Previously in the Darklyverse: Peter hid his involvement in the Death Eaters from the rest of the Order. Emmeline tried to find her footing with the other Gryffindors, including Sirius. The Order developed a curse-identification orb to alert them to the location of Unforgivable Curses as they are used. Sirius's father blackballed him from receiving any Ministry job offers. Mary asked Veronica Smethley to be her maid of honor. Lily filled in as the Order's de facto Healer.

xx

August 14th, 1978: Emmeline Vance

She's worried about Peter.

It's not like anything tumultuous just happened in his life, and it's not even exactly like there seems to be something wrong with Peter, but—she doesn't know. She catches him staring off into space with this little frown when people are talking to him; he gets home late from work some days, and he always has an explanation, but he gets so fidgety that Emmeline wonders if he might be covering something up, something sinister.

She wishes Peter would just tell her what's going on with him so that she could help him like he's helped her, but she doesn't want to disrupt the delicate peace they've made in this flat, and she doesn't really know how to bring it up. Their relationship has always been more about Peter helping Emmeline than about Emmeline helping Peter, and as much as she hates herself for that, she doesn't really know how to change it.

Notwithstanding her concerns about him, living with Peter is going great, though Emmeline can't say the same for her friendships with the other Gryffindors. It's sort of what she expected—without the excuse of mutual classes and mealtimes and sharing a dorm, her once-friends have been drifting away from her, apart from weekly letters from Alice and incidental contact via Peter, who's done a better job than Emmeline has at keeping in touch with everyone. Sometimes he has people over to the flat, in which case Emmeline says hello but mostly just hides in her bedroom. Other days he drags her out with him to other people's flats, and she sits in their living rooms and tries to remember how to be a normal person again.

Then, of course, there's Order business. Emmeline and Peter have been claiming shifts together once or twice a week to monitor the curse-identification orb, and she's been on two raids so far. The first time, they were able to catch one Death Eater and confine him there until help from the Ministry arrived; the second time, both Death Eaters got away.

That night, on her third raid, the Ministry is a little quicker than Emmeline anticipates getting to the scene, and she's barely able to Disapparate before she gets herself caught. And she can't get caught—the whole Order could go down if even one vigilante is captured. She knows they're digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole the longer they keep developing magic to help them get away with operating right under the Ministry's noses, but it's not like any of them trust the Ministry enough to hand over the orb and let them do the work. Power can be corrupted, and the Order suspects that there are a number of Ministry officials who are secretly Death Eaters, and another number who are under the Imperius Curse.

"You'll never guess who was the Obliviator who arrived on the scene," she tells Peter when she's back home and they're lounging in the living room, bowls of ice cream in their hands. "Gilderoy Lockhart."

"Oh, yeah, you didn't know? Mary says he can apparently deliver one hell of a Memory Charm. He didn't see you there, did he? I mean, I guess if he did, you wouldn't be here right now, but—"

"No, I got away in time. I think he got a glimpse of me, but I had my mask on. I didn't realize Mary was still in contact with him."

"Yeah—he's going to be Cattermole's best man."

Marlene will have a time of it, being paired off with Lockhart by virtue of being Mary's maid of honor—Emmeline remembers Lockhart's crush on Marlene in sixth year and how disgusted she was to be subject to his affections. When she mentions this to Peter, however, he just purses his lips and says, "Marlene's not going to be Mary's maid of honor. Veronica Smethley is."

"Smethley? Seriously? I know Mary and Marlene were having a rough patch of some sort, but I didn't realize it was that bad."

"Yeah, Marlene was pretty upset when she found out. Mary didn't even tell her directly—she mentioned asking Smethley to do it in a letter to Alice, who then told Marlene."

"Ouch."

Peter says, "Yeah. I mean, what was she expecting to happen, really? They had a massive falling out, weren't on speaking terms for weeks, and now barely see each other. If I were Mary, I wouldn't want someone I'd been through that with to be my maid of honor, either."

"I guess she just thought she counted for more than that to Mary," says Emmeline. Lord knows she can relate—she's still over here hoping she means something to Sirius when they haven't had a real relationship in years.

Ever since that awful experience in the hospital, Sirius has been making a sort of effort to be around for Emmeline, but like with most of her Gryffindor relationships, she's not sure where things are going to go now that they're out of Hogwarts. Peter and Em take a turn hosting the orb in their flat, and Sirius signs up to come over for Order duty three times that week. He's got to want to be around Emmeline at least to a degree to want to come over that often, doesn't he? Emmeline doesn't know. Maybe he's just tolerating her and coming for Peter—maybe he's noticed something off about Peter, too.

But on Sirius's first night at Emmeline and Peter's flat, Sirius says good night to Peter and then holds up a deck of Exploding Snap cards. "God, I haven't played that in forever," says Emmeline with a small smile. "It's like all we did in seventh year was study."

"I know," Sirius says, smiling back. "Care for a game?"

So they play a game, then two, then three. Emmeline is laughing harder than she's laughed in a while when Sirius finally packs up the deck and puts it away. "It's nice to see you happy," Sirius remarks, stretching his arms above his head.

She knows he doesn't mean anything by it. She knows he's with Remus now, and even if he weren't, there wouldn't be anything romantic between him and Emmeline. But damn, it's still nice to hear that he notices, that he cares, even if just as a friend. "I should really get to bed soon," says Emmeline. "Wake me up if the orb goes off, of course, but I work in the morning, you know."

"Lucky you," says Sirius. He's grinning, but his eyes look sad.

She thinks about it for a split second and then says, "You know, I could probably get you an interview at Scrivenshaft's. We're not even open to the public yet, so we're still hiring. I know you can't get Ministry jobs because of your parents, but if you don't mind working in a shop—"

"I wouldn't mind working in a shop at all," says Sirius earnestly. "That would be amazing, Em. Thanks."

So she puts in a good word for him the next day and arranges an interview for Sirius with her boss for next week. It's not much, working at Scrivenshaft's, but it's a paycheck, and Emmeline gets to spend a bunch of hours a day stocking shelves and doing inventory while making little to no conversation with her coworkers, so she's not complaining. It's kind of nice to get lost in the shelves surrounded by the smells of parchment and ink, anyway.

It goes like that for a few more days—shop work in the day, catching up with Peter in the evening, Order duty at night with Sirius and others. The orb doesn't go off again until Friday night, when Sirius and Gideon are both over, and Emmeline wakes up quickly, splashes water on her face, and Disapparates with the others to the scene of the crime.

If she thinks this is going to go the way that her first three raids went, Emmeline is very much mistaken. There are four Muggles in the home—a mother and three children—and they're all already bleeding out on the ground while no fewer than five Death Eaters whip out their wands on the offensive. "You two, get them to safety," says Gideon commandingly to her and Peter.

"But—"

"We've got this. Go! Go on!"

He's hit by a Stunner then, and Emmeline tries to Ennervate him, but she just ends up flat on her back, Petrified rigid. She can't see, but she hears a thud, followed by a cry of pain—Sirius's. A Death Eater hovers over her, mask touching mask, and then he bellows, "SECTUMSEMPRA!"

She doesn't recognize the spell, but she thinks she knows the voice from somewhere, though she can't place where. Either way, she only has a split second to ponder over it before gashes open all across her skin, blood blooming up through them onto her robes and into the air. It hurts, but she can't scream. She can't do anything at all besides stare at the ceiling and ache.

There's another thud—she doesn't know whether that's Peter or Sirius—and the familiar voice yells the unrecognizable spell again. She distantly hears one of the Death Eaters mutter something, but she's too far away and the voice is too low to tell what he's saying. Then there's a series of cracks, and they're left alone.

"Guys? Emmeline?" That's Peter's voice, sounding shaken. "Oh my god. I… what do I…"

She can't tell him to unfreeze her, but he figures it out and casts a few rapid Finites and an Ennervate. Emmeline stirs a little bit, but she's bleeding too hard to move much. "The Muggles," she croaks. "Take them to St. Mungo's. Then, Lily can—Lily can—"

"Right. Hang in there," says Peter.

What happens next is mostly a blur, but Peter tells her later, when she's waking up properly at Lily and Sirius's flat, that it took him two trips to get all four Muggles into St. Mungo's, while Gideon got Sirius up and they both managed to take Emmeline to Lily. And Lily apparently almost couldn't save Emmeline—the spell the Death Eater used on her was new, and matched the one used on the Muggles, and the mother and one of the children didn't make it even under the care of a team of Healers—but she managed to patch her up well enough that she woke up, even though Lily says Emmeline needs to be watched for at least a couple of days to make sure the magic holding her together doesn't fail.

"What I don't understand is why they left you alone," she tells Peter in a fractured voice after taking a very small sip of the water glass Sirius is holding up to her mouth. "They Stunned Gideon, Petrified Sirius, and used the new one—Sectum-whatever—on me after Petrifying me. But they let you be. Why did they let you be?"

"He… one of the Death Eaters gave me a message to deliver," says Peter, looking shaken.

"What message?"

"He said, um… he said we can't stay ahead of them forever. And—he said, 'Game on.'"

"Jesus. We capture one, and five more take his place," says Emmeline.

It's Saturday morning, which means that Peter is home from the Ministry until Monday and insists on adopting the role of Emmeline's home nurse. Sirius and Gideon were more or less fine as soon as Peter unfroze and woke them, respectively, and Gideon heads home once it looks like Emmeline is going to be okay, but Peter and Emmeline stay at Lily and Sirius's flat—so that Emmeline can recover without being moved, and because Peter doesn't want to leave the flat without her. Lily and Sirius, of course, aren't working anywhere at the moment, so they stay there with Peter and just sort of hang out on the floor of the living room near where Emmeline is set up on the couch—probably, Emmeline thinks, just so that she knows that they're there.

James and Remus and Alice all swing by to say hello after lunch, and Marlene comes at dinnertime full of well wishes. It's funny, Emmeline thinks, how people come around for her when she's in a crisis, then seem to forget all about her when the moment has passed. Not Peter—Peter is her one constant, and she's grateful to him for that. She even understands where the others are coming from: if there's nothing actively happening to make people want to look out for her, she can be quiet and difficult to connect with, she knows. It's just—funny how these things go.

Is that what she's effectively doing to Peter? Is there something going on and she's avoiding being real with him about it because she doesn't know how to approach him?

She's worked herself up so high about it that she tries to broach the subject on Sunday night, when they've moved her back to her and Peter's place and Peter is getting her all situated with water and snacks in bed. "Is everything okay with you, Peter? Anything going on that you want to talk about?"

Peter looks startled, his jaw dropping open a little and his eyes rounding. "I'm good," he says. "I'm good. I just want you to be okay, that's all."

She has a feeling that's not it, but she doesn't push it. All she can do is hope that she won't regret it.