Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

28 June, 1996 - Alone (II)

Lavinia did indeed take the next few days off work. And then those few days turned into a week. And then two. And as guilty as she sometimes felt about it, especially when her days felt long and empty, Lavinia knew it was the right choice.

Nothing proved this quite so much as the day after the Hogwarts term ended when Jasmine showed up on her doorstep, her face somber and her eyes already welling with tears.

Lavinia had taken one look at the girl and nearly broken down herself because she knew what Jasmine would say before she even opened her mouth. Knew what this visit was for. Because the story of Sirius's innocence and his death had appeared in the morning Prophet just a few days prior and with Jasmine now home for the summer... she should probably have expected this visit. Not that that would have made it much easier to bear.

The newspaper article, frankly, had been enough to bear on its own and that was without anyone actually speaking to Lavinia about it thanks to how little she interacted with other people these days. The idea of people actually trying to talk about it... Merlin. It was bad enough to see the particle printed. To see the headline proclaiming his death. Like it made it real. Concrete. Inescapable.

It seemed, given how late the article had appeared in the paper, that the Ministry had contained the story for as long as it could and Lavinia honestly didn't know whether or not that pissed her off. But of course, something as big as this could never have been completely ignored and now... well. Now it was out there for the public to read. For the world to know.

Lavinia, for her part, hadn't bothered to read past the first few lines. After all, the article wouldn't tell her anything new and she didn't want to hear the Ministry blabbering on about the "terrible mistakes" and "ensuring it never happened again" that they had already mentioned by the end of line two. It had happened once. And that was enough.

So she'd tossed the paper aside and tried her best to stifle the rage those few stupid sentences had sparked. Of course, she didn't try very hard because the rage was easier than the pain that came from seeing his name, his face, so blatantly printed in the pages of the newspaper. So... out there. For anyone to see. It felt wrong, somehow. Like his face should have become some sacred thing. Like the collection of photographs on her mantle that she still couldn't make herself look at should have become a shrine and anyone who dared paste his features all over the news like they didn't belong to someone she had know, someone she had loved... Like they were just another face. Another person. Instead of... him. And Lavinia couldn't explain the pain of seeing it even to herself.

So she settled for rage. And the rage was easy.

Because the Ministry had failed Sirius so horribly it would have been comical if it didn't hurt so badly. They had failed at every goddamn turn and now they had the audacity to apologize for it. Like that meant anything. Like that was all they had to do to fix this. It made her blood boil that all they had done was slap a cookie cutter PR statement on the front of The Prophet when surely they knew as well as she did that this was indicative of a much deeper problem that needed to be solved. Because first it had been their merciless post-war policies. The lack of a trial. No evidence ever presented. Just a conviction and a life sentence without the chance for anyone to say a damn thing about it. And then it had been their cowardice. Their willful blindness to the truth of a war they were now scrambling to prepare for only after Sirius had already given his life. Because it had taken someone dying in their own halls for the Ministry to see sense. To wake up and realize that just because their head was in the sand didn't mean the world around them had ceased to exist.

And Lavinia wanted to scream at them for it. She wanted to walk up to them and tell them to their faces what they had done. What they had cost Sirius. Cost her. She wanted to make them stare down a real person and explain that all of this had been a horrible mistake. A misunderstanding. She wanted to watch them flail to defend themselves against the truth they all knew. She wanted to make them admit to their cruelty and their cowardice.