"The Question of Trust"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy

It's one of the things they don't cover in class, something she's figured out as she goes along, as did the ones who came before her. It's not, she has realized, something that they can teach you. The question of trust is one to which each Auror must find their own answers.

Penelope Clearwater has found hers. She's known them a long time, longer than many of her classmates. But then, her perspective is different, has always been different. Penelope has based her career as an Auror on that of Alastor Moody. And Moody, they say, doesn't trust anyone.

It's more complicated than this, of course. He trusts rarely, cautiously, hesitantly. But he does trust. As does she.

She is younger, and she is supposed to be less cynical, less jaded. Mostly she isn't. In the past she has trusted where she shouldn't, and she's found herself burned. It hurt, sometimes it still does, and that's a kind of pain she'd rather not go through again.

She has enough scars.

Trust is always a risk, but insight and training make her hard to fool. Her gifts make her nearly impossible to deceive.

And sometimes she needs none of these things. Sometimes trust is a thing which simply is. There has never been a moment she hasn't trusted Alastor, never a moment when she doubted.

Sometimes it's like that.

Alastor, mentor, dearest friend, love of her life. Tara, oldest friend, sister of her soul, keeper of a thousand childhood secrets. Tonks, advisor, confidante, friend. Blaise, her soul's brother as Tara is her sister, Blaise who never doubted her, never questioned her strangeness, Blaise who took her home to his large, crazy family. That family, aunts and uncles and cousins, taking her in like one of their own, teaching her what family was, holding a lost little girl close as kin...

Tara's family, too, with its dreams and dysfunctions, even Tara's aunt, Lillith, who terrified and intimidated everyone, until Penelope found her one day, shouting at her own mother- and the words ring in her head forever.

"You cannot treat the girl this way."

And her mother's reply, disdainful, arrogant, because she doesn't know who she is dealing with, doesn't know that no one crosses Lillith Adler- not like this- a stiff denial; she is not Lillith's daughter, it does not matter what she says.

Lillith's smile, cool and dangerous and feral, and with her answer Penelope realizes that she belongs.

"My niece calls her friend. In all the ways which matter, she is ours, mine. Certainly more than she is yours."

She can't think of trust without thinking of things like this, all of those who have taken her in. (Somehow, she has gone from having one family hardly worth the name, to so many who care twice as much.)

Old school friends, Aurors, and their kin- these are the people Penelope Clearwater trusts, and the people who trust her.