Previously in the Darklyverse: Motivated by Lily's firsthand knowledge that France refuses to assist Britain in fighting Voldemort (CH24), the Gryffindors informally organized to raise awareness about Voldemort, adopting The Order of the Phoenix as its moniker (CH26); conflict arose between Alice and Sirius regarding Alice's quasi-purist upbringing (CH27), and Sirius reacted harshly to Emmeline's attempt at reconciliation (CH25).
xx
February 21st, 1977: Peter Pettigrew
"Careful." He seizes Mary's hand, then whips out his wand and mutters a few incantations, eyebrows furrowed; she tugs herself out of his grasp and raises her hands towards her chest as if in resentful surrender. "There, try it now, it'll just start screaming otherwise."
"Seriously?" she says, crossly snatching back the book and letting its stained pages fall open into her bony fingers. She's lost weight the last few months, skin taut and face gaunt.
Peter sighs and turns away, scanning the titles on the shelf. "Well, what else would you expect from Hogwarts? We don't have a permission slip to be back here."
"I know that, Peter, I just thought you'd have been able to get a note from McGonagall or someone so you wouldn't have had to spend the last week cracking the spell. It's not like we're looking up Dark magic or anything."
"For the night before we start rolling out the Order to the rest of the school? It'd look too suspicious. This isn't like the other pranks; we're not doing it for attention, we need to be anonymous if we're going to have a chance in hell of pulling it off."
"That's fair, I guess," says Mary as he sinks down the bookshelf to join her where she's reading, cross-legged and intent, on the ground. Short minutes pass as they skim chapters and scrawl the occasional note on the parchment leafs they've brought, Peter flipping slower than her through his volume—he's not entirely sure what the hell went down on Saturday that's got her so rattled, but whatever it was, it seems to have jolted Mary out of her stupor and into frenzied action to kick-start publicity for the Order of the Phoenix. "Ten Galleons says it wasn't Dumbledore's choice to keep this stuff locked up in the Restricted Section," she scoffs.
"No kidding. From what Marlene's uncle says about the Auror division, they've got to be leaning on the Prophet to keep it all quiet—just look at this, Wizarding Genealogy and the Ministry."
Urgently, he jabs several times at an adorned figure spanning a full two-page spread, what looks to be a web delineating the power hierarchy of the British Ministry of Magic. A startling number of titles are annotated with British pureblood surnames and purist or neutralist designations. She brushes shoulders with him to peer at it, shallow breath scraping his neck, and says, "Read what it says right there—'the influence of known purist members of the Ministry reaches far enough that the British Ministry of Magic has enacted no new Muggle or Muggle-born protection legislation in the last two decades.' When was this published?"
Peter flips to the front of the book. "1974—" barely three years prior.
"That's disgusting."
They drop to silence for a longer while still, Peter squinting to make out the tight print in the lamplight. The research, too, was Mary's initiative. In the grudgingly agreed vein that the best they can do for now is to raise student awareness and interest in the war, the idea is to counter common assumptions about blood purity and complacency with the Ministry's role thus far. To change anybody's mind, they're going to need to make grand gestures. To make an effective grand gesture, they're going to need to back it up with facts. To get facts, solid facts, they're going to need to spend a lot of time in the library.
Such is how he's found himself in his least favorite corner of the castle, poring over classified texts on purism and the Ministry during time that could be better spent pulling up his marks in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Or sleeping. Preferably sleeping. While Sirius and James were getting stone drunk for all of Sunday, he worked out with Remus the logistics and spellwork of their first prank—if it can be called a prank; it's not exactly comparable to their usual mischievous activities, and far more elaborate than the norm at that—and all that's left to do now is to look up exactly what they think the rest of the school needs to hear.
"Hey, Peter?"
In his reverie, it takes a second for the words to register. "Yeah," he says after a moment, still reading.
"Thanks for coming and helping and stuff."
"No big deal."
"No, really," says Mary, and he lets go the book he's holding and shifts to face her; "because James and Sirius have been out getting plastered, Emmeline is… Emmeline, and then Alice is off working all the time because she does that when she's cross, you know, like she wants to show everybody up by proving what a model prefect she is—and it's like Lily and Marlene don't even care when I try to bring it up to them. Remus was great and everything with the spells, but you—you've just been really great, out of everybody."
"But it's—not," he falters, looking back to his lap. "I don't—everybody's busy, it's just a couple hours—"
"Just a couple hours."
Peter grins and doesn't meet her eye. "Don't worry about it, okay? Anyway, I'm really proud of you for taking charge and planning everything out and putting in all the—the rote work, you know? You've been really creative, and—and you don't give yourself enough credit, I don't think, sometimes."
"Neither do you. Everybody gives Sirius and James all the credit because they've got the big personalities or whatever, but half the time you're the one running it," says Mary.
"I'm not that clever," he says, feeling a bit hot.
"Yeah, well, just because you're only going for five N.E.W.T.s doesn't mean you're not clever."
"You ever think about looking at yourself like that for a change?"
She rolls her eyes, raises her quill. "I'm not doing this because I'm clever or anything, I just—like, it feels good to be doing something for once. I'm rubbish at magic, I'm rubbish at everything, but—"
"You're not rubbish."
"You sound like a less pretentious version of Gilderoy."
"Shut it," he says, and then, "Lockhart?"
They're both bleary-handed and heavy-gaited the next morning at breakfast; he shuffles into his seat at the Gryffindor house table and accidentally ladles far too much syrup onto his waffles. "I'm guessing that means the research went well last night?" says Marlene, grinning.
"If by 'well' you mean 'slowly,'" says Mary, but she and Peter trade smiles all the same.
Delicately swallowing a sip of orange juice, Alice asks, "So we're doing one a day, right? Not just in the Great Hall but making sure that each one somehow reaches each student—"
"Only if you think you can stomach that much radicalism," says Sirius, aimlessly stabbing at his plate with his fork.
"For god's sake, Sirius, just because we happen to disagree on a few finer political points—"
"Finer points, Merlin's buttocks, you as good as called Remus a half-breed—" Sirius drops his voice accordingly "—right in front of his face and—"
Remus says, "Sirius, I keep telling you, it's fine, it's reasonable enough for her to think what she does, it's about common safety—"
"Screw common safety, he's not just some—"
"Sirius, I get where you're coming from, but you don't have to attack Alice to get your point across." It's Emmeline interrupting him, to Peter's surprise, quiet but sounding more like her old self than he's possibly heard in years, the girl who used to match Sirius well enough to keep him in check. Marlene raises her eyebrows and glances to Lily and back. "Bugger off if you'd rather milk your pissiness than get along with everyone for the five minutes it takes to play this out, but spare everybody the blowout for later, we've got an operation to run here."
No one's quite sure how to take that, especially Sirius, who stares down Emmeline in equal parts belligerence, shock, and bemusement. For lack of a decisive response, he starts rapidly devouring the contents of his plate with one last dirty look at Alice.
"Speaking of," says Remus. Sandwiched between James and Mary, it goes unnoticed by the rest of Gryffindor table when he slips a hand into his pocket and retrieves—nothing, or to be precise, what Peter knows to be a Disillusioned bit of nothing.
"Right." Remus taps it twice with his wand under the table. "That'll give it about ten seconds to make it up and a bit more for visibility—go get her," he says quietly and tosses it out behind him.
For a split second, they all just wait—and then James says, "Don't just sit there, blend in," and they snap back to their breakfasts, Marlene setting into a complaint against the essay Flitwick assigned yesterday.
It begins inconspicuously enough—in his periphery, Peter watches Professor McGonagall look left, then right, then left again with a frown. She shrugs to Professor Sprout and reaches for her goblet, then ducks fully with that frown deepening as a buzzing noise begins, louder and louder until it's catching the attention of the full student body. They glance amongst themselves in confusion for a few moments until McGonagall's involuntary dance catches somebody's attention and then they're openly pointing with one another, questioning, Peter and the Gryffindors playing right along among them.
And then you can see it and it's just a bit of paper, just a harmless bit of paper flapping around McGonagall's head, and she's pulling out her wand but it's too quick to hit, and it's getting so loud, and it's refolding itself from a neat little square into—is that supposed to be a paper airplane? Is that someone's idea of cleverness? But Professors Sprout and Flitwick and Sinistra are clapping their hands over their ears and McGonagall's lip is thinning and it's gusting such great winds down from the High Table, Dumbledore's beard positively windswept and robes aflutter all the way to the opposite ends of the house tables, and finally McGonagall's wand aligns with it just right—
But it's not ripping itself up or freezing midair or falling gracefully into her lap or even into her breakfast, the buzzing is giving way to a deafening echo of a four-string orchestral chord and it's rocketing high above the tables where all can see and bursting into a streaming banner, rippling in its own wind, proclaiming in such heavy, heavy black, "FACT: In December 1976, France set a European precedent by denying aid to Britain in the war against the Death Eaters."
And now it's the students themselves who are deafening, whether stricken by the proclamation itself or the radical shift to the foreboding or the impending nowness of it or the insult to their pureblood privilege, and the banner swells like a balloon and lets them erupt, lets them revel in it, takes its sweet time and then at once, like it's been waiting all along to make its comeback, drowns out them all with an earsplitting bang, and in instants the banner tears itself to pieces that set themselves aflame, scarlet sparks arising out of the glow in the unmistakable shape of a phoenix, wings raised and stretching high above its head, hovering, cindering, and at last reduced to smoke.
It's hard, so hard, to seek out a reaction as if he's as surprised as the rest of the school. "Remus, that's spectacular," whispers Lily, "how'd you manage it again?"
"Enchanted Howler—took the basic principles and adapted them to fit—adapted them a lot. Peter's idea, actually; he put more into it than I did."
They can't congratulate him here, now, but everyone's gaze flickers fleetingly to Peter and he doesn't want their looks, doesn't want anything but to get started fast as he can on tomorrow's demonstration. And then Mary says, "Glad I won't be with you lot for Transfiguration in half an hour," and he doesn't want anything but to survive the next ninety minutes.
He glances to the High Table to glimpse McGonagall's reaction—torn, now, but between what Peter isn't sure. Lily is starting to enter full panic, emitting a low stream of "there's no way we'll be able to fake it in front of her for the whole class, she's going to find us out, she'll get a confession even if she can't get any proof, especially if we're going to keep this up, she knows I interned in France, she knows that came from me, the problem's not even house points, she's going to take it up with Dumbledore that we're too young to try to get involved and this is all going to backfire so badly, we won't be able to see it through, we're all—"
"Lily, breathe," says James, but she shrugs him off, rubbing her temples.
Peter can't entirely read her when they reach her classroom, but judging by the thin, thin line her eyebrows make, whatever they've got in store can't be all good. "Some stunt that was at breakfast," she says as Remus pulls shut the door behind them and Peter stumbles into his seat, the fatigue returning now the adrenaline from breakfast is starting to wear off.
"Wasn't it?" James says, flicking a bit of lint off his robes and then looking up to smile cheerily at McGonagall.
"One of you and Black's stunts, I imagine?"
"Not at all."
Clearly, she was expecting this. "The level of difficulty may have far exceeded anything I've yet seen you do, Potter, but given your proclivity for school-wide pranks and considering that Miss Evans is presumably the only student at Hogwarts who's aware of the situation with France—"
"Professor, I assure you that Sirius and I have been, ah—otherwise engaged over the past few days and wouldn't have had the time to dream up the display from this morning, let alone execute it," says James with a smirk.
"He's telling the truth, Professor, we didn't know what was going to happen until this morning," says Alice, timidly at first but her voice growing stronger. "And—whoever was responsible could have found out about France somewhere else—they quoted it as fact; they'll have to back that up with sources, haven't they? And I remember there was a line in the back of the Prophet about it once, they could have caught onto that and done further reason. There's no reason why Lily had to have been involved."
McGonagall's nostrils have stopped flaring, at least, and she says, "Whoever was involved ought to realize that Dumbledore has made it explicitly clear that students are too young to participate in the war, let alone join up with some sort of—of renegade student organization and that this will not be taken lightly."
"I'm sure they will, Professor," says James calmly.
"They ought to realize as well the danger of voicing such strong political statements openly and that it is in their best interests to protect their anonymity from the rest of the student body."
"As they clearly do, Professor."
"And that so long as their actions remain informational only and do not disrupt their fellow students' safety and education—they have my full support."
"I'm sure they would appreciate that very much, Professor."
Peter can hardly believe their luck. Smiling thinly and giving James the slightest nod, McGonagall turns to the blackboard and instructs, "Very well, then, if you could all turn to page 487…"
The facts continue throughout the week—not all of Peter's design, to his regret, but homework calls and there's only so much extracurricular spelling a wizard can work in one day. On Wednesday, they set off a round of fireworks at dinner; Thursday is subtler, featuring embroidery spiraling across the body of every student's wizard's hat. "Everyone thinks it's us, don't they?" says Alice later that night, idly twirling her hat in her hands.
They're in the boys' dormitory, just the two of them—Remus and James are out working on tomorrow's demonstration (set to take place in all four individual common rooms and as such requiring Remus's prefect knowledge of the passwords), and Sirius is probably off snogging Marlene somewhere in determined avoidance of Alice. "I think they did at first, at least the others in our year—Mary says all the Hufflepuffs have been asking her about it—but I think it's starting to make them wonder about it that there's the phoenix emblem on all of them, that's new, and that we haven't come forward, they'd think we would have by now. Plus that Dumbledore's practically been encouraging it," he adds: the headmaster made a point of wearing his pointed hat around the castle all day and applauded last night's dinnertime display, to McGonagall's visible disdain.
"That's true," says Alice softly.
There's a short but uncomfortable pause. "Looking forward to what we've got planned for next week?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Alice…" She looks over at him, half hidden behind careful blonde curls and a fixedly pleasant smile. "You are… I mean, you do want to be doing this, right? After whatever's going on with you and Sirius and whatever it is you said about—"
"How many times am I going to have to defend myself to all of you?" says Alice, lips still upturned, eyes rounder now in appeal. "I may not believe that the Ministry is pulling some kind of—of conspiracy to keep Muggle-borns in line, but that doesn't mean I think it's okay for You-Know-Who to go around murdering them, that's sick, that's absolutely sick."
"I'm not saying you do," Peter says gently, "and it's not like I'm an expert on it or anything, my parents are Muggles, but—but don't you see that seeing through the Ministry is half the battle here? I mean—You-Know-Who's been at it for how many years now, and how much progress has the Ministry made fighting him? Honestly, think about it, they don't even—when you read about it in the Prophet, even then they just talk about him like he's a whack job terrorist, but he wouldn't get this much support if his followers didn't believe in some kind of ideology—"
"Of course they do, killing Muggles, and I'm not saying there's no discrimination, but that doesn't mean it's the Ministry's fault that purism exists."
"Okay, so the Ministry didn't create purism, but wouldn't it make sense if purism created the Ministry?" Alice says nothing. "Magical government has been around since way before anybody started thinking about Muggles and Muggle-borns. Up until—what, the 1600s?—it was always just back-and-forth between witch hunts and oppression of Muggles; the International Statute of Secrecy was the first time anybody ever thought about Muggles like they were—like people, ever."
"Peter, it's been over three hundred years since then."
"Three hundred years isn't a very long time in wizard history, just ask Lily."
She purses her lips and places her hat on the mattress beside her, pulls close her copy of Numerology and Gramatica, and says, "I don't have time to validate to you my sincerity in fighting You-Know-Who; I have four essays due next week already."
"Alice, please don't be like this—"
Sitting there next to him, she is tucked so neatly together with her hat at her side, textbook at her knees, quill behind her ear, curving just so over her parchment; and Peter wonders what she's going to do when she learns that she, too, breathes and swallows and blinks. "Like what? Honestly, let's not do this, Professor Vector wants a whole meter and I'm already behind schedule."
Friday is the first chance all week he gets to catch Emmeline alone. "Walk with me," she invites after breakfast, and so he does, following her out onto the grounds. By the lake, it's cuttingly cold, and he jams his fists low into his robe pockets and pulls his arms rigid and tight to his frame, chin bent to his neck. "You were really amazing on Tuesday, you know that?"
"Thanks," he says, tripping a little. "Things with Sirius going all right?"
"Considering that the alternative is probably him going off at me every time we're within earshot, I'd call 'all right' an understatement," says Emmeline.
"I'm sorry. That bad?"
"I just… I was an arse, I know I was an arse, but it wasn't for no reason, was it? My parents were dead and everything felt so… gone—he doesn't know what it was like in—in my head," she says. Emmeline's never been artful in saying these things; she used to speak brashly, and then she spoke nothing at all, and now that she's come back to herself, she flounders in the slightest surface ripple. "You get—gone like that and you lash out, you have to. But now—and he's got Marlene, and I don't think he's told her anything, but god, the way she's been looking at me lately, and I just want it to be like before, Peter, that's all I want."
"I could talk to him," Peter offers, for lack of anything better to say.
She laughs weakly and says, "No, that's all right, don't, I should… it'll just take time, it'll be fine. He'll come around."
"Honestly, Em, I think there's a chance this thing with Alice will make him forget all about it," says Peter.
"With Alice, really? What's even going on with her lately? She's always had a bit of a stick up her arse, to be perfectly honest—" there she is again, the Emmeline of old, harsh but only for the sake of harshness "—but it's not like Sirius hasn't known that since we were eleven, so why now?"
"I think—none of them are talking about it much, but I think what went down is she was debating politics with him and made a dig at werewolves."
"But Remus—"
"I know, and Remus was there, too. Didn't say much for himself, though, not that he needed to with Sirius going off on her."
Emmeline raises her eyebrows. Unlike Peter, she's loose, her arms swinging out even in the chill that's slowly bleaching the color from her hands. "That's bull; poor Lupe. Sure, it makes sense for werewolves to take precautions and everything against biting anybody else, and it was a bit of a shock to find out about him, but that doesn't mean anything about—about Remus, just that he deals with a lot."
"Yeah. God knows how long it'll take for this one to blow over."
Emmeline shakes her head a bit, walks backward and faces him for a moment before turning back around. "Hey, is there anything I can do to help you and Mary with the Order stuff? I feel like I've been useless all week."
"Yeah, actually, what do you think of purple and white?"
"Purple and white?"