Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

12 November, 1997 - Fight (II)

It was a few days after Remus's appearance in Lavinia's home that she received a letter from Tonks informing her that Remus had come home and that though she was obviously still less than pleased with him, they were working on it. Lavinia hadn't bothered to say that she had already known he was safe. If Remus had elected to omit his detour on the way home and Tonks hadn't questioned it, then Lavinia was going to let him have this one little lie. True, it might have been better to be wholly and completely honest, but it wasn't her place and besides, Lavinia suspected, or perhaps just hoped, that Remus felt guilty enough about the whole thing to have learned his lesson.

This meant that in a rather strange way, life went back to normal. Or as normal as anything could be given the current state of the world. Lavinia kept going to work and avoiding the hit wizard's ward for the fear of old friends' faces. She saw Remus and Tonks only rarely, communicating primarily with letters to update on the state of the pregnancy Tonks had finally confirmed. It reminded her of the first war. Where the ward was a place of hollow thoughts and long nights and deaths she didn't know how to stop. Where friends were just words on a page and a prayer that next week would see another glimpse of a familiar owl. Where the birth of another human was anticipated with some odd mix of joy and dread. And Lavinia found herself wondering, on those occasional awful days when even busy hands couldn't fight off the darkness in her head, how this child could possibly have a better life than the only other child whose birth she'd known of during the war.

It was a morbid thought, and she knew that. But she also didn't see how it could possibly last. It made her keep wondering about Remus's words, about his insistence that they needed to fight. And she maintained that it didn't need to be him, not with his wife and a child on the way that needed him but... But maybe he was right. Maybe someone really needed to fight. Maybe she really needed to fight. Because if they didn't, if she didn't, then how was this unborn child ever supposed to have a happy life? How was he ever supposed to make it. Lavinia knew she herself was capable of surviving just about anything and everything, knew she could make it through by sheer force of will but a child... that child would never know any other world. And that child would be stuck with a life far darker than any Lavinia would ever wish on anyone.

And yet still she held back. Partly, she knew, because she was a coward. Because the idea of standing on a battlefield with familiar faces opposite her... it hurt. And true, she'd managed it once or twice before but that didn't make it better. It didn't make it hurt less. And when it wouldn't just be isolated battles where she was there only partly to fight and mostly to heal, when she wasn't the backup called in but the instigator... She didn't know if she could handle that. Didn't know how she could possibly face it when she had done her utmost to avoid even stepping foot in the hit wizard's ward when there were Death Eaters there because seeing them, touching them, treating them... it made some part of her heart curl and up and scream. And it didn't really matter if the faces belonged to old friends or family or enemies she had hoped never to see again because they would both hurt.

And besides, she reasoned, even aside from her cowardice, she wasn't a fool. No one else in the world seemed to be fighting and this war wouldn't be won by a single person. This war would take hundreds, thousands. It would take armies. And she didn't have them. No one did.

Which, she reasoned, was probably why nothing much had happened to fix the situation. And nothing much had. Of course, the ministry was unlikely to report any rebellious activity unless it was truly so large it couldn't be contained but still, Lavinia hadn't even heard whispers or rumors or... Well. Anything. The world seemed to have stagnated and however much she tried to believe Remus, Lavinia's own words kept coming back to her.

The war is over. We lost.

And more and more as the weeks and months moved on, it became harder and harder to find evidence to the contrary. No one was fighting. The Death Eaters hardly seemed to be bothering to even look for resistance and they came into the ward less and less frequently, which was a blessing because Lavinia was starting to feel more than slightly guilty about how frequently she'd been avoiding that particular part of her job. Thus far, however, she'd been successful at it and no one has said anything about how frequently she left her paperwork for times when the hit wizards ward was frequently filled. She knew, of course, that it wouldn't last, but she'd certainly hoped.