Cornelius Fudge arrived at midnight.
He came with the specific quality of a man who had received alarming information and had chosen denial as his primary response before he arrived — the specific pre-emptive quality of someone who had decided what the information meant before encountering the information itself. He was in his lime green bowler hat, which Ron had always found the most legible thing about Fudge: a man who chose lime green in a crisis was a man whose aesthetic judgment and political judgment operated from the same compromised place.
Amelia met him in the entrance hall.
Ron was on the stairs, which gave him a clear line to the entrance hall without being in it — the specific position of someone who intended to observe rather than participate until participation became necessary.
'Cornelius,' Amelia said, with the quality of someone who had been preparing for this conversation since the moment Crouch Junior had been taken down. 'I need to brief you on what has happened tonight.'
'I've been briefed,' Fudge said, which was not the same as having been informed and both of them knew it. 'I understand there's been some sort of incident with the Tournament. The boy, Potter '
'Harry Potter has returned from a graveyard where he witnessed the resurrection of Voldemort,' Amelia said, with the specific precision of someone who had decided that the moment for diplomatic circumlocution was not this one. 'He has given a full account to myself, Albus Dumbledore, and two witnesses. Bartemius Crouch Junior, who has been impersonating Alastor Moody at this school for the entire academic year, has confirmed the account under interrogation. I have the testimony documented.'
Fudge looked at her. 'Amelia — '
'He's back,' she said. 'The evidence is substantial, the testimony is corroborated, and the Ministry needs to respond to this tonight rather than in the morning.'
What followed was not, technically, an argument. It had the structure of a conversation between two people who were using the same words to mean entirely different things and had both noticed this and were proceeding anyway. Fudge's denial had the quality of something that had been in place since before he arrived — not a response to the evidence but a prior commitment to a conclusion that the evidence was required to fit. He talked about hysteria, about impressionable young people, about the specific danger of crediting the testimony of a boy who had been through a traumatic experience.
Amelia's expression had the quality it had when she was managing a response that did not involve the words she most wanted to use.
Dumbledore arrived at some point in the middle of this, from the direction of the hospital wing, moving with the specific unhurried authority of someone who knew that urgency expressed itself in presence rather than speed. He stood beside Amelia and looked at Fudge with the expression of someone who had watched this particular pattern operate before and had specific feelings about it.
'Cornelius,' Dumbledore said, 'I have seen the evidence with my own eyes and I am telling you that Voldemort has returned. The choice before you is not whether to believe this. The choice is whether to prepare for it.'
Fudge looked at him. 'You've always — this has always been your position, Albus, that he would come back, that we needed to be prepared — '
'Because he was always going to come back,' Dumbledore said, with the patient quality of someone who had been saying a true thing for a long time and had arrived at the point where patience was not virtue but necessity. 'The preparation I have been asking for for thirteen years has not happened. We are now in the position where it needed to have happened and did not. That is the situation.'
Fudge turned to Bartemius Crouch Junior, who had been brought in from the grounds and was sitting in a chair in the entrance hall under Full Incarceration with two Aurors present. He looked at the man who had worn Alastor Moody's face for nine months and was now wearing his own, younger face, which had the specific quality of someone who had nothing left to lose and was choosing to spend that freedom on defiance.
'He's mad,' Fudge said. 'Whatever he's told you — he's a convicted Death Eater, he's been in Azkaban — '
'Escaped from Azkaban,' Amelia said. 'Which is itself a significant piece of information that we need to understand.'
Fudge made his decision in the space of approximately thirty seconds, which was how long it took him to look at the situation and conclude that the situation required management rather than response. He turned to the Aurors present and said, in the tone of a man who had decided on a course of action and intended to implement it before anyone could stop him: 'I want a Dementor brought here immediately.'
Amelia stood very still.
'Cornelius,' Dumbledore said. His voice had something in it that was not quite warning and not quite grief.
'He's a convicted criminal,' Fudge said. 'Sentenced to life in Azkaban. The sentence is clear. The Dementor's Kiss is the appropriate — '
'The Dementor's Kiss will destroy the only witness to what happened tonight,' Amelia said. 'If you do this you are destroying evidence in an active investigation.'
'There is no active investigation,' Fudge said, with the specific quality of a man who had decided what the facts were. 'There was an incident at the Tournament. The boy was harmed. The criminal responsible is in custody. The sentence is carried out.'
He called the Dementor.
Ron, on the stairs, watched it happen. He had known it was going to happen. He had known since the original timeline's account of this night that Fudge would make exactly this decision for exactly these reasons, and knowing had not made watching it easier. The Dementor moved through the entrance hall with the quality that Dementors had — the cold, the despair, the specific quality of something that fed on everything that made a moment worth being in.
Bartemius Crouch Junior ceased to be a witness.
Fudge left at half past midnight with the air of someone who had managed a crisis and was satisfied with the management. He said something to Amelia as he went that Ron was too far away to hear but which produced in Amelia's expression the quality of someone who had received information that required a response she was not going to give right now.
She stood in the entrance hall after he left and looked at the floor for a moment. Then she looked up at where Dumbledore was standing.
'He's going to deny it,' she said.
'Yes,' Dumbledore said.
'He's going to try and use the Prophet.'
'Yes.'
'And the Ministry will be divided,' she said, 'between the people who follow his lead and the people who have just watched what they watched tonight and cannot unsee it.'
'Yes,' Dumbledore said. 'That is precisely what is going to happen.' He paused. 'The question is what we do with the division.'
Amelia looked at Sirius, who was still in the entrance hall, who had the quality of someone who had held himself together through the worst of the night and was now in the aftermath of having held himself together, which was its own kind of cost. She looked at Ron on the stairs.
'Tomorrow,' she said, to no one in particular and all of them simultaneously. 'We'll begin tomorrow.'