Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

12 April, 1996 - Should

Thankfully, and, in Lavinia's opinion, surprisingly, Sirius ended up being completely and totally right. Not that she hadn't believed him when he'd said Harry would be fine it was just... she'd been so sure the Ministry was going to do something awful. She'd expected repercussions. But there didn't seem to be any.

Lavinia was exceedingly grateful for this, for a whole host of reasons, not least of which was that it meant that things went back to normal. Sort of.

On the whole, of course, this was a good thing. But it also did nest to nothing to soothe Lavinia's rapidly building nerves. It seemed to her that the past few months had been scattered with occasional incidents that felt like they ought to have changed things more than they had and she couldn't help but be suspicious of how much things had stayed the same. Arthur's attack had been an isolated incident with nothing of the sort since, but it still seemed like it should have been cause for more action than it had. The attack on the patient at St. Mungos that had resulted in Miriam's temporary suspension had come and gone without much fuss at all beyond the discussions Lavinia had quietly had with Sirius and Remus about who exactly had been behind it all. The breakout from Azkaban had completely disappeared from the news with no sign of a Ministry or Order response. The Quibbler article, similarly, had caused a splash and then faded away just like everything else.

Lavinia couldn't help but feel rather unsettled by this. Not because so terribly much had happened but because the things that had happened felt like they ought to have been enough to change things. To make people do something about it all.

Arthur had been attacked by the Dark Lord's snake inside the Ministry of Magic. The Ministry had, of course, reported nothing about it, but the Order also hadn't done anything to increase the safety of those nightly watches. The Unspeakable in Miriam's ward had been killed and the whole Order had agreed that it must have been a targeted attack because there was absolutely no other explanation. And the best culprit any of them could think of was Death Eaters. Why attack this man, none of them knew, but again, it felt like something that should have mattered. Someone at the hospital should have known what this meant. The Ministry should have known what this meant. Things should have changed.

The problem, really, was that Lavinia didn't know how to explain this to anyone without sounding rather awful. Because on the surface, it seemed like a good thing that people hadn't let these incidents get to them. It seemed like people were being resilient, being strong. Like they were soldiering on and not letting the Death Eaters win by giving up morale.

But Lavinia knew better. It was ignorance that kept everyone in their normal routines, not strength. And that ignorance meant they were unprepared. That ignorance was going to get people killed.

But these days, no one in the Order knew how to fix the ignorance. And no one in the outside world, it seemed, was willing to see it for what it was. Which put all of them at rather a stalemate and left Lavinia with that lingering sense that something awful was going to happen soon and that it was going to be made all the worse by how very little everything had changed in the past few months.

This unease was made no better when, in mid April, Dumbledore was replaced as Headmaster of Hogwarts. Of course, ousted might have been the better word, but the Ministry didn't seem inclined to go with that story. The official narrative was that Dumbledore had finally cracked and had committed direct crimes against the Ministry which were to remain undisclosed pending trial.

The story that everyone in the Order knew was that the Ministry had discovered the secret Defense Against the Dark Arts society Harry and his friends had started and Dumbledore had taken the blame for it, willingly leaving Hogwarts.

The end result, regardless of which version of the story anyone believed was that Dolores Umbridge was the new Headmistress of Hogwarts and Dumbledore was no longer at the school.