Harry Potter 05 - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

–’
    He seized the table on which the silver instrument had stood and threw that, too. It broke apart on the floor and the legs rolled in different directions.
    ‘You do care,’ said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. ‘You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.’
    ‘I – DON’T!’ Harry screamed, so loudly that he felt his throat might tear, and for a second he wanted to rush at Dumbledore and break him, too; shatter that calm old face, shake him, hurt him, make him feel some tiny part of the horror inside himself.
    ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ said Dumbledore, still more calmly. ‘You have now lost your mother, your father, and the closest thing to a parent you have ever known. Of course you care.’
    ‘YOU DON’T KNOW HOW I FEEL!’ Harry roared. ‘YOU – STANDING THERE – YOU –’
    But words were no longer enough, smashing things was no more help; he wanted to run, he wanted to keep running and never look back, he wanted to be somewhere he could not see the clear blue eyes staring at him, that hatefully calm old face. He ran to the door, seized the doorknob again and wrenched at it.
    But the door would not open.
    Harry turned back to Dumbledore.
    ‘Let me out,’ he said. He was shaking from head to foot.
    ‘No,’ said Dumbledore simply.
    For a few seconds they stared at each other.
    ‘Let me out,’ Harry said again.
    ‘No,’ Dumbledore repeated.
    ‘If you don’t – if you keep me in here – if you don’t let me –’
    ‘By all means continue destroying my possessions,’ said Dumbledore serenely. ‘I daresay I have too many.’
    He walked around his desk and sat down behind it, watching Harry.
    ‘Let me out,’ Harry said yet again, in a voice that was cold and almost as calm as Dumbledore’s.
    ‘Not until I have had my say,’ said Dumbledore.
    ‘Do you – do you think I want to – do you think I give a – I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’VE GOT TO SAY!’ Harry roared. ‘I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say!’
    ‘You will,’ said Dumbledore steadily. ‘Because you are not nearly as angry with me as you ought to be. If you are to attack me, as I know you are close to doing, I would like to have thoroughly earned it.’
    ‘What are you talking –?’
    ‘It is my fault that Sirius died,’ said Dumbledore clearly. ‘Or should I say, almost entirely my fault – I will not be so arrogant as to claim responsibility for the whole. Sirius was a brave, clever and energetic man, and such men are not usually content to sit at home in hiding while they believe others to be in danger. Nevertheless, you should never have believed for an instant that there was any necessity for you to go to the Department of Mysteries tonight. If I had been open with you, Harry, as I should have been, you would have known a long time ago that Voldemort might try and lure you to the Department of Mysteries, and you would never have been tricked into going there tonight. And Sirius would not have had to come after you. That blame lies with me, and with me alone.’
    Harry was still standing with his hand on the doorknob but was unaware of it. He was gazing at Dumbledore, hardly breathing, listening yet barely understanding what he was hearing.
    ‘Please sit down,’ said Dumbledore. It was not an order, it was a request.
    Harry hesitated, then walked slowly across the room now littered with silver cogs and fragments of wood, and took the seat facing Dumbledore’s desk.
    ‘Am I to understand,’ said Phineas Nigellus slowly from Harry’s left, ‘that my great-great-grandson – the last of the Blacks – is dead?’
    ‘Yes, Phineas,’ said Dumbledore.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Phineas brusquely.
    Harry turned his head in time to see Phineas marching out of his portrait and knew that he had gone to visit his other painting in Grimmauld Place. He would walk, perhaps, from portrait to portrait, calling for Sirius through the house …
    ‘Harry, I owe you an explanation,’ said Dumbledore. ‘An explanation of an old man’s mistakes. For I see now that what I have done, and not done, with regard to you, bears all the hallmarks of the failings of age. Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young … and I seem to have forgotten, lately …’
    The sun was rising properly now; there was