Bad Blood | Minister Lestrange

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[attr="class","cbody"]There was nobody, in her mind, that was more of a paradox than Andromeda Lestrange. The woman made absolutely no sense to Hermione whatsoever. She was well aware that not everybody in the world was split into good and bad people. It wasn’t all black and white, it wasn’t always all that easy to know just where people stood and what they believed. But there was still right, and there was still wrong. There were still lines that separated people, that made them either good or bad. Actions were louder than words sometimes, and there were people that made choices, that did the wrong thing, but that still managed to sit on their high horse and act like they were better than everybody else.
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And that, in her mind, summed up Andromeda Lestrange to a t. After everything that she had done, after the choices that she had made, she still had the gall to sit there and act like she was a good person. Like she was helping people, like she was not a traitor to the Order and everything that they had stood for. Everything that she had done, every choice that she’d made that had dishonored her late husband’s memory, that dishonored her late daughter’s memory, and yet still she sat, so sure of herself and her choices in a way that Hermione just could not understand.
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It wasn’t black and white. She understood that. There was moral ambiguity involved in this, there was no question about it. Maybe Andromeda had decided that it was okay to care about a few Muggleborns, ones that had grown on her that she didn’t want to see hurt or killed, while letting the ones she didn’t know suffer. Maybe she thought that made her a good person—she had married a Muggleborn, she could sit here and say that she had kept the aurors from trying to track them down, as if that made the rest of her complicity okay. As if that one action made up for the thousands of Muggleborns that were still suffering.
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Hermione wasn’t naïve. She knew that change could not happen overnight. There was a chance that Andromeda was angling for a complete reversal of the registration. That she was trying to get rid of it entirely. A part of her, a hopeless part that missed the woman that she had been friends with for half of her life, wanted to think that this had all been an act. Something that she had taken as far as she had so that she could get this power. So that she could make these chances, and make everything right again.
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But she couldn’t believe that. She didn’t. She didn’t believe that the woman had married Rodolphus Lestrange with the idea that she’d use that to become Minister. She didn’t think that she’d gotten pregnant with his child, that she had aligned with Death Eaters, thinking that she might get the chance to oust Ares Wentzell and get the registration reversed. It wasn’t a realistic thing to think. Too much had happened for her to truly believe that could have been the reason behind everything.
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“Even if I believed that, what do you expect? A thank-you note? There are thousands of Muggleborns in slavery that didn’t get a get-out-of-jail-free card, because you don’t have… some lingering fondness for my family.” She couldn’t even believe that it was fondness for her. It was hard to believe that she had ever cared about her at all. Harry, yes. Adaline, of course. But her? She was less certain.
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Hermione raised her eyebrows at the woman spoke again. It wasn’t as if she was implying the Ministry was falling apart or anything. In fact, she thought it was a wonder it was still standing at all. If Fudge had been Minister in a crisis like this one, she thought there would be anarchy in the streets by now. Still, from what she had heard, she would say they were still far from adjusting—or even being remotely okay. “I have no doubt. I do think, however, there are conversations that could be had on how to help the Ministry further adjust.” Hermione was sure that the woman was not ignorant to what exactly she was referring to.
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