@vanityemmx
Emma was out in public when she found out, and she found it hard to contain her anger. She’d never felt like this before. She’d never felt angry at what she read in the papers. Okay, maybe she sometimes felt angry when they badmouthed her. But this was different. People were dead. Innocent people were dead. And the knew her family could have done his. Emma knew that was why she felt angry. She’d already been feeling confused about things. Confused about where her loyalty was, and if she was doing the right thing by doing nothing. But, there was little to be confused about now.
“Fuck…..” She grumbled, shaking her head, as she spun around, throwing the paper into a nearby bin without even reading the rest of it. She ran her fingers through her hair, just trying to calm down.
—
Frank was just tired. He had been called to that scene, only to find that the Death Eaters were gone and that the Dark Mark loomed over the bodies. He had trouble finding the words for something that was greater than disappointment. This had never been a game to him, but there was dissatisfaction in how he felt about how slow the response had been.
He hadn’t looked too closely into it. Did the McKinnons really have to die? Someone had to arrange a funeral—that should have been his first thought. There was no going back on something that had just been too late. He wondered if there had been some kind of way to get intel—or if everything his department had been dealing with had just been wrong.
Today he was running a few smaller cases, checking in with people he had questioned about a minor vandalism a few weeks ago. He had been bored then, but grateful for it now, watching the walls scrubbed clean. A part of him wasn’t sure that they should be adding more security around here, just in case—but that hadn’t been his call to make, and he already knew that the Aurors were stretched thin.
But he saw a girl circle the bin, and he just spotted the crumpled sheet on top of it. He didn’t need to look too closely to recognize that it was the Prophet parchment, but he managed to stand up and move towards her. She looked as if she were driven insane by something.
“Come on,” Frank started. “You’re not hurt, are you?”
That was one way to start, at least in the most empathetic way he could manage. He had a hard time reading if she were upset or actually cursed, so he got close—but not enough to touch. He didn’t take his wand out yet, it wasn’t necessary as far as he was aware. But he’d take her to St. Mungo’s if the case may be that something had happened to her and that she needed the medical attention. These days, it was hard to be sure.