Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

31 August, 1995 - Molly

The silence in the room felt to Lavinia like it was stretching and warping and she honestly didn't know how much time had passed. She knew that Molly's sobs had subsided and the other woman was now merely sitting against the wall next to Lavinia, staring silently at that spot on the carpet where the boggart had been, apparently transfixed.

If she was honest, by this point, Lavinia was starting to think that she should say something. Should break the silence and tell the woman outright that she understood those fears. That there was nothing silly about them and that however terrifying it was, they had to keep going towards that inevitable future that might make those fears real. If only because there was nowhere else to go. Of course, she knew this wasn't the most comforting thing in the world, but Lavinia didn't think lying to make someone feel better was worth much. In her experience, people tended to know they were being lied to and it just made everything worse.

Of course, bottling it up was probably an even worse option, which was why Lavinia rather thought she ought to say something before Molly well and truly decided she was being silly and just shoved it all down like it was no big deal. Like those fears weren't both very understandable and very very real.

But that was exactly the problem. They were real. They were realistic. Which was worse. And though Lavinia was sure she should have been helping Molly, should have been saying something... her head seemed stuck. Frozen on those bodies. On that fear. On the reality she had understood from the moment Sirius had appeared on their front and said those two awful words.

He's back.

And the world had fallen away and she had felt it, that spiraling, falling sensation as she was tossed into all those memories. All those old fears. As she recalled exactly what it felt like to be afraid every time someone left the house. To stay up late, waiting, wondering, fearing. To wake sweating from a nightmare in a bed that was empty with no confirmation, no assurance that those terrors that haunted her dreams hadn't already come true.

And from that moment, from the second those words had been out in the open... Lavinia had known it was all going to happen again. Except this time, she also remembered exactly what the price for failure was.

But of course, it was one thing to know it and quite another to see it. Even if she knew it was just a boggart. Just an apparition. Not real. Not real.

But it could be real. It was all too close to being real because... this was war. This was hell. This was the price she had kept trying to warn the children of because they didn't get it. How could they? No boggart would appear to them like this. It was why adults were usually so much better at dealing with boggarts even if, technically speaking, their boggart banishing spells tended to be weaker.

Because children's fears were often... well. Childish. And it made it all too easy for the boggart to become precisely what that child feared most. After all, it was easy for the creature to become a spider or a snake or a banshee or any number of things that would reasonably be scary to most people, but which would constitute that all essential greatest fear of a child. So it could pinpoint the fear. It could target it specifically and it made it so much more effective against children. But in the same breath, those fears tended to be easy to make amusing, easy to overcome. Which made the banishing spells more powerful. It was a question of whether or not the child managed to get around to casting it.

But for adults, at least in Lavinia's experience, the fears were harder. They weren't dark creatures or pests or anything like that. They weren't specific, definable things. They were loneliness. Abandonment. Guilt. And that was harder to create in physical form. Which made boggarts rather ineffective against adults. But in the event that the boggart succeeded... Those things were harder to make funny.