It's weird, I just told Ron, the day before, that when you're playing chess you have to make sacrifices. Remember, he said that Desai set it up so he found 'evidence' I was selling things on the black market, and waited to see if Ron would turn me in? I told Ron that if that sort of thing ever came up for real, I wanted him to go ahead and denounce me as fast and as hard as he could, do anything he needed to keep his cover, because winning this war is more important than any one person and him with the Aurors is going to be damn helpful in the future.

And if you look at it that way, I shouldn't be upset, because showing people that the Protectorate is not all-powerful is an important thing to do, and losing one person in the middle of all that is just collateral damage. But then I think, well, the real reason for all this was to save Lucius sodding Malfoy, and making a public demonstration of the Protectorate's weaknesses was just a side benefit, and I don't know if that counts as important. And then I remember that no, we have Bellatrix Lestrange's hair now, and that might wind up strategically critical in the future. And and and.

I don't know. I think I'll eventually come around to, this was an important thing to do and one fuckup in the process is understandable and it's a miracle there weren't more. But I think it'll take me a bit to get there emotionally, not just intellectually.