Oh, brava! This was even better than the first part. (And of course, I was just thrilled to see that my boy Redeemable!Avery remains dishwasher-safe.)
I do have one tiny quibble, though, that perhaps Pip or her, er, enforcer Grey Wolf might be able to...um, help me out a bit with here. Preferably without recourse to Cruciatus.
Pip wrote, after an impassioned defense of the notion that many of the DEs in that graveyard hadn't really been disloyal to Voldemort at all:
Another, final point on the supposedly disloyal DE's.
Voldemort: "... I had given up hope, now, that any of my Death Eaters cared what had become of me."
'One or two of the masked wizards in the circle moved uncomfortably, ..'
Only one or two?
Thus implying that only those "one or two" of the Death Eaters had really been disloyal at all.
Erm. Um. The problem here is that, well, there are just far too many indications elsewhere in the scene that the majority of these guys really are profoundly uncomfortable in that graveyard.
The behavior of the entire group when they first appear, for example:
And one by one they moved forward...slowly, cautiously, as though they could hardly believe their eyes.
Then they all shudder as one when Voldemort looks around at them.
And then, when Voldemort sniffs at them and declares that he smells guilt:
A second shiver ran around the circle, as though each member of it longed, but did not dare, to step back from him.
They surely can't all be great actors just doing their bit to help feed Harry misinformation, can they?
I am willing to entertain the notion that Lucius Malfoy may be in on the Big Plan (if only because imagining his stammering there as evidence that he had forgotten his lines made me laugh so hard that my housemate ran into the room asking "What? WHAT?"), but I'm afraid that I'm just not quite up for a plateful of "all but one or two of the DEs were loyal." There's just far too much canon opposing that one.
But that's okay, right? Voldemort can have just a couple of loyalists, while the rest of them can still be treacherous disloyal slime, right?
—Elkins
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