Albus paused to catch his breath. He was currently trekking to the old Gaunt house on his hunch that Tom had hidden one of his horcruxes there. Unfortunately, it was definitely worth it to make the trek, despite the pain the long and winding path posed for his old bones.

He rested his palm on the trunk of a nearby tree and spread his awareness through the roots of both the tree and its neighbors until he had a clear picture of the area. This confirmed that there were no other humans in the area and no traps beyond the magical ones he’d already sensed.

When Albus had been planning his Horcrux Hunt, he had initially planned to pursue the Gaunt ring first, but after further consideration had decided to begin with Hufflepuff’s Cup. His influence was dwindling across the board, and he strongly suspected he would need as much of it as possible to obtain the cup.

And he had been right– the cup had been in the Lestrange’s vault at Gringotts. The goblins had resisted his requests for access all summer and he had finally managed to pull together some of his lingering influence to call in a few favors with the Goblin Liaison Office.

With the favors, he had been able to quietly force the goblins to relinquish the cup. He’d promptly taken the cup back to his office and destroyed it with the Sword of Gryffindor.

After he’d left his office, he had been informed that Severus’s cover was blown. He’d gone to visit Severus in the hospital wing and been relieved to find that Severus was now recovering, mostly unharmed thanks to the prompt activation of the experimental portkey Albus had designed to sense Tom’s feelings towards Severus. It had been intended to take Severus to safety if his status as a spy was exposed, and it had worked, leaving Albus free to plan for the future.

Now, Albus had kept a vague contingency plan for this possibility, and had gleefully set to putting it into motion. Everything had fallen into place just a couple of days before the students had arrived.

Once Severus had been settled in as Eli– and more importantly, Albus had derived all the enjoyment he could from watching Severus’s worldview shift- Albus had informed Minerva of his imminent departure, and then set out to finish tracking down the Gaunt ring.

Albus had been deep in archives when he’d felt Hogwarts’s wards react to dark magic. When the wards had gone off, Albus had been nearly done, so he’d taken the time to finish what he was doing before apparating directly to the source of the dark magic.

He arrived in one of the abandoned classrooms on the first floor. A quick survey revealed no damage and nothing out of place. He had noticed a portrait of two young women, though, so Albus had strode up to them and asked pleasantly, “Excuse me, did you happen to see anything unusual? It would have been half an hour ago, at most.”

The woman on the left had rolled her eyes and said, “No.”

So Albus had shifted his gaze to the woman on the right and raised an eyebrow. But she shook her head at him, so Albus had said, “Alright, well, if you happen to remember anything, do let me know.”

Albus had then retreated from the room, and as he left, he’d heard one of the women say to her companion, “His name is truly Dumbledore for a reason, isn’t it?”

The other woman had shushed her friend, and Albus had chuckled to himself as he apparated away.

Disrespectful portraits aside, Albus had found no evidence of dark magic.Without that, there was little he could do. If someone had witnessed the event, they would hopefully report it to Minerva, who was more than capable of handling the situation.

Aside from that interruption, Albus had been able to locate the Gaunt ring with minimal difficulties. He’d already known where the Gaunt shack was, he’d just needed to do some research to confirm that the ring was likely still there.

Which led Albus to where he was now, trekking through the woods on a Saturday afternoon.

Objectively, Albus knew why he had to approach on foot– Tom had warded the entire area against magical transportation, and muggle methods weren’t easily accessible for Albus.

As he approached the shack, the protections began to increase in intensity, and he had to focus his power and talents toward circumnavigating them. Were it not for the need for secrecy, Albus could easily have torn through all the wards and apparated directly to his destination, but it was exceedingly important to keep Tom in the dark regarding the danger his horcruxes were in.

And, Albus finally acknowledged to himself, the more secrecy surrounding this endeavor, the better, because he suspected that this ring was more than just a horcrux. He had long suspected that it was also a Hallow, meaning it would be catastrophic if any Hallows hunters caught wind of it.

Albus tucked his hope that the ring would be a Hallow back into a corner of his mind. He needed to focus on the task at hand, especially now that he had arrived at the door to the shack. As flimsy as it looked, Albus knew that this would be where the most dangerous protections lay.

Raising the Elder Wand, he began to unravel the wards around the door. He made steady progress until he triggered an outpouring of snakes from both beneath the shack, and also from the woods around him. Albus suspected it was a Parseltongue ward since it had slipped his notice. Then he spun in a circle, transfiguring the snakes into pieces of hot pink yarn.

Once he was done, Albus paused to refocus. It had been pure luck that he’d only triggered a simple ward and not an alarm.

And he couldn’t afford to rely on luck.

Thankfully, he managed to get through the rest of the exterior protections without mishap. The interior of the shack was just as dilapidated as the exterior suggested it to be, and more or less the same as it had been when Bob Ogden had been here.

Albus advanced slowly through the shack, sure that the ring would be far back, thus forcing him to fight his way through as many protections as possible.

But as Albus broke through a ward to the halfway point of the shack, he felt the weight of the protections lift at the same moment he saw the ring, and the mark of the Hallows clearly printed on the stone. Immediately forgetting the danger he was in, Albus plucked the ring off the ground and placed it on his finger, overwhelmed with the need to know who had cast the fatal curse on his sister.

Then Albus screamed.

Through the pain, he yanked the ring off, and surrounded it with his own wards. Then he dropped it into a heavily protected pouch he’d brought with him. Then he took the blinding pain and walled it off in his brain– a temporary measure to allow him to think clearly enough to get help.

Ability to think restored, Albus apparated away, directly to Alastor’s home. With Severus unavailable, Alastor was the best bet to combat the curse he could now feel eating away at the flesh on his hand.

When he coalesced into existence, he was barely able to convince his weakened body to dodge Alastor’s curse.

Albus held his hands up in supplication and said, “It’s me, Albus! I once, while inebriated, sang a wonderful karaoke rendition of My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion.”

This was, apparently, sufficient to halt the onslaught, because Alastor then lowered his wand slightly.

“I need your help,” Albus said, twitching his injured hand; the withering had clearly spread to most of his hand by now.

Alastor grunted and walked towards Albus. He said, “I see that you still only visit when you need me.”

He began casting diagnostic charms on his hand. After several rounds of casting a charm, waiting a moment for the results, and then casting again, Alastor finally began to cast containment and purification charms on Albus’s hand.

Gradually, the spread of the withering began to slow and, ultimately, stop.

And as the withering stopped advancing, the pain that Albus had walled off in his mind began to push much less insistently against its bounds. He could now tell that if he removed the walls, the pain would be manageable, so he went ahead and did it. The exchange of pain for the ability to think more clearly was worth it.

“Thank you, Alastor,” he said to his friend. Alastor nodded and mock-saluted him from the seat he’d taken once he’d finished casting.

“Can’t believe you let a curse like that get to you,” Alastor said gruffly, which was his way of asking how Albus had really been cursed..

But Albus didn’t think it was time to share the whole story yet. So he said, “That’s a story for another time. I’m afraid I’ll have to leave now. I need to clear up the loose ends from this particular adventure, but I’ll regale you with all the details later.”

Both of Alastor’s eyes fixed on his for a moment, and then he said, “I’ll hold you to that.”

Albus smiled and said, “I’m sure you will.” Then he apparated away to his office in Hogwarts. When he arrived, he took a moment to lean against his desk. Then he shook himself off and collected the Sword of Gryffindor from its display case.

He removed the ring from his pouch, taking a moment to regretfully vanish any of his lemon drops that lingered at the bottom of it Then he set the ring down in the middle of his office floor. He walked around it in a circle several times, casting wards to contain the backlash from its destruction.

Once he was satisfied that his office was adequately protected, he sheathed his wand and grasped the hilt of the sword with both hands. He raised the sword and approached the ring slowly, alert for any signs of external influence on his mind.

It seemed the curse had been the Hail Mary of the ring’s protections, because Albus was able to approach the ring, swing the sword down with his full strength, and crack the stone off of the ring, all without any interference.

The moment that the stone was divorced from the ring, a hideous black vapor rose up and quickly dissipated against the wards Albus had set.

He smiled grimly and plucked the stone off the floor. As he took in the mark of the Hallows engraved on the surface, his hands started shaking slightly. The answer to the question that had haunted most of his adult life was within his grasp.

But as his still-aching hand came to the forefront of his mind, he stopped his hands mid rotation of the ring.

He was too much of a coward to face the possibility that it had been his hand responsible for his sister’s death. Ignorance was bliss, and Albus would prefer to keep his.

Albus closed his fist around the stone and then retrieved the rest of the ring from the floor. He made his way around his desk and sat down heavily, dropping the stone and the ring onto his desk.

He reclined in his chair, deep in thought.

Slowly, the pieces of a plan began to come together. He sat back up and nodded to himself. He would place the stone in the snitch that Harry caught in his first ever game of Quidditch, and he would also enchant it so it would open only when Harry inevitably walked to his possible death, determined to remove the horcrux that lived within him.

This decided, Albus pulled out a roll of parchment. He inked his quill and began to write, “The Last Will and Testament of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore.”