The long-awaited meeting was upon them.
Harry had described it as senseless that they had not been able to coordinate with the Order more before their current talk, but really it was not as if the proper adults had ever condoned the creation of Dumbledore's Army, not that they would have allowed their kids to go back to school, not after they heard Ron talk about it. That had been the beginning of their case; Neville and Ginny, both decidedly in the camp of 'we should liberate Hogwarts' had asked him to give his honest opinion about it in front of everyone, summarized for time efficiency. Even if he did have some reason to oppose them, he had no option to make the school sound any better than he had the last time.
"It's a disgrace," Sirius said as soon as he was done. "It's like taking everything that the most panicky among us said would happen to the place if the Ministry had its way, and then inventing even more panicked delusions and making them real."
"It certainly is," Remus agreed. "The school's staff, however, are just underlings. They're not the most responsible. We have a long-standing policy of minimizing casualties, and when you target the underlings, you have to kill the masterminds too."
"Even if they are simply thralls of the government with no will of their own, which they're not, at least no evidence we have indicates they are, we'll still have to kill them in order to separate the enemy from the hostages. I don't think they're a bunch of misguided saps with no choice but to follow orders, too far in to get out and just waiting for someone to save them. I think that if they were owled a letter about how their bosses all had their heads on pikes, they wouldn't come out with their hands up; they'd barricade the doors and negotiate the children in exchange for safe passage into neutral territory."
"That's only what you think, we're not going to put anyone's head on a pike, and if when this is all over, the worst thing that happened was turning a few twisted bastards loose in some country that's not going to take kindly to them, then we won't have any cause to worry about it."
It was like the two lifelong friends were doing all the arguing on everyone else's behalf. They were not going back and forth on the same thing over and over, so each assertion could be said to be productive, but there were questions of value that could not be solved just by predicting what would happen. It would have been nice to have Dumbeldore there, of course, but they could only assume that whatever he was doing, it was more important. He was the first to admit it whenever he made a mistake, but there was no way for something to go on as long as his current absence and be a simple lapse in judgement.
"Let's put aside the little detail of how badly these underling bastards should get it, and when," Mad-Eye said. "Is this even possible? Minerva seems to believe we'd have no place to put the kids." If anyone had thought they would not have considered it already, there was the proof to the contrary. Daphne had a point when she basically said that even if they freed the kids, it would not turn everyone in the country to freedom fighters overnight, and many of them would simply return the kids.
"It's possible," Neville said after a moment. "We've got a plan for it. To Professor Lupin's credit, it will involve killing the officials there, but not all of them, and there isn't any other way. We have to prioritize the safety of the children over the rules about who should get killed. Killing them isn't a punishment; it's just a way to resolve the hostage situation."
"The Ministry won't have the authority to retrieve the children if we just put them in another country," Ginny said. "I realize that presents its own challenges-"
"It's fraught with challenges," Sirius said. "Who says they want to be involved in our conflict, and who says they'll feel like protecting the kids when the Death Eaters come after them?" He shook his head. "We send them all to their homes. Some die, but most live. They'll miss a year of schooling, but that won't matter. They won't be hostages."
Those who were in favor of liberating the school were willing to compromise on certain details of the plan, like where the kids ended up; the point was just to get them out of a place where they could all be used as hostages. The other camp had to deny that any of the potential solutions would work.
"It would be trivial for the Ministry to regain control of the situation," Michael said, having taken the other side. "If all those homes are on the floo network, they could round up the kids in an afternoon."
"It might not literally be one afternoon, but yes, it would be easy enough," Remus said, sighing. "The only circumstance in which this works is if the parents basically scatter with their children before they have the chance, and many of them are going to scatter into foreign countries." A sigh came out of some indefinable part of the room; it seemed those against the Order's policy of keeping things domestic did not all sit together. Harry thought it made sense, because as long as they thought they had a decent chance of winning, there was no need to introduce more variables, but it seemed there was a substantial opposition. Was that simply their fate without Dumbledore to cast the deciding vote? Even if he did apply some guiding moral principle to which everyone agreed, though, would they agree to how he predicted the plans would work out?
"Respectfully," Neville said. "-why is it the death of our cause if other countries are involved? The result may be more complicated, but if their case is worse than ours, and there are those who would fight for Voldemort, do we intend to leave them to it?" he asked. It seemed he had been rehearsing his own responses, at least a moment before actually delivering them, which was fine in his book. It did not make him so genteel as to call for another Sorting.
"As much as we would like to solve all the world's problems, we cannot do so for the same reason we cannot allow them to solve our own," Professor McGonagall said, interjecting before Sirius could finish laughing. Nothing that came out of his mouth after that would be terribly productive, even if she partially agreed with him. "If we were to so much as accept help with a vote in the Wizengamot, our process would be forever tainted; we would be surrendering our sovereignty. We are not enemies with the rest of the world, but we are not brothers either. The system we have chosen is the one we believe works for us, and the same is true for other countries. If we were to be permitted to interfere in the process of another country, we would be going against the logic for both of the systems. Should a public servant with foreign support ever prevail over one with only domestic support?"
"The best should prevail," Neville said. He had listened to her response, so he was probably close to the end already of his own. "We may have different histories, but it is impossible that we did not ultimately come from the same place. At some level, we are not so different, and I do not believe that there is not one standard under which we could all live."
"As long as the problem is our disagreement, then the solution is our discussion of it," Remus said, not entirely agreeing, just following the line of logic proposed to its conclusion. "While there may be some perfect system, I do not believe that any of us know what it is, and even if we did, other people would have no reason to believe us. If there is some future date where all things will be revealed, then I suppose that it would be realized, but until then, the best we can do for other countries is to have as good of a system as we can, and naturally they will want to copy us as long as they have similar values. At some level, at least, I believe they do have similar values, and that the differences cannot be explained by genetics or location. In the muggle world, rather recent history has shown that even the most ideologically committed cannot long endure starvation."
The compromise argument seemed to get everyone to move back to the main point. If anyone else objected to the Order's general policy of not involving other countries, they had at least enough of a reason to put that aside; if there was any further reason to object, it was a small thing, or they would have to have some kind of evidence to go against the argument that had been presented. Mad-Eye seemed chuffed for that particular turn of events.
"As long as no sides are forming, then we've agreed that it's impossible," he said. "We can finally get back to what we were discussing without the kids getting in the way."
"Getting in the way?" Ginny asked. "We're helping-"
"You're not helping as long as you're a liability, miss. As long as we have to watch our wands and as long as we keep putting keeping you alive above killing the enemy, then you're useless."
"I'm not useless," she objected, slamming a fist on the table. "I've learned to cast a killing curse. You don't have to worry about sacrificing me; I've already sacrificed myself, and I'm not the only one."
Immediately the meeting nearly lost its decorum. Harry had not been under a specific agreement to keep those under him from using dark magic, but the last thing he had said was that there was a team within his DA that had insisted on using it, and he had said that they were only researching it. It was not pleasant, but the buck stopped with him.
"We've discovered that there are harmful effects, as the theory suggested," he said. "I think we all know that, though. I think that all of us who have been using dark magic is aware that it does not come without a cost, and-"
"We know that, yes, but we're not children," Remus said. "I also do not doubt that you personally know or understand it. Minors, however, have an inalienable entitlement to not have their souls corrupted. I don't know how you chose the youngest-"
"I chose myself," Ginny insisted. "No one forced me into it. I had as much awareness about the effects of dark magic as anyone else. The only reason we don't commonly know what it does to people is because we don't study it and the others didn't study it either."
The arbitrary age of adulthood was obviously a heap paradox, even if they were all thinking about it in different words. The difference between someone who was one second from seventeen and someone who was seventeen was exceedingly small, and yet if there were to be a rule about something, it had to start somewhere. Hannah, though she had not been brought to the meeting because she did not firmly come down on one side of the Hogwarts liberation issue or the other, had said that she was more mature than any of the fence-sitting adults who had handed the country over. She said it would be more reasonable to simply have a test for adulthood that could be taken at any time, something hard enough there was no need to worry about children passing.
"I think there are three obvious ways we could go about this," Harry said after McGonagall was done with her scolding about misrepresenting the situation. "We could have everyone learn dark magic, we could swear off it entirely, or we could keep it to just a few of us. I don't think the first one is really an option. Even if it's true that proper adults can handle dark magic better, if everyone uses it, there won't be anyone to... I don't know, use as a moral yardstick. The change will start to look normal and we'll all get used to it." He avoided looking directly at Mad-Eye, who was probably just going to say that it would be a good thing. "If anyone here is using dark magic on a regular basis, he or she is relying on the rest of us to keep everything on track."
"That's an interesting point, Harry," Remus said. "As far back as when you were in school, I thought you were a clever young man, but now I hardly recognize you. You've learned a lot about being a leader, and I believe we should all recognize that. However, if you're about to suggest that we all swear off dark magic, I shall have to go against you. I don't like using it myself, and I respect the fact that many will not be prepared to kill, especially not at your age, but there is no other practical method of dealing with enemies in large numbers."
From the looks of the faces around the room, his former Defense teacher probably had the most moderate opinion on the subject. If there was anyone who truly did want to stop using dark magic entirely, he or she had already accepted it as impossible. He looked back to those he brought with him before continuing.
"In that case, we're left with option three. When the dark magic team brought this up with me, I thought it was fine as long as they were all okay with it. I don't see much of a difference between a fifth year and a sixth year. I think it's better if we use volunteering for it rather than any other system to decide who uses it and who doesn't."
"Perhaps, Mr. Potter," his former Transfiguration teacher said. "At the same time, I would have appreciated it if you had decided that those younger than you were ineligible to volunteer, but I suppose you did not have a wide variety of ages on hand."
"Does this mean we won?" Daphne asked at a whisper.
"More or less. We would need their cooperation to liberate Hogwarts, and they're not going to give it to us." The Order did not divide neatly into two camps on everything, but it seemed that those who disagreed with each other on other things were solidly against going to the school and getting the kids out, if for different reasons. Sirius might have wanted it himself, but he could not decide for the whole organization.
"Perhaps you could tell us what discussion we interrupted," Neville said after a moment.
"I wanted to get back to the establishment of a popular front," Mad-Eye said. "None of this is going to matter unless the majority of the country gets involved at some point. We need more wands, enough to completely overwhelm the Death Eaters, and bringing everything to the public is going to get us more than it gets them."
"In a sense, we're already doing that," Sirius said. "The Quibbler is still putting out articles about everything. There hasn't been another attempt to shut it down, thanks to those 'getting in the way'-"
"They only get in the way of the meetings. They just admitted to as much."
"Perhaps they only came at the right time, then," Remus said. "We all know that the Order is something of a secret society, a closed group where we all attack from different angles, through our different occupations and by our different skills, with a shared vision. Harry has created a group that's open to the public. He's already gone on record saying what really happened in the graveyard. In addition to a newspaper that speaks the truth, we need to give people a political option, we need to give them something to do with the information other than bugger off to the woods to literally train as insurgents- not that they won't have their uses."
"I should think that those closest adults to Mr. Potter would be the teachers at Hogwarts," Professor McGonagall said. "That brings us back to our original problem. The school is compromised and we are simply those who have fled from it."
"It doesn't have to be someone who already knew him," Mad-Eye said. "If anything, people would only think that he was siding with someone familiar. We need a figure for a grassroots popular front, not just someone who happened to be a responsible adult-"
"Are you suggesting yourself?" his godfather asked. "For the record I don't think this is going to work. If our aim is to have the sitting government send assassins after us, that might succeed, but we're never going to change this place from the bottom up. We're here to replace the captain, not rebuild the ship."
"That would be viable if this were any ordinary day in peacetime," Harry said, interjecting after enduring people talking about him in front of him. "If we did something like that to quickly stop the violence, we'd have time to fix the underlying problems without any actual violence going on, but right now there's violence and the underlying issues have become too serious to ignore." He looked over at Ron, who had taken Daphne's side after giving it some thought. "This is more like the fall of Rome. They replaced the captain over and over, but it doesn't matter who you are when you're the captain of a sinking ship."
No one said anything right away. It was hard to tell whether they were giving his words so much thought because of any merit of theirs, or because they had only just been talking about him, and it was only fair if they were going to make him the face of some grassroots movement just shy of a general rebellion. Whether they would believe it or not, it was something the DA had already discussed, in a sense; they just had not had the people to focus on it or the know-how to get started. The Slytherins, to their moderate credit, did not really think they were clever enough to take over the whole government in an afternoon, and depending on how they were asked, they would even admit it.
"I think I speak for everyone when I say that I know the younger generation has a lack of context, but this is, nonetheless, insightful," Remus said after a moment. "Allow me to correct the discrepancy first." It was like he had a tendency to head off toxicity by speaking first, and taking the chance to put things gently. "No one in this room doubts the severity of our current situation, but on balance, the situation is no worse than it was last time. We could go on all day about each little difference, but the situation is as much salvageable now as it was then."
"We only managed to beat Voldemort out of sheer luck," he said. "I know I didn't do anything. I can't tell you what my parents did. He's also not just kicking down doors and murdering people; he's gotten smart about it, but when he realizes we don't have anything up our sleeve-"
"Mr. Potter, as was implied, there are many factors, and that is one of them," McGonagall said. "It is not, however, relevant to our decision here. If in the unlikely event our enemy decides to strike a candidate we put forward, then he will have shown his hand at the least, and we must put forward something whether he reveals himself or not."
There was another pause, and it seemed no one was immediately inclined to take advantage of it. Snape was out, probably at a Death Eater meeting, and several others were at their work or on some other assignment. It was to be expected, though; his own group had done the same thing. Everyone was busy and that was not changing any time soon. As he steadily realized that he had no choice but to agree to their proposal and become the face of a grassroots movement, he realized also that he was only going to get busier, and not with anything he particularly liked.