These Hallowed Halls

Borgin

The Order is sliding.

Audra can see it happening, wants to tell them to stop.  Wants to warn them that even though the stories make things like this sound so black and white, a clear cut right and wrong, this is all grey, an endless grey void where you cannot see that you have crossed the line until you have already done it.  Wants to tell them that for the greater good is not good enough. 

But she doesn't.

There is nothing else for them to do, and besides- they already know.

"Remus."  Molly is standing with her threadbare apron, the one that Ron and the twins and Percy had scraped together their pocket money to buy her for Mother's Day when they were younger.  It has sun flowers all over it, though the pattern is now hardly recognizable.  "You can't mean that."

Remus doesn't answer, just shakes his head, fingers curling around the back of Tonk's chair with white knuckles.  His fingernail are warped and twisted, bent and blackened, and Audra remembers something that Fenrir had told her once, that if you don't embrace it, the change is the most exquisitely painful thing that can be brought upon another human being, that the only way to make it survivable is to give into the urge inside you.

That's why you don't scare me, Princess.  That had been his name for her.  It was always whispered, always so close that she could smell his rancid breath and feel it hot on her neck, where she could see the flecks of blood still caught in his beard.  He had always treated her with a rare reverence that he shows no one else- even to the Dark Lord there was no real respect, only a dull a sense of duty, the attitude of a servant towards a master that they cannot bring themselves to love but cannot break free of.  Nothing you could do can ever come close.

The people you turned, she had said, bristling, aware, as always, that this was a man who liked killing in a way that no other human being she had met has- likes it messy, likes it bloody, likes to be able to taste it.  It was a compulsion with him more than it was a means to an end.  It was one thing to be good at killing, and it was another to enjoy it, and often the two things make very different beasts.  The children, and she had been thinking of Remus, of his face when he choked down the goblet of potion that Snape used to bring him, of the lines of pain that had started to gather in Tonk's face.  Do you think they embrace it?

Fenrir hadn't answered.   She can't tell which kind of strength she admires more- giving into the feral or holding out.  Even as someone who has done both, she cannot tell which one was harder, but she does know which one has more blood on their hands.

"He does have," Bill pauses, buries his face at his hands, and beside him, Aunt Muriel's hand twitched, like she is considering laying a comforting hand on his arm.  She was seated at the head of the table despite not being part of the order, because she had deemed them all able to have their meetings in her house, so as to keep anyone else from coming under any more unnecessary suspicion from the ministry.  Because of Audra, after all, they already had guards posted.  "Certain information that we need."

"Information that he isn't giving."  Fred leans back with more force than was necessary and the floorboards squeal underneath him.  One of his legs kick out and she can hear the resounding thud echo from where he hits the table.  "What are we going to do?"

"There are ways."  Remus had been the one to voice the thought that they had all been thinking.  It is easy to tell where the divide stands among them- Molly with her serving spoon dangling loosely from her fingers, Arthur with his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose, Fred, Charlie, Damien, all of them never having to be the ones to make the hard decisions before.  And on the other side of the divide was Remus with his white knuckle grip, George with his hand unconsciously drawn to his missing ear, Tonks drumming her fingertips on the tabletop.   There had been so many of them to start, but now, with a third of their numbers cut away and most of what remains either under strict observation or on guard duty, they were so few.  "Things we do to make him talk."