December 5th, 1981: Frank Longbottom

Alice Disapparates about two minutes after Frank goes to check on Neville in the nursery. At first, he's not sure whether Alice has left or somebody has come to visit, but he puts it together quickly enough when he doesn't hear any voices following the crack of Apparition. He pads downstairs and, finding the living room empty, rolls his eyes. It always has been Alice's habit to run away from her problems—from any kind of confrontation.

She's left a note, at least, on the kitchen counter saying that she's headed to Remus and Emmeline's flat for the night. Frank assumes Remus and Emmeline didn't actually know when Alice wrote the note that she was on her way to their flat, but he's positive they'll take her in. Alice's friends have always been that way: they've always treated each other like family, for all their flaws and all the arguments they get into. It's probably because they're like family that they show those flaws to one another and get into those fights in the first place.

Knowing everything he knows about his wife, Frank should have seen this coming, and it makes him feel like an idiot that he didn't. Of course perfect, ambitious, overachieving Alice would feel trapped in her family when she never asked for that family in the first place—when it wasn't on her terms. Neville was an accident, and Frank—he knows she loved him (loves him, even), but they weren't supposed to get married when they did. He could see it in her eyes how ashamed she felt of the circumstances of their marriage; he just kept telling himself it was fine because he wanted so badly to be happy.

And he was happy. Is happy. It's only Alice's happiness that's apparently the problem.

Why can't he and Neville be enough for her? All they need is Alice, but Alice…

He thinks he might go crazy if he stays in this house, drenched in his wife's scent, for another minute. So he flings Alice's letter back onto the counter and heads back up to get Neville, who fusses and cries when woken. "It's okay, little guy," Frank soothes, slipping a dummy into Neville's mouth. "I know you don't like Apparating, but it'll be over in a minute."

He'll go to Lily and James's house to help out on any raids tonight, he decides. When he's in the field, at least Frank feels like he has some control over his life.

Sure enough, Neville starts crying his eyes out when they rematerialize outside Lily and James's house. It's strange for a second to be blinking in the sunlight: here in Vancouver, it's still the middle of the afternoon. James frowns at Frank when he answers the door. "You didn't sign up for orb duty tonight, did you?"

"No," says Frank, "but Alice and I got in a fight, and I just… she went to see Remus and Em, but I needed to get out of there. You don't mind if I put Neville down in Harry's room and then grab some sleep somewhere, do you? You can wake me if the orb starts going off."

"Yeah, no problem. Sorry to hear that," says James. "Doc and Dedalus are doing the same thing here. Harry's due for his nap soon, but we can conjure up a second crib for Neville. He'll have to sleep in the master bedroom with you—Harry won't be asleep all day, and Lily and I will be in the nursery with him to keep him away from any activity in the living room."

It occurs to Frank as he's rocking Neville back and forth and stepping into the house that James and Lily are probably going to hear all about Frank and Alice's problems within the next day or two, either directly from Alice or through Remus and Emmeline when Alice inevitably fills them in. He feels a flash of annoyance at the thought.

It doesn't take long for the orb to sound off—Frank hasn't even fallen asleep yet when it does. As Lily dashes into the bedroom to wake the three of them, Frank leaps to his feet and struggles to pull on his mask.

"It says it's the Cruciatus Curse," James says urgently when Lily returns with Frank, Dedalus, and Doc. "It's been fired three times so far. Are you ready to go? Do you need us to call in any backup?"

"We should be okay," says Frank. "Just watch us in the orb, and send a Patronus to Sturgis if we look like we're in trouble."

The curse-identification 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. Frank, Doc, and Dedalus all focus hard on the visual in the orb—a bedroom with two Death Eaters standing above a Muggle woman and her three children, all apparently slumped to the ground and crying out in pain. "On three," says Doc. "One—two—"

That painful feeling of compression hits Frank, and then he emerges on the other side of the woman's bed. Doc and Dedalus appear next to him with another couple of cracks.

Nonverbal magic is Frank'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 he focuses hard on Petrificus Totalus and aims his 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 Frank square in the chest.

That's when the bedroom door bursts open to reveal three more Death Eaters. Crap.

"Get them to safety," says Doc commandingly to Dedalus.

"But—" Dedalus starts to protest.

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

Doc's hit by a Stunner then, and Frank tries to Ennervate him once he's recovered from the Cruciatus, but he just ends up flat on his back, Petrified rigid. He can't see, but he hears a thud, followed by a cry of pain—Dedalus's. A Death Eater hovers over Frank, mask touching mask, and then bellows, "ORGANUM SANGUINEM!"

Frank doesn't recognize the spell, but he thinks he knows the voice from previous raids—it's like he's getting to learn each masked Death Eater by their speech, their mannerisms, the style with which they wave their wand. Either way, he only has a split second to ponder over it before invisible pain blooms up through him. It hurts, but he can't double over, can't scream. He can't do anything at all besides stare at the ceiling and ache.

There's another crack—he doesn't know if that's Sturgis arriving or Doc or Dedalus leaving—and the voice yells the unrecognizable spell again. Frank distantly hears one of the Death Eaters mutter something, but he'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? Frank?" That's Sturgis's voice, sounding shaken. "Shit. I… what do I…"

Frank can't tell Sturgis to unfreeze them, but Sturgis figures it out and casts a few rapid Finites and an Ennervate. Frank stirs a little bit, but he's in too much pain to move much. "The Muggles," he croaks. "Take them to St. Mungo's. Then, Lily can—Lily can—"

"Right. Hang in there," says Sturgis.

What happens next is mostly a blur, but Lily fills him in when he wakes up properly at her and James's house a few hours later. "Dedalus and Doc brought you to me," she says, "and Sturgis took a couple of trips to get all four Muggles into St. Mungo's."

"Are they okay?"

Lily bites her lip. "Two of them made it, but the mother and one of the children didn't. The Death Eaters used the same spell on them as they did on you, and it's a new one. I managed to cobble some healing charms together to patch you up well enough, but you'll need to be monitored for at least a couple of days to make sure the magic holding you together doesn't fail."

"What I don't understand is why they left Sturgis alone," he tells Lily in a fractured voice after taking a very small sip of the water glass Lily is holding up to his mouth. "They Stunned Doc, Petrified Dedalus, and used the new one—Organum-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 Sturgis, looking shaken.

"What message?"

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

"Jesus. Are they retaliating against the new additions to the curse-identification spell, you think?"

That's when he hears a crack and a wonderfully, horribly familiar voice cries, "Frank? Frank?!"

"Alice," croaks Frank.

She rushes to his side, kneeling down so that she's more level with his eye-line down on the couch. "I came as soon as I heard," she says. She looks tired, which makes sense: it's well into the night over in Britain. "This is all my fault. If I'd just kept my trap shut to Dirk, you wouldn't have been here at all tonight, and —"

"It's not your fault," Frank mutters. His voice still sounds horrifyingly raw. "Just—don't go, okay?"

Something flickers behind Alice's eyes, and in that instant, the terrible hunch that it's all over grips him. Why shouldn't it be? Frank almost dying on a raid isn't going to suddenly scrub over all his marital problems, to make Alice happy out of the blue. Besides, they risk their lives together every day—fight together at the Auror Office or for the Order or both every day. Almost dying in front of each other is old hat at this point: nothing to write home about.

Still, Alice whispers, "I'll stay tonight," and Frank allows himself to pretend, just for a while, that they can get through this. They're going to get through this because he needs them to. Alice may not need him, but he certainly needs Alice, and…

It looks like Frank is going to be okay, but Frank and Neville stay at Lily and James's house through the weekend so that Frank can recover without being moved. Lily and James, of course, aren't working anywhere at the moment, so they stay there with Frank and just sort of hang out with Harry on the floor of the living room near where Frank is set up on the couch—probably, Frank thinks, just so that he knows that they're there. Harry and Neville are both too young to understand why Frank is suddenly bed-bound and "tired" all the time, but they seem to accept it easily enough.

He's lucky, incredibly lucky, that he's got Lily to patch him up in the face of unknown curses. Her passion has always been for international relations, but she'd helped Madam Pomfrey out occasionally in the Hogwarts Hospital Wing, which in early days made Lily the closest thing to a Healer that the Order had. In Britain, she was working for St. Mungo's, figuring that she could work day shifts when Death Eater attacks were rare in order to pick up some proper training to put to use for the Order every night. She only quit her job long enough to run for Minister with Mary—and then again later when she and James were forced to go into hiding.

According to Lily, this particular curse doesn't leave any surface marks, but causes internal bleeding of pretty much all the major organs. He's damn lucky she was able to figure it out in time to reverse the damage before it killed him; apparently, she's still not sure whether she knows enough about the curse to be able to clean up in time the next person who comes to her under its effects. "Another one to add to the spell on the orb," she sighs as she and James are bringing Frank his breakfast.

Alice leaves to go back to Britain on that first morning. Frank doesn't bother asking why—or whether she'll be home to greet him and Neville when they return.