The art of delegation, as any experienced practitioner will tell you, lies in delegating your delegation.
Newt had always been one of the more straightforwardly decent people in the wizarding world. Reliable. Honest to a fault. The kind of man you could leave alone with your most dangerous creatures and find everything exactly as you left it. Something about him had recently become, as Nicolas would have put it, considerably more flexible.
There was an old principle that went roughly: virtue takes years to build and a bad example to dismantle in an afternoon. Nicolas did not know the precise phrasing, but he understood the concept perfectly, and it described the current state of Newt with uncomfortable accuracy.
Newt turned his head away to avoid Nicolas's stare.
He was not entirely without conscience about it. There was a faint internal resistance. But there was also the undeniable fact that being the one to redirect a problem instead of absorbing it was, morally questionable though it might be, deeply satisfying.
Tom had handed things off to him and Nicolas a considerable number of times. Individual incidents, nothing catastrophic, but the accumulation across all of them represented a meaningful volume of effort. Today, Newt had simply decided he was not absorbing the next one.
"Let's sleep first," Nicolas said, with the grin of someone who has made peace with his own hypocrisy. "Proper rest, then we go to Dumbledore together."
"Agreed." Newt smiled back, faintly sheepish. Something passed between them that did not require words.
That afternoon, while Tom was out with Astoria, both old men arrived at Hogwarts and located Dumbledore with minimal difficulty.
Dumbledore listened to the request, understood immediately that he was on the receiving end of something Tom had set in motion several steps earlier, and accepted the task anyway.
Purifying Inferi was not straightforward work. Doing it without disrupting the consciousness, keeping the subject in the liminal state between life and death rather than releasing them fully, required a level of precision that very few wizards in the world could manage. Two thousand of them, before the school year began, meant he could essentially clear his schedule of everything else. Fortunately, Grindelwald had been quiet lately. If that changed, the timeline would stretch considerably.
But Dumbledore could not say no. The previous night had shown him something he had not fully appreciated before: what it felt like to move through one of Voldemort's elaborate traps with three people of that calibre alongside him. Every obstacle dissolved. Nothing had required more than a moment's thought. If he wanted access to that kind of company in the future, the goodwill had to come from somewhere, and the somewhere was Tom.
They both understood this without discussing it.
A day later, Dumbledore arrived at Grimmauld Place carrying Regulus.
The transformation had reversed. The skin was still drawn tight over his bones, but the colour had returned, and the dark quality that had saturated him was gone, dispersed entirely.
"Thank you, Dumbledore." Sirius meant it without any qualification. "I want to hold a funeral. Bring him home properly."
"He has earned that."
The disagreement came over who to invite.
Sirius wanted it large. He wanted people to know what Regulus had done, because a sacrifice without witnesses was a sacrifice swallowed by silence, and Regulus deserved better than silence.
Dumbledore wanted it small. As few people as possible who knew the full truth of what had happened.
"The existence of Horcruxes is not something that should enter wider circulation. And announcing that Regulus turned against Voldemort is not something we should do right now."
"Why not?" Sirius was on his feet, pacing the cold sitting room. "He earned his name back. He earned people knowing."
Dumbledore's gaze moved from Sirius to the locket sitting on the table, and he made a decision.
"Do you know what a Horcrux is?"
Sirius stopped. He shook his head. He had been so focused on Regulus that he had not thought to investigate beyond what he needed to know.
"A Horcrux is among the darkest objects the magical world has produced. It is created by splitting one's soul and anchoring the fragment in a physical vessel. As long as the vessel survives, the maker cannot die. Creating one requires murder, because only killing fractures a soul in the way required. This is why Voldemort survived his own Killing Curse."
Sirius looked at the locket on the table. He took two steps back.
"That's why Regulus told Kreacher to destroy it."
"Now you understand why I want this contained," Dumbledore said. "If Regulus's story becomes public knowledge, so does the existence of Horcruxes. Once anyone with harmful intent begins investigating what a Horcrux actually is and how to make one, we will have traded one Voldemort for the possibility of several. And even setting that aside, Voldemort made more than one. If he learns that this one has been found, he will move the others. Finding them becomes substantially harder."
"But I don't want him to just disappear," Sirius said, the frustration bleeding through clearly now. "I don't want the world to forget he existed. I don't want it to be as though he was never here."
"Numbers aren't the only measure of things. Quality matters too."
Tom's voice came from the entrance hall. He had arrived to browse the library and caught enough of the conversation on the way through.
"What do you mean?" Sirius looked genuinely puzzled.
Tom settled himself on the arm of the wooden sofa. "You want a funeral worthy of him, don't you."
"Yes."
Tom pointed at Dumbledore. "The most powerful wizard in the world. Agreed?"
Sirius nodded without hesitation. Dumbledore looked slightly uncomfortable but said nothing to contradict it.