Dumbledore is dangerous. That fact stalks me like a cold echo in a cathedral. He moves with a moral certainty I can never buy, and his talent is older and stranger than my own. He outduels me not because I am weak, but because he is something else entirely — a man fused to myth and mercy. That makes him terrifying.
It does not make him invincible.
History is written by winners. If I am patient, meticulous, and merciless in the application of influence, I will see the ink dry in my hand. The important places in England are obvious to anyone with sense: Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, the Ministry. Hogwarts I will bend in time by shaping the children who pass through its halls. Diagon Alley I will protect and profit from — a market is better intact than razed. The Ministry, though… the Ministry is the keystone. Control the Ministry and you steer every law, every badge, every public lie and remedy. Control the Ministry and Dumbledore's moral certainties matter very little.
So I stop thinking like a general and start thinking like a statesman.
The plan is not a single breaking blow. It is a set of quiet measures, legal covers, and public rituals that make my ascendancy appear inevitable and reasonable.
Step one: Legitimise the fear.The Daily Prophet has done most of this work—Muggles are numerically dangerous, technology is accelerating, the Ministry seems slow and old. Now comes the policy language: emergency, contingency, national security. I draft a bill — not a sledgehammer, but a scalpel. The Emergency Magical Security Act. It grants temporary powers for coordinated responses to cross-border incidents, fast authorisations for protective measures, and — crucially — a mandate to establish Public Safety Zones under ministerial control. The bill reads like prudence. The bill reads like salvation. The bill is my Trojan horse.
Step two: Pack the committees.Law is votes and votes are people and people are appointments. Over the last months I have placed friends, favors, and debts into the Ministry's machinery: procurement clerks who file the right memos, licensing officers who delay inconvenient investigations, archivists who misfile incriminating records. But votes are decided in committees and committees are chaired by people with reputations. I move quietly now to install my allies into chairmanships: a Lord from Emrys as head of the Legislative Review; a reliable undersecretary to shepherd the draft through its early readings; a respected "independent" expert whom I've paid to speak at hearings proving the bill's necessity.
Step three: Shape the narrative.Public hearings will be televised, reported, and chewed over. The Prophets and pamphlets will present the bill as the only sane response to a world in which rockets and satellites scratch at our borders. I stage testimony of "experts" — technicians and muggle-technology specialists whose dossiers have been doctored by Tam and Itachi — and I let Arianna place a single, devastating question that the Order will find hard to answer in public without seeming alarmist. The narrative will fold: fear calls for power; power calls for me to hold it.
Step four: Make the first execution look benevolent.Once the Act passes, it must be used on day one in a way that appears compassionate. I will authorize protective checkpoints, emergency patrols, and a "temporary" set of protections for high-risk districts. Aurors, newly trained under our curricula, will seal off dangerous sites and, in front of cameras, evacuate innocents. My people will hand out food, medical charms, and pamphlets. Gratitude will be recorded and printed. Where there is gratitude there is loyalty.
Step five: Neutralise Dumbledore's leverage.Dumbledore's greatest currency is moral outrage and moral authority. To blunt him, we publicly propose an independent inquiry into the Order's own operations. I let small, untraceable scandals leak—old correspondences, misremembered anecdotes, the sort of smear that looks plausible to a world leaning toward suspicion. Simultaneously, I feed a counter-narrative: the Order's high visibility destabilizes public order; their moral absolutism leaves the Ministry unable to perform practical triage. The effect is subtle: not character assassination, but distrust. If Dumbledore loses the unanimous respect of the public, he loses the currency to rally every reluctant official.
Step six: The vote.The Wizengamot is where the law becomes law. I have already counted the voices — Slytherin, Emrys, and the families allied through marriages, favors, and ledgers. The math is cruelly in my favor. It will not be an outright roll; there will be theatre, drama, and a few concessions about oversight committees to make the bill palatable to doubters. But the scaffolding is set.
Operational details fall to my lieutenants. Itachi times diplomatic pressure in Europe so foreign ministers look the other way; Tam fabricates technical appendices that give the law teeth; Arianna prepares the special units that will "assist" Aurors in implementation; Solara flies aerial surveys that dramatize need; Lucius handles the social side—banquets and backroom promises that seal waverers.
Yes: Dumbledore is a threat. Yes: he fights like a man who has nothing to hide and everything to lose. In the last duel he proved a hair stronger in raw dueling prowess; but he is a single man and I have an apparatus. The war is no longer a measure of strength alone — it is a test of institutionality, time, and narrative.
Tonight I gather my inner circle in the manor's war room. The map on the table is not only geography but sociology—where the votes sit, which families breathe in which wards, the flow of press coverage, the locations of Auror detachments. I give commands in a voice that never trembles.
"Tomorrow," I say, "we introduce the bill. We let them talk. We let Dumbledore shout. We let the Order flail in public. Then we vote."
Arianna's smile is a knife. "And if he tries to stop the debate?"
"Then we will let him," Tam replies, eyes bright. "He speaks, he is recorded. Speak too loudly and he anchors himself to the emotion of the moment. The public prefers reason when fear is available."
Itachi's hands fold. "France will hold mirrors for us; distractions across the Channel will preoccupy foreign attention."
Solara rises and its feathers flare a small, ceremonial light that bathes the map in gold. There is a terrible poetry in it: a bird of flame overseeing the design of a storm.
We sleep with one eye open. The first reading tomorrow will be loud. The hearings will be longer. Dumbledore will be everywhere in the propaganda, and for a while things will look uncertain. That is an illusion I have learned to cultivate: let the public see conflict; let them choose the safe hand.
If I win the Wizengamot vote, the Ministry becomes the machinery that enacts my law. Then I do not need to hunt Dumbledore in the streets. I merely need to regulate the Order into irrelevance, to close their accounts, to block their training initiatives, to make their gatherings illegal under emergency decree. I will not need to break every wand. I will need to break their ability to be heard.
There is a comfort in this kind of violence: it is slow, it lives in paper and precedent. It is also durable. And it is mine.
Outside, London sleeps under a sky I have stained green more than once. Inside my chest there is the same small thrill I felt when I first turned the tide in Diagon Alley: that intoxicating sense that a plan is working. Dumbledore will fight. He will move like a man with nothing to lose—because in many ways, he does. I will move like a man with everything to gain.
Tomorrow we will see which the public prefers: the bright man with an unbending moral compass, or the man who promises safety, order, and a practical future. I already know the answer the majority will make when fear presses on them.
I only need to make that fear taste familiar.