the_debt_of_time

Lily, she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat. "I have t-to stop―" Sirius from being
framed.
"Please take caution, my dear," Dumbledore said kindly, daring to look concerned.
"The spell may cause some unpleasant side effects if you fight it too hard."
"I can't just sit back and do nothing," Mia whispered through her tears.
"I don't expect you to. You were sent back for a reason," Dorea insisted. "I've
memorised that letter too, and I believe that you are, indeed, a catalyst for events that are
meant to unfold."
"I don't want to help these events unfold," Mia admitted. "I don't want to be the
catalyst for m-my own―" brother's death!
"No, I imagine not the bad things," Dorea said softly, stroking Mia's hair. "Bad
things will happen, good people will suffer and even die, but if you try to change something,
someone else could take their place, or worse. A potentially painless death could instead
become one of great torture and suffering. A Killing Curse becomes a Cruciatus. A minor
injury becomes a death. Perhaps, think of the good you will do. What if the reason we win
the war, in the end, is because of what you will do here?"
"How can I help when I've been silenced?" She felt her eyes shift amber in her rage,
and she turned that anger on the meddlesome headmaster.
She was reminded of how very angry Harry had been with him during their fifth
year:
"So why's Dumbledore been so keen to keep me in the dark?" Harry asked her and Ron when
they explained that the headmaster told them not to tell him anything about the Wizarding world over the
entire summer, while he had been left alone at Privet Drive.
She remembered a furious Mrs Weasley screaming over the dinner table at an irate
Sirius:
"You haven't forgotten what Dumbledore said, I suppose?"
"Which part?"
"The part about not telling Harry more than he needs to know."
She remembered the moment when Harry got his hands on a copy of The Life and
Lies of Albus Dumbledore. Finding out about Grindelwald and "The Greater Good." She had
tried to defend their fallen headmaster to her friend, even while Sirius sat silently by—