Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

23 July, 1997 - Wedding Bells (II)

The morning of Remus and Tonks's wedding dawned with sparse clouds in the sky and the promise of a warm July day to follow. It was by all accounts a lovely sunrise but when the first rays of light came in through the window, they fell on Lavinia's back, illuminating the edges of her desk as her shadow was cast across the sheet of paper in front of her. She'd been staring at it for far too long by now, reading the words she'd written and scratched out and rewritten too many times to count. She knew she should be sleeping, knew she shouldn't have let the anxiety chase her from bed at such an early house but she wanted this to be perfect. She wanted everything about this day to be perfect. Because of course, Remus deserved perfect.

Which was why she'd written more drafts of this toast than she cared to admit, had scratched out words and phrases and checked and double checked that none of that quiet grief had slipped into a single sentence. Because this was Remus's day. And it had been a long time coming.

Not that it had been planned very far in advance. The entire wedding was a bit of a slapdash occasion, in part because it had taken Lavinia far too long to realize that Tonks was not particularly suited to planning things. Not that either the bride or groom seemed to mind much that everything had been thrown together at the last minute. Even so, Tonks had seemed more than happy to let Lavinia do the bulk of the organization and turn it into a semi respectable occasion. Remus on the other hand... well. Remus didn't seem to care at all for the formality of the occasion. Lavinia privately agreed with his mindset but Tonks had pointed out that this was a one time thing and her father would be so disappointed if he didn't get to see his daughter get married. So Lavinia had offered her house and the hills around it as a venue and her mediocre skills as a cook for the food.

It would have been far too much to manage herself had the guest list not been rather short. This didn't particularly surprise Lavinia, if she was entirely honest. Remus's only guests were his father and Lavinia. He would have invited Harry, but with the combination of the ministry's misplaced restrictions and the danger of Harry leaving his home at all, such a thing wasn't possible. So it was just the two of them plus Tonks's family and a few friends and, somewhat to Lavinia's surprise, Mad Eye Moody, who was apparently something of a mentor to Tonks and whose very existence at a wedding seemed to Lavinia to be a bit of a contradiction. Then again, she reasoned, she knew the man only from snippets of order meetings and a few encounters at work during which he had been far from in a good mood and with perfectly good reason.

Regardless, once the guest list was set, Lavinia had gone to work, glad to have something to do to distract herself from the ever increasing list of names in the Missing Persons column of The Daily Prophet and the seemingly unending string of bad news that suggested that, with Dumbledore out of the way, the Dark Lord had decided to focus on infiltrating the Ministry. And from Lavinia could divine, he was succeeding.

Under different circumstances, she supposed the Order would be doing something about this, but the honest truth was that the Order was a mess. Without Dumbledore they were scrambling to put together long term plans, painstakingly attempting to riddle out what his intentions and goals had been from fragments of conversations that none of them were even sure meant anything. At the moment, all anyone seemed to be certain of was that Harry had to be protected. Because Harry was the only chance they had.

Which was perhaps why the only concrete plan they had so far was to get Harry safely from his aunt and uncle's house to the Burrow. This had actually presented a bit of an obstacle thanks to restrictions the Ministry had put in place supposedly to protect the boy, but they'd managed a plan and, by Lavinia's estimation, it was a rather clever one. Really, what that particular meeting had taught her was that it wasn't that the Order lacked the intelligence or creativity to make plans, it was that they lacked the foresight, the clarity of judgement, the view into the future that had made Dumbledore both brilliant and aggravating. Because all of them were far too involved in the war to step back from it and plan the way Dumbledore had, to treat it like a chess board and see so many moves ahead. And without that... well. They would simply have to make do one step at a time and wait for the moment when they simply ran out of steps to take.