Bryan's proposal had been formally tabled by the full Assembly, pending further consultation.
This, too, had been expected. A proposal carrying such extensive, sweeping consequences could genuinely never pass on the strength of a single speech at a single evening meeting.
Every member state's representative was required, under standard procedure, to report the full matter back to their own respective Ministry of Magic; only after serious, careful deliberation at the national level could any final decision be properly reached and formally communicated back to Paris.
As word of the proposal spread out from the chamber, Paris abruptly became the singular focus point of the world's entire magical nations. Countless eyes turned to the city over the following days.
Both the world of Light and the world of Darkness watched with equal intensity as the International Confederation of Wizards was thrust unexpectedly back into relevance and the international spotlight after so many years of gradual irrelevance.
The mainstream magical press of every nation covered the unfolding story in considerable force, and no shortage of celebrities across the wizarding world took to the newspapers to air their own competing views and weigh the proposal's gains against its costs for their audiences.
Even at Hogwarts, far away across the Channel, Harry and the others still troubled by the unresolved break-in at Professor Watson's office—had heard of the considerable sensation their own Professor Watson had caused all the way in Paris.
For three consecutive days straight, Bryan hardly paused for breath, meeting one representative after another from the various national Ministries of Magic, tirelessly laying out his proposal to each of them in turn, adjusting his emphasis and examples for each nation's particular concerns without changing the underlying substance.
He was not, notably, the only one in demand throughout this exhausting stretch. Dumbledore, too, found himself thoroughly besieged by his own steady stream of visitors and of the two great wizards, it was, tellingly, Supreme Mugwump Dumbledore of the International Confederation of Wizards whom most delegates privately trusted rather more, given decades of established relationship.
They were eager to learn, directly from his own mouth rather than through Bryan's, whether some more ambitious, hidden design lay concealed beneath the proposal's reasonable surface.
Meanwhile, officials at every level of the Confederation's existing bureaucracy—several of the Vice Presidents, Vipor above all others— spared no personal effort in quietly building broader support for the proposal behind the scenes.
Even though it would ultimately be the sitting Chairman alone who held the real, formal power the proposal actually granted, the Confederation's own institutional standing in the wider international wizarding world would rise considerably alongside the treaty's passage, and these officials themselves would naturally reap corresponding benefits in career and prestige as a result.
In the end, after all this continuous pressure and persuasion, the resolution passed.
Not every member state of the Assembly, however, ultimately signed the Joint Security Treaty when the final tallies came in.
Every nation in Europe joined without exception—even the German Ministry of Magic, which held some degree of lingering personal prejudice against Bryan. That outcome was easy enough to understand on reflection.
For the magical nations of Europe specifically, the Death Eaters were a crisis staring them directly in the face after Erkstag, and they urgently needed to pool their combined strength to properly crush the organisation before it could spread further.
Outside Europe, the nations with the most formidable, established magical traditions on every other continent approached the underlying idea of a Joint Task Force with considerably greater caution before committing.
After all, they already commanded no small measure of armed magical strength of their own, developed over generations, and letting the Confederation's forces onto their own sovereign soil to hunt down dark-wizard organisations was hardly a trivial or comfortable matter to simply agree to.
Even President Quahog, who held some measure of personal friendship with Bryan, sought him out privately, away from the formal proceedings, to voice his own lingering misgivings about the whole arrangement.
But once Bryan quietly proposed building a new, dedicated Surveillance Omnioculars workshop in New York as part of the broader package, the clouds of visible worry on Quahog's face lifted considerably, and he gave his carefully phrased, "reluctant" agreement to support the proposal after all.
Nearly every smaller, weaker magical nation, meanwhile, voted decisively in favour of establishing the Joint Task Force without needing any particular additional persuasion.
To them, a foreign dark-wizard organisation slipping unopposed across their comparatively leaky borders would spell nothing short of an existential disaster—never mind an organisation as monstrous as the Death Eaters, even a comparatively small domestic dark-wizard group would already have been more than their own limited resources could realistically handle alone.
And the proposal's passage was not, in the end, anything like a conclusion. It was, in truth, only the beginning of a considerably more exhausting process.
Every single individual clause of the Joint Security Treaty was drafted, in practice, through what amounted to bloodshed—the preparatory drafting sessions dissolving repeatedly into ceaseless, exhausting quarrelling over seemingly endless points of detail:
How exactly to define a "dark-wizard terrorist organisation"; the Joint Task Force's precise operational guidelines and rules of engagement; whether, once inside a signatory country's own borders in pursuit, the Task Force would remain bound by that nation's domestic laws or operate under its own separate authority; how it would properly coordinate with each country's existing native armed forces to avoid dangerous confusion; its exact permitted size and total strength; the specific number of agents each participating Ministry of Magic would be formally allotted to send; its full operational budget and funding formula; the selection process for members of the Coordination Committee itself; and how many years would need to pass before the entire treaty required renegotiation.
Even Bryan, who had braced himself in advance for a difficult, contentious road ahead, found himself, in the face of this seemingly endless, gritty bickering, itching more than once to simply draw his own wand and settle certain persistent disagreements with his fists.
Still, the basic structural framework was, thankfully, finally properly set after all that grinding effort.
After a full half a month of one exhausting meeting after another, all sides at last managed to scrape together a workable consensus: member states of the Joint Security Treaty would have two months to properly select their contributed Hit-Wizards and report them to the International Confederation of Wizards' headquarters in Paris, and to pay their agreed operational budget contribution for the current year.
At the very first meeting held immediately after the Coordination Committee's formal establishment, Bryan—attending in his capacity as a member state's representative on behalf of the British magical world submitted a formal petition: that the Death Eaters be officially classified as an international dark-wizard organisation under the treaty's new definitions, and that the Joint Task Force be immediately authorised to hunt them down across every signatory territory without further delay.
The petition was approved entirely unanimously, without a single dissenting voice. Once the Task Force was formally, fully established two months later, elite Hit-Wizards drawn from every participating nation would begin tracking down and apprehending members of the Death Eaters across every signatory member state simultaneously.
The moment that final meeting properly adjourned, Bryan began packing his own belongings at once, ready to leave Paris behind him.
Through more than half a month spent almost continuously at the Confederation's headquarters, there had not been a single waking second when he wasn't actively fighting down the strong urge to simply draw his wand and burn something to the ground out of sheer accumulated frustration with the process.
Even Dumbledore who had personally lived well over a century by this point, and had seen every conceivable kind of political storm pass through this same building over the decades—looked considerably worn and visibly tired after half a month of these endless, grinding meetings.
Every room of the luxurious Goblin Hotel functioned as its own sprawling, self-contained little world, elaborately furnished and quietly maintained. The two of them, their travel bags now properly packed, strolled together at a languid pace down a cobblestone path scattered thickly with falling autumn leaves, making their way steadily toward the property's main exit.
Dumbledore's own steps came to a gentle halt partway along the path.
He reached out one finger and caught a single golden leaf drifting past on the breeze, gazing deeply at the fine, branching veins traced across its surface as though studying his own long life reflected in the pattern.
A faint, private sorrow surfaced briefly in his deep blue eyes at the contemplation, and his long, drifting silver beard, caught by the same autumn wind, made him look older still in that moment.
"Two months' time—"
He let the withered leaf fall from his fingers and started walking again, turning to glance sidelong at Bryan, who still carried a faint, unmistakable edge of menace about him even now.
"What do you suppose Tom will do with all that time, Bryan?" he asked, with a small knowing smile.
Bryan cleared his own rasping, exhausted throat before answering. "You know him better than anyone, Supreme Mugwump and Headmaster Dumbledore. In any case, we certainly shouldn't be optimistic enough to expect him to simply lay down his arms and wait for the Task Force to arrive at his door."
Dumbledore chuckled softly at that. "Indeed, quite true. But I rather suspect Tom won't be underestimating you again. He'll have come to realise, by now, that in a mere three months, you've managed to cause him considerably more trouble than I managed to inflict across thirty years—"
Bryan shook his head lightly at the comparison.
"I'm not especially concerned, myself, with what he privately thinks of me one way or another. History's wheel turns forward regardless of any individual's private opinion of another. All I care about, in the end, is when the name 'Voldemort' finally becomes nothing more than a settled piece of that history, safely behind us."
Dumbledore kept his own gentle smile in place at that, but fell into a longer, more considering silence.
Whether it was Voldemort himself, or Dumbledore, both would eventually, inevitably be sealed away together in history's accumulating dust, whatever their respective roles in the story turned out to be.
The future, in the end, belonged to the young who would outlive them both.
"What are your own plans from here, then, Headmaster? Back to school?"
Sensing something stirring beneath Dumbledore's outwardly composed surface, Bryan raised one eyebrow and turned to look him properly in the eye.
"Before that return, there's a place I intend to try my own luck," Dumbledore said, his tone kept deliberately light, still smiling.
"Try your luck. A Horcrux?"
Bryan's eyes narrowed sharply at that. There was, by this point in the sentence, genuinely little of an actual question left in his voice.
The two of them had, over these past years of partnership, settled into a clear division of work between them.
Bryan worked primarily in the open, striking directly at and containing Voldemort's forces, while Dumbledore worked continuously in the shadows behind that effort, digging carefully into Voldemort's murky and treacherous past, unearthing from history's dust whatever specific secrets might yet decide the whole conflict's final outcome.
Dumbledore gave a small, acknowledging nod at Bryan's quick deduction.
"Well put, as always. There is indeed a place I have in mind. In truth, it's not that the possibility only just occurred to me tonight—I've had the thought sitting with me for some time now. Only, I don't personally think it's very likely to actually be where Tom kept his beloved Horcrux. But since our investigation has made no progress regardless, I thought I might as well go there and try my luck on the chance—"
Bryan's own interest sharpened considerably at that. "Might I come along with you, Headmaster?"
More than half a month of intensive, exhausting meetings had drained his own energy reserves genuinely dry, and for the moment, he had absolutely no particular wish to return directly to Hogwarts and face the considerable stack of accumulated official correspondence the Ministry would, by now, have sent piling up on his office desk in his continued absence.
"I can think of no reason to refuse your company, Bryan," Dumbledore said, still smiling relaxedly.
"Let us hope, that luck is with us this time."
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