A/N: I believe the revisions to Book 2 (the seventh year chapters) are complete! For now, anyway. There's a bunch of new content and a reduced emphasis on the love triangle. Feel free to check them out if you're interested!

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Previously in the Darklyverse: Remus and Sirius broke up, but started having sex. The Order worked on developing a spell to identify whether someone is under the Imperius Curse. James cleared out his parents' manor and prepared to sell it.

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March 13th, 1979: James Potter

By now, James has come to expect Sirius to show up for full moons, but Remus doesn't seem to have registered that Sirius is going to keep coming back. "Hey," Sirius says to both of them, carefully sitting on the edge of James's bed. "Wormy on his way?"

"Yeah, he had a late dinner with Alice," says James. "Transformation should start in, what, twenty minutes, Moony?"

"Something like that," says Remus. He can't seem to stop staring awkwardly at Sirius, who is grinning way too easily for somebody caught in a half-relationship.

"Forget that. I'm changing now," says Sirius, and a moment later, Padfoot is sitting on James's bed, wagging his tail and panting.

Haltingly, Remus moves from his own bed to James's and puts a hand in Padfoot's fur. "I can go if you… I can go," says James.

"Oh, Prongs, you don't have to—"

"Who's got orb duty?"

"It's at Dorcas's flat," says Remus, "but you really don't—"

"No, it's cool. They can always use an extra pair of hands, right? I'll go there."

Orb duty has been tense ever since they discovered in the Daily Prophet that all of their captures were under the Imperius Curse. They have a working prototype of the identification spell, and while its effectiveness rate is pretty high, it still raises the issue of how to break the curse once it's been recognized. Breaking the Imperius Curse is something that Dumbledore's recruits have been doing long before Lily's cohort joined them, but it's a nasty process that takes days to complete, and they're racking up so many Imperius Curse victims that they're running out of places to put them all—as well as running out of Order members to work on breaking the curses.

What they really need is a safe space they can use as headquarters where they can house Imperiused wizards, keep the orb, and easily congregate for emergencies. They've been getting by passing the orb around to different flats and holding meetings at Mad-Eye Moody's house, but there are six Imperiused wizards with Moody already, and another three with Doc and Marlene, and four more with Jaime Raywood—

And then it hits him. Of course. Why didn't he think of it before?

"I want to use Helene's Manor as headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix," he says in a big rush when he Apparates to Dorcas's place.

Everybody turns around and looks at him funny—Dorcas, Fabian, Frank, and Rosalie. "Hullo to you, too, James," says Fabian, apparently amused.

"It makes sense," James insists. "It's not habitable by Muggles—there's too much magic in the walls, and it doesn't have any Muggle appliances wired in—and no wizard with enough money to buy it is looking at it, and it's more than big enough to have meetings there and hold all the Imperiused witches and wizards. Either it sits on the market collecting dust, or we use it for the Order. Personally, I'd rather use it for the Order."

Dorcas and Fabian look at each other and then back to James. "No complaints from me," says Fabian. "You'll have to run it by Dumbledore to make it official, though."

"This is going to sound stupid," says James, "but how do I get a hold of him? He doesn't usually come to meetings—he liaises with Moody, and I only see him when we meet formally every month."

"Well, you can wait until the next meeting and ask Moody to pass the message on," Dorcas says, "or you can go to Dumbledore directly. Send him an owl, or Floo your head into his office."

"I can't just Floo into Dumbledore's office," says James.

"Sure you can. Didn't you talk to him plenty while you were Head Boy?"

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I just popped into his private office anytime I felt like it."

"For what you're offering him, I think he can forgive you," Fabian says.

So James gets some sleep and heads to work the next day feeling pretty antsy about what he's going to do tonight. He has to remake Marina Hornbeam's desk chair seven times before he gets it right, and he's running an hour and two minutes behind schedule by the time he wraps with his last client and Apparates home. After much deliberation, he ends up sending Dumbledore an owl requesting a time to talk; Dumbledore's response comes the next morning, suggesting that James stop by on Saturday.

When Saturday rolls around, James shovels his breakfast into his mouth and then sticks his head inside the fireplace—no point delaying it. Sure enough, Dumbledore is already sitting at his desk in his office, tapping the pads of his fingers against each other and slouching down in his seat. "Hello, Mister Potter," he says as James hacks up a mouthful of ash and shakes his head.

He can still feel his knees on the loop carpet of his living room back home, and he will never, ever get used to this sensation, no matter how many times he did this to visit Emmeline when she was in the hospital. "Hello, Professor."

"There's no need to call me Professor anymore, Mister Potter. You are no longer a student at this school, and as a member of the Order of the Phoenix, I count you as one of my most trusted friends. Please, call me Albus."

"I—okay," James says, having no intention whatsoever of calling Dumbledore Albus. "I, um—like I mentioned in my letter, I wanted to talk to you about creating a centralized headquarters for the Order."

"I remember," says Dumbledore with a smile.

"I want to use Helene's Manor. You know—my parents' old house."

Dumbledore pushes his spectacles higher up on his nose. "You're not planning on selling it?"

"I was, but nobody's buying, and anyway, it's more than big enough to have meetings there and house all the Imperiused wizards we keep collecting before we break them."

"That's a very generous offer you're making. We'll have to put the house under a number of protections, of course—we can't put the Fidelius Charm on the existence of the Order itself, or else we wouldn't be able to recruit new members, but we could select a Secret-Keeper for the location of the manor as a home base for us. Of course, we'll also have to put down the same protections that are already helping to prevent the Imperiused from escaping individual Order members' homes—anti-Apparation charms and so forth to supplement the inhibitors already placed on the witches and wizards themselves."

"Of course. I'll need help with the Fidelius Charm, but I can help with laying down protections."

"As the homeowner, would you like to be the charm's Secret-Keeper, or did you have a different Order member in mind?"

"I'll do it," says James without even needing to think. "It's my place, and it should be my responsibility. But—does casting a Fidelius Charm prevent people from figuring things out on their own? Because if anybody has already guessed that I'm in the Order, finds out that I haven't sold the house yet, and puts two and two together…"

"If cast properly, the Fidelius Charm should prevent a person from being able to confirm that their suspicion is true—to see the secret in front of themselves. We should be safe," says Dumbledore with a smile.

"Cool. Then—I guess I'll call off my realtor on Monday."

"Oh, and Mister Potter?"

"Yes?"

"I don't know if I ever told you how sorry I was to hear about your loss last year. Charlus and Dorea Potter were great wizards and even better people."

"Thank you, sir."

"Albus," Dumbledore corrects him.

"I'll stop calling you 'professor' when you stop calling me 'Mister Potter,'" James mutters.

Dumbledore's eyes twinkle. "If you have a spot of time available, we can perform the Fidelius Charm and begin laying down protections on the manor. Is that all right with you?"

James nods. "Yeah, that's fine. More than fine."

It takes all morning and the better part of the afternoon to finish, and James feels like he's had enough of talking one-on-one with Dumbledore to last a lifetime. It's not that he doesn't respect Dumbledore, or even that he doesn't like Dumbledore—but it's a little weird for Dumbledore to treat James as an equal when he was James's headmaster for seven years until last summer. He wonders whether, aside from Dumbledore's busy schedule, part of the reason he doesn't usually frequent Order meetings is that he gets weary of people acting weird around him.

They call a meeting on Sunday so that James can share the secret to the rest of the Order members, and then it's just a matter of transporting all the Imperiused from their individual locations back to Helene's Manor. "Is it going to be okay having all of them crammed in here like this when you're away at work?" Sirius asks in an undertone as the others are busy recasting protections on the Imperiused wizards that they'd had to take off to get them here.

"Their presence here is covered by the Fidelius Charm, and the protections should prevent them from doing much other than sitting around in the rooms we've delegated for each of them. At least the manor is big enough that we can spread them all out."

"You're going to have a lot of evening guests coming over working on breaking the curses."

"Yeah, I know. Again, the bigger, the better, in this case."

"So the orb is staying here permanently?" Alice asks.

"That's right."

"And you—are you staying in the flat with us, or are you moving out?"

"I…" Truth be told, James hadn't thought that far ahead yet. Does he need to stay in the manor full-time, or can they all keep a rotating schedule to keep an eye on it? What about after he marries Lily—will he move her in here, too? "I guess I'll try it commuting from the flat, and we can see how that goes. I can always start staying here more often if that becomes necessary."

It occurs to him at this moment that the manor also provides Remus and the Marauders with an ideal place to transform on full moons. Even if other Order members are in the house at the time, they can stay in James's old bedroom or any one of the hidden rooms scattered throughout the manor and go totally undetected.

"We may as well do some curse-breaking while we're all still here," says Sirius, clapping his hands together. "I'll take Cornus if you take Leod."

All in all, eight of them (plus James) stay to work on the Imperius Curse, and they manage to free six wizards by suppertime. "Watch your back," James tells Aubrey Griffis, the sixth one, as Fabian and Dorcas are Disapparating. "That feeling we taught you, to question what you're told and fight? You'll need to use that to get yourself free if anybody gets you again."

"I don't know how to thank you," says Griffis. "My son and daughter must be sick with worry by now."

"Best get back to them, then," says James, patting her on the back. "Just remember, you don't have anything intrinsically valuable to them—they picked you at random to do their bidding and nothing more—so they probably won't chase you down to retaliate. All the same, be careful, all right?"

Lily stays for dinner, so when everyone else is gone, James takes her into the kitchen and starts conjuring up pots and pans. "Pity that I just finished clearing this whole place out. The dishes would have come in handy. Can you Apparate to the market and pick up some food for me?"

"What food?"

"Any food. Whatever you want me to cook."

They end up eating pasta salad and an assortment of fruits. "Weird that Dumbledore still didn't come today, even after helping you lay down the groundwork all day yesterday," Lily remarks. "You'd think he'd want to keep track of what his own organization is doing."

"He's probably busy up at Hogwarts," says James, "and I think—it might be a little lonely for him, working with people who all find him intimidating."

It's weird to think of Dumbledore as being lonely or flawed or anything but the all-knowing warrior they all know him as. "I'm sure Dumbledore is doing the best anyone can," says Lily, "but—what's his endgame here? What's the plan to take out Voldemort? We're so caught up doing damage control from the Death Eaters that we're not tackling anything proactively. Where does it end?"

He doesn't know. James just doesn't know.