"What did you think of Slughorn?" Dumbledore asked.
"A decent man who liked showing off a little," Kayson said.
"Actually, he was rather cowardly," Dumbledore said with a smile.
"Mm-hmm. Just say it straight: you mentioned before that Slughorn taught Voldemort, so you wanted to get information about Voldemort from him, right?" Kayson crossed one leg over the other as he sat in his chair.
"From your expression, you seemed rather confused," Dumbledore said, raising an eyebrow.
"I didn't understand why you needed me for this," Kayson explained.
"One of us had to play the bad cop and the other the good cop, didn't we?" Dumbledore raised an eyebrow.
"So, was I the good guy or the bad guy?" Kayson asked.
"Hmm..." Dumbledore merely smiled without answering.
"Fine, I'll go get Grindelwald for you." Kayson understood. Dumbledore had dragged him here to play the bad guy, so he immediately prepared to slip away and find someone who was genuinely good at this sort of thing.
"What I needed wasn't a death threat. What I needed was moral pressure." Dumbledore hurriedly stood up and grabbed Kayson's sleeve.
"...I'm not good at moral pressure," Kayson said stiffly.
"You weren't? I thought you were quite good at it. When you went to Slughorn's house with me before, you had plenty to say," Dumbledore said with a smile.
"That was genuinely what I thought. Didn't I tell you?" Kayson said speechlessly.
"Then there was even less of a problem. Moral pressure required someone who truly had morals to apply it, not someone like Gellert. Otherwise, it only felt like threats and temptation," Dumbledore explained.
And so, rolling his eyes nonstop, Kayson arrived outside Slughorn's office with Dumbledore.
"Why not just force him?" Thinking of this kind of job—neither dirty nor tiring, but undignified and