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Yay! Droves flock to the Fourth Man banner!
Well, er...two do, at any rate. Can two people be called a "drove?"
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Eileen wrote:
Elkins, I think you've hit gold here. Now, if you could tell me who the third murderer is in Macbeth.... :-)
Mmmmmm...the third murderer in Macbeth. Let's see...
Nope, can't help you there. But I can offer some very compelling evidence to prove that it was actually Caroline Shepherd who murdered Roger Ackroyd. Will that do?
I must admit that I brushed over the fourth man the first seven times I read the book...
LOL! What, you mean there was somebody who didn't view the Mystery of the Fourth Man as the central enigma of the entire novel?
It is very strange that the fourth man is given no attention by anyone, including Voldemort when he praises the Lestranges and Crouch Jr.
Yes! It's bothered me for...well, for over a year now, that has. It was keeping me awake at night. I would toss and I would turn...
I'll also note that the description of the fourth man "thinner and more nervous-looking", eyes "darting around the room" fit perfectly with the nervous wreck we meet in the graveyard.
I favor Thin Nervous Eye-Darty Man as Avery myself. But the Fourth Man theory is also willing to accomodate those who favor Thin Nervous Eye-Darty Man as Lestrange, and Thick-set Blank-Stare Man as (an already bordering on catatonic? or merely in a state of despair?) Avery.
Fourth Man is very inclusive that way.
Now, the fourth man gets up "quietly"... It's probably Barty Crouch Jr. who leaves our bleeding hearts thinking, and I can't say I blame them.
Yeah, it really was a good thing for Avery that little Barty carried on like that, wasn't it?
Even I sometimes wonder how far Crouch Jr. was in the business, though we know he's not as innocent as he made out to be.
Hey, young Crouch could have been innocent -- of torturing the Longbottoms, at any rate. No way to know for sure, is there? He sure seems like a sadist in GoF, but I imagine that ten years spent under the Imperius Curse could do a lot of funny things to your mind.
Fourth Man takes no strong stand on the issue of young Crouch's complicity in the Longbottom Affair.
Crouch Sr. must have been sick at heart when the bleeding hearts reopened Crouch's and Avery's cases. Perhaps, if Crouch Jr. was still around to be released, they wouldn't have released Avery? Instead, Avery walks free and it's Crouch son who's locked up in the kitchen. Must have made him furious.
And just imagine how Crouch Jr. himself must have felt about it! You know how very cranky he could get on the subject of DEs walking free.
Sort of makes you wonder what kind of things he might have told Voldemort about Avery, doesn't it?
As mentioned before, the convincing part of all this is that Avery really does act as if he needs forgiveness for something big. And Voldemort, even if he doesn't give it, gives a semblance of it.
Yes. The Dark Lord was really very generous there, all things considered, don't you think?
Honestly, Avery ought to have thanked him. Had he been a genuine Toady, rather than merely a Nerveless Hysteric, he would have...
<Elkins blinks down at the S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S badge which seems to have made its way out of her pocket and onto her bathrobe somehow, shakes her head crossly, and puts it away>
Finally, an answer for those who ask, "But how can Snape get back into the DE circle?" If Avery can, Snape can too, though I'm sure Voldemort has similar plans re: Cruciatus.
I think that if that's what Snape's gotta do, then he'll manage just fine. He's got tons of great excuses he can draw on, and unlike Avery, he isn't a Nerveless Hysteric. It woudn't surprise me, in fact, if he managed to pull it off without having to endure even a single Cruciatus -- although unlike Cindy, I find this notion more relieving than disappointing.
But, having picked up GOF and looked up the scenes, I am feeling VERY surprised, and somewhat elated. Something new, and something real. LOLLIPOPS I fervently believe in, but it's somewhere in the past in the murky realms of motivation, this is right there under our eyes.
Aw, gee whiz, Eileen. You're making me blush here. But you also bring up one very strong objection to Fourth Man, so let's see if we can manage to resolve it.
--------
Here is the great big threatening cannon that, as Eileen points out, is indeed aimed straight at Fourth Man's poor palpitating little heart:
"Avery-Nott-Crabbe-Goyle-"
"You are merely repeating the names of those who were cleared of being Death Eaters thirteen years ago," said Fudge angrily. "You could have found those names in old reports of the trials!"
<Elkins nods grimly>
Eeeeee-yup. That's canon, all right. And since I can think of no reason why Fudge would be lying there, we've just got to accept it.
Okay. So Avery did stand trial shortly after the Fall of Voldemort (presumably in late autumn or winter of 1981/1982), and he was cleared of the charges against him.
This, then, was presumably when Avery used the Imperius Defense to which Sirius refers in "Padfoot Returns." It does seem to have been an especially popular defense in the days directly following Voldemort's disappearance -- presumably because at least a couple of people really truly had been kept under Imperius, only to break free once Voldemort was discorporated.
"People who was on his side came back ter ours. Some of 'em came outta kinda trances. Don' reckon they could've done if he was comin' back."
—Hagrid, in PS.
I somehow suspect, though, that three or four years after Voldemort's fall, Imperius was no longer seeming like a very convincing defense. So let us say then that Avery's Imperius Defense was how he squirmed out trouble the first time around, back in 1981/1982.
This is all still perfectly consistent with Fourth Man. Sirius says that Crouch's son was "caught with a group of Death Eaters who'd managed to talk their way out of Azkaban." Avery, tried but aquitted, would certainly qualify.
The problem, of course, is this:
So, Avery was acquitted thirteen years ago, as Fudge tells Harry. But then, he gets "caught up" in the Longbottom fiasco, and it's off to Azkaban. Later, the bleeding hearts get him out. So, why tell Harry he was acquitted thirteen years ago, when he was more notoriously acquitted at the most eleven years ago, probably shorter?
Oooooh, a touch! A touch, a touch, I do confess! Can Fourth Man be saved?
Hmmmm. Well first, let's see if we can establish a time-line here.
Dumbledore says that the attacks on the Longbottoms came "just when everyone thought they were safe." Given that the Ministry took some time to round up the last of the DEs—that went on for about a year, I'm thinking—and given how obviously traumatized the entire society was by Voldemort's reign of terror, and given that it must have taken some time for everyone (fireworks and parties on the night of his disappearance notwithstanding) to really and truly and honestly believe that he was Gone For Good, "just when everyone thought they were safe" could mean as late as 1983.
(Yeah, I know that most people date the Longbottom Fiasco much earlier than that, but I like it better my way. Admittedly, this is largely because I'm also partial to Neville-With-A-Memory-Charm, which works much better IMO if Neville was well past the babe-in-arms stage by the time of the incident...but even aside from all that, I still think that a later date for the Longbottom Fiasco makes more sense.)
So let's say, oh, late 1982 or early 1983 for the Longbottom Incident and Avery's second arrest and trial, which would make the death of Crouch's wife and the supposed death of his son the winter of 1983/1984. Winter's good, because (a) sickly people tend to die in the wintertime, and (b) the weather in the Potterverse is often driven on the principle of pathetic fallacy, and so there really ought to have been a cold hard driving rain when Sirius watched the dementors burying Crouch through the bars of his cell.
Okay. So 1984 would be the year that Crouch's popularity goes into sharp decline. There's a Bleeding Heart backlash, Crouch gets shunted off into IMC, Fudge rides the wave to become Minister of Magic, and Crouch's successor comes into office at MLE and starts looking into old cases. Avery stands retrial in 1984, or possibly early in '85.
The second time around, I don't think that he would have gone for Imperius again. He'd already used that excuse once, and it would seem awfully fishy for him to claim to have been under the Imperius Curse twice. (Once is merely unlucky. Twice is...careless.) And besides, the times had changed: by the time of his pardon, it would have been the mid-'80s. The Imperius Defense was probably 'way out of vogue by then.
So a slight modification to the Fourth Man theory here. Avery doesn't claim Imperius at all at his retrial. He claims pure and simple innocence. He wasn't there, he didn't do it, he knew nothing about it, he was nowhere near the Longbottoms that night, and the only reason that he was arrested in the first place was because he happened to be over at the Lestranges' playing a rousing hand of Exploding Snap with them and young Crouch on the night that the Aurors came a'knocking on their door. It was guilt by association, pure and simple. Of course he had no idea that the Lestranges were involved in any of that sort of thing. If he had, then he would hardly have been hanging out in their kitchen playing cards with them, would he? I mean, not after what Voldemort had done to him, back in the late '70s and early '80s? Not after the Imperius Curse and all?
And since there was probably never any real hard evidence against any of them anyway, and since unlike Mrs. Lestrange he had never once confessed his guilt, and since he cut a truly pathetic figure in the dock, and since public sentiment had turned against Crouch, and since everyone was feeling sorta guilty over young Barty Crouch's death, Avery got his pardon and walked away free.
Okay. So why would Fudge have brought up the thirteen-year-old acquittal, rather than the ten-year-old pardon, when Harry mentioned Avery's name? That does seem a little strange doesn't it?
<Elkins pauses, bites her lip, shifts in her chair, and then suddenly sits bolt upright, smiling triumphantly -- if also just a touch madly>
NO! It does NOT!
Because what you have to understand about Fudge is that he was swept into office on precisely the same wave of public sentiment that led to Avery's pardon -- a Bleeding Heart backlash that did not last.
The backlash was very short-lived -- which is the reason that we see no Bleeding Hearts in canon. Avery's pardon represented the break of that particular wave; no sooner had he walked free than the backlash receded quickly, leaving people feeling decidedly...ambivalent about the entire affair. No other cases were in fact reexamined; the Avery/Crouch/Lestrange case was the only one that ever made it to retrial.
(And this is yet another reason that Sirius Black's case was never reexamined. Not only did it lack the pathos of young Barty Jr.'s trial [thus not appealing quite so much to the Bleeding Hearts], and not only did Albus Dumbledore show no sign of support for the notion that Black might be innocent, and not only is Sirius far too Tough to be willing to take the advice of his legal counsel and try begging off on Imperius at retrial, but also even if Black's case was ever on someone's agenda, it was far enough down near the bottom of the list that by the time it would have been reopened, public enthusiasm for the entire idea of reexamining Crouch's old cases had vanished away entirely.)
So as things turned out, Avery's pardon did not prove to be at all the great political coup that Crouch's successor had hoped for. Far from it: it was a bit of an embarrassment for everyone, and particularly for those politicians who had pushed most avidly for it -- people like Crouch's successor...and Fudge himself.
Fortunately for them, the cultural insistence on Not Talking Or Even Thinking About Those Dark Days Or Anything Related To Them that we see in effect in the HP books was now coming to dominate the wizarding zeitgeist. Nobody now wanted to think about any of that stuff at all, which made it a simple enough matter for politicians who might otherwise have been embarrassed by the affair to simply sweep it under the carpet where (to their minds) it rightfully belonged.
So this is the reason that Fudge mentions Avery's original acquittal but not his more recent (and more notorious) pardon. To mention the latter would touch far too closely on the subject of his own rather dubious claims to the position as Minister of Magic, as well as reminding everyone present of one of his own failed attempts to manipulate public sentiment for political advantage -- and that's a can of worms he most decidedly does not want opened right now. Not with these allegations of Voldemort's return and all. His position could be getting unstable enough as it is in the very near future, without dragging in all of that old business.
Okay. So, uh, where's the canon?
::thinks::
"Padfoot Returns." The canonical suggestion for all of this is in "Padfoot Returns," when Sirius first says of younger Crouch that he was "caught with a group of Death Eaters who'd managed to talk their way out of Azkaban," and then that he "was definitely caught in the company of people I'd bet my life were Death Eaters -- but he might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Well, that's an interesting ambiguity, isn't it? First he says that the people Crouch was caught with were Death Eaters, next only that they were people he would "bet his life" were Death Eaters. Well, come on, Sirius. Which is it?
The deep ambivalence that Sirius reveals there is perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the people he's referring to include both those he is certain are guilty (Lestranges), and those about whose guilt he is undecided (Avery). This undecidedness is consistent with the overall cultural attitude toward the Avery Affair -- Sirius, you will remember, has come by the majority of his information on this subject after his escape from Azkaban ("This is mostly stuff I've found out since I got out"); it was evidently not an incident that was much gibbered about by the imprisoned DEs. And Sirius' suggestion that Crouch might just "have been in the wrong place at the wrong time" is telling as well -- wherever would he have come by this idea? Why, from Avery's own defense, of course!
::pantpantpant::
There. Does that work? If anyone has a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it.
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Now, on to the question of whether Avery (who, as we all know, is by far the MOST important character in all of canon!) was ever a Ministry official, or if he was, whether he still is now.
Cindy wants Avery to have been the head of the Department of Magical Catastrophies (even at the tender age of twenty-one), so that she can have him responsible for tampering with evidence in the Sirius Black case and for recovering Voldemort's wand from the rubble at Godric's Hollow. She also wants him to have been given this position back after his release from Azkaban and sees no problem with the notion that Sirius would have failed to mention this, or that he would continue to perceive Avery as no particular threat to Harry, or that he would list his name last when he rattles off the names of Snape's old classmates. She writes:
Ah, but look at who else Sirius mentions. He mentions Rosier (dangerous and crazy enough to take on Moody)...
And dead.
...Wilkes (dangerous and crazy enough to take on Voldemort)...
And dead.
...and the Lestranges (just plain dangerous and crazy).
And in Azkaban.
Wouldn't you mention Avery last out of that group, even if he were responsible for a department that has responsibilities for little things like deflating Aunt Marge?
Er...no. I wouldn't. Not unless there were some reason for believing him to be really really non-threatening, which I hardly think that I would have if he had managed to become the head of a Ministry Department.
Nor, if he were the head of a Ministry Department, would I refer to him merely as 'still at large.' Being the head of a Ministry Department isn't being 'at large,' it's being 'in power.'
And besides, the DMC isn't a lame department at all. Working for the DMC must involve a good deal of interaction with many different departments, as well as with the Muggle authorities: it's not all Aunt-deflating and street-sweeping, you know. Remember, it was Fudge's department, right before he made Minister of Magic. (Now you in the back there, stop that snickering. Yes, Fudge is lame. But he's also the Minister of Magic, so he must have something on the ball.) If someone like Fudge can vault himself straight from DMC to Buck Stops Here, then I really doubt that the DMC has at all the Lame Duck reputation that you suggest.
But since you've been so nice about swallowing down my Fourth Man theory, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do for you here: I'll give you Avery in the DMC. Okay? Avery was in the DMC. He wasn't the Department Head, mind, but he was a junior minister in the department, just like Fudge. He was the chief investigator assigned to the muggle-blasting site, where he confiscated Sirius Black's wand (so that it couldn't be Priori Incantatem'd) and tampered with a bit of the evidence to make Sirius' guilt seem all that much more incontrovertible.
He was particularly motivated to do this, you see, because Sirius had once played a rather nasty prank on him back in their school days, and...
Well, okay. So that part's optional. You don't have to accept that part, if you don't want to.
There, Cindy. You can have Avery-Helped-To-Snooker-Sirius-Black. But I'm not willing to give you Avery-Retrieved-Voldemort's-Wand-From-Godric's-Hollow as well, because that would run completely counter to the entire "Avery has avoided the other DEs like the plague ever since his release from Azkaban" aspect of the Fourth Man theory, which is central.
Pettigrew can have Voldemort's wand all to himself. ::snerk::
----------
So what did Avery do after his release from prison? He certainly didn't go looking for Voldemort (his failure to do so is absolutely essential to the Fourth Man theory). I suggested that he moved into his mother's basement and took up coin collecting. But Cindy insisted:
His mother's basement? No, probably not. I think Avery gets out of Azkaban, and Fudge has been promoted to Minister of Magic....So Avery asks for his old job back. Fudge knows and likes Avery, and Fudge (being prone to denying the obvious) never really believed Avery was guilty. Who knows? Maybe Fudge pardoned Avery singlehandedly. The DMC is now very short of people who know how to puncture Aunts, so Fudge gives Avery his old job, with back pay to compensate for Avery's wrongful imprisonment.
Mmmmmm. Yeah, okay. I'm willing to run with this, if only because it offers yet more reason for Fudge to have wanted to avoid the issue of Avery's second acquittal altogether. Probably even Fudge has come to suspect, way down deep in his very heart of hearts, that Avery really was guilty all along.
But I still can't buy Avery as Department Head. The Fourth Man theory is far too dependent on the notion that Avery Has Had Enough, and Had-Enough Avery wouldn't seek a position of such prestige or power. Too dangerous.
No, if Avery's in DMC, then he's still a lowly (but NOT yet middle-aged!) desk drone, mistrusted and ill-respected by his co-workers, who occasionally gather around the water cooler to mutter darkly among themselves while shooting him suspicious glances. (He takes far too many sick days, too, and occasionally goes on extended personal leaves of absence for "reasons of emotional health.")
Avery does, however, resist all contact from Death Eaters like Lucius who would like to go on a Voldemort hunt.
You think Lucius ever wanted to go on a Voldemort hunt? I doubt it.
But yes. Avery resists all contact from former DE colleagues. In fact, he may well have children. If he does, then the reason we've never heard of them is that he sent them off to Beauxbatons or someplace. He wouldn't want them at Hogwarts, where they would be exposed not only to all of the other DEs' children, but also to the potentially corrupting influence of his old friend, Severus Snape -- a bad influence if Avery'd ever known one.
But speaking of Snape, Eileen points out a problem with my speculations:
Now, Elkins suggests we'll meet Avery again and not know who he is. I don't see how we can work this, especially if Avery is in the Ministry, as Cindy insists.
Well, if he's just a lowly drone these days, then that's not a problem. Snape, though...Snape's a big problem. Avery can't very well go skulking about Hogwarts Up To No Good with his old buddy Severus lurking around. Snape would recognize him, and more to the point (since Snape could be up to his old ricks in Book Five) so could a bunch of the other adult characters: McGonagall, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Flitwick...
Yeah, okay. So if any bit of plot does revolve around Unrecognized DE Avery, I guess it'll have to be a fairly minor one, and take place outside of Hogwarts.
::sigh::
Boy. Good thing I didn't put any money down on that one. Isn't it.
------------
And finally, on the question of how Evil Avery Really Is, Eileen wrote:
....it won't be some yet unknown virtuous Slytherin (a relative of Avery, or is Avery really evil now?).
Well, now, that all depends on which flavor of Fourth Man you prefer.
In "No-frills Fourth Man," Avery sure would seem to be pretty darned Evil, if also very Weak. But you could also choose "Fourth Man With Remorse," in which Avery truly regrets his past wrongdoings and has been leading a virtuous and muggle-embracing lifestyle for the past decade in his attempt to atone for all of his sins. Or, you could go for "Fourth Man With SHIP," in which Avery never really was all that Evil, and only became a DE in the first place due to his hopeless desire to impress the future Mrs. Lestrange. Or you can favor "Fourth Man With Imperius," in which Avery proves either too squeamish or too genuinely Good to be a very successful DE, and so really was put under the Imperius Curse by fellow DEs to guide him safely through his unwisely-chosen lifestyle. ("Fourth Man With Imperius" also has the added advantage of explaining why poor Avery seems so highly suggestible: it's all that Imperius, you see, it messed with his mind and left him highly vulnerable to outside influence...)
Or I suppose that if you really want him to be innocent, you could even go for "Fourth Man With Innocence," in which Avery really did have nothing to do with the attack on the Longbottoms, but was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Aurors broke down the door.
And, of course, there are combinations. Fourth Man With SHIP, Imperius, and Remorse is certainly a possibility, and one likely to appeal to those who really want to lay a great heaping load o' pathos on poor Avery's trembling head. Fourth Man with SHIP and Imperius, on the other hand, is more for those with a taste for perversion, and Fourth Man With Innocence and Remorse for those who prefer righteous angst to venal whining.
So really, Avery can be just about as Evil or as Redeemable as you like him under the Fourth Man Theory. One thing that he cannot be, however, is Tough.
Which brings us to Ambushes...
---------
Cindy (who is sold on the Fourth Man Theory, but feels confident that these S.Y.C.O.P.H.A.N.T.S. members eat their ice cream straight from the carton while lying in bed) wrote:
This is a dream come true! People are buying the ambush idea in droves (how many people does it take to make a drove, anyway?)!
TWO!!!! It takes TWO people to make a drove!
We're now to the point of talking about ambushes like . . . like there's actually some canon to support them or something!
::small exasperated noise::
But of course there is! There's plenty of canonical suggestion to support the idea of an ambush. We have Severus Snape spying for Dumbledore; we have Rosier, who "preferred to fight rather than come quietly" and took a piece of Moody with him; we have Dolohov—clearly a member of Karkaroff's "cell"—apprehended at the same time as Rosier's death...can there really be any doubt that we're talking ambush here?
O ye of little faith.
Are we all agreed that Snape arranged the ambush(es) to prove his loyalty to Dumbledore? Please? Pretty please?
Nope. Sorry, can't climb on that wagon. For one thing, the entire idea of Albus Dumbledore demanding a blood sacrifice as a proof of loyalty is utterly sickening. For another thing, it doesn't even make any sense. I mean, surely Big Bad Evil Voldemort would be perfectly willing to sacrifice a couple of his younger Death Eaters to help his valuable spy trick muggle-loving old fool Dumbledore, wouldn't he? (Hell, even I'd be willing to do that, and I'm just a SYCOPHANT, not an Evil Overlord.) And surely Dumbledore would realize that. So Snape's willingness to lead his colleagues into an ambush wouldn't even be a very good proof of his loyalty.
No, I think that Dumbledore was convinced of Snape's sincerity when Fawkes hopped into Snape's lap to snuggle with him.
Snape snarled and batted at the wretched creature, of course, but by that time it was too late: Dumbledore was onto him.
But, yeah. I do think that Snape's information was what tipped off the Aurors, thus allowing them to set up the ambush(es). Is that good enough?
Well, now that we know for a fact that there absolutely, definitely was an ambush, regardless of what JKR has to say about the matter...
Absolutely!
::bounces up and down excitedly in chair::
Ambushambushambush!!
...we have to pin down how it happened. Here's what we know:
1. Karkaroff. In the Pensieve, Karkaroff has already been convicted. Moody apparently took 6 months to track Karkaroff down.
Yet by the time Karkaroff is testifying before the hearing, Voldemort has already fallen. This gets important later on.
2. Dolohov. Captured "shortly after" Karkaroff, but Karkaroff doesn't know this. Karkaroff definitely knew Dolohov, as he saw him torture people.
And helped him to do it. Or was that just vile slander, O Brave Defender of Poor Igor?
3. Rosier. Caught "shortly after" Karkaroff also. Dead, but took a piece of Moody with him. Karkaroff knew him, too.
We also know that both Rosier and Wilkes were "killed by Aurors the year before Voldemort fell." Sirius says so.
What this means is that Karkaroff and Dolohov were both also apprehended "the year before Voldemort fell." By the time of the Pensieve hearing, then, Karkaroff has already been in prison for some months -- perhaps even for a full year.
(There now, Cindy, you see? There's another point in poor Igor's favor. He did spend a good long time with the dementors before he cracked and offered to start naming names.)
(Yes. You're welcome.)
4. Travers and Mulciber. Fingered by Karkaroff, but already apprehended.
We don't know when, though, nor even whether it happened before or after Voldemort's fall. They were still at large when Karkaroff himself was caught, but that could have been up to a year ago.
5. Wilkes. Karkaroff doesn't finger Wilkes, but Wilkes is dead, having expired the year before Voldemort fell.
Not just dead. Not just expired. Killed by Aurors. Sirius says that Wilkes was "killed by Aurors." He might have been killed before Karkaroff's arrest, or he might not have been.
Karkaroff is desperately casting about for names, and we have to presume he names every single Death Eater he can think of.
I agree. So in Karkaroff's cell, we have Dolohov, Rosier, Travers, Mulciber, and Snape. Wilkes may have been there as well: Karkaroff could have neglected to mention him because he already knew of Wilkes' death. And then there's Rookwood. I don't believe that Rookwood was really a member of the cell proper. But more on that below.
Karkaroff didn't know Avery, the Lestranges, or Crouch Jr. If he had, he would have fingered them. Agreed.
This, uh, destroys Elkins' half-hearted "Karkaroff Was Mrs. Lestranges' Little Pet Igor" theory, thank goodness.
No, no, no, Cindy! You're confused. It's Avery who might have been the Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange's Little Pet. That's the operating premise of "Fourth Man With SHIP and Imperius," a fine and upstanding (if also rather perverted) variant on Fourth Man that has nothing in the least bit half-hearted about it!
So I'm thinking that in the Pensieve scene, Karkaroff knows nothing about the ambush at all, which is why he keeps naming people who are captured or dead. That leads me to believe that the people he names were the victims of the ambush.
Absolutely. Karkaroff was caught by Moody before the ambush happened.
It would seem to not have been all that bloody of an ambush, alas, but you can't have everything...
Wilkes? Who knows? I guess he wasn't in the ambush. Maybe Voldemort killed him. :-)
Aurors, dammit. Wilkes was killed by Aurors. Sirius says so.
Of course, Sirius never says that Wilkes was a 'he' at all. Perhaps Wilkes was actually Florence Wilkes, Snape's lost love, whom he used to snog romantically behind the greenhouses back in their Hogwarts days...until they were caught out and humiliated by that meddling little Nosy Parker Bertha Jorkins, that is. No wonder he hexed her!
Alas, Love Of Wilkes Left Anguish, Polluting Our Poor Severus, which is the reason that he's always so damned cranky, and the reason that he joined the DEs in the first place, and the reason that he picks on poor little Neville Longbottom (Frank was the one who killed Florence, you see), and the reason that he was willing to defect to Dumbledore's cause (for with Florence gone, why would he remain in their midst?), and the reason that he will never, EVER be able to love again...
<Elkins grins and tosses a seashell lazily—if with no real malice—out to sea in the general direction of the Good Ship L.O.L.L.I.P.O.P.S.>
I know what you're thinking. Karkaroff also names Rookwood, who we know was still at large. Ah, but Rookwood is the head of the Department of Mysteries, making him, well, mysterious. Why wasn't Rookwood at the ambush? It's because Rookwood had intelligence that the ambush was going down.
::blink::
Rookwood wasn't actually the head of the Department of Mysteries, surely. Is that really stated anywhere? I thought he was just a member of the department.
But at any rate, I refuse to believe that Rookwood was a member of Karkaroff's little gang of thugs. He filled some sort of intelligence function for the organization as a whole, I think, and the fact that Karkaroff actually knew his identity was probably an accident. Karkaroff knows that Rookwood's the best he has to offer, which is why he saves his name for last...er, except for Snape's, that is. He didn't name Snape until the very end because he, um... ::clears throat:: liked the guy.
So that's why Rookwood wasn't caught in the ambush, IMO. Not because he caught wind of it ahead of time, but simply because he was far too important to be out and about torturing muggles with Karkaroff and his little death squad. Rookwood was intelligence. He had Big Important Taking Over the Wizarding World stuff that he was working on; Voldemort didn't want him wasting his time on frivolities.
To recap, then, we have Death Eater Cell 1 with Rookwood, Karkaroff, Wilkes, Travers, Dolohov, Snape, Mulciber.
I hold out against Rookwood. And I'm not entirely sure about Mulciber either, come to think of it—does the Imperius Specialist really travel around with a Thug Squad? Or is he more of a specialist who gets called in for special occasions? Could be the latter, and Karkaroff could have just known his name.
Tell ya what I'm gonna do. We can have A Great Ambush with Dolohov, Rosier, Travers, Mulciber. It's two Aurors against four Death Eaters.
<Elkins opens her eyes wide, breathless with anticipation>
Rosier is a loose cannon who has always been a great shot and a little too impressed with his own dueling abilities.
A loose canon? Who woulda thought it?
Rosier sees Moody and immediately knows he has been set up. Moody starts to shout out something like "Keep your wand where I can see it, and let's talk about this, because we wouldn't want anyone to get . . . " Rosier pulls out his wand and tries to blast Moody, but misses wide right and grazes a chunk from Moody's nose. Moody, (being Tough so that one little wand blast will never bring him down) shows no mercy and blasts Rosier point blank, right between the eyes, just like Elkins so desperately wants.
<Elkins, beside herself with excitement, jumps up and down in her seat, shrieking happily>
YAY!!!!!!!!!!! Bloody ambush! Bloody ambush! Bloody ambush!
Then Travers, Mulciber and Dolohov put up a fierce struggle against Frank Longbottom, who eventually subdues all three in a glorious firefight.
YAY!!!!!!!!!! Glorious firefight! Glorious firefight! Glorious firefi--
<Elkins stops abruptly. Her expression of bloodthirsty satisfaction slowly dissolves into one of stark horror>
Oh, good Lord. When precisely did I get like this?
Cindy? Are you sure there was nothing in that brandy?
(Moody helps a little, but Frank does the heavy lifting). Moody, being a fabulous guy and also rather thankful that Frank saved Moody's life in the firefight...
Well, that creates some sort of a mystic bond between wizards, right?
...tells everyone how fabulous Frank is and gives him all the credit in the Daily Prophet, making Frank very popular. (This makes the scenes between Fake Moody and Neville all the more chilling because Real Moody has told Crouch Jr. all about this, and Fake Moody uses it to get close to Neville.)
Hmmmmm.... Neville... Fake Moody... Longbottom Incident... Mystic bonds between wizards...
Hey, wait! Didn't Eileen want us to thow a memory charm theory in here somewhere?
Well, this isn't quite a Memory Charm Theory, but it's on a related topic, so here goes.
How's this? Crouch didn't really need this story to get close to Neville. You see, Neville is instinctively drawn to Fake Moody anyway, due to the mystic bond formed when one wizard saves another's life, because back when Neville was but a wee toddler, young Barty Crouch took pity on him and hid him from Avery and the Lestranges when they were targetting Frank's family.
Neville can't really remember this, of course, because of the whole Memory Charm thing, but the bond is still there: he responds to it as a matter of instinct. It's the reason that he's willing to speak up in class even when the subject matter is the dread Cruciatus Curse; it's the reason that he's willing to venture into Scary Fake Moody's office to have tea with him; and it's the reason that Fake Moody's herbology praise is so very effective in giving him that nice boost of self-esteem.
And as for Crouch himself: that explanation that he gives Harry of why he took Neville under his wing is not entirely accurate. It wasn't until he already had Neville in his office for a while, and had already fed him some hot chocolate and biscuits, and talked him down from his state of rather extreme distress, and been generally uncharacteristically kind and compassionate to him that it even occurred to him that he could turn this situation to his advantage by planting the Water Plants book. The ploy was really only an afterthought. It wasn't until well into his tea-and-sympathy conversation with Neville that he even learned that the kid was particularly friendly with Harry. That's when he thought of planting the book on him. But as to why he felt compelled to show such kindness to young Longbottom in the first place...well, Crouch could never understand that himself. It rather preyed on his mind, in fact—it disturbed him—and so he eventually succeeded in convincing himself that planting the book had actually been his Cunning Plan all along. In actuality, however, he had merely been a helpless pawn of that mystic bond forged between wizards when one saves another's life.
There. How's that for subversive? ;-)
I also like this theory because it explains why Mrs. Lestrange went after Frank....she picks Frank because she wants revenge for his role in the ambush because he killed her old flame Rosier. (She doesn't know it was Moody who killed Rosier because Moody gave Frank all the credit, and Mrs. Lestrange is still a little woozy from her time in Azkaban.)
Woozy? From a mere couple of weeks awaiting trial in Azkaban?
Hah! The Dead Sexy Mrs. Lestrange is way too Tough to get that easily woozed.
No, she knew perfectly well that Moody was the one who killed Rosier. That's why she did such an inspired number on the poor man's leg, and his eye, and heaven only knows what other body parts that could be salvaged over at St. Mungo's without resort to the magical bionics. (I quite agree with Cindy that this must be the reason that Moody was not present at her trial.)
No, she went after Longbottom because Longbottom killed Wilkes.
(Haven't I told you again and again that Longbottom killed Wilkes?)
Anyway, I know I'm a little short on canon here.
Canon? Oh, right. That.
But you have to admit that JKR seems to have been very precise in weaving a rather complex tale of which DEs did what and where everyone was at particular points in the timeline. I doubt that it was all random.
The truth is out there.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 13, 2002 4:18 PM
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