"You were considerably more commanding back then, sir," said Sherlock, turning to Dumbledore once the three of them had found their footing on the wooden floor, a dry note of wit threading through his voice.
"One simple conversation, and you held the upper hand throughout, not so much as a hairline crack for him to push back through. And that last line in particular 'I am the headmaster' had a remarkable ring to it."
Dumbledore shook his head with a rueful smile, knowing by now how to read Sherlock's particular brand of expression.
"If you mean that I refused to call him Voldemort, yes, that was quite deliberate." He acknowledged it openly, his gaze drifting toward the window with the distant look of a man revisiting old ground.
"By that point, Death Eaters had already begun to rally around him. Yet as you saw, they were still operating in the shadows, not yet fully exposed to public view. I could not do a great deal but I could at least ensure that Hogwarts remained beyond his reach."
"The Defense Against the Dark Arts position rotating every year, did that begin after this meeting?" Sherlock asked, following the thread immediately.
"It did." Dumbledore let out a quiet sigh, a heaviness settling in his expression.
"Though he never said outright which subject he wanted, I understood his intention perfectly. Since the night I refused him, no Defense teacher has been able to last more than a year. It was his revenge, a dark curse left behind as punishment. It held until this very year. I had assumed the curse was weakening because his power was waning. As it turns out, the opposite is true."
"Sir, was it the Horcruxes that made his face look like that?" Harry asked, unable to hold back, his curiosity sharper than his unease.
Dumbledore nodded slowly, his tone growing heavier still.
"To be precise, it was the consequence of repeated fracturing of the soul. Each Horcrux he created left his spirit more incomplete, more shattered and the body began to reflect that damage. His appearance grew progressively less human, increasingly close to something that can no longer be called a person at all.
No one, before Voldemort, had ever attempted to create multiple Horcruxes. And yet, even knowing what it cost him, he did not stop. At the time, I confess, I believed it was simply the long-term corruption of the Dark Arts. I did not yet know the truth."
"No matter, knowing now is not too late," said Sherlock, his tone even.
"No, it isn't. We still have time." Dumbledore's mouth curved upward slightly, a little of the heaviness lifting. "Well. I've kept you long enough for one evening. I'll say only that I hope you both do well in the third task. As for Harry's scar, I'm sorry, I haven't yet found a satisfying answer. But the moment I do, I'll let you know at once."
"Thank you, sir," Harry said sincerely, his eyes full of genuine gratitude.
He was already beginning to rise when Sherlock spoke.
"One more thing."
"Go ahead," said Dumbledore.
"That line you said in the memory — 'the time when I could frighten you with a burning wardrobe and compel you to reflect is long past.'" Sherlock's gaze was fixed steadily on Dumbledore. "When did that happen? Was it when you visited him at the orphanage, when you first came to tell him about Hogwarts?"
Dumbledore paused, visibly startled. Something flickered in his eyes, the same quiet amazement he felt each time Sherlock managed to draw meaning from a detail that others let pass unnoticed. Even after all he'd seen of Sherlock's abilities, it still surprised him.
"Yes, Sherlock. Much as Professor McGonagall later came to find you, I went in person to the orphanage to meet young Tom Riddle."
He settled into the memory, speaking slowly.
"Even then, he had already done things, frightening the other children, secretly locking away objects that didn't belong to him. A yo-yo, a silver thimble, a harmonica, little things, treasured by the other children. Even as a boy, he had a habit of taking what was not his. There was a deep, cold acquisitiveness at his core."
"So, you set the wardrobe on fire?" Sherlock pressed.
"I did but I didn't let it burn fully." Dumbledore's gaze went somewhere far away, as though he could see again that damp, shadowed room in the orphanage.
"I ignited it with magic, then extinguished it quickly. I required him to return every object to its rightful owner and apologize to each child sincerely. I wanted the lesson to leave a mark, to make him understand that theft and intimidation were wrong."
"And did he do it?" Harry asked, leaning forward without meaning to, something tightening in his chest.
"He did, yes. But—" Dumbledore paused, seeming to choose his words carefully.
"But it meant nothing." Sherlock said it plainly, without hesitation.
"Why?" Harry asked quickly, puzzled.
Dumbledore, too, turned to look at Sherlock with an expression that was almost anticipatory.
"Every apology, every returned toy, it was a calculated act of submission, nothing more," said Sherlock, his gaze sharpening in that way it had, as though it could pass straight through the surface of things.
"He did what you asked not because he had recognized any wrongdoing, but because in that instant he made a very precise and rational calculation: defying a wizard who was standing over him with a wand, a wizard who represented his only path to Hogwarts would destroy everything he stood to gain. You believed the lesson had taken hold. What had actually happened was that he had chosen tactical retreat in the face of superior force."
Sherlock leaned forward slightly, his long fingers beginning their familiar rhythm against the desk.
"I haven't seen that memory of yours, sir, but I would wager a Galleon on what was going through his mind. No shame. No remorse. Only cold, deliberate compliance. For him, it was not a moral correction, it was an assessment of power.
Your intervention showed him how strong you were. And it showed him, with perfect clarity, what it felt like to be weak, to be forced to obey. You intended to teach him the rules.
He took from the encounter an entirely different lesson: that rules are the tools the strong use to constrain the weak. That apology planted no moral seed in him. It deepened his conviction that the only way to escape the humiliation of being made to submit was to become, himself, the strongest force in the room."
Sherlock's voice carried cleanly through the quiet office.
"Someone like him would have walked away thinking: once I have that kind of power, I can take whatever I want, and I will never again owe anyone the indignity of an apology. You thought you were demonstrating the right way to use power. He was quietly studying how power is used to rise above all rules entirely."
The silence that followed was complete.
Harry stared, his mouth slightly open, unable to find words.
Dumbledore went very still as though something cold had moved through him and his fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly.
"Sherlock, I—"
He opened his mouth, and found nothing there.
A faint note of irony crossed Sherlock's expression, then softened.
"Of course, your intention was not wrong. As you yourself said, Tom Riddle already had the seeds of this worldview long before he met you. Your aim was to guide and contain those impulses, not to inflame his hunger for power.
The misjudgment lay elsewhere, you overestimated what a lesson, however well-conceived, can do for someone who was born without the instinct for conscience. Tom Riddle was not Harry Potter. Their childhoods, in many ways, looked alike, if anything, Harry's circumstances were worse. Yet Harry carries within him something Riddle never had."
Harry looked across at Sherlock, quietly moved.
His friend really did know how to say the right thing. And how to say it at the right moment.
"For someone like Riddle," Sherlock continued, "every moral constraint was simply an obstacle to route around. Every act of submission was an investment toward future dominance.
What you did was like fitting a collar around the neck of a wild young lion. You thought you might gentle its nature. What you didn't see was that it was simply gathering its strength, waiting for the day it could tear free of the collar and turn on the one who had put it there.
As you said, he returned those small stolen things in the end. But the acquisitiveness that drove him never left. It only scaled up: from a silver thimble, to the power and dominion over the entire wizarding world."
Harry said nothing.
Dumbledore said nothing.
Even after Sherlock and Harry had gone after the door had shut at the end of the corridor and their footsteps had faded Dumbledore still had not fully returned to himself. He stood motionless in the middle of the room, whispering to no one in particular, "Can it be, that I was truly wrong?"
"Steady yourself, Albus." The portrait of Armando Dippet spoke up from the wall, his tone gentle. "Didn't the boy himself say it wasn't your fault?"
"He also said my judgment was flawed." Dumbledore's voice carried a trace of bitterness.
"Anyone who had gone to that orphanage in your place would have done no better. That much I'm certain of," Dippet said, making an effort to console him.
"I'm not so sure," said Dumbledore, with a kind of quiet stubbornness. "If it had been Sherlock, he would have done better."
"Now you're being unreasonable," Dippet said, with a sigh of mild exasperation. "That boy wasn't even born yet. Would you go back in time, use a Time-Turner?"
"Armando," said Dumbledore, with quiet firmness, "I would never do something so reckless as meddle with time. Under any circumstances."
At this point, the portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black broke in with undisguised irritation.
"Must you two keep on? It was a few remarks from some boy in his teens, is it really worth all this hand-wringing? I fail to see what makes that child so remarkable that you treat him with such extraordinary regard."
"I wouldn't expect you to see it, Phineas," Dumbledore replied, with a serenity that carried its own quiet sting.
Fawkes, as though he could sense the mood of the room, stirred on his perch and let out one long, low, liquid note.
"I think I finally understand what Dumbledore meant," Harry said, the moment he and Sherlock had turned the corner of the corridor outside the office. He couldn't contain it any longer.
"That line about wishing he could pull thoughts out of his head, I know what he means now. Finding out all of this about Voldemort at once, and the Tournament on top of that, I feel like my head might actually split open."
"Your mental capacity overloads this easily?" Sherlock raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly.
Harry scratched the back of his head, a faint flush spreading across his cheeks. "Well, more or less, yes. I feel like I need a Pensieve of my own right now. Just to tip everything out and sort through it."
"You don't need a Pensieve," said Sherlock, his voice carrying the ghost of a laugh as he reached up and tapped his own temple. "You only need to do what I do, file the useful information into the right compartments in your mind, and clear out the useless noise and clutter."
"That's easy for you to say!" Harry threw up his hands. "I don't know how to do that!"
"Do what?" A clear, familiar voice came from just ahead.
Hermione and Ron stepped out of a shadowed stretch of corridor, both of them bright with relief, and moved quickly toward them.
"I knew you'd be together," Hermione said, catching Harry's arm and looking him over at once, her worry barely concealed.
"When Sherlock was called out of class, I knew something wasn't right. Then the moment lessons ended, Ron found me and told me what happened in the lesson how are you? Did Dumbledore work out what caused it? Is everything all right?"
She checked Harry's forehead, found nothing visible to read, and turned her gaze to Sherlock, her questions still coming.
Ron hovered close, his face tense and guilty. Even now, he still blamed himself, if he hadn't dragged Harry to Divination, none of this would have happened.
"Nothing to worry about," said Sherlock, glancing between the two of them. He looked at Harry. "Over to you."
Harry nodded. The four of them walked and talked mostly Harry talking, while Sherlock, Hermione, and Ron listened.
By the time they reached the common room, Harry had told them everything, everything except the Horcruxes.
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