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She is three years old when she begins to remember what she was. In a past life she was still and silent and equanimous and swift and unmerciful. Her mind was quiet, intentions and feelings taut like wire and all perfectly aligned toward a solitary purpose that burned bright and sharp like a star, a purpose that she cannot yet recall. She tries to move like that and think like that, but her body is small and clumsy and her mind is clamorous with no room for the thoughts she is accustomed to thinking and the feelings she is accustomed to feeling, and her mother thinks it is sweet, and she hates her, and she remembers that too.
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thick_woolen_socks
He hears the reports. He listens to Calliope's secondhand account, to Minerva's secondhand account, to the children's respective firsthand accounts. The picture becomes clear enough.
He meets with Severus, in private.
"I think, Headmaster, there are facts regarding Clover Evans-Potter that we need to discuss, that inform my account of this afternoon's events."
thick_woolen_socks
"I don't imagine that discussion will go anywhere it has not already gone, Severus. Whatever else Clover is, she is, truly, a child, or she would not have spent eleven years in the care of Petunia Evans."
" - is that Maledict Gaunt was a consummate liar! She taught me for seven years, she worked with you for how long - "
thick_woolen_socks
"Perhaps she could perfectly imitate a child if she wanted to," Albus says patiently. "But why would she want to? For eleven years, as everything she built crumbled, as her people turned against each other? The chaos of the last decade cannot have been Maledict Gaunt's plan for Britain."
"I have no idea, and neither have you! You don't know what she is, neither of us understands - nobody still living understands everything that happened that night, I doubt even Gaunt herself does! And you have collapsed all of the possibilities into two, either Clover Evans-Potter is Maledict Gaunt reborn with all of her powers, or she is a perfectly innocent child!"
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"I don't believe she is perfectly innocent," Albus says. "Children are more than capable of careless or intentional cruelty, we both know that. But whatever she may have inherited from Maledict Gaunt, I believe she is a child, with a child's cruelty and a child's kindness and a child's potential to grow and change and decide what she will be. And the accounts I have heard, not only from her young friends, do not suggest to me that you treated her like a child."
"Do they suggest I treated her like a nascent bully, ringleader, and skilled and habitual liar? Because that is what I believe she is."
"The Weasley twins threatened to violently hex a student two years their junior, Headmaster. Leaving aside our other - disagreements - that is not acceptable behavior."
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He sighs a little. "Yes. I am sure Taggart will want to speak with them about deescalation."
