Harry organized an address to the entire army. Members of the Order had refused ranks, unwilling to take orders from him. It was not as if he had not proven himself, and it was not as if there were not older people in his ranks, what with all the recruits, but it was basically impossible for someone who had started out in a position of authority over him to turn around and take orders. It was hard to explain without sounding self-absorbed, but no one who had been a rookie once could go back through the same struggle again.
"I can't overstate the losses that we've suffered. I can't promise that the gains we achieved are worth them. What I can promise you, is that if we stop now, it's all going to be wasted." He knew that there were all sorts of strategies for motivating troops, but he had no idea what any of them were; what he had done so far was treat them all with respect and give them the details. "Voldemort's been hamstringed. No one's seen him since... well, since Dumbledore and I managed to get his wand away from him and he left rather than trying to fight at a serious disadvantage. Assuming he has a new wand, he's no less powerful himself, but with only a few Death Eaters, he can't accomplish nearly as much. Now's the time for the Ministry to come clean and admit that he's back, when it's least likely to cause a panic. At the same time, though, they might figure that now's the right time for the enemy to lay low, lower than they have been, and if that's the case, they may do just the opposite, though that's a small chance in my best estimation."
No one said anything; whether or not they agreed with his assessment was impossible to tell. There was no way that the Minister had not been made aware of all the bodies that they had collected after the battle; the Order had made the judgement call to allow the Aurors in their numbers to go back with the information. Claiming credit for the cut off loose ends after the Azkaban breakout sounded like a good idea, but the Head would most likely not go for it; most likely he would come up with a bid to get Harry on his side rather than against him, the better to get intel on the enemy. Anyone who wanted to claim credit would probably first think to disappear the witnesses to what actually happened, but that was impossible; Tonks and Shacklebolt had told everyone in the Corps in a general meeting. The icing on the cake for Scrimgeour would be getting rid of Fudge after over a year of denying him the return of the Death Eater Laws.
"The Ministry as an institution has backed an endless series of statements against Eleazar Higgen, a man who has never existed. That's the play that's the most important here. The Prophet can go back on its word about Voldemort by claiming that their sources all lied to them, and even though that would be a devastating blow, that wouldn't be the end of them. With our fake candidate, they've got no plausible deniability prepared because they really believed he existed the whole time. There are a lot of people who would be tempted not to be cheered by this, and I don't blame them. They think it's just words, just more of the same, that no one is really going to care about this. After all, it's almost every day that they had a new story that contradicted some other story they ran, and if the readership cared, they would have noticed before. I don't think that this is the same, though, and if you'll allow me to explain, I can demonstrate why this should change things."
Ron joined him on the stage in front of everyone. His expression made it clear he was still concerned about Hermione, who was managing to stay up longer than a few minutes, but that was it. The malady from which she and Daphne suffered was unprecedented, but having suffered from it herself, she at least had an educated look on the epicenter. They had forgotten the point of the demonstration, so Harry only pointed at him.
"Suppose he's the worst Prophet-reader in the world. Suppose he believes everything that it says no matter what. He's gotten pretty invested in the case of Eleazar Higgen; he's told his friends and family that he'd never go anywhere near the man, nor anyone else who did. He's said that our fake candidate is the greatest shame of our island home. Encouraged at every turn to make his personal life all about these ridiculous stories, he's even started smoking a different brand and follows a different Quidditch team. At this point, he's betrayed, and he's got no choice. He's not blaming every single source that the paper used, he's blaming the paper itself. I haven't told Ron about this or what his role might be for this demonstration, but we've discussed this general subject already. Does anyone have any recommendations for how he can avoid facing the truth?"
For a moment, no one responded. It was certainly an odd way to structure a pep talk, but at length someone said that if he found himself in that position, he would have walked off something and just died. Even though no one directly responded to that, from the way everyone seemed displeased with it, he decided it did not need to be explained that even if a few people committed suicide to avoid the shame of having been wrong, the majority would not. A few other people seemed to say that he misunderstood the problem entirely, and it was not as if they held up the Prophet as a divine source of information; they were just insufferably normal and refused to consider perspectives that did not seem normal. Harry nodded along and Luna joined him on the stage moments later.
"Suppose she's the most incorrigibly normal person in the world." No one laughed at least. "She doesn't really trust the paper; she just reads it because everyone else does. In the same way that it can make you rather popular to get new robes on Diagon Alley, I think it's been observed that you can get other people's approval from having the most popular opinions. It's not important whether or not it's true, just whether or not other people believe it, and how much they're willing to fight over it. You'll notice that some people are a lot easier to incite to action over it than others, and everyone else knows it too. It's important not to offend them."
She did a surprisingly good job of acting the part while he explained it, giving people time to think of arguments. If they thought it was as strange of a method to raise their spirits as he did, they said nothing about it. Some people were laughing, but not derisively. For many of them, it was probably the first time they had laughed in months.
"Now, say the same thing happens. Say the most popular news outlet on our island home starts printing the exact opposite. What's her reason not to roll with the punches and act like she knew it all along? She liked listening to all the famous people talk about how Eleazar Higgen was scaring children and eating pet rats raw, but she likes it even better when everyone can turn against those same celebrities. Don't expect to see her praising our candidate- after all, there's no need to forgive him of his imaginary wrongdoings- he doesn't exist! He's the easiest person in the world to get over hating."
The murmurs were much louder and some people were shouting 'the resistance lives' to be heard over them. Out of all the feathers that the Order had put in its cap in the last two years, from foiling Voldemort's plan to get the prophecy, to finding one of the Horcruces with just the intel that the DA shared about it- even killing several Death Eaters was dwarfed by killing the confidence in the Prophet by working with the Quibbler to create the fake candidate. It was not as if everyone would suddenly start thinking for themselves because they wanted to do all the work of sorting out the truth, but they would have no choice. Some would want a successor to the Prophet, something that they could just read with their brains turned off, but detractors from other publications would have to be taken more seriously, and Lovegood's magazine was the perfect place to start. The moment more people actually started reading it, they would tear it to shreds with all the insistence on strange creatures without an iota of evidence for any of them. Tearing down the Quibbler would be the perfect catharsis after their favorite paper fell apart, and those who really cared about being right, if not the truth, would be satisfied with knowing that there had not been a way for them to trust any publication; they had only failed because success was impossible.
When the lecture was over, the time had come to discuss their strategy and that meant that the lower ranks would be spending their time training. Some of the Order members had been surprised at his move, training even the adults, because they had all retained a level of combat effectiveness since their Hogwarts days, and for them the war was mostly about solving problems through nonviolent means, but they eventually came to respect the decision when they saw that some people had become rather rusty and had barely learned in the first place, and it served as a way of building camaraderie. Sirius had been on board the whole time, and he thought that the Order should adopt the practice as well, or at least something similar.
"I think it's a matter of pride, Harry," he had said at one point. "I... well, I skipped a few developmental stages of early adulthood. I didn't go through the same 'settling down' phase as a lot of the others, and I don't think less of them for it, not as long as they recognize it. I was still ready to bounce off the walls like a teenager all through the war, and then... well, you know the rest."
He did know the rest. His godfather had not exactly matured in captivity; he had suffered, but that was about it. There was no lesson to learn, and if he did anything other than stubbornly hold on to the fact that he was innocent, he would have lost his sanity. Those who accepted their fates were about as bad off as those who had been kissed. For everyone else, life went on.
"Did you at least forgive Lupin- Remus, I mean?"
"Oh, I didn't think badly of him once. The case against me was so good that anyone would have been convinced. There were times when I hated him in Azkaban- there were times I even hated your father for dying without leaving a letter that said I was not the secret-keeper. Dumbledore wasn't completely convinced, I don't think, but he had no evidence to suggest your parents had switched the secret-keeper without his being aware of it. He thought that their keeping secrets from him was no surprise when he found out." He shook his head. "It doesn't matter anymore. I honestly hate your old Potions teacher more than I've ever hated any of my old friends... except Peter."
"He's no longer with us," he said after a moment. "There's no way of getting revenge if you wanted it."
"I know. It's strange. I told myself that I didn't want revenge, but when he died, it was like I let something go."
With things he would prefer not to accept out of the way, even though they were there, as much as the graves were there for the fallen, he found himself in a stressful meeting. It was true that there was good news, but planning for things to go one of two ways was more complicated than simply coming up with two plans; really, the Ministry could take a compromise course of action, and based on the way the institution worked, it was actually sensible to predict as much, but there was a good chance that it could try to put on a united front. Ron did not seem to think so.
"I might not be Ernie, but that's not what they're going to do. They're going to blame it all on Fudge and Umbridge- one's already dead and the other's wanted to retire for years, I reckon. That's their angle; they don't want anyone to realize there are things that benefit the whole organization and so they act like these mostly fake conflicts define policy."
"Fake conflicts?" Blaise asked. "If anything's naive in all this; that is. They could be going through a lot less trouble to mess around with public opinion if it didn't matter."
"We're not saying that it doesn't matter at all," Susan said. "It's just that they have ways of focusing public perception so that it distracts from the actual problem. People like conflict, in a way- at least they like it when they're winning, so feeding them a narrative-"
"How the hell are they going to be feeding them a narrative if no one trusts their favorite paper anymore?" Michael asked. He had recovered from the curses he had suffered at the wands of Death Eaters, though there were still times when he twitched weirdly and he said he had no idea how to fix it. "We have this under control. We'll put out a new message and it won't matter how they try to spin things. We should go public and recruit more aggressively. We'll be able to do pretty much anything with more numbers, no matter what they try to do, and you're still going to have to fight Voldemort-"
"That's correct," Harry said. "Whatever we decide will have to be colored by that reality." He sighed. "The enemy knows the essence of the prophecy, but not its exact wording, and not its context. There have been mistakes from all angles, but I would say that for the most part, we've managed this well. We've kept it from escalating beyond what we can predict. At the same time, there is a level on which nothing that we've done matters. If this is all eventually written down, a lot of it would be considered pointless detail."
"Well, sure, but we're not able to advance that at all," Ginny said. "I would love to arrange another face-to-face confrontation, but we can't do that. We have to make it so that he has no choice but to find us, and that means-"
"We know," Susan said. It was subtle, and he was not able to see it himself, but Luna had said there was some amount of resentment between the two of them. "We killed a lot of the minions that Voldemort could just toss at us without a second thought and what remains are hardened, useful allies. They might think that they could win in a direct confrontation, though, so we have no choice but to stay hidden while keeping them from taking over the Ministry. Even if they're wrong about their chances against our numbers-"
"What do you mean we have no choice?" Michael asked. "If we had greater numbers, that would decrease their confidence that they could win in a direct confrontation and it would make it look like we were the new authority. The more people seem to be joining us, the more follow them. Yes, it's a problem that the Auror Corps hasn't suffered as much as we have, but-"
"That's not what we're doing. We're not becoming a band of armed teenagers taking over the entire country." Everyone was silent when Harry spoke again. It was as if there was a moment of noise, and then his word, and then the noise resumed. "We've used force only because we were left with no other option. We probably wouldn't have been slaughtered wholesale, but a few of us would have been killed and the others would have been in Azkaban for life."
"Thank you," Terry said. "We should ask what the alternative is every time we consider a new level of force. Using it to frighten a bunch of non-combatants into changing the makeup of this government will only win us the chance to accomplish some of what we want a few years sooner and cheat us out of a better way forward. The average person could have done better the last ten years, but he's not at fault for the very existence of Lord Voldemort. Some amount of fallout is expected and effectively inevitable. We can't help it if someone we had to kill had a family, and that family had to suffer. That's not what I'm trying to address here. It's an injustice when we fail to be impartial, and that includes being impartial in our evaluation of ourselves and the enemy."
"What I'm saying is that we should work with the Ministry rather than against it," Ron said after a moment. "Everything they've done will be recorded and they'll have to answer for it, but the idea of tearing down the whole system down because of what it's done to us is just a counterproductive revenge fantasy. Trust me; it doesn't do any good. We're not going to be naive about it; we're going to have to expect that they'll try anything to get out of the consequences, so we'll have to work with multiple parties- publishers, public figures- we need to make damn sure we have a clear record of everything that they've all done. That's when their behavior starts to improve."
The meeting let out after a few hours and he was at last allowed to talk to Neville, who was recovering from his injuries. He was one of the few who was still being treated, with his condition having been judged to be stable. It seemed like nothing could address the overwhelming sense of defeat he felt, and he had refused a Cheering Charm.
"I know how that is," he said after a moment. "I wouldn't want to be cheered up like that either."
"I just... I know you're meant to be more responsible for this than I am, but... I can't help it. I can't help but feel like a failure. Our side of it fell apart after I failed to realize-"
"I've heard it." That much was true. He had every second of the battle over-analyzed for him by countless voices already. It did not seem likely that one more account would help. Why did it not feel any better that they had done the best they could?
"Do you ever feel like it'd be better to hang it up?"
"It's just not an option. I've written it off."
"I wish I could say i had. It keeps coming up." He sighed. "I know I can't get out of it. I feel like... I just want to go home, but my home doesn't exist anymore. It wasn't even home last time I was there."
"Well, you want to go back to a world that makes sense," Harry supplied. "I wouldn't mind that either, for the record. The only thing to do is fight for it."
"I know that... I know, I just. I wish I had a say in it."
"There are some things that you can choose, and some things that you can't. That's all there is to it."
They sat there for a moment. If all Harry could do was act as a community organizer, then he would be the best he could. While he did not agree with Neville's desire to hang it up, he did doubt his qualifications, and sometimes it felt better to fall back on something he knew, especially if that was a skill he had to cultivate in the first place, and not something that came naturally to him like flying.
"I'll tell you what," he said after a moment. "We've burned through loads of potions. We need more ingredients. Get back to that, and we'll have another talk about your responsibilities."
"Thanks," Neville said as he was on his way out. "I didn't think you'd go for what works with you."