"How are you, Rachel? Did you have a good new year?" Madam Angela Edgecomb asked.
"I did, thank you. How about you?" Rachel asked politely. She supposed she shouldn't be surprised that the Head of the Department of Magical Transportation was here to greet her instead of just a clerk in the portkey office.
"Very quiet. We had Marietta home for a few days over the holiday," Madam Edgecomb said. "Now, Amelia tells me you want a portkey for a round trip to Azkaban. Is that right?"
"Yes, it is," Rachel said. She supposed if Madam Bones hadn't told her why, it would seem like a very odd request.
"Are you certain, dear? It's not a pleasant place," Madam Edgecomb asked, looking worried as she watched Rachel.
"I'm certain. I don't intend to be long, I just need to get an idea of how it runs for some research I'm doing," Rachel explained.
Madam Edgecomb continued to peer at her. "Have you considered a career with the Unspeakables? You sound very much like them, wanting to head off to strange places to do 'research'. As head of the department, all Unspeakable travel goes through me."
Rachel wondered what Madam Edgecomb thought she was researching. "I intend to do a Potions Mastery and join the Guild. After that, I'm not sure."
"Well, there is always room in the Unspeakables for another potioneer. Now, are you sure about Azkaban?"
"Yes, I am. I have a corporeal Patronus, so I think I'll be alright," she said. If she passed out before she had a chance to cast it, well, hopefully someone would bring her unconscious body back to the Ministry.
"Alright then. You're going to the main MLE entrance at the top, rather than the prisoner's entrance. Keep your cloak closed, it's going to be downright freezing this time of year," Madam Edgecomb said. "This is a round trip portkey. To activate it to go, hold it with bare skin and say 'To Azkaban'. To return, hold it with bare skin and say 'To the Ministry'. Keep it on you at all times."
Rachel accepted the portkey - it was a round pendant about the size of a Snitch, and it was laced on a fine metal chain - and pulled it over her head.
"Questions before you go?"
"They're expecting me?" Rachel asked.
"Amelia made arrangements, yes. They know a Wizengamot member is coming to tour the premises."
"How often does that happen?"
Madam Edgecome's mouth went flat. "Never. The Minister goes to Azkaban once a year for his duties as head overseer, but other than that, no one visits Azkaban."
That was convenient. The Wizengamot never had to face what they were doing to people. "Anything else I should know?" she checked.
"Just take care of yourself. If you start feeling faint, come back. There's no shame in that," Madam Edgecome said.
Rachel nodded. She'd rather come back early than pass out. "Alright. I hopefully shouldn't be more than a few hours."
"I would think that would be more than sufficient, there's not that much to see," Madam Edgecome said.
She held the portkey in her hand. "To Azkaban."
Rachel immediately remembered how much she hated portkeying. It was a terrible way to travel. She gripped the pendant as tight as she could and closed her eyes, not wanting to watch the world spinning around her as she flew through the air. The force of landing drove her to her knees and Rachel felt a wave of cold crash over her.
"Expecto patronum," she said, grabbing her wand immediately. Her doe appeared, but did not lessen the cold. She looked around, fearing Dementors closing in, but there was nothing. She stood, keeping her Patronus close to her, and decided that the cold was because it was January and she could hear the crash of the ocean far below.
"State your name," someone called.
Rachel turned and saw a doorway in one of the dark stone walls. "Wizengamot Member Rachel Snow. Madam Bones arranged for me to visit," she called. She didn't like using her title, but she felt it would be useful here.
"Come forward," the person called back.
She walked toward the person, her wand directing her Patronus alongside her.
"I'm going to use a security sensor," the man said when Rachel was in front of him.
"Okay," she said. The letter she'd received had said to leave any charmed items at home, so she wasn't wearing any of her jewelry. The only things she carried with her was her wand and the portkey she'd been given.
He waved a metal rod at her and seemed satisfied with whatever it told him. "Come in. I'm Mark Sitlass, MLE Patrol. Head guard at Azkaban for the winter quarter," he said, pulling back the hood of his cloak once they were inside. It was marginally warmer in the room.
"How do guard rotations work?" Rachel asked, figuring she might as well start there.
"We've got twenty guards here at Azkaban in two shifts. We stay for three months and then take positions on the MLE Patrol for the rest of the year and another set of guards comes out. Usually. We've been here for six months because the MLE Patrol doesn't have the people to replace us," Mark said.
"Oh," she said. "It must be very difficult to stay that long."
"You get used to it. Winter is worse than summer, but you get used to it. Everyone is on a regimen of mood altering potions to keep the Dementors from getting to us too much. It's a little numbing, but better than feeling the full force of the Dementors."
Rachel opened her mouth and decided not to say what she was thinking. The fact that they were drugging the guards did not sit well with her at all. "I see. How many prisoners do you currently have?"
"Thanks to the recent Death Eater trials, we have almost a full house. Currently we've got two hundred and eighty six prisoners. That's higher than usual. This time last year we had about two twenty," he explained, motioning her forward. "Where do you want to go? Do you actually want to see the prisoners?"
"Yes," Rachel said, though she didn't really. She needed to though, that was the whole point of coming. How could she report on the conditions of the prisoners if she didn't see them for herself.
"I'll show you our top floor. I'm not going to take you down to see the Death Eaters," he said, leading the way further into the dank prison.
"How are the prisoners arranged?" Rachel asked as they walked, since there seemed to be a method.
"The worse you are, the further down you go. Lifers are at the bottom, near where the bulk of the Dementors are. The Dementors patrol more frequently down there to keep them subdued. Currently we have one hundred and sixty eight lifers, which is high. That number will drop as some of the new ones die, they haven't had the chance yet. Above that we've got the twenty to forty year sentences. Then our ten years. Then we keep the two to five years at the top. Most of them make it out," Mark explained.
Rachel winced. They kept the people with short sentences in the most protected position and still a third of them died. "Why are people dying?" she asked, wanting the perspective of someone who had seen it happening.
"For the most part, they give up. It's easier for the shorter sentences. They can tell themselves that they'll be free in a certain amount of time and they just have to endure until that point. For the longer sentences, it seems insurmountable. People can't manage to think twenty years ahead and think living through this is worth it. You always know when a prisoner has given up because they stop eating. After that, they're usually dead in a month or two."
She exhaled and tried not to show the horror she was feeling.
"Alright, we'll do a quick loop of the top floor of prisoners. Are you ready?" Mark asked as they reached the top of a staircase.
"Ready," Rachel said, not feeling ready at all.
Mark cast his Patronus, a medium sized dog of some sort, and they started down the stairs.
Rachel swore she felt the chill getting worse and tried to get closer to her Patronus. "Are the Dementors on this level currently?" she asked, wishing she'd asked before they started down the stairs.
"No, they're further below. What you're feeling is us moving beyond the protective enchantments on the guards level," he said.
She nodded. "If I pass out, will you please send me back to the Ministry?"
Mark looked at her. "Sensitive to Dementors?"
"Yes." That was an understatement, but yes.
"Tell me if you start to feel faint and I'll bring us back to the guard level by emergency portkey. All the guards carry them in case they start to get overcome," he said.
"Thank you." They reached the bottom of the staircase and were standing in a dim corridor. On either side of the corridor were cell doors.
Rachel took a few steps forward and peered in the first cell. There was an emaciated man inside, dressed in rags, his hair long and unkempt. He was curled into a ball on the floor in the back of his cell and the only thing that said he was alive was that she could see that he was trembling.
She continued down the corridor, seeing person after person in similar conditions. None of them seemed aware of her passing. Horror and outrage battled inside of her. They called themselves civilized - they called muggles barbaric - and then they did this. An entire culture passively accepting that it was okay to do this to people. She remembered person after person telling her that Azkaban was not so bad and that her reaction to Dementors was abnormal.
Rachel abruptly wished she'd brought her camera. People should see this. Everyone should see this.
They completed a loop of the first floor and climbed the staircase back to the guard level. "Why is it a triangle?" she asked, feeling defeated.
"This was originally the Dark Lord Ekrizdis' fortress. He lured people here and tortured and murdered them and performed all sorts of foul dark magic. After it was cleared out, it was abandoned for years. Minister Damocles Rowle was the one who decided to use it as a prison. That was nearly three hundred years ago now," Mark explained. "The Ministry likes it because it's impossible to reach by apparition and in general no one knows where it is in order to use a portkey or a broomstick to reach it. Makes it much harder to escape or to stage a breakout."
"But not impossible," Rachel said, still cold but feeling a little less overwhelmed as they went inside the guard area.
"No, not impossible. I don't think anything is impossible, not anymore," Mark said.
"What do you think I should know about Azkaban?" she asked.
"Well, me and the rest of the guards would like out of here as soon as possible, if you want to give that message to Madam Bones and maybe Minister Scrimgeour," he said.
"I will," she promised. "What about records? Do you keep records here?"
"Some. You can see our current prisoner roster if you want. We also have the quarterly reports for the end of 1998 if you want to see that before we send it in," Mark offered.
"I'd like to see that," Rachel said, thinking she could make at least a cursory comparison between what was happening now and what was happening in the 1700s and 1800s.
Mark took her inside another room, this one with windows looking into the center of the prison. There was a group of guards sitting around a table playing cards, but they didn't do more than give her a second glance.
"Here you go. Current prisoners. Last quarter's report," Mark said, bringing her to a thick book and a smaller pile of parchment.
Rachel flipped through the book, seeing a list of names, their cell number, and a countdown for how long they had left in their sentence. When she reached the back of the list, there were names crossed out, with notes of 'deceased' or 'released' next to them. The book kept adding pages as she went through, just like their two–way books did. "How far does this go back?"
"That volume covers from the 1950s onward, we have more volumes for previous years."
She nodded and turned to the quarterly report for the last months of 1998. Sixty six people were sent to Azkaban, with forty eight of them with life sentences. She had sat on those trials herself. Twelve had left Azkaban in the same time frame, two of them released, and the rest had died. Rachel turned the page, wanting to know how long their sentences had been for.
A name stuck out at her and she felt a wave of cold that had nothing to do with the Dementors or January.
'Leander Wickes. Born 12 January 1974. Deceased 10 December 1998. Fourteen years left in sentence. Family did not claim the body. Interred in Azkaban graveyard.'
"Can nothing be done for them?" she heard herself ask as she closed the report.
"What do you mean?"
"The dying. Can't they be seen by a healer?"
Mark shook his head. "A healer wouldn't do them any good, not once they've given up. You can shove potions down their throats, but if they're not eating, it doesn't help. Just extends their suffering."
She nodded. "Is there anything else you'd like to tell me?"
"Just my message to Madam Bones. Do you want me to write it down for you?"
"No, I've got it," she said. She looked around and found she could barely take anything in. It was time to go. "I'm going to go now."
"Yes, of course. Let me walk you back out," he said.
They went back to the entrance and Rachel looked out into the grey ocean far below. It seemed impossible. Everything seemed impossible. She pocketed her wand and gripped the portkey. "To the Ministry."
A few moments of nauseating whirling later and Rachel was back inside the Department of Magical Transportation. Madam Edgecomb hurried over. "You're awfully pale. Do you need some chocolate?"
The last thing Rachel felt like doing was eating. "No. Thank you. Thank you for the portkey," she said, taking it off and handing it to Madam Edgecomb. "Is there a floo on this level I can use?"
"Yes, of course. Probably best not to apparate after that, you might splinch yourself. Did you find what you were looking for?"
Rachel followed her further into the department, not really seeing where she was going. "Yes," she said, though she wasn't sure what she'd found at all. Azkaban was worse than she expected. Far worse.
"That's good. Here you go. Go rest for a while. Make sure to get yourself warm," Madam Edgecomb said, holding out a container of floo powder once they reached a fireplace.
Rachel flooed back home and was relieved to find the sitting room empty. She went upstairs to her bedroom, took off her cloak, and laid down on her bed.
She didn't know what to think. It was like she was stuck on the moment of seeing Leander's name. He was dead.
Feverfew jumped up on the bed and came to investigate Rachel.
Rachel tucked her stuffed bunnies around her and then held out her arms for Feverfew, who obligingly climbed onto her chest and curled up. She laid there, feeling the cat breathe, feeling herself breathe. Things seemed very unreal at the moment. Like the entire thing could have just been a dream and she was waiting to wake up.
Leander was dead.
She didn't know what to do with that. She couldn't even identify what she was feeling, other than maybe shock. She kept repeating the words to herself, trying to make them seem real. He was dead. It wasn't like she didn't know about death. She'd seen plenty of people die. She'd even been responsible for some of them.
Maybe this was just how death felt; this mildly horrified, numb, frightened, guilty mess that was residing somewhere in her chest.
She had gotten him sent to Azkaban. And now he was dead.
That was something she was going to have to find a way to live with, just like she lived with the deaths of her aunt and uncle.
She found herself biting down on her lip and made herself stop before she made it bleed. She needed to do something productive. She needed to figure out what she was going to do about Azkaban. Somehow she had to find a way to put what she'd seen into words that people would understand because the situation could not go on as it was. Somehow she would fix this. Somehow she would make them understand.
"Madam Bones wants you," Tonks said as soon as Rachel came into the MLE on Wednesday morning.
Rachel felt her shoulders sag. "She's kicking me off the team?"
"I don't think so, but you should put some serious thought into resigning," Tonks said.
Rachel pressed her lips together and looked down. "I'm putting you in danger."
"We're all in danger. What we're doing is not safe by its very nature. Fighting Death Eaters is never safe. And we're working on the problem of them trying to separate us. I'm not asking you to consider resigning for my sake. I like working with you. I'm just worried that the Death Eaters are becoming fixated on you."
She exhaled. "But they're not trying to capture me."
Tonks shrugged. "I think the problem we're running into information wise is the Death Eaters aren't acting under one grand plan anymore. That's why the targets don't make sense. That's why some of them try to kill you, some of them cast other spells, and some of them ignore you. There could be Death Eaters that want to capture you, but until we capture some of them, we won't know that. What happened last week could be a fluke or could be a trend. We don't know at this point. Come on, we shouldn't leave Madam Bones waiting. When she says jump, we jump," Tonks said, motioning her in the direction of Madam Bones' office.
"Hi Stella," Rachel said as they approached her desk.
"Hi Rachel. Hi Tonks. You all better now?" she asked.
"I have skin on my arm again, so that's good enough for me," Rachel said. Truthfully she felt like she'd been in a fog ever since she went to Azkaban on Monday.
"Your expectations are way too low," Tonks said, Stella nodding in agreement with wide eyes.
Rachel's upper right arm was now pink and hairless, but it didn't hurt anymore. She figured the new skin would sort itself out with time.
"Madam Bones and Head Auror Robards are waiting for you," Stella said.
"Thanks," Rachel said, feeling her stomach drop. If it was both of them, it definitely wasn't a good sign. "Are you coming?" she asked when Tonks joined her.
"You'll understand why once we're in there," Tonks said.
Rachel had no idea what to make of that so she knocked on Madam Bones' door and went inside when she was bidden.
"Over here today, Rachel," Madam Bones said from her table. Head Auror Robards was sitting next to her and they had numerous pieces of parchment laid out in front of them. "How was your visit to Azkaban?" she asked once Rachel and Tonks were seated at the table.
The truthful answer was 'terrible'. "It was informative," she settled for. "Mark Sitlass asked if I would pass along a message."
"He and his team wish to be relieved as soon as possible, I know," Madam Bones said. "As soon as I have twenty willing bodies who will go, I will send them."
"Where is the MLE Patrol sitting at?" Robards asked.
"Forty two members, but twenty of them are in training. I'm not sending untrained people to Azkaban, not in the current state of affairs and not ever," Madam Bones said firmly. "I can't supplement with aurors or hit-wizards. We need every single body that we have. We may have won the war, but it has left us barely able to function. If Rookwood and his Death Eaters get a foothold now…"
"Don't worry about Rookwood, leave him to me," Robards said, glancing at Rachel. "You've fully recovered from being injured?"
"Yes," Rachel said, uncertain if this was the part where they fired her. It didn't feel like they were about to fire her, but she couldn't tell.
"Good. No curse wound effects?" Madam Bones asked.
"None, thankfully. The Healing Salve fixed my skin by the end of the sixth application." And she was thankful for that. She didn't want to spend several months regrowing the skin on her arm.
"Still no idea what they cast at her?" Tonks asked.
"There are only two spells I know that would remove skin but leave the flesh beneath intact. One would have removed about a hand width of skin, which I understand from Healer Dawes was not the case?" Robards asked.
"No, she was skinned from shoulder to elbow, everywhere the spell touched her," Tonks said, grimacing slightly.
Rachel's stomach turned as she remembered viewing the injury in the mirror. Somehow she and Hermione had managed to get through treating and bandaging it without being ill. Hermione had called it good practice for her training.
"The other spell I know that would have done that should have left curse wound damage and should have been green in color," Robards said. "You said this one was yellow?"
"Yes, kind of a sickly yellow. It moved pretty fast. Faster than the Killing Curse," Rachel said. After thinking about it some more, she'd decided that she would have dodged the Killing Curse in time, though she admitted that she could simply be deluding herself.
"No idea then. I'll send it down to the Unspeakables and see if it's something in their arsenal. Maybe it's something Rookwood taught. The Death Eater who cast it didn't know the name of the spell and couldn't tell us who taught him," Robards said.
"There was something else I wanted to ask about," Rachel said.
"What's that?" Madam Bones asked.
"Can anything be done about Rita Skeeter? Is what she's doing maybe considered harassment? Someone I know suggested a possible way to deal with her might be to get her blacklisted in Britain," Rachel asked. It had been in the back of her mind since Andromeda had suggested it.
Madam Bones and Head Auror Robards both looked thoughtful as they sat quietly. "It's an interesting idea," Madam Bones finally said.
"I could see a fair portion of the Wizengamot going for that," Robards said.
"For her to be blacklisted, we would need a specific act. Unfortunately I don't think the cumulative effect of years of her articles is going to work here. If we can catch her reporting information she shouldn't have, then it might be a possibility," Madam Bones said.
"We're watching her, regardless," Robards said.
"Anything else we should know before we begin?" Madam Bones asked.
They hadn't even begun yet? "No, I don't think so. I take it there's a specific reason you've asked me here?"
"I'm afraid so. We've been receiving some very disturbing letters addressed to you this past two weeks and it's reached the point where we are concerned there may be an attempt on your life," Madam Bones said.
"From Death Eaters?" Rachel asked, feeling a little confused. Of course there were people trying to kill her. Everyone knew that.
"That's one of the disturbing things, we can't trace the letters. All of our spells come back telling us that no one wrote them," Robards said.
"Because they used one of the auto-writing quills?" Rachel asked.
"Even that leaves a trace. At the very least we should be able to tell what being wrote it. Some people will have their House Elves scribe for them so that they can't be identified, but we should at least be able to tell something," Madam Bones said.
Rachel felt chilled all of a sudden. "The Dark Lord sent me a letter like that. Professor Dumbledore couldn't trace it."
Robards looked at Madam Bones and then back at Rachel. "You-Know-Who wrote you a letter?"
"Yes. It's complicated."
"It is complicated," Madam Bones said, shaking her head slightly at Robards. "I'd like to show these letters to Albus then and perhaps he can tell us if it is the same sort of untraceable as the letter you received from You-Know-Who."
"Perhaps You-Know-Who taught someone to do it," Robards said with a nod. "Rookwood, maybe. Or Crouch Junior."
"That's fine," Rachel said. "I guess I don't understand why these letters constitute more of a threat than I'm usually under."
"They describe your daily patterns. When you come into the Ministry. When you go into and leave the MLE. When you go into and leave the Wizengamot chambers. When you attend Quidditch practice," Madam Bones said. "Thus far they haven't listed any public sightings of you, but we suspect that will be next."
Rachel shook her head, though she was getting that same hunted feeling she'd felt during her fifth and sixth years at Hogwarts. "I don't go out in public."
"Good," Robards said. "I know no young person wants to hear that their movements should be restricted, but for right now, I don't think going out in public is wise. For the time being, we're assigning Auror Tonks as your guard. Whenever you're in the Ministry, you should be with Tonks. Whenever you leave your home and are not apparating directly into another protected building, you should be with Tonks. Apart from the Death Eaters, who can you think of who might have reason to threaten you?"
"Well, the Selwyn family as a whole," Rachel said.
"We're watching them," Madam Bones said. "How has the situation been with Anyssa? Has she approached you?"
"She introduced herself, but seemed fairly friendly. She was watching me at the ball, but seemed upset. Otherwise I haven't had any interactions with her," Rachel recounted.
"Try to keep it to a minimum. We'll have Tonks with you in the chambers, so it shouldn't be a problem, but don't let her get you into her office alone," Robards said. "Who else?"
"The students who were expelled for attacking me and Draco in our sixth year, maybe? They might have a reason to hold grudges."
"We've got all of them under watch too. None of them have been inside the Ministry in the last six months," Robards said.
"Leander Wickes' family, maybe," Rachel said reluctantly.
Robards made a note. "Why is that?"
"He went to Azkaban because of a situation involving me. He died in December."
"I don't think I have anything on Wickes' family," Madam Bones said, looking through her notes. "As far as I recall, they didn't attend the trial and they didn't claim his body."
"Is that common?" Rachel asked.
"Very," Robards said. "Most people who wind up in Azkaban are disowned by their families. People can't handle the shame of it."
"We'll look into them and see if any of them have been in the Ministry lately or if they have family contacts here," Madam Bones said. "Anyone else you can think of?"
"I mean just Death Eaters and their families as a whole. A lot of people died in the war and I don't think it's a stretch to say some of them blame me," Rachel said, feeling like she had a weight pressing her down.
"Some probably do. If it wasn't for you we would have lost the war that day," Robards said.
Rachel wanted to protest, but as crazy as it sounded, it was true. If Rachel hadn't killed the Dark Lord, he and his Death Eaters would have finished killing the people at Hogwarts and then came to the Ministry to finish killing the people here. It was strange how the loss of one person - the right person, or the wrong person, depending on how people looked at it - could change everything.
"Do you have other concerns? Questions about how this will work?" Madam Bones asked.
"How will we know when the threat has passed?" Rachel asked.
"When they attack and we defeat them," Robards said.
"What if they don't attack?" she asked, feeling that was an important possibility.
Robards shook his head. "No. These letters are a specific threat to you. If this was vague death threats, we wouldn't be this concerned. The person who wrote this intends to kill you and they will act."
"I'm afraid that's true," Madam Bones said. "There are different kinds of threats and over the decades of dealing with this sort of thing, we've learned there are certain indications in threats that will tell us what the person intends to do. This is an intelligent person, probably a pureblood or a half-blood who was raised in pureblood culture. They're well versed in the Ministry. The fact that they can describe the Wizengamot chambers means they've been inside before. They are very clear that they intend to kill you."
Rachel frowned. "Then why write the letters at all? Why not just kill me?"
"They want you to be afraid. Afraid people make stupid decisions. They want you to act erratically and wear yourself out so that you are primed for assassination," Robards said.
Rachel shook her head. This still wasn't adding up for her. "Then why not try to kill me when I'm out on a call with the team? That's probably their best chance."
"That's the part that makes us think they might not be a Death Eater, because otherwise they should do just that. The fact that they know your schedule suggests that they don't have another way to reach you," Madam Bones said. "Speaking of which, do you wish to stay on the team? No one would think less of you for resigning."
She hesitated and then decided that she wasn't in any more danger on the team than she was anywhere else. What was one more person trying to kill her? "I'd like to stay on the team, as long as I'm not placing my teammates in any additional danger."
"Sort out the problem of them separating you," Robards said.
"We will, sir," Tonks said.
"Yes, sir," Rachel quickly agreed.
"Any other questions?" Madam Bones asked.
"Not right now," Rachel said. Her mind was racing and she didn't feel like she could come up with coherent thoughts anymore. She needed to get away and think for a little bit.
"Let us know if you do, we know this is a lot to throw at you," Madam Bones said.
"Thank you," Rachel said.
"Go join the rest of your team. Beta team is debriefing at ten," Robards said.
"Yes, sir," Rachel and Tonks both said before leaving the room.
Rachel sighed once they were in the hallway. "Girl-Who-Lived duty again?"
"Hey, I signed up for it. I'm glad I was their first choice for the job. And I can promise you, any Wizengamot member who was getting these threats would be getting a full time guard. Are you secure in the warding on your home?" Tonks asked.
"Very. Same warding that's on Severus' home, and that got us through the war just fine," Rachel said.
"Ready to join the rest of the team?" Tonks asked, looking in the direction of the classroom.
"Ready," Rachel said, though she really wanted to go hide in her office for a bit.
Inside the classroom she took a seat next to Draco and Ron and pointed her eyes in the direction of where the teams were receiving a lesson on auror procedure. She just needed to get through the next three hours, then she could go hide for a bit.
On Wednesday afternoon Rachel went home instead of going to her office in the Wizengamot chambers to get some work done. She assured Tonks she was just going to be at home for the rest of the day and that she'd see her back at the MLE at eight tomorrow.
She felt like her mind was overloaded with things to think about, so she went into the cellar and started brewing. She was brewing two cauldrons of her modified Dreamless Sleep potion and a cauldron of Pain Relieving Potion since she'd used most of their doses when taking care of her arm.
Their cellar wasn't as nice as Severus' cellar and Rachel had absently thought about improving it. Right now they had one work bench with enough space for four cauldrons and two brewers and a shelf for equipment and a shelf for ingredients, and then a large sink she and Severus had installed in the corner so they weren't dragging cauldrons upstairs to wash them. She'd already hung a line for drying ingredients - and photos - but there was still more than half the cellar that was just empty space. They could have a whole wall of ingredient storage, with space underneath for different cauldrons and equipment.
Even though she was brewing and she was trying to think about what they could do with the cellar, her mind stubbornly kept returning to things she was trying not to think about. Her visit to Azkaban had been awful, and other than jotting down a few notes about the number of prisoners and how they were arranged, Rachel hadn't done anything about it. She didn't know what to tell people about it. She didn't know how to put into words the needless suffering she'd seen there.
She knew there were some who felt the suffering was the point. There wouldn't be anything she could do to convince them. But she had to believe that the majority of people weren't okay with this. That if they saw it for themselves, they'd want to do something to stop it. And if that turned out not to be the case, if people decided they were okay with the systematic torture and murder of prisoners, she wasn't sure what she would do.
At some point she needed to talk to Sirius and see if he was willing to speak for her proposal. If anyone could give a perspective of what Azkaban was like day to day, it would be him. On the other hand, it was a lot to ask of him. It could wait. She wasn't at the stage of talking to the Wizengamot yet; she still had a lot of work to do on the proposal.
The biggest hurdle was convincing them that using Azkaban and the Dementors was wrong. Once they were past that stage, convincing them of her plan for a different prison - once she had a plan - shouldn't be so bad.
Her mind flipped to seeing Leander's name and then to Madam Bones telling her someone was trying to kill her. She checked her watch and turned down the heat on the two cauldrons of Dreamless Sleep. She had come to brew because she didn't want to be obsessing. She felt like if she could find a solution to these problems then she could stop thinking about them.
There wasn't a solution to Leander. He was dead. That was sort of the end of it. But just like her relatives, she couldn't stop thinking about him. She wondered if she should tell Severus he was dead. She wondered if Severus would feel guilty for his role in sending Leander to Azkaban. Somehow she didn't think he would.
Rachel felt guilty, but she also felt frustrated by that. She hadn't done anything wrong! All she had done was tell Severus what Leander had done. That's it. She couldn't have known what would happen to Leander after that.
She also felt she had an entirely different perspective on the situation now that she was an adult. She was eighteen, the same age Leander had been when he'd lured her into the prefects' bathroom. When she was twelve, it hadn't been a surprise to her that a grown man had wanted to do something sexual with her. That had seemed fairly normal. At eighteen, Rachel knew enough about the world to know that was not normal at all and that her experiences as a child had completely skewed her understanding for what was appropriate about sex.
None of it answered the question of why Leander - and the men at the hotel - had done those things. Because they wanted to, of course. But why did they want to? To Rachel, the idea of doing anything sexual with a twelve year old felt ridiculous. They were children. Then again, Rachel also did not feel the desire to have sex with anyone, so maybe there was just something she was missing.
She understood why Severus had reported Leander to the MLE. He had to stop him from doing that to other children. Rachel had briefly considered telling Tracey that Leander was dead, but had decided against it. She didn't think it would be a comfort to Tracey anymore than it was a comfort to her, and Tracey had enough to deal with after Tristram's death. She didn't even know who else Leander had hurt, just that there had been two other girls that Rachel had gone to Hogwarts with.
When it came down to it, Rachel didn't believe that Leander should have been killed for what he had done. He needed to be stopped from doing it to anyone else, but he shouldn't have been killed. And given the death rate at Azkaban, it was really just a way to kill people who had done crimes. Leander had lasted five and a half years, out of the twenty he'd been sentenced. He had been twenty four years old when he died. She couldn't think of this as anything but a tragedy for everyone involved.
Rachel refocused on her cauldrons and stirred the Pain Relieving Potion thirteen times clockwise. After that she added the willow bark.
She needed to tell her friends that someone was sending those letters. She didn't think the person could find their home, not under the Fidelius charm, but they deserved to know that they might be in danger just by association.
Rachel had spent some time thinking over the criteria that Madam Bones had given her. There was a somewhat obvious solution. Anyssa Selwyn. She was pureblood and raised in pureblood society. She knew her way around the Wizengamot chambers and the Ministry. She had ample opportunity to see Rachel's schedule this past month. The letters had started coming mid-December, which was after Anyssa joined the Wizengamot and after Alfred Selywn's trial. Alfred could have learned from the Dark Lord how to send mail like that and then have taught his daughter. Anyssa wouldn't be going out with Death Eaters on attacks. And then there was the way Anyssa had looked at her at the ball.
It all fit, but somehow Rachel didn't think it was right. Anyssa didn't need to send threatening letters in order to have access to her, she could easily kill her one day in the halls of the Wizengamot chambers. Rachel kept coming back to why send letters at all. She wasn't particularly frightened by the letters. She supposed that spending four years with the Dark Lord wanting to kill her had somewhat inured her to death threats. But then maybe the person sending the letters didn't know that she wouldn't be frightened by them.
At any rate, she could live with hanging out with Tonks for a little while, even if she felt it was a little unnecessary. Even though she'd been injured recently, Rachel still felt fairly confident in her defense skills, more than ever now that she'd had another four months of auror training. She was a fairly difficult person to kill and she could make that even more difficult by limiting her time in public places.
Rachel finished the two cauldrons of modified Dreamless Sleep and set them aside to cool before she put doses in vials. She was of two minds about continuing to take the potion. On one hand, she wanted two nights a week of peaceful sleep. On the other hand, she found herself both with the urge to take it more often and to not take it at all. She figured as long as she kept a handle on those urges, she would be alright. For the time being she brewed enough to last for six weeks and made sure she didn't keep more than that on hand.
Given that parts of her life always seemed out of her control, she kept the things she could keep in control locked down as tightly as she could. That much she could manage.
"How was your week?"
"Not that great, actually," she said after a moment. "The parts that should be bothering me aren't actually bothering me all that much, and the part that I am struggling with is just frustrating."
"Do you want to talk about the part you're struggling with?" Torey asked, perhaps predictably.
"Leander is dead." Those words still felt unreal. "I found out on Monday."
Torey nodded. "I imagine that brings up a lot of things for you."
"I keep focusing on it and I don't know why. I can't get the words out of my head. I have other things that I need to be thinking about right now, but my mind keeps coming back to this. When I try to go to sleep, it's like the immensity of it is just hovering over me, getting ready to crush me."
"I don't think that it's strange that you're thinking about this a lot. That's big news and it's only been a few days. Do you have any ideas about what you're feeling about it?"
Rachel felt a flash in her saying that all of this was stupid and it was stupid for it to matter this much to her. "I don't understand my reaction."
"Okay. Can we start with what your reaction is?" Torey asked, her gaze focused on Rachel.
Rachel wondered at how much Torey could see just by watching her. She thought she and Torey knew each other pretty well after seven years, but sometimes she felt Torey didn't understand her at all. "Guilt, I suppose. Anger and frustration. I don't even know what the word for it is, but just the senselessness of it all. He's dead and that doesn't help anything. I'm not going to tell Tracey. I don't want to make things worse for her."
"Tracey was one of his other victims?" Torey asked.
"Yes, though I don't think of myself as a victim," Rachel said. "I don't…It's like I'm caught between thinking that what he did to me was not a big deal, and thinking that it was seriously messed up. I was twelve."
"You were twelve. You were still a child and he took advantage of you," Torey said steadily.
"I'm the same age now as he was when that happened, and it's just unfathomable to me," she said, running her hands through her hair and wishing she'd worn it back today. "I can't understand it. With the Death Eaters, I get it. I don't like it, but I get it. They think muggles and muggleborns are less than human and that they should be killed. They think they're doing something right. Same with the people who want to kill me now. I get that. I was involved in something that hurt or killed people close to them. I can't understand what Leander did. I can't put myself in his place and see how he did what he did, not just to me, but to Tracey and two other girls as well."
"We've talked about sexual attraction a little bit before," Torey began. "Most people are attracted to people who are of similar ages, with that age span tending to get larger as people are adults for longer. While it would be uncommon for a twenty year old and a forty year old to be in a relationship, it's somewhat more common for a sixty year old and an eighty year old, especially in magical societies where we have a longer life span. A lot of this comes down to people wanting to be with someone who is sharing a life stage with them."
Rachel nodded. That made sense to her and it seemed to be what she saw in relationships around her.
"There are a very small number of people who are adults who are sexually attracted to children. The terms for this are generally pedophile or hebophile, depending on the age of child the person is attracted to. Most people who experience this attraction do not act on it and they deal with those urges in more appropriate ways. There are some who experience this attraction and prey on children, generally having a preference in age and gender and sometimes appearance."
Rachel cringed. "He was attracted to me? But…"
Torey waited, watching Rachel patiently.
"What about the men at the hotel where my uncle was taking me? They didn't know me. There were only a few that I saw regularly," she asked, wishing she wasn't having this conversation but feeling like she needed to understand.
"Most of them were probably pedophiles with specific preferences that you happened to fit. For some of them it wouldn't be more specific than a girl of a certain age," Torey said.
Rachel looked down at her lap and tried to figure out what she was feeling. "I don't want people to be attracted to me. Not even now. I am not afraid of having sex, I just don't want to have it, and I don't want people looking at me like that."
"That's a perfectly understandable reaction. Many people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual assault try to take control of that in some way, whether it's by having sex to reclaim that part of their lives or by only initiating sex under certain circumstances, or even by avoiding situations where someone might express sexual interest in them. Appearance can play a role in this as well, with some people choosing to dress to invite sexual proposals, or to purposefully make themselves seem less sexually attractive. All of that can be a normal response. What's important is that you are making decisions about what you want and that you understand the decisions you're making."
She didn't think she purposefully made her appearance less attractive. It wasn't even a consideration, she just dressed in clothing that she thought was appropriate for various situations. She was never quite comfortable wearing gowns, but she didn't think that had to do with the attractiveness of them. She'd never bothered with makeup just because it was an extra thing for her to try to have to deal with and she was dealing with as many things as she could manage for the moment.
"I don't like being in situations that are out of my control," she managed to say, feeling that her eyes were watery. "And I think that's why this is bothering me so much, because it wasn't expected, but I should have expected it."
"Why? Why should you have expected Leander's death?"
"Because of the research I'm doing about Azkaban. More than sixty percent of people with twenty year sentences die in Azkaban. I just…I never made the connection while I was doing the research. I didn't even think about it until I saw his name on the list of the deceased."
"Even with your research, even if you'd acknowledged the possibility that Leander might be dead, I don't think you can say that you should have expected this. And you're right that it is out of your control. Death is out of everyone's control," Torey said, nodding. "Something else to think about is that having sex is not entirely in your control either, once you choose to have sex. You're with another person, and while you can be clear about what you want to do and negotiate, sometimes it brings up unexpected thoughts or feelings."
Rachel shook her head. She was not going to be having sex, therefore that was not a problem. "I'm just tired of people dying. It sounds strange to put it this way, but I want a break from people dying."
"Also understandable. You've witnessed and experienced a lot of death these past three years. Have you considered that your position with the aurors potentially exposes you to more of that?"
"Why is everyone trying to get me to resign this week?"
"I'm not trying to get you to resign. I'm saying that you are telling me that you would like some time away from dealing with death, and I'm pointing out that something you are doing may lead to circumstances in which you experience more of what you would like time away from," Torey said, raising her eyebrows.
"We've been surprisingly death free on my team," Rachel said. "Not that I'm expecting someone on my team to die, but we haven't killed anyone either. The Death Eaters either apparate away or we capture them."
"Just because a situation is a certain way now does not guarantee it will be that way in the future. From what you've told me about the attacks, the Killing Curse is being used very freely."
"It is. It is. I know. I just…I don't want to leave the aurors. And I think it's weird that people keep trying to get me to leave."
"Are these people expressing concern for your well-being when they ask you this?" Torey asked.
"Yes." Rachel wanted to say her well-being was just fine, thank you, but this week it wasn't really. "I get that people don't want me to die. I don't want to die either. But as far as I can tell I'm not more likely to die than anyone else on the team and no one is going around asking them to leave."
"Do you know that for sure?" Torey asked. "If I had to guess, I'd say that their friends and families worry about them too."
"Ron's mom didn't want him to join. Sirius was not really thrilled about me or Draco joining," Rachel said after a moment.
Torey nodded. "Being an auror is a dangerous job even in the best of times, and right now is not the best of times."
Rachel could agree with that at least. "At least I'm not a dragon tamer. Ron and Ginny's brother works with dragons."
"Also a dangerous occupation," Torey agreed with a small smile. "Do you want to talk more about your feelings about Leander's death?"
"I'm not sure whether or not I should tell Severus."
"Are you worried about what his reaction will be?" Torey asked.
"No. I just don't want to hurt him. Leander was his student and Severus lost a lot of former students during the war."
"I think Severus might feel differently about Leander than he does about other students."
"I guess, I feel guilty, so I feel like Severus will feel guilty too, even though I don't actually think he will," Rachel said, uncertain if that made sense to anyone but her.
"Why do you feel guilty?" Torey asked.
Rachel supposed she should have expected that question. "I didn't do anything wrong."
"No, you didn't."
She exhaled in frustration. "And Severus had to tell the MLE, to stop Leander from doing that to anyone else."
"Yes, he did."
"And the Wizengamot had to sentence him, because he admitted to what he did. Just like with the Death Eater trials, and I had to vote for their guilt, even though I did not want to send them to Azkaban."
Torey nodded. "They needed to do something to stop Leander from doing that to anyone else, and the law gives a certain sentence for the actions that he did take. Leander's actions are what brought him to Azkaban."
"And I was the one who told about what he was doing."
"To stop him from hurting you again or from hurting anyone else," Torey said steadily.
"Then why does it feel like I did something wrong?" Rachel asked. She understood all of that. She did. She just wanted for Leander's death to not feel like her fault.
"I think it comes back to control. We've talked about this with other things too. If you feel like something is your fault, you feel like you can control it, but that also comes with a lot of painful and unnecessary emotional baggage, and doesn't actually help. You can't control other people. You can't control death. The only person you can control is yourself."
Rachel swallowed past the lump in her throat. "I don't want to live in fear that someone is going to hurt me again. And I don't, not exactly. Someone is sending me death threats and I can't even bring myself to care. At this point it's just another person who wants to kill me and that isn't actually a threat to me."
"I think this is one of those situations where your perspective has been skewed by extreme events in your recent past," Torey said, though she now looked actively worried. "How is the situation with the death threats being handled?"
"I have an auror guard pretty much everywhere I go. I asked for how long, and Head Auror Robards said until the person attacks me. I don't think this is a serious threat to me. I am fairly difficult to kill."
Torey was frowning outright, which meant she was really worried. "I'm glad they're offering you protection. Are there other things you can do to protect yourself?"
Rachel shook her head. "I'm pretty protected. I don't go out in public without a disguise. I mostly stay inside places that are warded and are under the Fidelius charm. If those places weren't breached during the war, I'm not worried about anyone getting in them now. And Tonks is very skilled and I'll be with her when I'm not at home or with Severus. I also have plenty of ways to call for help if I need it."
"It sounds like you and the aurors have a good plan for how to help keep you safe and it sounds like you are comfortable with your protections," Torey said, her mouth slowly easing back to a more neutral line.
"I am. I'm really not that worried about it. I just want my own mind back. I want to be able to control what I'm thinking about."
"Intrusive thoughts or anxiety?" Torey asked.
"Both."
"Do you want to work on that a little bit with the time we have left?"
Rachel nodded. She'd rather that than continue their previous discussion.
On Friday evening they sat around the dinner table, the remains of the shepherd's pie in front of them. A light snow was falling outside and since it was early January the sun had set nearly three hours ago. The kitchen felt warm and cozy and Rachel hated to disrupt the fact that everyone was looking forward to the weekend, but she'd been putting off telling them about this for two days now and they needed to know before anyone went out in public.
"Can I talk to you about something?" Rachel asked when there was a moment between conversations.
"Of course, what's going on?" Hermione asked.
"Well…the short story is I've been getting death threats and the MLE is concerned," Rachel summarized.
"Can we get the long story?" Theo asked, his look of worry reflected around the table.
"I've been getting letters, well not me, but Booker is handling my mail, and he's turning over the death threats to the MLE. Apparently the letters describe threats to kill me and describe my day to day activities within the Ministry and at Quidditch practice. Madam Bones assigned Tonks to stay with me any time I'm in a publicly accessible place, as well as within the Wizengamot chambers."
"They have no idea who the letters are from?" Draco asked.
"Apparently whatever spells they do to identify the writer aren't working. They can't even tell what sort of being wrote the letter. I received a letter like that from the Dark Lord once, where it wasn't traceable. Madam Bones is going to show it to Professor Dumbledore to see if it seems similar to him."
"Well, there is the obvious threat: Death Eaters. But I don't know why they'd send you letters, their intent is pretty clear," Theo said.
"I don't understand why they'd need to send letters either. If they want to fight you, all they have to do is show up while you're on call," Millie agreed.
"The Selwyns," Neville said, getting a nod from Draco.
"The MLE is aware of the Selwyns, and I also checked about the group of students we got expelled in our sixth year and apparently they haven't been near the Ministry, but they're keeping an eye on them anyway," Rachel said. "Anyssa seems like a good fit at first glance, but she doesn't need to send letters, she has access to me."
"A family member of a Death Eater who died or was imprisoned, maybe," Hermione suggested. "Anyone else that seems even a little like a possibility?"
"Leander Wickes' family," she said reluctantly. "He died earlier in December and the letters started coming mid-December."
"Have you had any contact with them at all?" Neville asked.
"No, I've never even met them," Rachel said. "I just think there's a possibility that they might blame me for him dying in Azkaban."
"Well, I think the biggest factor here is that they sent an untraceable letter. That's not a simple thing to do," Draco said.
"Do you know how to do it?" Hermione asked.
"I wouldn't even know where to start," Draco said, shaking his head. "And that information wouldn't be published anywhere either, that would have to be taught."
"Which is one reason I keep coming back to Anyssa," Rachel said. "The Dark Lord could have taught her father, and then he could have taught his children."
"That could be true for any Death Eater family though," Theo said. "And it's like you said, Anyssa has access to you, she doesn't need to send you a letter, she can just draw her wand on you in the Ministry. She fits, but it doesn't make sense for it to be her. If it was her, she should have killed you before you were assigned an auror to guard you."
"So I suppose the question is, what do they gain by sending the letters?" Millie asked. "Doesn't that just make Rachel harder to kill?"
"Robards says they're trying to frighten me into acting erratically," Rachel said.
"They don't know you very well then," Theo said. "I could see someone who has only read the newspaper articles thinking you'd be frightened by this, but anyone who was with us at Hogwarts knows that you lived for years under a worse threat than this."
"Are you frightened?" Hermione asked.
"Not really. A lot of people want me dead. Having someone sending me letters saying that isn't that big of a threat. It's a little concerning that they know my schedule, which is one of the reasons I told all of you. I think we should assume that whoever this is will be willing to hurt all of you to try to get to me," Rachel explained.
"We're fairly difficult to get to as well," Theo said after a moment. "All of us go to warded places. We're not out in public much. You're never out in public without a disguise."
Millie nodded. "It's just like at Hogwarts. We may have enemies, but we're pretty prepared."
"We are," Neville agreed. "I doubt they'd attack me and Draco in the Wizengamot chambers. That wouldn't gain them anything."
"And we're pretty safe in the MLE," Draco said.
"I can't imagine that anyone would attack me at St. Mungo's," Hermione said.
"And our home is warded and is under the Fidelius charm, so I think we're safe enough here," Rachel said as she looked around at her friends. They seemed somber, but not outright worried. "Overall, I'm not too concerned, I just wanted to make you aware of what was happening."
"We appreciate that. And if there's anything we can do to help, we want to," Hermione said, getting nods from around the table.
"Thanks," Rachel said as she stood. Now she just had to tell Severus. That could wait until she saw him on Sunday. "I'm going to go get a little work done while my brain is still functioning."
"Alright, you know where we are if you need us," Theo said.
Rachel left the kitchen and went up to her bedroom, Feverfew following her as she'd finished her dinner in the kitchen as well. She spent a moment looking around her room. She should be working on the Azkaban problem. Yesterday she'd spent some time writing about what she'd seen, but it didn't feel like enough.
A knock on her door startled her and Rachel turned. "Come in."
Millie peeked inside. "Do you want to talk?"
"Sure," Rachel said, though she wasn't sure what else there was to say.
Millie closed the door behind her and sat down on Rachel's bed. Rachel sat down near her and Feverfew jumped up to investigate.
"May I pet you?" Millie asked.
Feverfew meowed and tilted her head up in invitation.
Millie began rubbing around Feverfew's neck and chin. "Are you alright? You've been quiet this week."
"It's been a rough week," Rachel admitted. "Leander's death was a bit of a shock."
Millie nodded. "When did they tell you?"
"They didn't tell me. I saw it in the records when I went to Azkaban on Monday."
"That's a bad way to find out," Millie said, glancing at Rachel.
"I'm not sure there would be a good way to find out, but it was better than watching it happen. Not having visions from the Dark Lord has made this past six months much easier." For that much she could be grateful for. "Do you think I should tell Severus?"
"About Leander or about the death threats?"
"I think he needs to know about the death threats. They could be a danger to him as well." She wasn't too worried about Severus. Of all the people she knew, he was probably among the most difficult to kill.
"Would you rather him find out about Leander from you or from someone else, like reading it in the newspaper?" Millie asked.
Rachel hadn't considered that. The guards at Azkaban hadn't sent their report back yet, but they would eventually. She wasn't sure if Rita Skeeter would make the connection or not. It had been nearly six years. "From me, I suppose. I think it's usually better to have someone tell you about someone dying, rather than randomly finding out. I'm not even sure how he'll react. I barely have an understanding of my own response, let alone his."
"How did he respond? When it happened?"
"He was…" Rachel trailed off as she tried to remember what it all had been like. "He was surprisingly calm about it with me, but he immediately worked to get Leander expelled and to summon the MLE. Later…later when he talked about it he was a little less calm. I don't know. I think it upset him."
"It upset all of us. None of us like you getting hurt," Millie said. "And, honestly, I find it disturbing that we knew Leander for two years and he was doing that to people and no one knew."
"No one does know, I think, unless it's happening to them," Rachel said. "People just don't think about it."
"Did you ever think that about Leander before he…before he hurt you?" Millie asked.
"I didn't feel comfortable around him. But I wouldn't have felt comfortable with anyone paying attention to me at that point. I didn't exactly expect that he was going to do that, or that he'd been doing it to anyone else, but I think my perspective on those sorts of expectations wasn't really right either."
Millie nodded after a moment. "I suppose if you didn't know, and Professor Snape didn't know, there wasn't a way for anyone to know. I wish one of the other girls he was hurting had told, so that it didn't happen to anyone else, but I get why they didn't. That's scary."
"The only reason I told Severus was that he and Torey had specifically told me that if someone did something like that, that I was supposed to tell them. I'd guess no one ever said anything like that to Tracey or the other girls," Rachel said.
"My mom talked to me and Isobelle about it when I got home that summer. She told me what to do if I was in that situation and asked if I felt uncomfortable with any of the students."
"What did she tell you to do?" Rachel asked.
"Yell for help. Try to get away. Tell someone immediately. I don't know. Her advice didn't exactly seem right to me. I don't know how much it would have helped in that situation." Millie shrugged and looked at Rachel.
Rachel shrugged. "There was no one around to hear me call for help. And it's hard to get away when you're a second year and an adult is holding their wand on you. Telling someone is probably good advice though."
"Can I hug you?" Millie asked.
"Sure," Rachel said, scooting closer and hugging Millie.
"At least it's over with, right? And Leander can never do anything like that to anyone again." Millie said, her arms around Rachel's back.
"Yeah." It didn't feel over. She didn't think it would feel over until she could get it out of her head.
"You don't want me keeping secrets from you, do you? Even if they are things you probably don't want to know?"
Severus watched as Rachel settled on the sofa and tried to fathom what had gone wrong this time. "In general I prefer if we don't keep secrets from each other, regardless of the content. If it's important to you, I'd like to know."
She frowned and fidgeted for a moment. "Give me a second, I have to think of the right way to do it."
If anything he was even more concerned now and he tried to prepare himself for the possibilities of what new disaster had entered their lives. Death Eaters were always an option. Some absurdity in Wizengamot politics, perhaps. An upset with her friends could be a possibility, particularly if dating had become more of a problem in her life.
Rachel exhaled heavily. "I went to Azkaban on Monday."
Severus felt his brow furrow in concern. "Why?"
"So that I could give a first hand report on conditions there. I can hardly make a persuasive argument that we should shut down Azkaban if I don't know anything about it."
"You passed out from the presence of the Dementors?" he guessed, thinking it was foolhardy of Rachel to go in the first place.
"No, actually. I kept my Patronus with me and I was fine in that regard. It was…unpleasant. Just being there in the corridor was bad. It was worse than I imagined. The people I saw there. The suffering. I don't know how to tell the Wizengamot about that and make it mean something. I don't know how to put that into words."
"Experiences can be difficult to convey. If you are persuading people individually, you might place part of that memory in a pensieve and let them view it. Otherwise, I think doing your best to describe what you experienced is probably your best option." He paused for a moment, uncertain if he should even suggest it. "Your godfather may be willing to speak of his experiences to the Wizengamot."
"Maybe. I feel bad asking him to do that. Talking about that night in front of the Wizengamot was hard; what right do I have to ask anyone else to do it?" She looked at him now, her expression almost pleading.
"I don't know that it's about right, I think that you should ask your godfather if he is as dedicated to dismantling Azkaban as you are, and then tell him what he can do to help. In the end, it is his decision."
Rachel sighed, but nodded. "There's something else. There's two something elses, actually."
"Alright." He waited, watching as she tried to put herself together.
"Azkaban sends a quarterly report to the Ministry about what is happening there. I saw…"
Severus watched her struggle, wishing he knew what to do to make this easier for her. "You can tell me, it will be alright."
"Leander is dead." She looked at him again, her eyes frightened behind her glasses.
He took a slow breath and reminded himself that Rachel's response was what was important here, not his own. "I'm sorry you had to find out that way."
"Does it matter to you? Should it even matter to me?"
"It does matter to me." He felt frustration and regret. The life of a bright young man wasted because he had chosen to hurt children. Leander had signed his own death warrant by his actions, but Severus thought it was unfortunate that it had come to this. "Whether or not it matters to you is something only you can decide."
"I feel guilty."
"You did nothing wrong."
"I know. I do. And that's why it's so frustrating. I didn't do anything, and I feel like I killed him."
"You most certainly did not kill him," Severus said firmly. "Leander had to be stopped-"
"I know. I get it, I really do. And the Wizengamot had no choice but to find him guilty. But he shouldn't be dead." She sounded almost desperate. "Why does no one see how wrong Azkaban is? I don't understand."
"Most people prefer not to think about it. It's an unspoken spectre in the minds of the nation. People believe it is an appropriate punishment for criminals as long as it has nothing to do with them."
Rachel shook her head. "No. No one deserves that. There is not a person on this planet who deserves that. I wouldn't send the Dark Lord to Azkaban, and not just because he probably could get out if he wanted to."
Severus somewhat doubted that the Dementors would even bother the Dark Lord - he wasn't human enough for that.
"The Wizengamot sends people to Azkaban for five years, thinking that it's a reasonable sentence. More than a third of them die in there. For more than a third of them it's a death sentence. I have a hard time believing they'd assign the same punishment if they believed they were sending a third of those people to be killed." Her shoulders slumped. "I want to believe that, but what if I'm wrong. What if the entire world is just like this? All this time I thought we were working against the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters because we wanted better for people. But what if they're just like the Death Eaters?"
"I think they're separate problems and it doesn't make sense to conflate them. We had to stop the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters because they were killing people."
"The Wizengamot is killing people too, they just don't look at it that way. Just because someone is a criminal doesn't mean their life doesn't matter. They're still human."
"They are," Severus agreed. "And you're right that the Wizengamot does not view itself as killing people. At the end of the day we need a mechanism to separate people from society who will hurt others. Right now that is Azkaban, but that does not mean it must always be Azkaban."
She nodded, now looking weary as she leaned against the back of the sofa. "I'm going to make it stop. Somehow, I will. I just wish I'd been in time to save more people. I wish that about the war too."
"I know. But we can only do what we can do. You were not in a position to influence this before now, just as you were not in a position to end the war before you did. Do you want to talk about Leander?" he asked, feeling they'd gotten away from the heart of the topic and why she was reacting so strongly.
"Not really. I just want to stop thinking about him. Which is maybe wrong, I don't know."
"It's not wrong. You don't need to carry him with you," Severus said, though he knew that he would. He had somehow failed Leander, just as surely as he failed his other students who had died in the war.
"Maybe."
"You said there was another item you wanted to discuss?" he asked, since she seemed like she wished to be done with that topic for now.
She sighed again. "I'm receiving death threats. Madam Bones is concerned. Tonks has been assigned to me whenever I'm in public or in the Ministry. I wanted to warn you because it's possible they will try to get to me through you."
Severus frowned as his mind combed through the possibilities. "It would be odd for a Death Eater to send you death threats at this point."
"That's what I thought too. If the Death Eaters want to try to kill me, then they should just show up when my team is on call."
He made himself refrain from asking her to leave the auror team. If she hadn't resigned already, he wouldn't be able to convince her to do so. "Family members of a Death Eater who was caught or killed, maybe," he suggested.
"I think so. Or possibly Leander's family, if they blame me. The letters started coming in mid-December and Leander died on the tenth. Did you know them?" she asked.
"No, I never met them. They didn't come to the trial."
Rachel nodded. "They didn't collect his body either. Robards says that's pretty common."
"Many families choose to shun or disown a family member who has been sent to Azkaban," he said, having seen it a number of times at the end of the first war. "Does Madam Bones know about the possibility that it might be someone in Leander's family?"
"She does. They know about the Selwyns too. And about the students who were expelled at the end of my sixth year. That's everyone we could think of."
Severus pondered that for a moment as he tried to think who in the Sewlyn clan would be most likely to attack Rachel. If he had to pick from the members he knew, it would be Aaron Sewlyn. He'd had somewhat of a smoldering temper when he'd been Severus' student, but he'd also been fairly skilled. "I trust you are taking appropriate precautions?"
"I am. It's not like I go out in public anyway. There is one thing I wanted to ask you. It's kind of asking a lot."
As usual, he had no idea what to expect from a request like that either. "What is it?"
"I'm going to go tour some other magical prisons in Europe, to see if there is a better way that we can have a prison. Something without Dementors, but that is still secure. I kind of don't want to go alone. Would you go with me?" she asked, looking more worried about this than she had the death threats.
"Of course." He did not particularly wish to travel, but he also did not want Rachel to go alone. "When are you considering doing this?"
"End of this month. Should take about a week, though I'm still getting all of the details in place. We'd have to go by portkey though. I really hate portkeys."
"They are not my favorite method of travel either, but it's the most effective way to travel long distances. I will go with you, just let me know what our schedule is and if you can get me our dates of departure and return I can make arrangements with the apothecaries that I'm brewing for."
"I will. I should know that soon. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I didn't want to go alone. Isn't it stupid that a death threat doesn't scare me that much, but the idea of traveling alone makes me really nervous?" she asked, her fingers absently fiddling with the edge of her blouse.
"No, it's not stupid. You have a great deal of experience with threats to your life and almost no experience with traveling, let alone by yourself. Most people are nervous when attempting to do something new," he pointed out.
"I suppose. I just thought after killing the Dark Lord that things wouldn't bother me so much. I did something that was really difficult, but somehow it didn't make anything else easier."
"I wish it worked that way," he told her honestly. "However you do know that you can persevere in times of great struggle and that you can overcome obstacles, and those are good skills for anyone to have."
She nodded. "I suppose. I'd kind of like to spend some time not struggling."
"That is understandable. You need to let yourself take breaks and to give yourself rest. You do not spend enough time caring for yourself." He regretted not emphasizing those skills when Rachel was younger, but they were also not skills that he was well practiced at either.
"I guess I keep telling myself that I'll take a break when everything is done. You know what is nice?"
"What's that?"
"No more final exams."
"That is nice," he agreed. "Are you ready to have dinner?"
"Yeah, I am. I'm glad I get to come here. It's nice living with my friends, but this is nice too," she said as she stood.
"You are welcome here anytime," he told her, but he was glad he'd made their home a place where she felt comfortable. To his own surprise, he felt comfortable here as well.