Previously in the Darklyverse: Sirius moved in with Alice and Remus, with whom he got back together, after returning from Hogwarts. Meanwhile, Emmeline moved in with Mary, who became her Secret-Keeper after Reg left as a result of their fight about Mary being a vigilante. Alice investigated money from Canada to the British Ministry that went missing.
xx
May 25th, 1982: Alice Abbott
Sirius has been living with Alice and Remus for the past three weeks, and Alice has had enough.
It's not that Sirius is such an awful roommate for anybody to have. He does his share of the cooking and cleaning, makes a point of stopping by Alice's room every night to chat, and is always happy to help her entertain Neville on the evenings she has him visit. But he and Remus are back together now (or close to it), and being around the pair of them makes Alice want to scream.
The romantic tension was unbearable enough those first few days when they weren't dating, when the air was thick with unspoken attraction and Alice kept catching Sirius coming out of Remus's bedroom in the mornings. She would have thought that some of that tension would have eased up from them admitting their feelings to each other and clearing the air—but this has not been the case. If anything, it's gotten worse. It's okay on evenings when Remus is still at work in Canada and Alice and Sirius are alone together in the flat. But on weekend evenings, the two of them are always together in the living room, cuddled up on the couch and trading intense gazes, and it makes her feel unwelcome in her own home, like she's got to hide out in her room all the time to save herself from getting caught in the middle of somebody else's epic romantic saga.
It's not that she's not glad for them. Lord knows they're both always full of angst anytime they're broken up, and if they make each other happy, well, more power to them. Sure, it was a bit weird at first when she'd thought they were both straight and had to shift her perspective, but she got over any hangups she had about that a long time ago. She just wishes she didn't have to live with both of them together.
So when she decides to swing by Mary's flat after work, she's not doing it because she particularly wants to spend time with Mary or Emmeline or even because she's concerned about either of them and wants to be a good friend—she's doing it because Em has been hiding out there long enough, and Alice needs her back to put a stop to her current roommate situation. Now.
When she Apparates onto the welcome mat out in the hall and knocks on the front door, she hears Mary yell from inside, "Just a minute!" So Mary's home from work already, which is no surprise—out of everyone in her immediate friend group, Alice puts in the longest hours at work.
She blinks when Mary opens the door—like she did back in sixth year, Mary's sheared off all her hair and returned its previously brown color to her natural black. It's short enough to be a man's hair, and it's sticking out in all directions. "Felt like a change?" Alice surmises.
"Em did it for me," says Mary brightly, stepping back so that Alice can come inside. "It's so much easier to take care of this way, and it's not like I have a husband around who's going to care."
So Cattermole still hasn't come home. He's been gone for three whole weeks now—Alice knows this because he left on the same night Sirius moved in with her and Remus. "I'm sorry, Mare. Has he told you where he's been staying or anything?"
"With Gilderoy," scoffs Mary. "He's back from Turkey, but after the way Sirius bailed on him and tried to sic him with the rent when he took the post at Hogwarts, Gilderoy didn't want to reach out to him about living together again. They're staying in Wales somewhere while Gilderoy works on his new book."
"Lockhart's writing a book?"
"Yeah, about his travels. Apparently he saved some Muggle village from a hag that was ravaging it? I don't know. We haven't really talked on account of Reg staying with him."
"Huh," says Alice. She'd never thought of Lockhart as being particularly talented at magic, but then again, she's never had a Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson with him. "I'm glad he wrote to you, at least, although if he and Lockhart have rented their own place together…"
"It's a month to month lease," says Mary, shrugging. "And I've got Em here to keep me company in the meantime, anyway. I'm sure it'll blow over once he's had some time to cool off. He's just scared of the Order—he'll calm down once he's had some time to adjust. We're not going to end up—"
"Like me and Frank," Alice finishes for her. Mary smiles apologetically.
Alice isn't sure that a disagreement as big as Cattermole not being okay with Mary's participation in the Order will just blow over, but that's not what she's here to argue against. "Where's Em? I kind of wanted to talk to her."
Mary turns around and hollers, "Em! Al's here to see you."
Emmeline comes out into the living room a moment later, wearing fuzzy slippers and a bright blue bathrobe. Her hair has been cut shorter, too, though not nearly as short as Mary's—her scraggly blonde locks fall just above her shoulders. "Hey, Alice. How are you?"
"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about," Alice admits. "Sirius and Remus are driving me mad. You've got to come home so that Sirius leaves."
Mary raises her eyebrows so high that they disappear into her short hair.
"I'm not sure me coming back will get rid of him," hedges Emmeline. "It's not like he's using my bedroom—he's sharing with Remus."
"Yeah, but aren't you two avoiding each other? He wouldn't want to live with you, would he?" Mary points out.
"You heard about that, huh?" Em mutters.
Mary smirks. "Sirius told Lily, and Lily told me. Honestly, Em, that should come as no surprise. What are you dodging each other for, anyway?"
Emmeline pointedly ignores this question. "We set up the Fidelius Charm so that I'm protected only within Mary's town. If I moved back in with you, we'd have to redo the whole spell."
"I can help you with that," says Alice quickly. "I'm not as adept at Potions as Lily is, but I could help with the Charms portion of things, anyway."
"Or, Alice," says Mary, "you could just move in with the two of us—you know, at least until Reg comes back."
Alice laughs out loud. "If we keep this up, I'm going to lose track of who's helping whom with what portions of each other's rent."
"I'm serious. It would solve your Sirius and Remus problem, and I don't want to be alone here until Reg comes home. I'd be happy to live with the both of you before everybody figures out where they're going long-term."
"I appreciate that, Mare, but you're already one bedroom short with Em staying here."
"We're witches, Alice. I know how to conjure extra beds. What do you say?"
Mary's still married, and assuming she and Cattermole make up like she seems to expect they will, living here would just be putting off dealing with the problem. But Mary looks so earnest and eager that it pains Alice to reject her. "I don't want to hurt Remus's feelings," Alice says, putting up her last argument. "I don't want him to think I have a problem with him being with Sirius. And I don't! It's just—living with a couple isn't my cup of tea."
"You could just tell him that," Em reminds her.
Alice smiles. "How about this: I'll talk to Remus if you talk to Sirius and work out—whatever's wrong between the two of you right now."
Emmeline looks at her blankly for a moment. "Or you can just tell Remus that Mary and I asked you to stay with us for a while. You know, like a jilted exes club for singles and divorcées."
"Reg and I aren't divorced," says Mary, rolling her eyes, "but that could work. It would buy you some time, anyway, while Lupe and Sirius are figuring out whether they want to keep living together. They've only been back together for, what, two weeks? Three? It's a little soon for them to go all in."
Alice sighs and shrugs her shoulders. "I guess we have a plan, then."
xx
Talking to Remus goes better than expected. He accepts her reason for moving into Mary's flat, and he seems to have noticed that there's been tension now that Sirius has been living with them because he tells her that he'll talk to Sirius to make a decision about their living arrangements before Cattermole moves back and upends Alice again. By Thursday, Alice has moved all of her essential belongings over to the Cattermole flat, and Mary has clumsily stuck two spare beds in the living room, one for Alice and another for Emmeline.
Alice has lived with Emmeline some of the time since they graduated from Hogwarts, but it's been a good four years since she and Mary have roomed together, and she has to acclimate to Mary hogging the bathroom in the mornings and having Veronica Smethley and Greta Catchlove over for dinner all the time. Alice isn't totally sure why Mary bothers keeping up with them—Catchlove is nice enough, but Smethley is pretty caustic and nasty, and it's not like Mary can talk to either of them about her life with the Order. Then again, after being married to Cattermole for all these years, maybe Mary's gotten used to compartmentalizing the different areas of her life.
With her housing situation figured out for the moment, the most pressing concern on Alice's mind is figuring out exactly what happened to the missing money from the deal between the Canadian and British Ministries of Magic. After pinning down from Martine Miponia who exactly was present when the deal went down, Alice has been looking into all the relevant Brits, and she's concluded that she probably can't directly approach any of them without risking losing her job, up to and including the scribe who's most likely responsible for that ink stain obscuring the location of the missing money. (The scribe, Dolores Umbridge, was a Slytherin a year ahead of Alice. From what Alice remembers of the prefect meetings they attended together, Umbridge is totally ruthless and self-serving, and Alice wouldn't put it past her to be in on whatever Runcorn is playing at.)
So she's tasked herself with identifying and tracking down the Canadians instead—after all, they'll be just as concerned as Alice is about making sure the millions of Galleons they've contributed are actually being used the way Britain is supposed to be using them. The problem is, Alice doesn't have any Canadian Ministry connections, and neither does anybody she knows. She doesn't know who was involved on the Canadian side, and she doesn't have anybody who can find that information out for her.
The Canadian Minister was obviously in on it, but Alice can't exactly go marching into their Ministry and demand a meeting with her—she'd be laughed out of the country. Hell, Alice doesn't even know where the Canadian Ministry is located or how to get inside it.
Remus, who's still working at Jonker's Wands in Alberta, asks around at work for her and reports back (via owl in the middle of the night Monday) that he's identified the entrance to the Canadian Ministry. So after work on Tuesday, Alice scopes it out. As opposed to Wizarding Britain, where people tend to hide magical institutions and businesses in plain sight in crowded cities, Canadian wizards apparently opt to build most of their magical establishments way out in the wilderness and load them up with Muggle-Repelling Charms, similarly to Hogwarts' design. He gives her the coordinates of the Canadian Ministry along with a picture of its exterior so that she can envision it clearly when she Apparates there.
It's a massive Gothic Revival castle with the whole architectural shebang—ornate stained glass, pointed arches, and flying buttresses. The bricks are slate grey, in stark contrast to the glittering windows, through which she can faintly see figures hunched over desks and hurrying along corridors.
She ascends the staircase leading to the giant double doors out front and pushes them open with a loud creak. Inside, the walls and floor of the entrance hall are mostly as grey as the outside of the castle, save for the colorful windows bordering the double doors; there are wizards bustling in and out of the hall and others seated at desks along the far wall, and Alice makes her way toward the desk over which hangs a sign that reads VISITOR CHECK-IN.
There's a bit of a line, and she shifts her weight from foot to foot, taking her mind off her nerves by studying the architecture of the ceiling. Finally, when it's her turn, she approaches the wizard sitting at the desk, who's wearing a fixed smile. "How may I help you?" he asks in a deep voice and a jarring Canadian accent.
"I'm here from the British Ministry of Magic on the authority of Alastor Moody. My name is Alice Abbott, and I'm a junior Auror. I'm here about the deal made between our governments to provide relief to Britain in the war against the Dark Lord Voldemort."
The wizard's smile slips out of alignment. "Do you have an appointment?"
"Well—no. But—we suspect that some of the money has gone missing, and I'd like to verify our financial records against yours. Can you point me to someone I can speak with?"
He rummages through a desk drawer for a moment and then hands her a colorful map crammed with tiny room numbers and letters. He taps it with his wand, and rooms disappear with each tap to be replaced with new colors, new letters, that Alice assumes correspond to different floors of the castle. "You're going to want the Department of the Treasury in fifty-eight G—that's on the seventh floor."
"It's not a reclaimed broom cupboard, is it?" she asks, laughing a little. The wizard just raises his eyebrows at her. "Guess not. Your people must be much better organized with their finances than mine are."
"If you get lost, ask one of the portraits for directions," he says in a dull voice that Alice can only assume means that visitors get lost in the castle all the time.
She does get lost, in fact, before she even reaches floor G, and the portraits prove almost entirely unhelpful, shouting rapid sequences of left and right turns that Alice ought to follow all while arguing over each other about the best route to take. When she finally makes it to the treasury department, she's feeling thoroughly irritated and turned around.
At first, she thinks she's walked into the wrong office. It looks nothing like the dank closet that houses the Treasury at the British Ministry—this place is a wide, clean room with six witches and wizards sitting at desks. Late spring sunlight is streaming in through narrow windows resting at the very top of the walls; underneath them, the walls are lined with oak bookshelves full of neatly labeled parchment.
"Can I help you?" asks one of the witches, who looks up from her work and flashes Alice a friendly smile.
"I hope so!" says Alice, feeling very aware of her own British accent. "I'm an Auror for the British Ministry of Magic, and I'm looking into some missing records from the British-Canadian deal."
"You said you're an Auror?"
Alice suddenly realizes that the Canadian Ministry probably doesn't use the same names for all of their positions. "Dark wizard catcher," she clarifies.
"And they sent you over instead of someone from the Treasury?" says the witch. Her voice is polite, but she's frowning.
"Our Treasury department is run by just one person, and she's just been fired for starting to investigate this," Alice explains. "I don't want to make assumptions, but—we suspect there's something deeper going on here. I hand-copied our record of the transaction—you can see here the four hundred thousand Galleons that we can't account for…"
Lips pursed, the witch takes the parchment Alice is holding out and skims it for a moment. "Bernard, you were in on those meetings, weren't you? Can you pull up our records of the deal? They should be on the south wall somewhere—it'll be marked on the shelving."
"Sure thing, Gloria."
The wizard called Bernard finds them in under a minute, and Alice smiles a little, thinking of what Miponia would have to say about the organization in the British Ministry's Treasury contrasted with this one. He looks it over with a frown, then passes it to Gloria, who hands both records over to Alice.
She tucks her hair behind her ears and takes a look. She recognizes most of the line items—Aurors, check; Hit Wizards, check; Obliviators, check—and scans down until she finds the entry that's splotched on her copy.
There it is: just over four hundred thousand Galleons, and they're supposed to go to—
"What's the Muggle Protection Taskforce?"
Bernard says, "Muggles—that what your lot call No-Majes, isn't it?"
"Uh—you mean people without magical abilities?"
He nods. "From what I remember from being present during negotiations supposed to be an office under the Department of—I don't remember, and I don't know the precise names of British Ministry departments, but I think it's in either Magical Law Enforcement or the other one, the one for magical mishaps."
"The Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes?"
"Must be, yeah. There was a big discussion during negotiations on the effects of the war on British No-Majes. The Taskforce was supposed to be a new initiative to deploy wizards to cast protective charms on No-Maj areas, improve education about No-Majes among wizards from pureblood families, and bring on Ministry employees to draft legislation meant to safeguard No-Majes and educate them to a limited extent about the dangers they're facing."
"I've never even heard of it," mutters Alice. "It wasn't reported in the Prophet—the Daily Prophet, that's our main newspaper—and there hasn't been any talk of it anywhere in our Ministry that I've noticed."
"Well, your executives did say it would probably take a while to implement," says Bernard. "I'd check with your Treasury to see where the delays are coming from. If they don't know, you'll want to speak to somebody who works with your Minister's support staff. I can look up the person the initial organizing work was delegated to, if you'd like."
"That would be great," replies Alice. She highly doubts that information about this Taskforce has just been lost in the shuffle, and she'll have to be careful how she approaches anybody in the British Ministry about it, but she'll need to be armed with as much information as possible.
"It looks like… you need to speak to Gwendolyn Bragge. She's a Junior Assistant to Runcorn."
"Perfect. And—can I get a signed copy of your records? Just in case, I'll want evidence that this is where the funds are supposed to be going."
Ten minutes later, she steps back out into the hall and Apparates back to Britain, into an alleyway near the Ministry employees' entrance. She's got work to do.