After dinner, night settled in.
The wind outside the Burrow made the window frames rattle softly.
Ginny went upstairs with a cup of hot tea.
She sat in front of her bedroom window.
Beyond the window lay fields of dark blue-black.
An occasional light shone in the distance.
As though someone had pricked the night with a needle.
Ron's complaints still drifted up intermittently from below.
Fred and George chimed in.
They were like three gnomes tangled in a muddle.
But by the time those voices floated up here.
They already sounded very far away.
Ginny cradled her cup.
The steam flushed her fingertips faintly red.
She remembered the blank sheet of parchment in the Gryffindor Common Room.
She remembered them gathered around the table, none of them able to say what they ought to oppose.
She also remembered Harry's frown.
He was not afraid of enemies.
But this was precisely the sort of thing he was worst at dealing with.
A faceless pressure.
An order with no clear malice, yet one that pressed in at every step.
Ginny took a sip of tea.
Umbridge was certainly loathsome.
But blaming everything on her was too easy.
As easy as forcing a scapegoat of a number into a complicated equation.
She was merely the most conspicuous pink shell.
What was really operating was the entire apparatus behind her.
Rules.
Standards.
Data.
Habits.
And people's surrender to what was "effective."
She spoke quietly.
"That's the real trouble."
The wind rattled the gap in the window softly.
She leaned against the wall.
The Charon Detective Agency suddenly surfaced in her mind.
The name had once carried a hint of play.
They took leads.
Investigated problems.
Looked for people.
And occasionally fought against the assorted chaos at school.
But that was before.
If they