the whole affair had ended as a triumphant display of how far his students had come rather than as a catastrophe. Gilderoy chose to dwell on that part of it, and on that part he was enormously proud, whatever Minerva and the other Heads of Houses might have had to say.

"It gladdens me to hear it," Dumbledore said, his eyes twinkling above his spectacles. "Incidents aside, do keep it up. You are doing well."

The praise settled somewhere complicated in Gilderoy's chest, and he found he could not quite hold the old man's gaze. He looked down at the grain of the table instead. He had earned this. He knew he had earned it, every bit of it, through real work and not a single bit of stolen valor. And still some small part of him refused to believe the approval was meant for him, and not for the man he had spent a decade pretending to be. The two feelings sat side by side in him, pride and something far closer to shame, and he could not for the life of him decide which one he was supposed to listen to.

— Albus Dumbledore —

Dumbledore could not help but sigh.

Once again, Gilderoy Lockhart had surpassed his expectations. For any other teacher, such a thing would have filled him with quiet joy, the simple pleasure of watching a colleague flourish. With Gilderoy, it brought him only a slow and creeping unease.

It had been a difficult year for trust. The previous one had ended with the confirmation of something Dumbledore had long feared but never allowed himself to fully believe, that the gravest mistake of his life still drew breath in some form, patient and waiting. He had spent the summer turning it over in his mind, and it had left him more cautious than he liked, more inclined to look twice at things that did not fit. He was aware that this caution shaded easily into paranoia, and he tried to hold himself honestly accountable for the difference. But some part of him had decided that he would rather be wrong and watchful than trusting and blind, not after the price the latter had once cost him.

And Gilderoy Lockhart did not fit.

By every account, the man was a fine teacher. An unusual one, certainly, fond of spectacle and clearly hungry for the admiration of his students, but an educator all the same, and a genuinely capable one. The children adored him. The older students respected him. He had written a textbook of real and considerable merit. None of that was the problem. The problem was that Dumbledore knew something about Gilderoy Lockhart that none of the others did, and it sat at odds with everything he had watched the man become.

It had begun years ago, with a letter.

An old friend of his, a reclusive and brilliant wizard who had spent the better part of his life in the mountains of Armenia, had written to him in great excitement about a recent adventure. A werewolf had been terrorising a remote stretch of country, and his friend had dealt with it through a strategy so simple yet elegant that he had wanted to share every detail. Rather than face the beast directly, he had conjured a heavy stone golem to occupy it, and while the creature spent its fury uselessly against unfeeling rock, he had bound it with a complex curse from the safety of a high tree after which he’d used the Homorphus Charm in order to reverse the transformation for that day. It was a clever and careful strategy, exactly the sort his friend had always favoured, and Dumbledore had read the account with great fondness.

A few days later, he had written his reply.

His friend's response had unsettled him deeply. The old wizard had no idea what he was talking about. He recalled no werewolf, no golem, no binding curse, nothing of the adventure he had described in such vivid detail only days before. Alarmed, Dumbledore had cleared what he could from his schedule and travelled to Armenia at once, and his friend, equally troubled, had given him leave to examine his memories.

There had been no gap. That was what had chilled him. A clumsy Memory Charm left holes, blank and obvious spaces where something had been removed. But when Dumbledore looked, the days in question were simply filled with the ordinary routine of a quiet life, seamless and unremarkable, the false memories woven so neatly into the true ones that the join was almost invisible. It was the work of someone who understood the Memory Charm with rare and frightening intimacy, someone who had not merely erased a thing but replaced it.

He had stayed for a time, asking quiet questions in the surrounding country, searching for any thread he might pull. He had found nothing. In the end, bound as always by the endless duties of his office, he had been forced to set the matter aside, though it never truly left him.

Months later, he had heard of a new book by one Gilderoy Lockhart, an alumnus of his own school. He had heard the name before and paid it little mind, put off by the gaudy way the man's work was sold to the public. But the title of this one had struck a faint, uncomfortable chord in him, and so he had obtained a copy and read it through.

It had not been an exact retelling. The names had been changed, the places moved, and the feat itself inflated into something far grander and more dramatic than the truth, such as curing the werewolf of his curse. In the book, Lockhart claimed to have wrestled the werewolf himself and subdued it in thrilling single combat. But beneath the embellishment, the bones of the story were unmistakable. The same creature, the same stretch of wild country, the same sequence of events, and the same final outcome. Yet the very fact that the method which led to the defeat had been changed told Dumbledore the most damning thing of all. The ending, with the Homorphus Charm being cast, had remained the same. The author had taken a true account from someone who had been there, stripped out the careful brilliance of it, and dressed himself in the glory of a battle that had happened in an entirely different way.

He had wanted to investigate further. He had wanted it very much. But the years had a way of burying intentions beneath obligations, and the matter had slipped, once again, beneath the weight of everything else that demanded him.

Then, this past summer, a letter had arrived on his desk. It was florid and overlong, dripping with self-regard, an application from Gilderoy Lockhart himself for the vacant post of Defense Against the Dark Arts. Dumbledore had read it twice, and he had felt the quiet hand of fate upon his shoulder.

The interview had only confirmed what he already suspected. The man who sat across from him had been charming and vain yet almost entirely hollow, plainly unsuited to the responsibility of teaching children. Dumbledore had asked him not about dueling, nor about theory, but about the events of that adventure in Armenia, and about another, the banishing of a banshee in Bandon by a witch Dumbledore also happened to know had lost a piece of her memory. Lockhart had answered with the easy confidence of a man recounting his own glories, and had noticed nothing at all.

He should have turned the man away. By every measure of good sense, he should have. But after Quirrell’s demise at Harry Potter’s hand at the end of the year, he had to report that the previous professor had vanished without trace, and as such there had been no other suitable candidate willing to take a position the wider world had begun to whisper was truly cursed. The only alternative had been to accept some appointee of the Ministry's choosing into his castle, and that Dumbledore would not do. So he had taken Gilderoy Lockhart instead, a known fraud, and he had told himself that a fraud would at least be a transparent one, that the man's own incompetence would in time undo him in full view of everyone, and that perhaps some measure of justice might be served in the doing.

That had been the plan.

And then Gilderoy had arrived in the autumn, and he had not been the man from the interview at all.

He was still recognisably himself, still vain, still fond of his own reflection and the sound of his own voice. But underneath it, something had shifted. There was a discipline to him now, a depth of real skill, a strange and unaccountable diligence that the hollow man across the interview desk had shown no trace of. The fraud Dumbledore had hired to expose himself had instead become genuinely, bewilderingly competent, and Dumbledore could not for the life of him explain how, or when, or why. People did not change so completely. Not without reason. And in a year when his oldest fear had begun to stir once more, an unexplained thing walking the halls of his school was not something he could allow himself to ignore.

So he had made up his mind.

Dumbledore drew himself back to the present, to the warm staff room and the small assembly of professors waiting patiently before him. He let a gentle smile settle over his face.

"Ah," he said, chuckling softly and shaking his head as though at his own wandering thoughts, "it seems age has truly caught up with me. Forgive an old man his daydreams." He spread his hands across the table. "If there is nothing further to discuss, then you may all go, and thank you for your time. Though Gilderoy, if you happen to be free, I would very much like a small word with you."

A few of the professors were already rising, gathering their things. Across the table, Gilderoy went still for the briefest moment before answering.

"O-of course, Dumbledore," he said, the faint catch of a stutter in his voice.

Dumbledore considered that stutter with careful attention, and could not yet decide what to make of it. It might have been the nervousness of a man with something to hide, fearing at last that he had been caught. Or it might have been nothing more than the ordinary unease of anyone asked to remain alone with their headmaster. He did not know, and he disliked very much what he was about to do in order to find out.

He steeled himself all the same. Dumbledore had never used Legilimency lightly, and he did not intend to start now. He understood, as few others did, that a person's mind and their memories were among the most sacred things they possessed, not to be trespassed upon for curiosity or convenience. But understanding a thing did not always excuse a man from doing it. He needed to be certain, and there was only one way left to him to be sure.

Gilderoy lowered himself into the chair on the other side of the desk and composed himself, smoothing the front of his robes with a practiced motion. Dumbledore let the quiet sit comfortably between them for a moment before he began.

"Tell me, Gilderoy," he said, his tone light and unhurried, "how have you been finding the work itself? Teaching is a great deal more demanding than most expect of it. I wondered whether you had run into any troubles, settling in."

It was a gentle place to start, and a deliberate one. He needed to know what the man had made of his time here, in this castle, and a mind reached most easily for the memory it was already turning toward. As Gilderoy considered the question, Dumbledore reached out alongside him, light as a breath, and let the surfacing memory draw him in.

A flash came, and for an instant he was no longer behind his own desk. He stood in Gilderoy's chambers late at night, papers spread across every surface, the open textbook resting at his elbow. He felt himself, as Gilderoy, rise from the chair and sweep his arms wide at a room with no one in it. "Now, now, students! Compose yourselves!" Dumbledore said, inside of Gilderoy, rehearsing the words to an audience of empty furniture, adjusting the flourish, the timing, the precise tilt of the smile, again and then again until it was right. And beneath the memory ran the feeling bound to it, a deep and weary pride, the exhaustion of a man who had worked himself thin, threaded all through with a bright and genuine joy at the thought of the children's delighted faces.

The flash lasted no longer than the space between two words. In the room, no time had passed at all.

Gilderoy let out a small, rueful laugh. "I will admit, Headmaster, the work has been rather more than I bargained for," he said, his hands folded loosely in his lap. "I had imagined I would simply stand at the front of the room and dazzle them all. Instead I find myself buried under lesson plans most evenings." He paused, and something honest flickered across his face. "Though I will say, there is a certain something to it. Watching a child finally grasp a thing you have shown them. It is a finer feeling than I expected."

Dumbledore felt a quiet warmth at that, and at what he had seen. Whatever else the man was, he was no longer the hollow performer from the interview. He had become, by every sign, a true educator, and that was a thing Dumbledore could not help but be glad of.

"Filius tells me the two of you have been making good use of an empty classroom," Dumbledore went on, his eyes twinkling above his spectacles. "He came to ask my leave for it, and he speaks very highly of your progress. I confess I was a little surprised to hear that a man of your reputation felt the need for practice at all."

Again he reached out as Gilderoy's thoughts turned, and again a flash answered him. He was inside that empty classroom now, the padding charms thick upon the walls, Filius a small blur of motion before him. He felt the jolt of a jinx catching him in the shoulder, the sting of the padded floor as he struck it, the burn in his legs as he forced himself upright once more. Dumbledore, inside of Gilderoy, raised his wand and fired and missed, and adjusted his feet and fired again. The feeling was sharp and bright, frustration and determination tangled tight together, and under them both a fierce, hungry satisfaction, the pleasure of a man clawing his way, inch by inch, toward something he badly wanted.

"A man can always stand to improve," Gilderoy said lightly, though there was something almost sheepish in the set of his mouth. "Filius is a remarkable teacher. He has put me on the floor more times than I should like to admit." He smiled. "It is humbling. I find I do not mind it nearly as much as I once would have."

So far, every answer the man gave matched what Dumbledore had seen behind his eyes, true and untroubled. He let himself relax by a fraction, and turned the conversation, as gently as he could, toward the thing he had truly come to test.

"You have quite the career behind you, of course," he said, leaning back and lacing his fingers together. "I find myself curious whether you mean to keep writing. A man with your wealth of experience must have a great deal still to set down on the page. Perhaps a volume on your year at Hogwarts, once it is done."

He reached out as he had before, expecting another flash, some scene from the writing of those famous books. None came. Where there should have been an image, there was only the feeling, a thin and uneasy thread of worry curling through the man's thoughts and fastened to nothing Dumbledore could see. He kept his face perfectly pleasant, and behind it, he frowned.

"I ask," he continued, his voice as mild as a summer afternoon, "because your earlier work was so very vivid. The banshee. The vampires. That werewolf in the hills. One does wonder how a single man found the time for so many remarkable encounters."

Gilderoy's eyes dropped to the surface of the desk, just for a moment, before he caught himself.

"Now, Gilderoy," Dumbledore said, gently chiding, the smallest smile on his lips. "We are colleagues, you and I. You may meet my eyes. You are no child any more."

Gilderoy lifted his gaze and held it. Dumbledore held it in return.

"Tell me," he said, his tone never losing its warmth, "the werewolf, in that book of yours. You wrote that you cured the poor creature for good, that you lifted the curse from him entirely. Was that truly so?"

For a long moment, Gilderoy said nothing at all. Then he let out a slow breath, and when he spoke there was a tiredness underneath the words. "No," he admitted quietly. "That part I made up, I am afraid. The Homorphus Charm only reverses the transformation for the one night. There is no permanent cure, none that I have ever heard of." He gave a small, tired shrug. "I wrote adventure stories, Headmaster. Not textbooks. The truth, as it happens, does not always sell quite so well as the tale."

It was as the man spoke those words that Dumbledore felt it happen.

He had kept the lightest of touches upon Gilderoy's mind throughout, certain that the talk of the werewolf would draw the true memory up to where he might glimpse it. Instead, the very moment he reached for it, the memory was simply not there. This was no Occlumency. He knew well the feel of a guarded mind, the smooth walls and false faces of a man trained to keep him out, and this was nothing of that kind. The connection still held. Gilderoy still sat before him, still met his eyes, and Dumbledore could feel the man's emotions as plainly as his own. But where the memory ought to have been, there was an absence so total that it defied all understanding. It did not feel hidden so much as sealed away, locked behind something he could not begin to interpret, a vast and silent emptiness, a void of time in which there seemed to be nothing at all but thought, and more thought, and more thought still.

And within that void, he felt the little that had been left for him to feel. Guilt, heavy and old. Shame. A thin, dark thread of something close to self-loathing. And running beneath the whole of it, stubborn and unmistakable, a need to be better than he had been. Whatever had happened to this man in the space between the day of his interview and now, it was buried somewhere down there, under all of this, in a place Dumbledore had no means at all to reach.

The pressure of it bloomed into a sharp ache behind his eyes, and he withdrew.

The staff room sharpened back into focus around him, the dull throb of a headache settling at his temples. Across the desk, Gilderoy had gone rigid, his eyes wide, one hand frozen against the arm of his chair. He looked startled, almost alarmed, and Dumbledore could not help but wonder whether the man had felt something of what had just passed between them.

If he had, he recovered quickly enough. Gilderoy drew a slow breath and eased back into his seat, and though his composure returned in a moment, his expression had taken on a faintly pinched quality, the look of a man nursing a discomfort he had no wish to name.

Dumbledore let none of his own unease show. He smiled, warm and untroubled, and rose to his feet. "Well," he said, "I have kept you a good deal longer than I meant to, and I have no doubt you have a great deal still to do. Thank you for indulging an old man's curiosity, Gilderoy. I must say, I look forward very much to seeing what you make of the rest of the year."

Gilderoy murmured something polite in return, got to his feet, and left, the door clicking shut behind him.

For a long while after the man had gone, Dumbledore sat very still, his fingers steepled beneath his chin, and thought.

The memories had not been erased. Of that much he was certain. A mind stripped of its past left behind a particular sort of emptiness, and this had not been that. He had felt the emotions still clinging to those vanished memories, which meant the memories themselves yet remained, somewhere, whole. They had not been destroyed. They had been locked away, buried so deep beneath that crushing weight of guilt and shame that not even he could draw them up, and guarded besides by that strange and worrying presence whose touch still ached behind his eyes. He did not know what that presence had been. He liked very little that he did not know it.

What he did feel he could trust was that Gilderoy Lockhart, for the present at least, was not a threat. There had been no malice in that void, no buried cruelty, none of the things that set his oldest instincts to screaming the way true danger always did. If anything, the feelings he had touched spoke of the very opposite. The guilt the man carried at the mere mention of his books, the quiet honesty of his admission, all of it pointed to a conscience at work rather than a danger concealed.

And so he was left, as he so often was, with a great many more questions than he had answers. Was Gilderoy Lockhart simply a man trying, in his clumsy and theatrical way, to atone for the sins of his past? It was possible. It was even, Dumbledore thought, likely. But possible and certain were very different things, and he had learned long ago, at great cost, not to mistake the one for the other. He would wait, and he would watch. Dumbledore had always believed, deeply and without apology, in the worth of a second chance. Whether Gilderoy Lockhart had earned one was a thing only time would tell.

— Gilderoy Lockhart —

Gilderoy walked away from the headmaster's office with his heart still hammering against his ribs.

It had come upon him partway through their talk, in the moment the old man's gentle questions had turned toward his past, toward the books and the grand adventures he was meant to have had. A message had flashed across his vision, and it had taken every scrap of his composure not to bolt upright out of his chair.

[Memory Reading (Legilimency) detected. Memories of the host prior to receiving the System and memories of the System itself are locked.]

He had held himself together, just barely, and seen the conversation through to its end without giving the game away. Only now, alone in the corridor with the office door shut behind him, did the full weight of the thing finally settle on him.

The message had named it Legilimency, a word that meant nothing at all to him. But the rest of it had been plain enough to read. Memory reading. The Headmaster had been inside his head, turning over his thoughts, and Gilderoy had not felt the faintest trace of it until the System threw up its wall.

Perhaps the old man had managed it before then. Gilderoy had no way of knowing how much he had seen in those first unguarded moments, and that not knowing was a quiet horror all its own. How much of his life had Dumbledore watched before the wall came down?

The thought made his skin crawl. Someone had been inside his head, turning over his memories like the pages of a book, and he had not felt so much as a flicker of it until the very end. He was offended. He was frightened. And beneath both of those, he was deeply unsettled at the violation of the one place he had always believed was his and his alone.

Though there was, he supposed, a certain irony in that. A man who had built his entire life upon tearing memories out of other people's skulls, bristling now because someone had merely dared to look at his own.

And what, in any case, could he actually do about it? Storm back through that door and accuse the Headmaster of crawling about inside his head? He very nearly laughed aloud at the thought. Even if it broke some rule, even if a soul believed him, who on earth would take the word of Gilderoy Lockhart over that of the Headmaster of Hogwarts? The man was a vastly superior wizard, with political connections that ran the length and breadth of magical Britain. Gilderoy had nothing to set against him. He would be laughed out of the castle.

And in truth, could he even bring himself to blame the old man? He thought of the impossible thing he had become, the leap from fraud to professor that no ordinary explanation could account for, and he understood it perfectly well. Dumbledore had plainly sensed that something about him did not add up, and he had set out to be sure of it. Standing in the Headmaster's shoes, Gilderoy was not at all certain he would have acted any differently.

None of which changed the way it sat in his chest. He felt helpless, exposed, laid bare before a man who could reach into his mind and pluck the truth from it whenever the mood took him. And helplessness was an emotion Gilderoy had sworn, in a sterile white ward, that he would never feel again so long as he lived.

That settled the matter, then. His magical training could no longer be a thing he tended to on the weekends, when the time happened to present itself. And whatever this mind reading was, however it was done, and far more importantly, however it could be guarded against, he was going to learn it. He would not be left this open ever again.

Author’s Note: I needed a way to skip time, without it feeling too unnatural and thus the Teacher’s meeting. Frankly, I just wanted an excuse to get a kick in Gilderoy’s ass to start moving more - which is needed, because he’s still Lockhart. 

I’d like to see all of your opinions on how I’ve written and portrayed Dumbledore. I’m unsure how Legilimency was portrayed in the original, but this is a fanfiction. I hope that the System defending his memories isn’t too much of a stretch? 

Overall, I really enjoyed writing this chapter. Characterising Dumbledore was genuinely fun, I hope that his POV read differently as compared to Gilderoy, because he’d fundamentally think and word things differently.  We are also very close to the actual plot of the Chamber of Secrets starting as well!

If you enjoyed this, please drop a like on this chapter, it would be GREATLY appreciated since it gives me the boost to continue writing. My bad for skipping last week but exams have got me DEAD, but they’re over with, so yay!

Thank you all for your continued support!