Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

19 June, 1996 - Tonks

In the days after Ethan left, Lavinia was restless. This, she decided, was a good thing. Restless was, after all, a whole lot better than sitting around stewing in the loneliness. In the grief. In the heavy, awful feeling of missing people. Because Lavinia had had enough of missing people for a lifetime. Not that she was about to stop, of course, but she also wasn't about to complain when her restless hands found something to do to keep her busy instead of sitting and thinking and hurting.

Of course, at some point, she ran out of things to clean and that was when the restlessness stopped being quite so nice. Because now her hands wanted to move and her heart wanted to ache and she didn't know how to make either sensation stop. Just last week, she would have taken this as her cue to go for a walk. She would have wandered across the hills and through town and up to that apartment that now stood empty and lonesome. She would have asked Ethan to join her and Ethan would have said yes. Because Ethan always said yes, especially if the proposition in question had to do with anything he might reasonably have called an adventure. And so they would have whiled away the hours tracing familiar paths while Ethan inevitably found some new beauty in the views they had both seen a million times before.

And now... well, now if she took a walk, it would be alone. And alone... alone the hills weren't nearly as beautiful. Those old views were just old views and if she took a moment to pause and try to look for the beauty, then the loneliness hit twice as hard because this was what Ethan did. What Ethan always did. And he wouldn't have had to try for it. He would have found it instinctively, pointed it out like it had just jumped out at him. Like it was obvious. And when he was there that felt natural, true. Like it really was as easy to find as he always made it seem.

But when he was gone, when Lavinia had taken that single walk after he'd left, she'd felt only an ache in her chest at his absence and a pinch of something like jealousy that she had never been able to just... see these things. That she had had to fight for it. That she still did. And true, it was an effort worth putting in but at the moment... well, at the moment, it was hard. And besides, she told herself, fully aware that she was merely making excuses, it was too dangerous to be out alone on the hills. It was safer to be at home. Safer to try to sate the restlessness and drown the grief in books where her adventures could be imaginary and she could fit her soul inside someone else's body. Someone else's life.

And that was exactly what Lavinia was doing when the knock sounded on the door.

She looked up, frowning. Knocks were uncommon these days because after all, who would be visiting? Actually, they hardly saw anyone at all these days. There was the occasional Order meeting of course, but those were rare - rarer than Lavinia would have liked, really. But then, Dumbledore was busy more often than not and if they were all being honest, holding meetings without him wasn't particularly helpful. There was information to share, but putting it together and forming a plan... that was where Dumbledore came in. Because Dumbledore always seemed to have a plan. Or, rather, he usually seemed to have a plan. Because these days, if he had them at all, he was keeping very quiet on the subject.

Actually, the only direction the Order really seemed to have was to gather information. As much as they could safely get. And other than that... Well. No one much seemed to know what to do. Because there would be no outright battles this time. Dumbledore had made that clear. And though no one said it, Lavinia knew it was because if it came to battles, the Order would lose and lose badly. They simply didn't have the numbers to face up against what was rapidly becoming a formidable Death Eater Army.

So what they needed right now was time. Time to make plans. Time to let the Ministry pull together a response and an army. Time time time. And each of them privately knew that they didn't have time. But they took it anyway, if only because there simply was nothing else to do.