AN: This chapter deals with a lot of the same topics as the last one...it's going to be a theme for a while, I'm afraid, until Harry can tome to terms with this at least a little.

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The next invitation was issued to the Shacklebolts. They came without children, since both of them were at Hogwarts already, but at Alduin's request, they brought Kingsley with them. He had thought Harry might like to meet a real Auror, and he had been right.

"Do you have a lot of work?" His young charge was asking curiously as soon as he learned what the younger Shacklebolt brother did for a living.

"Not as much as we used to," the man said easily, "which is a very good thing."

"Oh, have you been an Auror during the war already?" Harry's curiosity seemed to grow.

Kingsley nodded. "Yes, I joined directly after Hogwarts, and at that time, the war was just beginning. I was thrown in at the deep end, but it did have some upsides – I managed to gain experiences that way which none of of the new recruits have...But it's not that we don't have anything to do, there are always people attempting to cause mischief."

"Are many of them ex-Death Eaters?" Harry continued his questioning. Alduin was very glad for this opportunity his ward had to talk to an Auror and a Gryffindor who had reasonable opinions.

Kingsley smiled at his question. "Officially, there are no ex-Death Eaters outside of Azkaban, or almost none. Unofficially, well, I have to say that they rarely cause any trouble, at least of the open kind. They know they have to tread very carefully." He shrugged. "Periodically, there is a backslash against them, their houses are raided and every time, some dark objects are found, but well..."

Harry frowned. "What do you mean? You sound like you think it doesn't matter."

The Auror shrugged. "Because I don't think it does. Many of those things are family heirlooms, coming back from times when the border between what is and isn't dark was much less firmly established. Most old families have such things in their vaults. As long as they aren't using it, I don't see why we should be wasting energy by attempting to ferret it out. Mind you, I am far form thinking those people are free of any evil intent – but we should be trying to find out what those intents might be, not go chasing wild geese."

His older brother added: "Very likely, it's those ex-Death Eaters who have some nefarious plans that set the spark for those chases when they want to distract the Ministry. It falls for it every time, more's the pity."

"Well, with Fudge being the Minister, what can you expect?" Alduin asked rhetorically.

"What's wrong with Mr. Fudge?" Harry enquired curiously. All the adults a the table chuckled.

"He is...not the most capable of men," Alexandra explained.

"Understatement of the century," Susan Shacklebolt muttered.

"Then how come he is the Minister? I mean, I thought normally..." Here Harry paused. Alduin assumed he had been about to make a comparison with the Muggle world, but remembered he wasn't supposed to make those.

"Well, Harry, it's like this," he took the word. "When you have several equally strong fractions, each with a strong candidate, then making a compromise often involves putting in an insignificant person that doesn't offend anyone."

"But that's stupid!" Harry exclaimed. "I mean, if he does a bad job, everybody pays for it, don't they?"

Alduin smiled at this. "Yes, but less so than if a person directly opposed to their interest was in the function, perhaps. Or so many people believe."

"Who was it supposed to be, then, the strong candidates, I mean?"

Here, Nathan rejoined the conversation. "Bartemius Crouch was the most likely candidate, but that fell through when his own son was discovered to be a Death Eater." He smirked. "There are still impassioned discussions going on about who was behind that discovery."

Harry's eyes were wide as saucers. "I don't understand. You mean someone forced him to join?"

"Not necessarily, even though that is possible too, of course," Nathan said evasively.

"Then what?"

"Come, Harry," Alduin said, "you already know that many people who were Death Eaters escaped prison. He was well on the way to becoming one of them, when he was caught. Someone convinced him to join that last foolhardy effort to bring Riddle back and it is extremely likely that that someone did it precisely to discredit Bartemius Crouch." He exchanged a look with Nathan. They were dissembling and they both knew it – everybody in both the Ravenclaw and Gryffindor camp were certain enough about who was behind that particular clever bit of politics. The Smiths were the ones most opposed to Crouch getting the position, and Mrs. Duncan Smith's great-nephew married Gerda Crabbe, sister to one Death Eater and sister-in-law to another. She was young Crouch's cousin by marriage, and so either Wilhelm Crabbe or Leo Goyle were likely to have been his sponsors among the Death Eaters, and those who introduced him into Dark Lord's service. It was not in any ex-Death Eater's interest to have Barty Crouch as a prime minister either, and so it would have been a piece of cake for Gerda Crabbe or her relations to convince one of them to persuade Barty Junior to take part in that idiotic effort. But like many other things, Alduin knew Harry was not prepared to hear this.

Nathan spoke again, saying: "Apart from Bartemius Crouch, well...I am sorry – and embarrassed! - to say that the Gryffindor camp was completely incapable of agreeing on anyone else but Dumbledore, even though it was perfectly obvious that he was going to refuse. The Smiths were trying to push forward one of them, Aidan, but that was doomed to fail too, since no one tends to like them. The Slytherins were attempting to convince Paolo Proudfoot to take on the job for them, since the Proudfoots were the only one of the Slytherin Noble and Most Ancient families that never got entangled with the Dark Lord, but he very sensibly told them to go to the devil."

Kingsley chuckled. At the others' questioning look, he explained: "One of Paolo's sons is an Auror and I know him quite well. We've discussed this a couple of times, and he told me how absolutely enraged his father had been at that time. Because obviously the Slytherin families expected he would defend their interest as a Minister, and then, it mostly meant keeping their various family members out of Azkaban. Now Paolo is no fanatic and he has no particular desire to lock up a father of two small children, for example, but going out of his way to get guilty people out of their punishment is a different thing entirely. I believe he was quite vocal and explicit in his refusal."

"So you see, Harry," Nathan finished his explanation, "it turned into a match between Bartemius Crouch and Aidan Smith, with many people not wanting to have either on the job, and so the search for a perfectly inoffensive candidate started...in the end, the Junior Secretary to the previous Minister was picked, and that was how we were saddled with Cornelius."

"My husband gave you a very unbiased account," Susan added. "Speaking with most people, they would tell you that the fraction they hate the most put Fudge in place. Most Gryffindors swear it's the fault of the Slytherins, the Hufflepuffs are cursing the Ravenclaws, and so on."

"As if that wasn't absurd," Alexandra noted. "No self-respecting Ravenclaw would ever promote Fudge of all people as a minister."

"And you could say the same for the Slytherins," Alduin added. "As I was trying to explain to Augusta Longbottom recently, Lucius has too much sense of style to support something like that." That was not to say, of course, that he would not take the opportunity such a weak minister presented.

"Based on this logic, I think we should blame the Hufflepuffs," Susan commented. "They are by far the most likely not to mind, and it is Fudge's old house, after all."

"You can expect no objection in this of all Houses," Alduin laughed in response.

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Next morning, Harry was frowning through breakfast.

"What is it?" Alduin asked.

"Well...there's something bothering me, but I'm not sure if I should..."

Alduin sighed exasperatedly. "How many times do I have to tell you that you can ask me anything?"

Harry straightened his shoulders. "All right then," he said. "I don't understand how you can be so okay with all those ex-Death Eaters roaming free. If I understand it right, you even see many of them at parties! I know we've already talked about this a little, but I mean, they hurt you and put you in a coma for nine years! Maybe it's not so bad as having your parents killed, but still-"

"Harry," Alduin interrupted him. "Death Eaters killed my parents, too. And my grandparents."

Harry stared. "They I don't understand. How can you not care?"

Alduin rubbed his eyes, frustrated. "It's not that I don't care, it's that the Death Eaters are not, for me, just bogeymen from a story. They are real people, and I know most of them personally. Some of them are truly more monsters than humans, but most are just people who made some bad decisions and did not have the courage to risk their lives to make up for it." Seeing that he was still not getting through to Harry, he said: "Look, I told you I have an uncle in Azkaban. We knew perfectly well he was a Death Eater during the war. He joined right at the beginning, before it was clear what it was really going to be like. But once he did, there was no way out."

"But why did he join at all?" How could anyone join an organization like that and not be a bad person?

Alduin took a drink and prepared for another lengthy explanation. "My grandparents were conservative people who, while no Muggle haters, nevertheless thought that our traditions were disappearing at an alarming rate and that something should be done about it, and that the old pureblood families were the best possible guarantee of that. Their sons differed greatly in their opinions about this. My father, while esteeming wizarding traditions, argued that some degree of change was natural and that, at any rate, preventing Muggle-Borns and half-bloods from participating fully in our society would be a much greater evil than any disappearing traditions. We all have to do what we can to preserve them personally in our lives, he said, but we should not try and limit what everyone else does. My uncle, on the other hand, took a more hard-line view, saying that we must demand that the newcomers into our world adapt, or they should not be allowed to be part of it. He did not wish for the Muggle-Born to be educated with the children of purebloods, and he only wanted half-bloods at Hogwarts on the condition that they would prove they adhered to the wizarding traditions, not the Muggle ones."

Harry mused about this. He supposed it made sense, in a way, if Alduin's uncle really thought the wizarding traditions were in danger, from the Muggle ones, but where would the Muggle-Borns be educated then? Who would teach them about wizarding culture? Meanwhile, his cousin continued: "My uncle met some people at school who were of the same opinion, and some of them put him in touch with Riddle. Death Eaters were presented to him as precisely the sort of organization that would attempt to achieve what he hoped for. The name was only invented later, you have to understand – or at least it was only made known to him later – so there was no clear indication of what was really going on, except perhaps for Riddle's pretentious pseudonym, but the man had charisma enough to carry it off, or so I am told. So my uncle joined, and then the demands on him grew and he understood there was no getting out, so he at least tried to protect his family and friends as much as he could. That was why my parents lasted so long – they started their anti-Riddle activities quite soon, based on the information they had from my uncle, but he shielded them for a long time. And then, when he couldn't do so any longer, he warned them that if they did not stop, Riddle would send someone after them. Well, they made their choice, and my uncle's warning turned out to be true...only what he did not expect was that they would come for my parents while they were attending a party with my grandparents, and as my grandparents tried to protect them, that they would be killed, too. That had been a true shock for my uncle, and perhaps had there been someone to turn to, he would have gone against Riddle at that point...but he was not going to go to Dumbledore, whom he disliked and strongly disagreed with. And so he stayed loyal, at least formally so, and is in Azkaban for his trouble. My great-grandfather died of shock and grief after hearing the news, and my great-grandmother only lasted until the attack on me, as far as I know. So you see...while my uncle is not a particularly good person, and he did many terrible things, he is not a monster, and he never was to me. He was just the uncle I regularly met at family parties."

Harry didn't like this, but it was hard to argue with what Alduin said, and presumably, he knew his own uncle. "Well he might have been," he conceded reluctantly, "but what about the others? The ones who attacked your parents, for example?"

Alduin sighed. "But this is what you have to understand...a good half of Death Eater stories was like this. My own uncle took part in many attacks like that against my parents, because he was not brave enough to say no, not brave enough to be tortured and die. Those who killed my parents were only human, like him."

"Do you know who did it?"

Alduin did. There were several low level Death Eaters present, but Lucius Malfoy was the one in command. He never let it on to the man that he knew he was behind the death of his parents. It would serve no purpose at this moment. He had no illusions about Lucius being quite innocent in the matter and his hand being forced – that was true as far as his parents' death was concerned, but attacking at such a moment that led to the deaths of his grandparents was Lucius' personal choice, and it was no doubt motivated by wanting to gain more influence by eliminating members of one of the most prominent families. Yes, he would have had enough cause for a vendetta against House Malfoy, but it would be singularly unproductive, at least at this point.

The problem was, what to tell Harry? Truth was out of the question, but he did not like lying, in case it came out later. He wanted the boy to trust him enough to ask questions, after all. "I do," he said at length, "but I have decided not to seek revenge, and so I will not tell you."

"I just...is something wrong with me?" Harry asked. "I cannot think of my parents' death without getting really angry, and I can't even imagine knowing who did it and just letting it go if the person wasn't punished."

How very like James, Alduin mused – and like Lily, too, he supposed. "That's natural enough, Harry," he said aloud. "The murder of your parents forced you to grow up without them, with an aunt and uncle who mistreated you. Of course you would be extremely angry that it happened. I, on the other hand, was a grown man when the attack took place, and while I regret that they died before their time, knowing that they knew in advance there was a very good chance of that and choose to take the risk makes me much less angry about it. It's more complicated with my grandparents, but well, they weren't that young any more, and...there are other deaths from the war that pain me much more. That of your parents among them."

Harry exhaled. "You're probably right," he said. "Still, I'm not sure if I wish I could be as forgiving as you, or if I think it's wrong."

"You don't have to decide, at least not at the moment. It happens to me quite often, that I at the same time admire some character trait someone has and really do not wish I had it myself. It sounds contradictory, I know, but people are like that."

Musing about this, Harry went upstairs to get his books.