Chapter 27 :: The Lightning-Struck Tower

[monkeyshine4616]

Sorry about the timing. Too much on my plate at the moment. I completely forgot that I had a summary to do until I saw Chapter 26 on my f-list. So so sorry. *begs for forgiveness*Harry apparates himself and Dumbledore back to Hogsmeade after the adventure in the cave. Harry notices Dumbledore isn't feeling so hot, so he tells Dumbledore that they'

Comments

Re: oh, yay, exposition

[cyber_fay]

Dumbledore's argument here is pretty feeble. Draco is only anything less than a murderer by accident. The necklace and the poison in the mead were meant to be fatal. If neither Ron nor Kattie had gotten medical attention immediately would they have survived? Probably not. Putting a land mine in front of the wrong house doesn't make it any less deadly. No matter what rationalizations Draco may have chanted to himself, his actions were deadly and his reprieve in each instance is an accident at best.

I guess that in that scene Dumbledore was counting on the type of killer/evil-doer/whatever Draco is. IMO, Draco is the kind of person who hire killers, or that orchestrate deaths that do not involve his direct firing the wand (like poisoning, weird accidents, and so on). DD was playing a dangerous game, assuming that just because Draco spent the year trying to kill him from a distance he wouldn't do it "in cold blood". But, as usual *rolls eyes*, DD was right. Anyway, IMO it was actually very consistent with what we saw about Draco and his methods in HBP, maybe even before that.

Re: oh, yay, exposition

[cadesama]

Oh, agree, and I think Dumbledore was probably right to assume he was fairly safe in the situation as long as he kept the ball in Draco's court. But I don't like the whole "Draco, you aren't a killer" thing. It's really misleading, and it could just be more of Dumbledore's patter while he tries to talk Draco down, but I think the fact that he never moved against the attempted murderer in their midst sort of belies that.

Re: oh, yay, exposition

[cyber_fay]

but I think the fact that he never moved against the attempted murderer in their midst sort of belies that.

Yeah, I wondered about that, too.
If he knew that Draco was the one spreading havoc in Hogwarts, why didn't DD do something about him sooner? I may be stretching the argument here, but maybe Dumbledore chose to keep Draco around in order to learn (by Legilimency or whatever) more about Voldemort's plans, methods of hiring, current preoccupations, etc - after all, Harry is being blocked out and cannot help him any longer. I know that at this point he has Snape for that, but the more information the better and Snape is also an expert Occlumens. So Dumbledore probably thought that he could manage everything Draco could pull out, and so he kept him around for the sake of information. And then hubris was the cause of his fault. Yeah, I know that now I'm just being mean :)

Re: oh, yay, exposition

[cadesama]

Actually, I think that's very plausible. Most of the instances where Dumbledore is biding his time, it seems to be under the guise of diverting the enemy (such as the entire plot of OotP), or gathering information (the reason why Dumbledore wasn't destroying Horcruxes years ago, presumably). The problem is that we just never see any actual information come out of this effort.