"Come in, come in, Harry. Please sit down. Thank you for coming to see me on such short notice."
Harry sat down in the chair in front of Professor Dumbledore's desk, and sighed a little, and decided that he'd better say something before Dumbledore got started talking. "You're welcome, sir. But I do want you to call me Mr. Malfoy."
Professor Dumbledore only paused for one moment, and then nodded. "As you wish. Now, as I expressed to you last year, although the prophecy that led Voldemort to attack you and your family—"
"The Potters."
Dumbledore watched him with something like pity. "The people who loved you and died for you."
"And kidnapped me." Harry stared at him. Dumbledore just stared back, and so Harry decided to do something that Draco and his father never would have done. "It's confusing enough to deal with what they were to me, sir. Please don't make it worse by insisting that I need to only think of them as people who loved me."
Dumbledore winced a little. Harry held back his chuckle. Yeah, that hurt, didn't it?
"Of course," Dumbledore whispered. "It would be a confusing morass to deal with if you were an adult, never mind being a teenager. I shall not forget again, Mr. Malfoy."
"Thank you." Harry smiled at him. "So you think that the prophecy is still in play, sir?"
"I don't know if it is or not." Dumbledore shrugged. "I honestly have never run into a situation like this before. But I believe that Voldemort will think it is still in play. It might be one reason he told Sirius Black to break out of prison and go on the run."
Harry sat up straight. He hadn't even thought that someone might believe that about Sirius breaking out of prison. That meant he had to tell the truth now, and hope that maybe Dumbledore could capture Sirius and get him a trial for the kidnapping instead of believing he was Voldemort's faithful servant.
"He didn't!"
Dumbledore frowned. "Pardon me, Mr. Malfoy, but you sound very certain of that."
"I am." Harry tried not to clench his hands together as he looked at Dumbledore. It might make him seem guilty, or uncertain, or something. "Sirius Black came to Malfoy Manor over the summer. He was unfortunately able to slip through the wars because he had Black blood." Harry thought that was a safer lie than trying to tell the truth about the Black madness and the fact that his mother had it. "He told me that Peter Pettigrew was the real traitor, because he was the real Secret-Keeper. And our house-elf took away his madness, so he's sane now. I don't know why he's still lurking around, except maybe because he wants to kidnap me again. He did say something about that. About using a necromantic ritual to try and make me a Potter. But he didn't betray the Potters."
Harry reached the end of that and found his voice a little breathless. He hoped that he didn't look like he was lying or uncertain now, either. He looked hopefully at Dumbledore.
Dumbledore blinked, and blinked again. Harry had only seen him look more surprised on the day they found out that Harry was a Malfoy.
"Mr. Malfoy," Dumbledore said slowly, "if he only told you this story when he was mad, then what makes you think it's the truth?"
"He never got a trial," Harry said. That was true enough. He had looked through all sorts of old newspapers that Mrs. Malfoy had found for him in the library—charmed to keep copies of all paper or parchment that passed through the family's hands—and he'd found that. "They just took him straight to prison. How do they know that he betrayed the Potters or he was even their Secret-Keeper? He said Dad—I mean, James thought about it, but they decided Sirius was too obvious. So they made Pettigrew the Secret-Keeper. But he was a traitor, obviously."
Dumbledore's frown went on and on, deepening. Then he shook his head. "I admit this is a striking idea, Mr. Malfoy, but it cannot be true."
"Why not, though? If he didn't have a trial?"
"He must have." Dumbledore's voice was strained now. He stared at the perch where his phoenix sat with a disturbed expression. "I thought…" He shook his head again. "I don't remember. I should remember, but I don't."
"Did he have a Dark Mark?" Harry asked. "Did anyone ever check, sir? I thought most Death Eaters had a Dark Mark." He had noticed that his father was very careful to keep his left sleeve always pulled down. Sometimes Harry liked that, and sometimes he thought it was Mr. Malfoy coddling him.
"It's true that I can't remember them checking," Dumbledore murmured. "But the Ministry would not simply have put a man in prison without a trial, even a Death Eater accused of a serious crime! I remember trials for other Death Eaters, including Bellatrix Lestrange, who was born a member of the Black family."
Harry had the feeling that Dumbledore thought he would be upset about that or something, but Harry ignored it. Sirius was the important member of the Black family right now. "But you don't remember attending it. Do you remember reading it about in the papers, sir?"
....
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