Alice and Frank/Legilimens and Memories ( wasRe: THE OLD CROWD – INTRO)

[Jen Reese]

Jen:
> Did you think when JKR shut off speculation about the sweet 
> wrappers, she was also sending a message that neither of the 
> Longbottoms, specifically Alice, will ever make a partial 
> recovery?  
 
Potioncat:
> That's what hit me. Up till then, I thought Alice and Frank were 
> still in there somewhere, and they'd find a way out. Only, I hadn't
> realised that was what I thought. It was a very final moment.
> 
> All the time Frank and Alice should have been a reminder to us
> that in war not everyone dies a heroic death, although still
> heroes, and not everyone comes back whole. Instead, many of us
> were cheerfully hunting for the hidden code that would make
> everything OK.

Jen: That's a really sad thought, Potioncat. I *did* want them to be 
OK, for Neville, but like you said, and Kneasy points out in another 
thread, "hard choices dinstinguish a realist from a posuer," it's 
satisfying to know Frank and Alice were the Real Deal. 

I do wonder if their SK will have a role at all? Maybe not, since 
they were out of hiding before the torture.

hg:
> But what I find more disturbing about the Longbottoms now, after
> HBP, is that it seems Dumbledore never went to see if there were
> any retrievable memories in their brains, like with Morfin and
> Hokey.  I think that if there were anything useful, it could have
> been related to knowledge of Horcruxes (the DEs had come to the
> Longbottoms looking for info about the whereabouts of Voldemort)
> and then would have been conveyed to Harry in the course of HBP.
>  Regardless of Horcruxes, if Dumbledore didn't ever try to gain
> any memories from them, why?  And why didn't he ever go interview
> Sirius in Azkaban, as he did with Morfin?  It makes me
> wonder...I'll have to poke around the list and see if anyone has 
> been dishwashing...

Jen: I have a boring answer, but I'll look to you to come up with an 
exciting one! DD has been shown to take memories from people willing 
to give them (Bob Ogden) or when a memory was implanted to clear a 
person wrongly accused (Morfin and Hokey). If Slughorn had willingly 
given him the Horcrux memory, it would be similar to Ogden, with the 
person giving permission. Then we have the Kreacher incident, where 
he used legilimency without consent.

Now Sirius was unique in two ways. Even if extracting memories could 
possibly save him from Azkaban, he wasn't exactly thinking 
*rationally*. In his guilt over James and Lily, he didn't seem to 
want out of his punishment; he apparently could have escaped Azkaban 
much sooner if he wanted too, but didn't. And unlike Morfin and 
Hokey, DD had no reason to believe Sirius was innocent. Bottom-line--
DD didn't approach him, and it's doubtful Sirius would give his 
consent anyway.

And as for the Longbottoms, I was left with the idea that they were 
totured so severely no real memories remained. 

Now another question: When exactly did Dumbledore begin his search 
into Voldemort's past? He mentions visiting Morfin in prison in the 
last weeks of his life, "by which time I was attempting to discover 
as much as I could about Voldemort's past." (chap. 17). He didn't 
start thinking about the Horcruxes until Harry brought him the diary 
in COS--was he putting together Voldemort's life a long time before 
this? 

Hokey sounded incredibly old at the time Voldemort murdered Hepzibah-
-was it not long after, when Voldemort left B&B, that Dumbeldore 
started his search?

Jen