Previously in the Darklyverse: The Hogwarts Order of the Phoenix combined with Dumbledore's vigilantes into one group, but without Mary, who opted to drop out of the Order and in doing so created distance between herself and the other Gryffindors. Upon returning to Hogwarts for their seventh year, the Gryffindors splintered into cliques, with Emmeline spending time primarily with best friend Peter and with Mary, who's been avoiding Marlene and Lily.

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September 9th, 1977: Emmeline Vance

Call her a bitch, call her a snob, but Emmeline is getting really sick of Mary tagging along with her and Peter everywhere they go. She knows Mary and Peter have always gotten on well—Peter has told Emmeline about some of the heart-to-hearts that he and Mary have shared, and Emmeline knows for a fact that it's Mary whom Peter turned to for advice about Emmeline after they kissed last year—and Mary is Emmeline's friend, she is, but Mary is no longer the subdued little girl Emmeline befriended in the Great Hall on their first night at Hogwarts back in first year, and Emmeline, too, is no longer the girl whose parents were alive, who was so outgoing and cheerful and full of life instead of spite. She's trying to move on, she is—to forgive Sirius and leave the past in the past—but she's been trying so hard to fit back into her long-lost circle of friends, and she just doesn't feel like the same person who first befriended them anymore.

It's exhausting, trying to make herself into something she's just not anymore, and she feels like Peter is one of the only people who really understands what she's going through and is making a parallel effort to like her for who she is now, not who she used to be. Mary—Emmeline feels like Mary doesn't get it, and that makes it equally exhausting trying to spend all of her time with Mary around instead of just with Peter. And Emmeline means all of her time—it's like Mary is glued to her side, forever and always waiting at the ready to snatch away any private moment Emmeline could possibly get with Peter.

But as much as Emmeline doesn't want Mary around, she feels sorry for her: Mary, the only one who left the Order and accepted, for better or for worse, that she was in over her head meddling in a war she wasn't prepared for. And when the eight of them first receive an owl carrying a letter and a Portkey from Dumbledore at breakfast on Friday, inviting them to an Order meeting on Saturday evening, Emmeline feels a surge of pity for Mary, who sits there eating her sausage and doesn't make a sound.

On Saturday at a quarter to seven, Emmeline and Peter bid goodbye to Mary and head to an empty classroom on the first floor to meet the other seventh years for the Order meeting—they'd all agreed that they should use the Portkey somewhere away from prying eyes, where their disappearance won't be questioned. Alice has the Portkey, a Muggle one-pound note with a thick black streak in one corner, and the eight of them crowd themselves into a tight circle, each putting a finger or two on the note. Emmeline's hand brushes up against at least three others, and her shoulders are wedged tightly between Peter's and Sirius's. She tries not to think too hard about Sirius's body heat as they wait: fifty-seven, fifth-eight, fifty-nine…

Finally, the Portkey sends them spinning in a thousand directions, and Emmeline feels herself land in a small, bright room crowded with people, a few of whom she recognizes—Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid. The Prewett twins are already here, along with Edgar Bones and Dorcas Meadowes. Marlene is hugging and saying hello to a middle-aged man that Emmeline distantly recognizes as Marlene's uncle. "Frank's on his way," says Eddie after he greets them, "but Benjy's not coming. He's in, and everything, but I—I think today was too hard, after losing Liz."

Emmeline can feel hot shame bubbling in her gut as she sits there, everyone avoiding everyone else's eyes, thinking about the people they lost because of them last spring. God—they thought they could make a difference, and two people died because of it, because of what they did. She looks around: James and Lily are chatting animatedly about the meeting, as if they've got no shame at all, and Emmeline wonders, not for the first time, how Dumbledore chose those two as his Head Boy and Girl.

Dumbledore calls the meeting to order, starting by welcoming the flurry of new members and acknowledging the group's new combined name as the Order of the Phoenix. He quickly passes leadership over to a magical-eyed, wild-looking Auror named Moody, who launches into a report on the Ministry's efforts to capture and kill Death Eaters during raids. He's five minutes in when James interrupts with a frown, "Isn't anybody pushing back against the mandate that Aurors use Unforgivable Curses against suspects, or that suspects be imprisoned in Azkaban without standing trial?"

Moody halts his speech and scowls. "Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, these kids, aren't they?" he says, more to himself than to anyone else, but before James can retort, he says, "Yeah, there's a faction in the Ministry that opposes the changes. I'm part of it. But old Barty isn't changing his stance, or the law, anytime soon, and it's slow going, trying to convince Aurors and others in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to rely on spells like Petrificus Totalus when up against Dark wizards who would kill them, and you, given half the chance—and who are aiming to kill during battle. There's a whole culture pervading the Ministry—Aurors who would practice the Cruciatus Curse on each other in preparation for battle—it takes real hatred to get the full effect, you know—"

Dorcas and Fabian are muttering to each other, as are Marlene and Lily. "You talk almost like you understand where they're coming from," says James now.

"I do understand where they're coming from. Are you telling me that you wouldn't have used Crucio or Avada Kedavra on those sons of bitches you were up against last May if it could have saved your friends from dying? It's not the right way of doing things, but people are getting desperate."

After Moody concludes his report, a Squib named Arabella Figg discusses what's happening to the Muggles and what, in turn, the Muggles have been assuming is happening—and then come assignments. Emmeline can see most of her peers straightening up in their chairs.

None of them are put on duty for active battle, though that hardly comes as a surprise, after how badly they screwed up with Liz and Millie. Last year's Hogwarts graduates—Dorcas, Fabian, and Gideon—are tasked with going door-to-door in at-risk Muggle neighborhoods casting protective enchantments, while McGonagall asks Eddie and Frank (and, in absentia, Benjy) to join the Gryffindor seventh years in the educational missives they had been putting out last year, to inform the student body about the war effort and the problems inherent to blood purity politics.

"From now on, I'll be your liaison," Dorcas tells them at the very end, just before Dumbledore wraps things up. "It'll be easier for me to get onto the grounds through Hogsmeade and meet with you in the castle than it would be to Portkey you over to us every time we meet. I'll send one of you an owl when I have the next meeting date and time."

"There's a secret passageway to Hogsmeade behind a mirror on the fourth floor," says James, lowering his voice so that it's hard to hear over the side conversations that have sprouted up all around them. "I reckon it's definitely big enough to hold meetings inside of, too."

"I know the one," says Dorcas. "Hang in there, all of you. I'll see you soon."

All in all, it could have been a worse first meeting. When the girls get back up to their dormitory, Alice says sleepily as she's pulling on her nightgown, "Even if we're just doing what we've already been doing, at least they're not stopping us. At least they're letting us help and including us in what's going on out there."

"You're going to wake Mary," Marlene whispers pointedly, indicating Mary's four-poster, whose curtains are already drawn with her inside. Emmeline wonders whether Marlene noticed that Mary's "snoring" stopped the second that Alice started talking.

Starting tomorrow, she'll be nicer to Mary, Emmeline vows. Or, at least, she'll try. She'll be nicer, she'll be more social, she'll be inclusive to others the way that Peter was inclusive to her when she needed it last year—starting tomorrow.

But it's so hard to motivate herself to act friendly to others when she feels like this on the inside. All Emmeline ever thinks about is what she's lost—her parents, her relationship with Sirius, her closeness to her fellow Gryffindor girls—and what she's taken away from others, too, like the families of Millie LeProut and Elisabeth Clearwater.

Sometimes she thinks she could just drown in the grief. What's the point of fighting this war when she's proven herself incompetent to stop the enemies? Why bother mending her friendships with Sirius and the other Gryffindors when she's made sure that she's the least important member of her friend group to everyone else in it?

Tomorrow will be better, she tells herself firmly. She'll be better, and things will be better, and she'll feel better, too, because she has to—

—because if not, she doesn't know how much longer she can take it.

Even though it's been months since the ambush, Emmeline still feels like everybody's staring at her, whispering about her, everywhere she goes. A small boy at the Hufflepuff table actually points at her and Peter with a shocked look on his face while they're walking into the Great Hall for breakfast the next morning. "I wish they'd just accept what happened already," she mutters. "It happened. We messed up. There's no need to keep treating us like pariahs."

"To be fair, two people did die," says Peter as they grab a space next to Remus, who is sitting alone at the Gryffindor table. "The people who loved them aren't going to just get over that just because the summer's over."

"Yeah, but do you ever notice how most of the people doing the gossiping aren't the people who cared about Elisabeth and Millie? The Venn diagram of those two groups of people is two circles."

Peter snorts. "Morning, Remus."

"Morning." Remus looks tired, though not as tired as he always looks leading up to a full moon.

"Where's Alice?" asks Emmeline.

"She was going to meet Dirk Cresswell for breakfast," says Remus after a pause, once he's swallowed his mouthful of oatmeal.

"They're really jumping in with both feet lately, aren't they?" mentions Mary, who's just slipped into the seat next to Emmeline. Internally, Emmeline heaves a sigh, but she smiles at Mary and scoots down the bench a little to make room.

Peter shrugs. "Personally, I think it's nice that she's got someone besides us in her life who cares about her. Everyone could use that, you know?"

After breakfast, Mary offers to accompany Remus to the library, which leaves Peter and Emmeline to grab their books from the Gryffindors' tower and head outside, where they can sprawl in the grass under the beech tree and study with the warm summer breeze on their faces. It's N.E.W.T. year, which means more intense mountains of homework than they had even in fifth year preparing for their O.W.L.s, and even one week into the trimester, Emmeline can feel herself starting to fall behind the rest of the class in all her subjects. She wishes she had a better justification for why she can't get her head on straight and concentrate like a normal person, but despite anything she may have said to Peter, she's not over what happened in that clearing with the Death Eaters, and she can't stop seeing motionless bodies and flashes of green light every time she closes her eyes.

An hour later, she hasn't made half as much progress on her Transfiguration essay as has Peter, who is almost finished. "Give it to me," he tells her, stretching out a hand, and she gratefully sets down her quill and passes Peter the parchment she's been working on.

"Have you given any thought to what we might want to do to keep up education about the war?" Peter asks when he's a few paragraphs into Emmeline's essay, biting his lips. "You know, for the Order?"

"A little," says Emmeline, even though it's all she's been able to think about for the last day. "I was thinking we might want to do something more personal than just more pranks, you know? Something less—less theatrical and more serious. If we keep hiding behind secrecy and anonymity, we're sending other people the message that they shouldn't be talking about these things in public, when really, we ought to be talking about the war and pureblood supremacy in public as much as we can."

"So what are you suggesting? That we—because we can't just go up to the High Table and make speeches in the Great Hall about this."

Shrugging, she says, "I was thinking we might want to found a student org—you know, we could advertise it on the bulletins in the common rooms and meet… somewhere. Get permission to use an empty classroom or something. But we could start each meeting with a news overview and then, you know, have discussion topics or something, encourage people to share their experiences. It might really open people's eyes to what Muggle-borns go through every day, and it'd be all above board."

"That could work," Peter muses, setting down Emmeline's essay with a sigh. "I can run it by the boys in our dormitory tonight, if you tell the girls?"

Her job will be harder than his, since she shares a dormitory with Mary and she doesn't want to rub Mary's face in the idea any more than will have to happen if and when they publicly advertise the new organization, but she nods anyway. If nothing else, trying to track down Alice, Lily, and Marlene all individually will give her a task that she can focus on when she feels like she's suffocating.

She finishes the essay with Peter's help, and then they practice Transfiguring each other into dogs and back. (Peter is much more successful in his attempts than Emmeline is—she can't seem to give him more than a tail and floppy ears.) She can't help but think that Elisabeth would have been much better at it than Emmeline is—Elisabeth was always at the top of the class, right up there with Alice.

She's starting to think that she's never going to move on, that she's always going to be stuck on these people she killed, this crime she did. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe she doesn't deserve closure.

Emmeline knows she ought to be more excited about her student org idea, but she's… just not. Honestly, she can't remember the last time that she got excited about anything, that anything was enough to crack through the shell of despair and regret that has become a constant, nonstop fixture in her mind. She wonders how much more of this she can take before she snaps, before enough is enough and she—well—does something drastic.

Frankly, "doing something drastic" is looking more and more appealing the more time goes by.