𖥔 regret
“You’ve been quiet lately,” Dumbledore said, handing Harry a cup. “Either you’re deep in thought, or plotting something truly catastrophic. I’m hoping for the former, but I’ve been wrong before.”
Harry gave a tired smile. “Just trying to make sense of things.”
“Ah.” A pause. “The hardest truths are rarely about the world, but about ourselves.”
Harry said nothing, but his eyes gave him away. Dumbledore looked into his ward’s green eyes and saw the familiar conflict of grief that didn’t come from hatred.
Familiar, he thought, looking at his boy who has grown into a young man. The way love twists when it’s tethered to someone the world says you must destroy.
He had seen that look before, in a mirror, a lifetime ago.
He offered softly, “Regret, Harry, rarely comes from love itself. Only from what we do—or don’t do—because of it.”
Tom Riddle is a storm. A unique, immovable force, but Albus has weathered through something similar before, in another man, across another impossible divide.
If his boy chooses differently… perhaps it will matter. Perhaps it will mean something.
Perhaps, in another life, it already did.
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