God Made Girls | Ron

It wasn’t like she had any idea how long they were going to be here. Bets wasn’t sure of much of anything when it came to a time line really. The no maj born citizens were no longer imprisoned, but that hadn’t been their main objective. No matter what it was that people thought. Yes, that had been important. Equality was important. But she knew that they were here for something else. They were here for what Samira and Davis were working on. They were here to try and cure the disease that was afflicting so many of them here in the UK.

They didn’t understand it. No one understood it. And they had been here two months now. Two months, and she still wasn’t sure that there was a whole lot that they had accomplished. Lucius Malfoy was a prick. That was about all that she had managed to discern from what he would let her see of his books. Commerce was more cooperative, and that was good. But she needed access to the Treasury too, and he was being difficult simply because he could. Because she was a woman. Because she was young enough to be his daughter. Because she was smarter than him.

Still, trying to get that man to cooperate with her seemed to be working just about as well as trying to herd cats. She couldn’t get anything done. She wasn’t making progress, and she felt like she was failing. Yes, half of her job was done. There were options. Not great ones, but options. But she couldn’t fix an economy that was stagnant. She couldn’t fix an economy with no trade. With no imports, or exports. She couldn’t fix something that was closed off from the rest of the world. A country could run in isolation, an economy could not.

They were going to fall apart from the inside, and soon. She had to convince Luiz to convince the Minister to open the borders. But she didn’t know how. She knew that the Minister was a healer. That she was a doctor. And while that had been good when the Epidemic had started, she had known to contain it, she had known to isolate them all, now what was it doing for them? Nothing. It was doing nothing. And she wasn’t going to want to open the border, because it would mean a risk of international infection. Bets knew that. But she didn’t think that crushing her own country was an option either.

There was only one viable option. Someone had to find a cure for this. Someone had to find the answers. They had to do something. They had to come up with something. Part of her wanted to grill Samira for information, but she knew that she wasn’t going to understand anything that she was saying. She was an Economist. An international and political economist, and she could not see a way out of this. She could not see how they were going to continue to function like this. How on earth they had made it this long?

She knew how they had made it this long. Asking around had gotten her that much. The pureblood Lords and Ladies were funding the country. But how long could private families fund an entire nation? They weren’t going to hold out forever. The goblins in the bank couldn’t give her details, but what they could tell her was that it was names like Slughorn, and Black, and Malfoy that were doing the majority of it. Names that she knew. At least two of them. Because one belonged to the Minister, and one belonged to a man she had come to loathe.

Still, she couldn’t do anything about it tonight. And she couldn’t do anything about it in the morning. It was a Saturday night, and she had decided that instead of spending it at the Adria, where people were starting to recognize her, and they knew who she was, and what she was a part of, she had decided to try something else. The Leaky Cauldron. It had quite the reputation, and she had been meaning to come here since they had arrived. Legendary as it was.

Slipping into a seat at the end of the bar she smiled at the bartender. Bets could wait until she was finished with the men that she was currently serving. She was in no real rush, and while the place was busy, it wasn’t anything crazy. She had seen far bigger crowds in Boston, and even in Geneva. “Whiskey, neat.” The bartender rattled off brands, and she shook her head until she hit a familiar one. “Jack it is.” One of her favorite men, after all.