Butterfly, Caught
a collection of unrelated short stories spun into the tale of the world
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Character(s): Horace Slughorn, Kingsley Shackbolt, Cornelius Fudge, Muggle Prime Minister
Context: end/post book 5 (following Voldermort's public appearance at the Ministry)
Challenge: Poetry Quotes and Numbers Challenge, 4 – 5: "I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild."- Allen Ginsberg / The Long Haul III, Week 1
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Even a man in utter control of his life may find it find sand sifting through his fingers another night. And the hysteria was swift.
Every day till that, the mainstream papers ranted about the impossibility of Voldermort's return. They ranted about the lies pouring from the mouth of Grindelward's destroyer, about the senseless rambles of the madman who had saved them from Voldermort's plight once before – or, as the less faithful claimed, told of the false rambles of an old man who'd finally passed the age of sense, and a once-hero who'd let his fame clout his head. And those stories had been told for the better part of a year; there was no man in Britain who hadn't had to put forward their opinion on the matter to family, colleagues or even nosy little neighbours.
But that changed overnight. Without warning, the papers one day were stapled – and not just the mainstream papers, but every sort – with the same headline: "Voldermort has returned". And most were accompanied by a photo: of the Dark Wizard himself wrapped in robes and shooting green fire from his wand.
Some called the bluff. They were dead within weeks, if not days. The rest of the world was more believing, regardless of whether they had believed or not before.
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Horace had been extra cautious all year, as soon as the first whispers of Voldermort's return had arisen. He didn't know much about Harry Potter, and what he did know told nothing of his truthfulness at all. He did know though that the threat was too severe to simply ignore, and so he began preparing.
He was a Potions master by trade, which gave him access to very valuable stores in return for making him easily accessible. And that was a problem he needed to quickly solve, though a difficult one to work around. The easiest would be to simply freeze his supply lines and then vanished off the face of the world – but that was no solution, short term or no. Potion-making was what he did, and he needed his supply of ingredients for that.
He put in as many defences as possible instead. He screened everything that arrived. He stared carefully at every person to walk through the threshold of his shop as they shrugged off the aftertaste of his curtain of spells, and started whenever his front door bell rang and spat curses at being disturbed. He'd changed his address as well, just in case: the new one was known to few and told to none. And all that was for a piece of news that most believed to be false.
He simply couldn't afford to take that chance, and when it was proven true overnight and an Owl arrived the following morning with the front page headlines, he was glad he hadn't. Over the next few nights, more papers came: disappearances around corners. Deaths behind locked doors. His heart hammered in his chest every time; it could have been him, it could have been him, if he'd been less prepared.
He was prepared, as prepared as one could be for when the world exploded into panic, but even that wasn't prepared enough. They found him, at work, at home – he was forced to surrender it all and vanish into the calm where the panic was slower, duller.
He disappeared into the Muggle world.
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The Ministry was in chaos after Voldermort's appearance, and only the members of the Order were prepared. Sensing a change in the flow some weeks ago, the Order had made a few arrangements ahead of time – arrangements that were proving to be quite beneficial now.
One of those was Kingsley's transfer, which was approved the day following Voldermort's little show. Overnight, the Minister Fudge changed from reluctance to waste resources in such a manner to feverence that his counterpart, the Muggle Prime Minister, was in need of the highest security they could offer.
In another day, Kingsley found himself sitting comfortably in his new job, one eye on his paperwork and the other on the Muggle Minister. And he saw how the panic spread; it took a few days, because the Muggles knew nothing about Voldermort and even less about the magic beneath their nose. But they couldn't miss the death and destruction that exploded like a rippling wave once the need for secrecy was obliterated. They couldn't miss the bridge collapse, or the fog that was spreading like wildfire. They couldn't miss a healthy woman dying behind locked doors. They couldn't miss a chemist being blown sky high, or the hundreds of people suddenly missing, hospitalised or dead without cause.
Kingsley, on assignment to protect the Muggle Minister behind the desk, was far from most of that chaos. No-one else knew Amelia. They didn't know the Dementors. Or the killing curses that could kill without a visible mark. They didn't know the swimming smoke skulls that was Voldermort's Dark Mark…and even if he had been prepared for it all, he felt like a child waking up to a new world.
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Cornelius was one who had almost lost his stomach in the change. He had been vehement in his arguments against Voldermort's return, and the validity of that claim had raised many a problem in the world. One was obvious: the state of panic coincided perfectly with Voldermort's first major moves. The man fed of fear after all, and…well, they'd pretty much asked for a spectacle.
There were other problems as well. People now thought him incompetent: the same people who had so easily believed him before. They said he should have known the truth, should have prepared the world – and yet he hadn't been the first to discredit the claims of Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore. He'd just been the first to doubt them.
And he had been a fool to do it; an adult fool. Now he was a child, because he didn't have the power to change what an adult could. Within weeks he was made an example of and stripped of his position. Within weeks, he had become what he'd feared if Voldermort's return had really turned out to be true.
He couldn't move the world towards a victory against the Dark Wizard, and the world knew that. He would have graciously stepped down if he could, but he hadn't wanted to believe. They all hadn't wanted to believe – except those precious few who had believed and suffered for that belief.
But what else could he have done? There hadn't been any proof, and Albus Dumbledore could afford that, but not a weak man like him.
He couldn't even afford the tatters the Ministry now was. Or the world outside: people being killed, buildings destroyed – all in one fell swoop now that the secret had been yelled out to the world.
He was a coward in heart, he knew. But even the ignorant mass of Muggles were now in hysteria with impending doom.
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The Muggle Prime Minister saw the change, but he saw it slowly. More and more suspicious deaths began to appear. The weather began to change. The city began to crumble, as though its decay had passed its critical point. Other unexplainable things began to occur, and others turned to him. The opposition pointed fingers. The public demanded answers.
He had no explanation. He simply didn't see how a woman could be killed from the inside of a locked room. He didn't see how a sure-sturdy bridge could suddenly collapse upon its own weight, or how fog could cover places at random in the middle of summer, while the sun shone brightly upon all of Britain.
Magic, was the whisper in the room, whenever he fell into silence thinking of it. It is magic. The unexplainable. The unexciting. The only explanation when things descended into chaos.
Except magic did exist, and he was one of the few incapable of practising it that knew. And if magic was responsible for the inexplicable deaths and destruction that ran all over Britain, then he was powerless to do anything about it.
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They were all powerless against hysteria; it was too powerful a force. Even the most prepared of them were swept into the panic. Even the ones who denied felt themselves thinking about precautionary measures, and about their worst fears realised.
No-one was spared when the first waves of war crashed into the shores, setting the stage and claiming the first sweep of victims. Everyone, Muggle or magical, heard of the terror that rapidly spread through Britain. Everyone felt the force as it spread.
And no matter how they'd tried to avoid the wave: by denial, by putting their efforts into precautionary measures, they found the wave crashed upon them all with undeniable force. And no-one was an adult in a poll of children screaming out in terror, fighting for the cramped space beneath the beds where they could lie in fear and wait.
No-one could hold sand between their hands without it slipping away. No-one could hold hysteria when it broke lose.