Previously in the Darklyverse: In an alternate universe, Peter came clean as the spy and fled when Sirius approached him about making him the Potters' new Secret-Keeper. Sirius admitted to Remus that he'd suspected him as the spy before this. Sirius confronted Dumbledore, who offered him a job.

xx

October 24th, 1981: Emmeline Vance

"So—you're telling me that, after tonight, you're leaving."

"Yes," says Sirius helplessly.

"To live at Hogwarts," Emmeline continues. Sure, she understands, but she still feels like she's got to spell it out to make it real.

"Yes."

"Because Dumbledore needs a new Transfiguration professor."

"Yes."

"Because McGonagall is replacing him as Interim Headmistress."

"She is, yes."

"Because he's taking a leave of absence."

"Mm hmm."

"To—kill You-Know-Who?"

"He didn't say as much, but I think so, yeah."

Emmeline scrubs a hand over her face and leans back in her seat. It's evening, and they're sitting in Emmeline's living room, nursing Firewhiskeys and speculating about what, exactly, Dumbledore intends to do with his time off. Sirius's brash honesty takes up a lot of space, but she still feels like the flat is empty without Peter in it. God, Peter…

Did he ever love her at all? Would he have sold her out, too, if given the chance, like he probably sold out Marlene and all the others?

She knows that her personal sense of shock and betrayal pales in comparison to what Peter's done—what Peter almost did to the Potters—but can you blame her for not being able to get past it? He was practically her whole life. He held her together, and she trusted him, and now…

"He said he had a hunch," Sirius continues, and Emmeline tries to shove her bag of emotions aside. "I think it might have to do with Dorcas—you know, how she died."

"What, because the Killing Curse came from her own wand?"

He nods. "You and I both know that she didn't kill herself. She wasn't at home, for one thing—she was on Death Eater turf—and she was hell-bent on going after Voldemort for what the Death Eaters did to Fabian. I don't think Voldemort got her wand and used it to kill her. I think she tried to kill him, and the curse rebounded."

"So that makes him—what? The only person ever known to survive Avada Kedavra?"

"Which means he is immortal," Sirius pushes on, "and Dumbledore has some kind of idea of how to spoil his immortality so that we can take him down. I just don't know what, exactly, he thinks he can do. If he can survive the Killing Curse—how do you undo that?"

"I hope Dumbledore knows what he's doing," says Emmeline. "We're all going to be dead by the end of the year if something doesn't give."

"We might be okay now that Peter's come clean—assuming he doesn't go running straight back to the Death Eaters," Sirius growls. "For all we know, all the deaths this year were because of his information. But it's not good. We might need to realign our priorities—focus on recruitment. There's no way any of us are going to survive this without reinforcements."

As if on cue, an owl arrives for Emmeline an hour later, when she's in the bathroom brushing her teeth. She rips it open with both hands, her toothbrush dangling precariously from her mouth. Inside, there has been written just one sentence: I want back in. —Mary

Emmeline's totally baffled at first—after all this time?—but it makes more sense the longer she thinks about it, distractedly scrubbing her bottom molars way longer than she needs to. To her knowledge, none of Emmeline's friends have communicated much with Mary since Marlene's death, but she's got to be taking it hard. Marlene was maybe the most important person in Mary's life, after all, and they weren't exactly on good terms for years leading up to Marlene's death: Mary's got to have regrets. She certainly looked taken aback and upset when Emmeline saw her today to break the news about Peter. Maybe Mary's been wanting to avenge Marlene ever since, and finding out about Peter was the last straw in her resolve not to get involved.

When she gets out of the bathroom, Emmeline scribbles a note back to Mary with the location (the Potters' house) and time (seven o'clock) of the upcoming meeting, then dashes off another note, this time to Dumbledore, letting him know to expect Mary tomorrow. Maybe he'd want her to check with him before agreeing to include Mary, but Dumbledore invited Mary right along with everyone else to join up with him back in sixth year after that disastrous ambush: Emmeline figures nobody will have objections to an extra pair of hands, especially belonging to someone who has shown herself willing to do the work in the past.

When she tells Sirius that Mary's back in, he doesn't look pleased, exactly, but some of the tension smoothes out of his face. "Good," he says. "We need her. We could use anyone we can get."

He looks totally desolate, standing there in his pajamas with his hair all rucked up and his hands trembling. They stare at each other for a second, and then Emmeline bows her head and looks away with a nervous little laugh. "I should go to bed," she says.

"Yeah. Me, too."

"I can't believe you're leaving me to work at Scrivenshaft's alone," she adds after a pause.

Sirius barks out a laugh. "You'll do okay. If you ever work a weekend shift, I'll come and visit you. Listen, Em…"

She raises her eyes again and is dismayed to find that he's looking at her with even more intensity than before. "Yeah?"

"Are you sure you're going to be okay? I mean, I'm here tonight if you need anything, but…"

She wonders if Sirius will just be the first in a very long line of people who think she's going to fall off the wagon because of losing Peter. "I'm fine, thanks," she says carefully.

"You should—you should talk to Remus. Move in with him. He needs a roommate anyway now that Benjy's…"

Dead, she thinks. The word he's looking for is dead. "I'll talk to him after the meeting tomorrow," she agrees. "But really, I'm going to bed."

"Let me know if you need anything," Sirius repeats, and she nods and pads off for the spare bedroom.

Sleep doesn't come easily. All she can see is Peter's face, sitting stricken in the bedroom staring at Sirius as he pleads for understanding, for mercy. Peter, struggling against the ropes Sirius binds him in before he latches onto his wand and transforms into the rat. Peter, the spy. Peter, the traitor.

Is she going to crack up without him? Because lying here in the dark, she certainly feels like she can't hold on.

By half past midnight, she's totally convinced herself that Peter never loved her, that he was lying all along and would hand her life over to You-Know-Who in a second if it meant getting brownie points with the Death Eaters. All she wants is to scrub over it, to replace him, to forget him and make it like she never needed him. All she wants is to go back to yesterday, when everything was right in the world…

It's ten after one by the time she wrenches herself out of bed and knocks on Sirius's door. "Yeah," he calls, but he's slurring his words.

"Sorry," she says when she enters. "I know I've probably woken you up. I just…"

"Too late," says Sirius a bit more coherently.

"Pardon?"

"It's too late at night for a heart-to-heart," he elaborates, and something inside of her sinks down. "Just get in."

"Get in?"

"In bed. With me. Come on."

"Sirius, we can't…"

"Relax, Em, I'm not hitting on you. Just get in."

So she gets in, even though a part of her wishes that he were hitting on her, if only so that she could show herself that she knows how to love somebody besides Peter. She could have had her chance with Sirius in fourth year, she reminds herself. Maybe everything would have played out differently if she hadn't blamed him for her parents dying, if they had gotten together the way it had seemed at the time like they would.

If they had, she never would have loved Peter. If they had, she never would have had to feel like this.

xx

The Order meeting, as anyone could have predicted, doesn't go smoothly. There are a bunch of revelations that come at once: that Peter is the spy, that Mary is back, that Sirius is taking Dumbledore's place at Hogwarts while Dumbledore goes on leave. Sirius pushes the recruitment point, and a few people volunteer to help—Sturgis, Frank, and, surprisingly, Mary. "It's not like I already have an assignment," Mary tells Emmeline after they've completed their agenda, "and I'm good with people. I mean, at least, I was good with managing people and convincing people to vote when Lily was running her campaign."

"You're good with people," Emmeline reassures her.

Mary's mostly quiet during the meeting, glancing around the room like she's expecting everybody to be staring at her, and in all fairness, they kind of are staring at her. Emmeline wonders if Mary will ever truly come back into the fold after so many years away from the Order—away from their friends. She hopes so.

When she tracks Remus down, he agrees to be her roommate, offers her Benjy's old bedroom back at his flat. She takes it, eager not to have to spend even one more night in the place where she and Peter fell in love. When Remus offers to help her move all her stuff over tonight, she takes him up on it.

Against her better judgment, when Remus is busy in the bedroom Vanishing away her belongings to retrieve back at his own place, Alice goes to the drawer where Peter kept his guitar and his tabs and Vanishes those, too. Her hands linger on a set of tabs that look familiar. I don't know no loves songs, and I can't sing the blues anymore, but I can sing this song, and you can sing this song when I'm gone. Can she really? Is just the memory of Peter's love for her enough to tide her over? Was it even real?

She feels pretty guilty suddenly spending all this time with Remus when just last night she almost—well, nothing happened, and nothing was going to happen, and she probably wouldn't have even tried anything. But if she's being honest with herself, she sort of maybe wanted something from Sirius. He and Remus haven't been involved in a long time—it's not like Sirius is Remus's property—but the history there is messy enough that Emmeline still feels like she's stealing, or at least like she had wanted to.

And then—her life falls into a new normal, one where Peter isn't around and everyone else is moving on. She talks to her old landlord to get out of her lease. Scrivenshaft's is dull and lonely without Sirius. She starts to get used to sleeping in bed alone again. That part might be the hardest at first, because the empty space in her bed just reminds her that Peter isn't here to fill it. But when she adopts the habit of stuffing extra blankets behind her, where Peter usually lay, and in front of her, where his arm usually rested, it gets a little easier.

She settles into that new normal, almost starts to accept that maybe she needs to come to terms with it as being permanent—and then comes the letter.

Remus is with her at the kitchen table finishing up dinner when the owl starts pecking insistently at the living room window. When Emmeline puts down her fork and knife and clambers over there to retrieve it, she recognizes Peter's handwriting instantly.

"Who's it from?" Remus calls out.

She considers lying, saying it's just a check-in from Alice like she often sends during the week, but what's the point? It's not like she'd be protecting Peter: he's already been caught, has already thrown away his life. It's not even like she owes it to him to be on his side. "Peter," she says, her voice breaking.

And then Remus is immediately at her side. Her hands shake as she opens the thing and reads:

Em,

I need you to know that I would never hurt you. I never meant to hurt anyone, and I didn't ask or give permission to anyone to kill everyone who's died since Liz and Millie. I know you have no reason to believe me, and I would come right back there to prove it to you if I could, but you have to understand that I can't. I'm afraid of what the Order will do to me now that they know, and I'm even more afraid of what You-Know-Who will do to me when he finds out that I can't spy for him anymore.

I love you, and I miss you, and you were the best part of me.

Don't write back. I don't want anyone to trace the owl and find me. I'll write again as soon as I can.

Peter

She stares at it, her eyes glazing over, long after she finishes reading. It's everything she wanted to hear, and yet—not. If he misses her, why won't he come home? If he loves her, how could he have lied to her?

"Em," says Remus uncertainly. She almost jumps: she'd half-forgotten that he's right here next to her.

"It's not good enough," says Emmeline weakly. "It's just not enough."

"I know," he murmurs, and when he tries to put his arms around her, she lets him, imagining that they're Peter's arms instead.