Then He'd Miss the Last Ride

Gavin looked at the scene before him, quietly tossed aside the celery leaf he had been fiddling with, and headed for the door.

Dumbledore took a step back too, his boot grinding softly against the gravel path.

They exchanged no glances and made no gestures.

They simply walked in silence along the gravel path through the front garden, leaving the father and daughter, still kneeling on the ground and holding each other as they cried, plenty of space.

Outside the iron gate, Dumbledore stopped in the shade of an old oak tree.

Sunlight slipped through the leaves, dappling one shoulder of his deep-purple traveling cloak.

"Alaric has spent the last two years in Nepal," Dumbledore said, his blue eyes behind his glasses turned toward the distant outline of the valley. "The wizarding tribes there have an ancient meditation technique for treating minds tainted by evil spirits."

"Of course, that isn't quite the same as an Obscurus, but some of the symptoms overlap."

"He spent two years learning from them, trying to combine their methods with European Charms."

Dumbledore paused and stroked the tip of his beard.

"The elders there told him the complete treatment had been lost two hundred years ago."

"The last practitioner to master the entire technique died in a landslide before he could pass it on."

"Alaric has been trying to reconstruct it ever since. It's the only possible method he's found in all these years. He's worked from fragmentary texts, oral accounts, and a few old stone tablets carved with partial incantations."

"It wasn't that he didn't want to come back. He felt there was no point in returning until he'd found a solution, and he wanted to find one as quickly as possible."

Gavin leaned against the oak, hands in his trouser pockets, and listened