Taking Precautions

"I want you to leave..." Dumbledore raised his arm in a gesture of dismissal. "Cornelius Fudge..."

"You want me to leave?" Cornelius Fudge's eyes bulged as wide as they could go, bloodshot veins visible in them. "Dumbledore! Where exactly do you want me to leave?"

Perhaps because the way things had developed had completely exceeded his expectations, it had somehow given him a kind of courage akin to "smashing the jar since it was already cracked."

He puffed out his chest again and said with incomparable stubbornness, "Dumbledore! You have no way to prove any of this! It's nothing but an excuse!"

"It's an excuse for you to expose your ambition! Peter Pettigrew had his soul sucked out by a Dementor, and you're pinning all of this on me, saying it was my fault!"

"It was clearly this castle, Hogwarts, that was at fault! Otherwise why would he have run? You even gave orders to Williamson and Prout! They are Ministry of Magic employees! My employees!"

"What right do you have to go over my head and order them around? Why do you have to interfere with me? Why did you have to catch Peter Pettigrew..."

Cornelius Fudge seemed to have lost control, spittle flying as he roared sentence after sentence, making Nymphadora Tonks and the others beside him rather tense, afraid something unexpected might happen;

It was not Dumbledore they were worried about, but Cornelius Fudge. They were afraid he would fail to restrain himself and do something even more outrageous.

Dumbledore's expression remained calm, but the disappointment in his eyes only grew heavier;

And that disappointed look seemed to turn into a drop of water falling into hot oil, making Cornelius Fudge thrash about even more wildly. His roars grew louder and louder, and his voice grew increasingly