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deathtocapslockI had an idea which might explain a few of the more frustrating bits about the Order’s failure to catch the spy and the whole Godric's Hollow fiasco. Help me poke it to see if it holds up!
On November 1, 1981, Dumbledore might have concluded that my Prank Redux theory was the correct one. But what did he think before that?
My first spy in the Order theory was that maybe (despite them pretending 1996 was Remus's first werewolf spy rodeo) Dumbledore had in fact gotten Remus into Greyback's pack as a spy during VoldWar I, had him leak some genuine information to sell his cover, and assumed that information filtered back to Voldemort and accounted for enough of the Order's problems that there needn't be a real spy in the Order. This isn't impossible, but it is flimsy.
But suppose Dumbledore thought James was the spy.
This would give us a good...well, a less-bad reason for Dumbledore to take the cloak in July and keep it: he thought he'd identified the spy and wanted to limit his opportunities to sneak around doing Voldemort's bidding. (Oh, it also happened to be Death's own cloak, which Dumbledore wanted anyway? What luck! But he may not have discovered this until later.)
It also would explain why he may have led the Marauders to believe that a person couldn't be their own Secret-Keeper, as we saw by Bill's example that you could. Otherwise James could have let Voldemort in whenever he wanted, and they couldn't have that! (Even if you prefer a Dumbledore who coldly planned for Voldemort to get in eventually for prophecy reasons, he'd have wanted to control the timing.) Much better to force James into a position where he had to agree to go under the Fidelius Charm, still cloakless. Sirius as (apparent) Secret-Keeper was the next best thing to it being Dumbledore himself, because it seemed plain that Sirius would die rather than betray James. Fidelius plus no cloak would keep James locked down tight.
Now, this would require Dumbledore to believe that James would willingly betray his wife and infant son to their deaths. Unthinkable! But Dumbledore's a hundred years old at this point. Surely he'd heard of at least one case of a man deciding his wife and baby were cramping his style and murdering them. Dumbledore had observed years of James demonstrating manipulative charm, callous indifference to others' suffering, and a taste for violence. If he ever caught James thinking in passing that Lily hadn't been paying him enough attention and was no fun since the baby was born, and maybe he'd be better off without them so he could run around with Sirius like in the good old days, and also Moody and Dumbledore were really keeping them down with all these rules and stuff and at least the Death Eaters didn't have to hold back...maybe Dumbledore thought he'd cracked the spy case.
He could have been wrong about the depths of James's depravity if you prefer. I'm just saying it might have looked plausible.
This doesn't let Dumbledore off the hook for making reckless decisions. It would mean he let Lily and Harry stay in a house with a man who might be a danger to them. In his partial defense, if he thought Harry wasn't at risk of death from anyone but Voldemort, then maybe he optimistically told himself Lily probably wouldn't be either. And he might have thought that it's different than in Muggle cases, because wands are a great equalizer that make witches perfectly capable of defending themselves against wizards. (Would it surprise anyone if a wizard born in 1881 had an even poorer grasp of how domestic abuse works than many people today? Me neither.) Plus, he knew James couldn’t stand to stay locked up with no stimulation for long; surely he’d soon break out to do something dastardly, Dumbledore could catch him at it, and therefore Lily and Harry wouldn't suffer living in that cottage with him for long anyway.
Dumbledore was canonically willing to risk an entire school full of children under his care as long as he could lure Voldemort in to trap him in front of a mirror. And to allow non-prophecy-protected Neville, Hermione, Draco, and Hagrid to chase a unicorn-killer he believed to be either Voldemort or Voldemort’s agent (and who was in fact both!) for detention. And to allow someone he knew or strongly suspected routinely damaged people’s memories to teach a school full of kids for an entire year, not for any war-related greater good, but because the curse would zap the guy in the end, and anyway it was hard finding anyone to take the job. This sounds like a Dumbledore who would be plenty willing to let one young witch and baby live with an awful guy for a few months or a year if it meant taking a dangerous spy off the game board. File under “horrible but consistent with his canonical actions.”
On Halloween, he realized he'd miscalculated.
Hagrid's report of a distraught Sirius begging to take Harry, then giving up without violence and offering up his beloved motorbike, might have been what made Dumbledore think Prank Redux in the first place. If James was the spy, he'd have floated this idea to Sirius: let’s trap Voldemort and be big damn heroes! All you have to do is pretend to betray me… James would have intended to make a show of being horrified and grief-stricken when the plan "failed" and Lily and Harry died, leaving James unconscious or Petrified but alive. Foolish boy didn't realize that Voldemort would have no more use for him and would kill him instead. Sirius, not knowing he'd been double-crossed, was obviously blaming himself for going along with the plan, or at least for (he thought) screwing it up. He wanted to make amends by caring for Harry, and when that was denied him, he left, intending suicidal revenge against Voldemort (hence giving away his motorbike). But Peter caught up to him first, and Sirius reacted violently — he might not have been an intentional traitor, but he was still a dangerous loose cannon who would kill one of his oldest friends if provoked. Azkaban was still the best place for him, even if it was tragic.
Or...Dumbledore might hope that's what happened while fearing he might have miscalculated even more badly than he'd initially realized. Maybe his first assumption had been half-right: James was Voldemort's spy — and so was Sirius. Everyone said they were inseparable. Well, maybe that was true. Maybe they both decided the Order was no fun, Lily-and-baby had been nice for a while but were now getting in the way of the wild bachelor life James and Sirius had so enjoyed, and it was time to switch to the winning side and have some fun. Of course Voldemort broke whatever promises he'd made them, killed James, and left Sirius holding the bag. That's why Sirius didn't make more than a token effort to get Harry — with Voldemort, James, and Lily dead, what was the point? So pretend to be a grieving godfather, then flee. Except Peter caught up with him first...
If (as Terri suggested) Moody or anyone else performed Legilimency on Sirius and realized he wasn't actually Voldemort's agent, just a loose cannon (apparently) as dangerous to his own side and innocent bystanders as to the enemy, Dumbledore might have returned to the Prank Redux theory pretty quickly. Though that depends on how confident he was that Sirius was grieving over something other than getting caught and (maybe) losing his best friend/partner-in-crime.
Once Peter was revealed as the true Secret-Keeper, Dumbledore might again wonder what really happened. Was Peter the only spy, and he betrayed the Potters without any hints anyone could have picked up on? With or without him also convincing James and Sirius to pull a Prank Redux plan so that if he and/or Voldemort didn’t kill Sirius in time, he'd have the backup cover story of "we meant it to work differently so we'd be heroes but it went wrong”?
Or were Peter and James both Voldemort's spies? We saw in GoF that Peter didn’t trust Voldemort’s promises and only returned to him because it seemed like the least bad option. Elkins suggested this was because Voldemort had already broken one promise to him: perhaps Severus wasn’t the only person who asked Voldemort to spare Lily – perhaps Peter did too. We know how that worked out. But if Peter knew James was a spy and Voldemort had killed him to make sure no one found out and because he was no longer useful, that would serve just as well. Or hey, why not both?
If Dumbledore thought right up until his death that James at least might have been one of Voldemort's spies, that also might explain a point Terri made:
Yeah. Here's another reason he might think James didn't sacrifice himself. He ran out into the hall without his wand, shouting valiantly, because he thought he was playing his part in a scripted drama, not genuinely trying to protect Lily and Harry. Again, Dumbledore might have been wrong, but he might have believed this.
By the time Dumbledore confirms that Sirius really wasn’t a spy and genuinely felt awful about how Halloween went down, the question of exactly what happened was mostly academic. The only risk was that Harry might find out somehow that Dumbledore suspected his father of being the spy, possibly even correctly – but how likely was that?
Dumbledore certainly wasn’t going to tell him unless forced by circumstances. (“Well, Harry, I thought your father was a traitor who didn’t care if Voldemort killed you and your mother, so I made sure he was stuck in the same house with you for months on end. Lemon drop?”) If Moody knew or suspected, he’d trust Dumbledore’s orders and keep silent without question. Peter might not have known, or simply decided there was no point in trying to convince anyone, not that he had many chances. (I mean, imagine him trying that in the Shack. He’d expect that to push Sirius and Remus over the edge and leave Peter a charred burn mark on the floor. No thanks!) The only other person who could taunt Harry with the information was Voldemort. Now he might have tried even if he thought Harry wouldn’t believe it, because even a teensy gnawing doubt in Harry’s mind would amuse Voldemort. On the other hand, Voldemort has a serious case of James Bond Villain Exposition Syndrome. Maybe he was building up to it with comments about James being a meddling fool and but fighting bravely (which Voldemort would delight in revealing as a lie later, all the better to shatter Harry), and he simply never had enough chatting time with Harry to get to the point.
So Dumbledore might never have needed to make up his mind about whether he believed James was Voldemort’s other spy in the Order, and we would never find out. It would hardly matter to us either if it didn’t make a possible explanation for a few otherwise-puzzling actions back in 1981. What do you think?
On November 1, 1981, Dumbledore might have concluded that my Prank Redux theory was the correct one. But what did he think before that?
My first spy in the Order theory was that maybe (despite them pretending 1996 was Remus's first werewolf spy rodeo) Dumbledore had in fact gotten Remus into Greyback's pack as a spy during VoldWar I, had him leak some genuine information to sell his cover, and assumed that information filtered back to Voldemort and accounted for enough of the Order's problems that there needn't be a real spy in the Order. This isn't impossible, but it is flimsy.
But suppose Dumbledore thought James was the spy.
This would give us a good...well, a less-bad reason for Dumbledore to take the cloak in July and keep it: he thought he'd identified the spy and wanted to limit his opportunities to sneak around doing Voldemort's bidding. (Oh, it also happened to be Death's own cloak, which Dumbledore wanted anyway? What luck! But he may not have discovered this until later.)
It also would explain why he may have led the Marauders to believe that a person couldn't be their own Secret-Keeper, as we saw by Bill's example that you could. Otherwise James could have let Voldemort in whenever he wanted, and they couldn't have that! (Even if you prefer a Dumbledore who coldly planned for Voldemort to get in eventually for prophecy reasons, he'd have wanted to control the timing.) Much better to force James into a position where he had to agree to go under the Fidelius Charm, still cloakless. Sirius as (apparent) Secret-Keeper was the next best thing to it being Dumbledore himself, because it seemed plain that Sirius would die rather than betray James. Fidelius plus no cloak would keep James locked down tight.
Now, this would require Dumbledore to believe that James would willingly betray his wife and infant son to their deaths. Unthinkable! But Dumbledore's a hundred years old at this point. Surely he'd heard of at least one case of a man deciding his wife and baby were cramping his style and murdering them. Dumbledore had observed years of James demonstrating manipulative charm, callous indifference to others' suffering, and a taste for violence. If he ever caught James thinking in passing that Lily hadn't been paying him enough attention and was no fun since the baby was born, and maybe he'd be better off without them so he could run around with Sirius like in the good old days, and also Moody and Dumbledore were really keeping them down with all these rules and stuff and at least the Death Eaters didn't have to hold back...maybe Dumbledore thought he'd cracked the spy case.
He could have been wrong about the depths of James's depravity if you prefer. I'm just saying it might have looked plausible.
This doesn't let Dumbledore off the hook for making reckless decisions. It would mean he let Lily and Harry stay in a house with a man who might be a danger to them. In his partial defense, if he thought Harry wasn't at risk of death from anyone but Voldemort, then maybe he optimistically told himself Lily probably wouldn't be either. And he might have thought that it's different than in Muggle cases, because wands are a great equalizer that make witches perfectly capable of defending themselves against wizards. (Would it surprise anyone if a wizard born in 1881 had an even poorer grasp of how domestic abuse works than many people today? Me neither.) Plus, he knew James couldn’t stand to stay locked up with no stimulation for long; surely he’d soon break out to do something dastardly, Dumbledore could catch him at it, and therefore Lily and Harry wouldn't suffer living in that cottage with him for long anyway.
Dumbledore was canonically willing to risk an entire school full of children under his care as long as he could lure Voldemort in to trap him in front of a mirror. And to allow non-prophecy-protected Neville, Hermione, Draco, and Hagrid to chase a unicorn-killer he believed to be either Voldemort or Voldemort’s agent (and who was in fact both!) for detention. And to allow someone he knew or strongly suspected routinely damaged people’s memories to teach a school full of kids for an entire year, not for any war-related greater good, but because the curse would zap the guy in the end, and anyway it was hard finding anyone to take the job. This sounds like a Dumbledore who would be plenty willing to let one young witch and baby live with an awful guy for a few months or a year if it meant taking a dangerous spy off the game board. File under “horrible but consistent with his canonical actions.”
On Halloween, he realized he'd miscalculated.
Hagrid's report of a distraught Sirius begging to take Harry, then giving up without violence and offering up his beloved motorbike, might have been what made Dumbledore think Prank Redux in the first place. If James was the spy, he'd have floated this idea to Sirius: let’s trap Voldemort and be big damn heroes! All you have to do is pretend to betray me… James would have intended to make a show of being horrified and grief-stricken when the plan "failed" and Lily and Harry died, leaving James unconscious or Petrified but alive. Foolish boy didn't realize that Voldemort would have no more use for him and would kill him instead. Sirius, not knowing he'd been double-crossed, was obviously blaming himself for going along with the plan, or at least for (he thought) screwing it up. He wanted to make amends by caring for Harry, and when that was denied him, he left, intending suicidal revenge against Voldemort (hence giving away his motorbike). But Peter caught up to him first, and Sirius reacted violently — he might not have been an intentional traitor, but he was still a dangerous loose cannon who would kill one of his oldest friends if provoked. Azkaban was still the best place for him, even if it was tragic.
Or...Dumbledore might hope that's what happened while fearing he might have miscalculated even more badly than he'd initially realized. Maybe his first assumption had been half-right: James was Voldemort's spy — and so was Sirius. Everyone said they were inseparable. Well, maybe that was true. Maybe they both decided the Order was no fun, Lily-and-baby had been nice for a while but were now getting in the way of the wild bachelor life James and Sirius had so enjoyed, and it was time to switch to the winning side and have some fun. Of course Voldemort broke whatever promises he'd made them, killed James, and left Sirius holding the bag. That's why Sirius didn't make more than a token effort to get Harry — with Voldemort, James, and Lily dead, what was the point? So pretend to be a grieving godfather, then flee. Except Peter caught up with him first...
If (as Terri suggested) Moody or anyone else performed Legilimency on Sirius and realized he wasn't actually Voldemort's agent, just a loose cannon (apparently) as dangerous to his own side and innocent bystanders as to the enemy, Dumbledore might have returned to the Prank Redux theory pretty quickly. Though that depends on how confident he was that Sirius was grieving over something other than getting caught and (maybe) losing his best friend/partner-in-crime.
Once Peter was revealed as the true Secret-Keeper, Dumbledore might again wonder what really happened. Was Peter the only spy, and he betrayed the Potters without any hints anyone could have picked up on? With or without him also convincing James and Sirius to pull a Prank Redux plan so that if he and/or Voldemort didn’t kill Sirius in time, he'd have the backup cover story of "we meant it to work differently so we'd be heroes but it went wrong”?
Or were Peter and James both Voldemort's spies? We saw in GoF that Peter didn’t trust Voldemort’s promises and only returned to him because it seemed like the least bad option. Elkins suggested this was because Voldemort had already broken one promise to him: perhaps Severus wasn’t the only person who asked Voldemort to spare Lily – perhaps Peter did too. We know how that worked out. But if Peter knew James was a spy and Voldemort had killed him to make sure no one found out and because he was no longer useful, that would serve just as well. Or hey, why not both?
If Dumbledore thought right up until his death that James at least might have been one of Voldemort's spies, that also might explain a point Terri made:
why didn’t Dumbles ever bring up the possibility that James, like Lily, had sacrificed himself? Particularly since he was always encouraging Harry to model himself on the gallant hero Harry imagined his father to have been?
Twinkle’s actions and words are (unusually) congruent here. Both make most sense if Dumbles really did believe that Lily, but not James, had died to protect Harry.
Yeah. Here's another reason he might think James didn't sacrifice himself. He ran out into the hall without his wand, shouting valiantly, because he thought he was playing his part in a scripted drama, not genuinely trying to protect Lily and Harry. Again, Dumbledore might have been wrong, but he might have believed this.
By the time Dumbledore confirms that Sirius really wasn’t a spy and genuinely felt awful about how Halloween went down, the question of exactly what happened was mostly academic. The only risk was that Harry might find out somehow that Dumbledore suspected his father of being the spy, possibly even correctly – but how likely was that?
Dumbledore certainly wasn’t going to tell him unless forced by circumstances. (“Well, Harry, I thought your father was a traitor who didn’t care if Voldemort killed you and your mother, so I made sure he was stuck in the same house with you for months on end. Lemon drop?”) If Moody knew or suspected, he’d trust Dumbledore’s orders and keep silent without question. Peter might not have known, or simply decided there was no point in trying to convince anyone, not that he had many chances. (I mean, imagine him trying that in the Shack. He’d expect that to push Sirius and Remus over the edge and leave Peter a charred burn mark on the floor. No thanks!) The only other person who could taunt Harry with the information was Voldemort. Now he might have tried even if he thought Harry wouldn’t believe it, because even a teensy gnawing doubt in Harry’s mind would amuse Voldemort. On the other hand, Voldemort has a serious case of James Bond Villain Exposition Syndrome. Maybe he was building up to it with comments about James being a meddling fool and but fighting bravely (which Voldemort would delight in revealing as a lie later, all the better to shatter Harry), and he simply never had enough chatting time with Harry to get to the point.
So Dumbledore might never have needed to make up his mind about whether he believed James was Voldemort’s other spy in the Order, and we would never find out. It would hardly matter to us either if it didn’t make a possible explanation for a few otherwise-puzzling actions back in 1981. What do you think?
no subject
Date: 2025-09-28 11:42 pm (UTC)