Tying Up Loose Ends
Eulalie Moire
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing; J.K. Rowling owns everything. I make no money and intend no infringement.
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The hand hangs off the edge, curled naturally so that water drips off the knuckles in two directions; some drips to the floor and some pools in the slightly cupped palm. The index finger, curled a little less than the rest, lays gently against the thumb, which is also dripping water. The hand, like the rest of the body to which it is attached, has been in this position and in the rain so long that it is hardly recognizable as human. It looks rather more like those fakely-skeletal hands that one finds on sale around Halloween.
The body is unrecognizable with decay and no one does recognize it until Neville comes through with the rest of the Aurors to burn the bodies of the Dark Wizards so that some enterprising despot cannot sweep through in the future and reanimate himself an army. Necromancy is an abhorred but not a lost art and they must take precautions.
If A yields B and B yields C, then A yields C. If you are in Slytherin House, you are a Pureblood. If you are in Slytherin House, you are a Death Eater. If you a Pureblood, you are a Death Eater and so you must die. But this logic is incorrectly symbolized and erroneously proved. Still, though, there was a war on and no one—on the winning side, at least—was particularly concerned with how good the logic of propaganda was.
Can you say "power vacuum"? Very good.
Harry Potter at seventeen was not fit to run a state. Hogwarts was no school of political science and even if it had been, Harry's marks had been only mediocre. If Dumbledore had still been around, he might have been able to explain this to the people in a position to decide which powers would be in post-war Wizarding Britain. He could have said that Harry needed his privacy or that he had had enough pressure or that the in the public eye was no place to finish growing up. But Dumbledore was dead and some fool with an eye for the grand gesture decided that Harry Potter would make an excellent Minister of Magic. So that was that and then came the massacres.
Harry ran the country, but he didn't really, because Hermione was almost always tucked behind the drape, whispering in his ear, and Hermione was an existentialist and didn't believe in Prophecies. Hermione said a lot of things to Harry, like that everyone was inherently and always radically free, that everyone chose. They chose life over justice, security over resistance.
Fudge, said Hermione, chose to protect his own power rather than listen to Dumbledore, and how many lives had been taken in the year that he refused to acknowledge Voldemort's return? So why shouldn't he die? He'd made his choices and he was responsible for them. So Fudge was poisoned, quick and clean.
The Death Eaters chose their own power over anything else, so that was easy; that was logical and Harry wouldn't even have needed Hermione to explain things to him.
But the people who had chosen to ignore the crisis and shun Dumbledore until it was too late to do anything but acknowledge the truth, those people who followed Fudge's lead not out of a desire for power but out of a desperate need to feel safe, to not live in bone-deep terror again? Those people had been too weak of will to accept the truth and they were too weak to go forward and build the new order. They had to go too, and that meant most of the old order at the Ministry—and sometimes their families as well. It meant Percy Weasley, though Molly begged pitifully for his life.
When it was over, the new administration was responsible for nearly as many deaths as the Death Eaters had been, but they, at least, took responsibility for their own actions in a Sartrean sense, which Hermione said made it okay. They had chosen to save lives in the long run, to purge the evil elements in society and begin again. They were the architects of a new, free, open future.