Dec. 29th, 2008 @ 04:41 am ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif) aumuses: Voldemort |
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Dora had known that name, and known a wide range of negative reaction to it, all her life. Fear, from as simple as determined caution not to speak it (you-know-who!) firm enough to actually work on the wayward girl, to the actual awareness of how badly he could, and did, hurt people that got her scared (she was six years old. And if the adults could be scared, the children were allowed to be, too!). Stubborn resistance against the power that he represented, possibly rooted in the same rebelliousness against authority that always got her into problems with her mother.
Resentment. Relief that he was gone, even if at that price.
Initial horror that he was back, and even worse, that nobody took that as reality. Well, not nobody, thankfully, and Dumbledore's recruitment was sure welcome as a chance to defy - in a less-than-mindlessly-suicidal manner - him. Just like the rest of those who didn't avoid thinking.
And as an adult, she had grown to appreciate the terror that he, and even his name, managed to inflict. And to actively work against him, and to see, to feel the consequences of his actions.
And then he was gone, because Harry could do what nobody else could do in his place. And the name remained but a remembered shadow. A history lesson. Never something to scare Teddy with (not that he got scared by much of anything). Never something to be kept too close, despite all the ills he'd done, all the ways he was involved in her world's, in her family's, in her son's background.
Just a (now) harmless shadow. An image that doing the right thing could dispel. Teddy's parents doing the right thing, his godfather doing the right thing. Himself doing the right thing (if even just by existing).
Voldemort was not somebody they could erase from existence, not with all the years of his controlling over the fates of people.
But he could dwindle into insignificance, some small mention in a boring lecture told by a ghost from a thick, dusty book that was more interesting to watch than the lecturer, and as unsuccessful at keeping the Hogwarts students awake.
Nothing more than he ever should have been.
And everybody could move on, and get over that damned fear of the name, and live a little more freely.
And they did. New turn of the wheels. New hopes.
In its way, new order, without him to threaten the peace of mind of children who'd done nothing other than being born. Just like everybody was, once.
New order of things. Quite not what he wanted.
Thankfully. |
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