Order Only: Private message to the Weasley family

[alt_bill]

Fred and George and I went to the Burrow this morning to re-set the wards.

We altered them the night Percy testified against Mum at the hearing over the WWW licence, so that they wouldn't admit him, even though he shared our blood. We re-set them in the same way again today, this time to keep Ginny out.

I hope to Merlin this will only need to be a temporary measure, and it's an unnecessary precaution besides. Rachel doesn't think that Dolohov is going to be taking Ginny out of New London for any expeditions. Still, I didn't want them to make it easy for them if they had the bright idea to let her go inside her old home and burn the place down as an impressive way to cement her newfound loathing for her family. If we ever get her back, we will need the Burrow, so we can help her recapture her happy memories of home, and build her family ties back from there.

The house is looking okay, although I'm afraid the gnomes have been having wild parties in what's left of the garden.

I brought back one of the family photo albums, and all the framed photo portraits of Ginny I could find. They're in Mum's room. I think there are enough framed pictures for everyone to have to keep for now.

Comments

[alt_molly]

Thank you, boys. Maybe Rachel's right, and it's an overabundance of precaution, but I'd rather be sure.

(Bill, thank you for thinking to bring back the pictures. I've put that lovely one from her last Purest Sparkle shoot right next to my bed.)

[alt_fred]

Mum talked with us about some of the stuff Ginny's writing to her. Guess we're being written off as villains, same as Bill and Mum. But it sounds like she isn't quite as hacked off at Ron, from what Mum has been able to glean.

Charlie, has she written back to you?

[alt_molly]

It seems to be a mixture of things that are true and things that aren't, that put us in as terrible a light as possible.

Rachel, do you have any idea whether it is wise to challenge the memories which aren't accurate? Will that just make her dig in her heels more, and make the false memories more difficult to eradicate?

[alt_rachel]

What's your goal, exactly?

I mean, you do understand do you understand what will happen if you persuade her that her memories are inaccurate?

[alt_bill]

Is she responding better to Ron? That's good news, at least.

It's a guess, but I'm thinking that worrying about undoing the false memories when and if we rescue her shouldn't be our primary concern.

Ron, feel free to blacken my name as much as possible if it helps build any bridge of trust with her.

[alt_molly]

Well, I'll admit that I hope, in the long run, to rescue her, and to bring her mind back. And I suppose that my question about being able to undo the memory damage is with that hope in mind. AFTER we rescue her.

But we may never be able to achieve that. I must keep reminding myself of that. Right now, I think my goals are twofold: to keep her alive, or at least, to make MLE think it's worth their trouble to keep her alive so that we can rescue her later. In order to do that, I think, she has to have some propaganda worth to the old MLE.

On the other hand, I don't want her value as a propaganda tool be so great that it causes unrepairable damage to our attempts in establishing Albion.

Oh, dear. The problem is that those last two goals are so contradictory.

If it will protect her, I'm willing to let her hate me. But I just want there to be enough left of her for us to have a chance of bringing her back if we can ever get her out of there. Does that make sense?

If she becomes too damaging to us in their hands, and there is no hope whatsoever of bringing her back to herself--

I'm trying to think what Ginny would have wanted. If she could have foreseen this, and she could have let us know her wishes. I did already give permission--when we thought--but we couldn't reach her.

But if we could reach her now, if only to eliminate her?

Rachel, I'm sorry. I'm trying.

[alt_rachel]

We can't reach her at the moment, so you don't have to put yourself through that particular grim thought experiment. If her captors put her within reach I'd be inclined to attempt a rescue. But that's not gong to happen anytime soon.

Here's the thing. If you succeed in reaching her, if you persuade her that what she's remembering wasn't real, Antonin Dolohov will cruciate her until she 'sees' that you are lying and manipulating her. Cruciatus is an incredibly persuasive tool for getting people to do whatever they think will stop you from using it, and if they have to believe that up is down, black is red, and two plus two is eight-six, they will.

Long term, I don't know much about undoing this sort of brainwashing. We saw some demonstrations as part of Auror training, when I went through it, but the victims were not rehabilitated. You might ask Poppy and see what she thinks.

[alt_rachel]

Okay, I tracked down a Healer named Ellen Hadresham, one of the ones who recently joined us. She spent time working at the Vale of Health, among other locations, and is something of an expert in the lingering after-effects of cruciatus.

She thinks that if we can get Ginny back, she'll likely sort through the real and false memories on her own, given time. However, we should expect her to be hostile and difficult; her sense of self may never be quite what it was, nor her relationships with all of you, but if we can get her back, she will eventually be able to understand how those false memories were created. (She literally cannot understand that now; she can't afford to.)

Healer Hadresham wasn't sure what sort of messages right now would be helpful or unhelpful. She kept going back and forth. If you send her messages, she will see that her family is neither forgetting her nor giving up on her; however, the risk is that if she wavers, she'll be subjected to more cruciatus, which does damage even if it's not at the level of what happened to Neville; the physical damage makes the psychological damage harder to heal from; moreover, she may blame you afterward for the additional torture she was put through, even after accepting that some of what she remembers was the result of brainwashing and not real history. However if you don't write to her she may feel abandoned; it will feed the narrative that her family never truly cared about her, and even as the fabricated memories fade and become less real to her that sense of abandonment when she was a prisoner may linger.

Ellen also noted that this is an unusual situation as most prisoners of MLE historically have not been handed their diaries and encouraged to correspond with their families.

And once again I'm not sure if that was at all helpful.

[alt_charlie]

Yeah, she wrote back to me. I went for "I believe you, but I don't remember anything, so will you tell me what I missed" and tried reminding her that she's always been able to talk to me about anything, but she told me to leave her alone and that she didn't believe that I didn't remember, so I'm guessing I'm also on the list of people who've done horrible things to her. She was incredibly vague, though -- no specifics, nothing more than "you know what you did" type talk.

At least Ron doesn't seem to be on the shit list. I wonder if they haven't tried turning her against Ron, or if they tried and she just wouldn't do it so they picked a different story instead.

[alt_sally_anne]

I wrote to her, too, and I got an answer that was sort of cold but didn't accuse me of anything.

So I could keep writing to her. But if she started thinking I was her friend does that mean Dolohov would make her come up with reasons I wasn't?

[alt_charlie]

I don't know. On the one hand, you're Ron's wife, so you might be all right. On the other hand, you're Ron's wife, and if you push she might turn that into you having married him to control him or influence him or something and it could get ugly.

Fuck, why is this so fucking hard.

I'd say that maybe we should all make a roster of everybody in the Order writing to her regularly to remind her that we love her so they'd have to spend all their time keeping up with making up new horrible things to convince her of, except the way they're convincing her is to torture her until she agrees, so that's right fucking out.

[alt_sally_anne]

Well, maybe we should encourage anyone who's friends with her, at least, just to write every now and then and say 'hello, thinking of you today, hope you're okay.' I mean if they're not asking questions or pushing for a response maybe Dolohov won't care. And she'll at least have people writing.

[alt_charlie]

Yeah. Maybe if it's not us, they won't care as much. And if it's not trying to convince her that she's wrong and needs to listen to us, just saying "thinking of you" type things.

Maybe people who aren't in the Order, even. You had that group of people who were sympathetic but not Order members, maybe you could ask a bunch of them to write her occasionally. If it's not people in the Order directly, maybe Dolohov won't bother trying to isolate her from them.

Hell, maybe you could get Patil to write her, even. )Although that might get Ginny's captors more interested in trying to get something out of her.) I just think it'll be important to keep lines of communication open, so they can't isolate her completely. Anybody over and above Dolohov and Crouch and Bellatrix that she talks to might be a potential way in someday, because if they manage to keep her completely isolated, she'll only get their perspective on things.

[alt_sally_anne]

I don't know if Patil would be a good idea. We aren't brainwashing her (are we?) so I think she probably still hates us and prefers the other side.

But yeah, the other Galleon holders could write her notes.

[alt_charlie]

Yeah. I was just thinking of the least likely person possible.

Some of the younger kids in Gryffindor, maybe? People who looked up to her? They wouldn't be threatening.

[alt_molly]

You know what you should do, Charlie?

Write to her about Adam. Just about Adam. Because he's never done anything to hurt her, so what terrible things can Dolohov make her believe about him? That he's spit up on her?

But it will give her news about at least one member of her family, and remind her that she's tied to us.