Of Monsters, Of Men

Chapter 32

Lupin stared at him, grief on his face. "I couldn't—I didn't want to raise my hopes in the slim chance that you had lived."

Harry hunched his shoulders. Tom carefully slung an arm around Harry, fingers curling around his bicep. "It wasn't your fault. You couldn't have known," Harry said quietly. He flicked his eyes to Snape. "Did you know?"

Professor Snape cleared his throat. He seemed subdued in his answer. "No. I'd briefly suspected it, but I didn't want to believe it."

Because that would have meant your life's work was done in vain. Because I lived, while Lily died. Everything that you'd done leading up to now wouldn't have mattered.

A silence fell upon them.

"So what now?" asked Tom coldly. "We have many unanswered questions."

"We answer your questions," Dumbledore replied. He looked as though he had aged a decade within the last minute.

Harry buried his head in Tom's shoulder and decided to let Tom speak for him.

—

Feeling Harry curl on him and withdraw into himself, Tom cursed the people in the room in his head.

At Dumbledore's words, Tom nodded curtly. His hand underneath the table squeezed Harry's. Harry squeezed back. "Earlier, I learned that Pettigrew wasn't ordered to kill Harry, instead that he was ordered to stun Harry. The Unbreakable Vows on his being made it quite difficult to figure out a motive."

Dumbledore sighed, seemingly aging a decade again before Tom's eyes. He placed a familiar silvery gray piece of fabric on the table. "It's because of this particular Invisibility Cloak. Or rather, the owners of the Cloak."

Harry stared at Dumbledore with a terrified expression. Because Harry was the one who had stolen the cloak from Dumbledore, and now Dumbledore had gotten it back. Tom resisted the urge to gnash his teeth together and instead stroked the back of Harry's hand under the table.

"Don't worry, Harry," Dumbledore said gently, "You aren't in trouble. You'll soon find out that the Cloak was yours all along. I simply held it for safekeeping purposes."

"The Potters?" Tom asked, desperate to draw the conversation back on track.

"Yes. Do you know the Tale of Three Brothers?" Tom noticed that Professor Snape's eyes sharply darted to Dumbledore, while Sirius Black and Professor Lupin exchanged confused expressions.

Tom cleared his throat. "The one written by Beedle the Bard? Yes, Harry and I are familiar with the fairytale."

Dumbledore nodded. "Good, good, that'll save us some time. The youngest brother was Ignotus Peverell. As the generations passed, the Cloak was also passed down to his descendents, eventually to the Potter family after Iolanthe Peverell's marriage to Hardwin Potter. After a time, the Cloak landed in your father James Potter's possession."

Impatience was starting to eat holes in Tom. "That's good and all, but what does Grindelwald have to do with any of this?" He couldn't bear listening to Dumbledore's long-winded tangents while still not knowing the reason that Harry had been targeted.

"Grindelwald was always obsessed with the idea of immortality. I knew him when he was young, and he was convinced that obtaining the Deathly Hallows would grant him a life without death."

The tales that madmen tell themselves...

Tom shook his head before saying, "So that's why Harry was targeted. To obtain the cloak. But then why couldn't Pettigrew simply have stolen the cloak and apparated back to Grindelwald?" he asked.