Previously in the Darklyverse: After graduation, Alice moved into a flat with James and Remus, kept up with Mary via weekly letters, and continued the Auror training that she started in her sixth year internship. Alice and Frank skirted around their romantic tension after respectively breaking up with Dirk Cresswell and Dana Madley. James, Sirius, and Sturgis Podmore finalized a spell that allows the Order to identify the use of Unforgivable Curses and their locations in realtime in order to Apparate there and interfere.

xx

August 12th, 1978: Alice Abbott

Alice has to say, living with James and Remus hasn't been as much of a mess as she was expecting it to be. She's still surprised that they even asked her to be their roommate instead of, say, asking Marlene, or in lieu of getting a big bachelor pad with Sirius and Peter, but they did, and she said yes, and it's going all right. She loves the flat they got: it's a two-bedroom place, with Remus and James sharing one room and Alice taking up the other (she's not interested in sharing the way that Sirius and Lily do). There are two bathrooms and a storage unit in the basement of the building. James is covering two-thirds of the rent for both himself and Remus, giving their share of the gold to Alice so that she can convert it all to Muggle money and pay up every month.

It's sort of nice, living with them both. After a whole year of basically hiding behind Dirk Cresswell until they broke up, it's nice to be around some of her mates from Gryffindor more—not that she has a lot of downtime to kill at the flat. Between Auror training and Order duties, she's not really home all that often.

Auror training is going—fine. Thanks to her sixth year internship with the department, they've shaved a little time off of the three years of training usually expected of budding Aurors. She and Frank are the only recruits from this year, which means that between work and the Order, they're both seeing a lot of each other. This is fine with Alice, who's always liked Frank. She's not really sure where she stands with him—the last time they really, seriously were honest with each other, Alice basically admitted that there's always been a romantic undertone to her friendship that she doesn't want to let play out right away. But she's—well—she's getting over Dirk faster than she might have expected, and seeing as much of Frank as she has been feels—good.

It sort of comes to a head that weekend at Doc and Marlene's flat, when Alice is on watch for the curse-identification spell. Frank wakes her up at four A.M., the agreed time, but when she thanks him and rubs the sleep out of her eyes, he tells her, "I'll stay up with you a little while longer. Let's get out there, come on."

Spell duty is certainly more interesting when there's somebody else there to break the silence with you, and Alice is grateful that she has Frank to keep her company instead of just Marlene's novels and her own notes from Auror training. Alice feels every centimeter between herself and Frank on the couch as they sit there, going over their notes from the last week's worth of training, wondering aloud whether the spell is going to sound off tonight or not.

"I feel like I'm being run ragged between this and Auror training," Alice says finally, kicking back in her recliner. "I'm not saying I would change it, but it's a lot."

"I'm glad I get to see more of you this way, though," Frank answers. He's got his hands folded together and is continually rubbing one thumb along the index finger of his other hand. "It's like, before, we only got to spend time together during prefect rounds."

"Or on double dates," Alice agrees. "Not that we did as many of those last year."

"It's nice not to need the excuse of our partners to see each other. I do… uh, I really like everything I've learned while getting to know you."

There it is again—that flushed force that Alice has always felt between herself and Frank, the one that rises in her belly and gets stuck as a lump in her throat—only this time, Alice feels like she's allowed to feel it, like nothing bad or forbidden is going to come out of it. "Frank, I—"

The curse-identification spell chooses that moment to sound off. Alice and Frank leap to their feet, scattering notes on dueling from Auror training everywhere. "I'll wake Doc and Marlene," says Frank, and he dashes back into their bedrooms to shake them awake.

"It says it's the Cruciatus Curse," Alice says urgently when Frank returns with Marlene and her uncle. "It's been fired three times so far. Are we ready to go?"

"Nearly," says Marlene, who's shaking her head back and forth to push past the grogginess. "We just need to send a Patronus to somebody to come and watch the orb for us while we're gone."

"I'll contact Hyatt and Dorcas; it's their turns in the rotation," says Doc, fishing in his robes for his wand.

The spell is contained within an orb roughly a meter in diameter that gives an aerial view of the scene of the crime as well as its coordinates. After their backup arrives, Alice, Doc, Frank, and Marlene all focus hard on the visual in the orb—a bedroom with two Death Eaters standing above a young woman who's slumped to the ground and appears to be crying out in pain. "On three," says Doc. "One—two—"

That painful feeling of compression hits Alice, and then she emerges on the other side of the woman's bed. Doc and Frank appear next to her, and then there's a fourth crack coming from downstairs that must mean Marlene has arrived.

Nonverbal magic is Alice's best friend on these raids—they give the element of surprise, so that the Death Eaters don't know when the spells are coming, and besides, you can usually think about the words of a spell faster than you can get them out of your mouth and into the world. So she focuses hard on Petrificus Totalus and aims her wand at the Death Eaters. It works, sort of: one of them collapses to the ground, but the other dodges the ray of light and sends a Crucio their way that hits all three of them.

As the weeks pass, Alice is finding herself getting more and more acquainted with the Cruciatus Curse. She wishes she could say it gets easier, that you build up a tolerance over time, but you really don't. The best she can do is try to hold her screams in while, out the corner of her eye, she watches the Death Eater who hit them freeing up the one on the ground so he can join in on the fun, too. Alice has just been hit with another Crucio when she hears Marlene thundering up the stairs; the bedroom door flies open, smacking the wall next to it, and Marlene yells, "STUPEFY!"

The Cruciatus offender goes down next to his fellow, and Marlene stows her wand in her pocket and says, "Well, that didn't take much time."

"These raids will get harder the more time passes," says Doc darkly. "Once they realize we've figured out a foolproof way to identify them and show up at the scene of their crimes, they'll get tricky, start bringing extra backup. Even capturing these two won't be a huge win for the light side—this scene is likely just low-level cronies blowing off some steam, given that there's only two of them here and they've chosen a seemingly random house with only one inhabitant to invade."

Speaking of the house's inhabitant, Frank helps her up and asks her name. "Cassidy Cerbus," she says. She's shaking, and she leans against the wall for support. "I—what are—who are you people?"

"We're here to help," says Frank shortly with a smile. "I take it you're a Muggle, then?"

"What… what's a 'Muggle?'"

"It's all right. We're going to call the authorities, and you'll have to give a statement, but after that, we'll make sure that you can get back to your normal life without any trauma from being targeted. Do you take tea? We should make some tea for you."

"I… all right."

Frank guides Cassidy downstairs as Doc finishes up conveying his message to the Patronus he drums up, an orangutan that's almost as tall as he is. "Go on, then," he says when he's done, rubbing the creature on the cheek, and it nips playfully at Doc's hand and then vanishes. (Alice has really got to practice her Patronuses—it's not a skill that she learned at Hogwarts, and it's probably the fastest way to communicate that the Order has.)

Before the Ministry arrives, they clear out. Given that vigilantism isn't exactly legal, it would be especially terrible for the Order for the Ministry to find out that three of their Aurors and one of their Hit Wizards are Order operatives.

"That will probably be the last of it for tonight, but I'll keep watching it in case somebody goes rogue," Frank says as Pertinger and Dorcas are leaving. "You lot go on back to bed. I'll wake you up at six for your turn, Marlene."

Marlene and Doc head back to their bedrooms, but Alice stays out in the living room with Frank, too wired to sleep. They were about to maybe have a real conversation about their feelings for each other when the orb interrupted, but now, Alice has no desire to sift through anything so complicated. She sifts through Doc's bookshelf for something to read and tosses a copy of a Muggle novel at Frank. "Read to me?" she asks, and he dutifully obeys until Alice, leaning back in her recliner, drifts off to sleep.

Luckily, it's a Saturday night (well, technically, early on a Sunday morning), so none of them have to worry about waking up for work in the morning. Alice drowses in the armchair until about ten o'clock, when she wakes up to the sound and smell of Doc making pancakes. "Stay for breakfast," he says cheerfully when he notices her stirring.

"Oh, I couldn't possibly—"

"Of course you could possibly. Frank's staying, too."

So she stays for breakfast. Frank sits next to her, and Marlene keeps shooting her knowing looks from across the table, like she knows better than Alice does what's going on in Alice's love life.

Once they've finished eating, and Alice and Frank have cleaned up all the dishes with a few well-placed Scourgifys, Alice insists that they really must be going. She hugs Marlene goodbye, allows Doc to clap her on the back, and then turns to Frank, feeling—anxious, maybe. Shy, certainly. "I'll see you in the morning at work, then?" she says.

It feels odd, leaving Frank for the day, given how much time they've been spending together these days. All the same, it's good to have some alone time when she gets back to her flat. James and Remus are home, of course, and Alice fills them in on everything that happened overnight, but afterwards, she retreats to her room and closes the door and takes out her parchment and quill.

She's been writing to Mary every Sunday all summer. She always hears back later that night in a letter from Mary—nothing too crazy or long, just a quick recap of how her week went at work, how the wedding planning is going, how Cattermole is doing. They don't really have much to say to each other, especially since Alice has been withholding details about the Order, but she thinks it's nice at least to make this small amount of time for each other, just to keep Mary a little bit in the loop. They were never particularly close—Mary always gravitated toward Marlene as well as the Hufflepuffs, and Alice…

Loathe as she is to admit it, Alice didn't have much of a niche in school. Sure, she hung with the Ravenclaws a fair amount when she was dating Dirk, and she always got on well with Remus, and it's not like she was ever an outcast among the Gryffindors like Lily or even Emmeline was at times. But she never had a best friend. If she stops and really thinks about it, she envies everybody else from her House who did have a best friend, even if Mary and Marlene's case their bond didn't last.

Alice is good at burying things, including burying them from herself, but sitting there writing that letter to the girl who probably only tolerates Alice, for all she knows—it makes Alice want to cry or scream or throw things. But she doesn't. Of course she doesn't, because that wouldn't be proper, and if Alice has one thing she can hold onto, it's her propriety.

She gets so, so lonely sometimes, but maybe she's not meant to click anywhere. Maybe all she'll have will be a penpal she never sees and roommates who never need her, and maybe that has to be okay, because maybe it isn't going to change.