Previously in the Darklyverse: Romantic tension mounted between Alice and Frank in sixth year until Frank started dating Dana Madley. Dirk declined to join the Order when Alice invited him to do so and later insisted that the Gryffindors' alleged involvement in Elisabeth Clearwater's and Millie LeProut's deaths was a bad influence on Alice. Alice struggled to balance her relationship with Dirk with her Gryffindor friendships. Alice and Remus bumped into Regulus, who defended Remus and Sirius when Raleigh Greengrass called them a homophobic slur.

Revised version uploaded 29 January 2022.

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February 13th, 1978: Alice Abbott

Like she usually is these days, Alice is with Dirk off away from the rest of the Gryffindor seventh years. Honestly, she knows she's neglecting her most important friendships—knows that she should spend more time with them and be there for them through the struggles they've been facing. Emmeline obviously could use support for her depression, Marlene and Mary both seem to be spiraling since they stopped being friends—Alice doesn't actually know the full story there, but then, that just goes to show how out of the loop she is.

So she knows she needs to catch up with them, but truth be told, she's been deliberately avoiding them ever since she found out Lily was named Head Girl. No, that's not right: she started avoiding them way back last year after that disastrous day at the nightclub for Mary's birthday, when that half-veela witch tried to tell Alice off for being biased in favor of pureblood supremacists.

It's kind of dumb, because Alice has learned so much from War Stories that she's not really the same person she was back when they had that fight, so there's no need to still be on the defense. Still, it's hard for Alice to swallow her pride and admit when she's wrong. Add that to the indignity of getting passed over for Head Girl, and—

When it was still summer, when it was boring at home and she didn't want to be left behind, she made more of an effort to be around and intentionally spend time with her friends, but then she got passed over for Head Girl, and the school year started, and Dirk was there, blessedly separate from any of the dramas happening with Alice's friends. A fresh start. She's not proud of running away, but, well, Alice isn't proud of a lot of things she's said and done anymore—that doesn't necessarily mean she's going to stop.

She's patrolling the corridors with Dirk that night when he says, "So, uh, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."

"Sure, yeah," says Alice easily.

"Why don't we ever spend any time with your friends?" asks Dirk.

Alice is so surprised she almost stops walking. "What?"

"Whenever we're together, either we're alone, or we're hanging out with my friends from Ravenclaw. Why don't we ever hang out with your friends from Gryffindor?"

"It's—I don't know. It's kind of a select crowd, I guess."

But Dirk clearly doesn't want to accept that. "Alice, we've been together for how long now? Almost two years? If we're going to make this work, you're going to have to integrate me into the rest of your life instead of treating me like something you have to hide."

"I do not treat you like I'm hiding you," says Alice, nonplussed. "I just—well, for months now, I haven't really wanted to spend much time with them, either."

"Because of whatever happened at the end of last year, with Millie and Elisabeth dying? Because—"

"It's not, actually, and I'd appreciate it if we didn't talk about that, please."

"But that's just it! You keep leaving me out of the most important bits of your life because you think I'm going to judge you for them—"

"But you are judging me for them, Dirk," says Alice, struggling to remain patient. "I can't even talk to you about War Stories because you think it's all tied up with Liz and Millie—"

"Don't try and tell me it's not connected, because it is. I know it is. And I'm getting tired of worrying to death that the girl I love is going to end up dead because—"

"Wait a second. You love me?" Alice's voice sounds breathy and lost.

"Oh—that wasn't supposed to… I wasn't planning on saying that yet," says Dirk, sounding abashed. "Forget I said it."

If Alice were a better person, she would say it back. If she were a truly good person, she would feel it back. But she doesn't.

Days pass, and Alice can feel Dirk's frustration mounting, but she can't afford to think about how to make it right. She gets a letter in the mail from her parents on Thursday asking again, You're not still with that Muggle-born boy, are you? Even just to show them up, she wants this thing with Dirk to work, so they can get married and have half-blood babies and prove that Alice doesn't need to be with a pureblood to be good, but she knows that's not a very good reason to stay with him.

So she does what she does best: hyper-focuses on school so that she can feel good about the one thing in her life she has control over. Where she used to have date nights with Dirk, she now has study time alone in the library, poring over textbooks and practicing spells until Pince closes the place up for the night.

It's during patrols the next week that Dirk calls her out on this. "I feel like I haven't seen you at all this week. Is everything okay?"

"Oh, everything's fine—I've just been busy with schoolwork."

"Really? It's not like there are exams coming up."

"Can we not talk about this right now?"

"I feel like you've been saying that a lot lately," says Dirk, frowning.

Alice sighs. "Look. You want to meet my friends? Remus and Sirius are dating now, and that hurts Marlene, so I have to avoid both of them to avoid hurting her. Meanwhile, Marlene and Mary are fighting, and I can't pick sides, which just leaves Lily, who's on Marlene's side, and Emmeline, who's being followed around by Mary and sometimes James and Peter. That doesn't leave me with anybody, Dirk."

Dirk lets out a breath in a whoosh. "That sounds—worse than Ravenclaw even gets, and I thought we were pretty bad."

"You are?"

"My year has been okay—lately, anyway—but Dana just broke up with Frank, and I'm friends with both of them, so that's been a nightmare."

"Back up. Dana broke up with Frank?" says Alice.

"Yeah, just last night, so word hasn't really gotten out yet. She thinks he's keeping secrets from her, and honestly, I think she's right. He sneaks off in the evenings to do stuff he won't talk about, and he—I don't know. Apparently, he's been acting funny ever since those two girls died, which makes Dana think he knows something. And I'm sure she's right. He's mixed up with it just like you are. Aren't you both? Not that you killed them, but that you—know something, or were involved, or something."

Before she even registers frustration with Dirk, Alice is filled up with an immediate concern for Frank's safety. She knows that the Gryffindor seventh years have all been pegged as involved somehow in last year's events, but she'd thought that Frank, along with Eddie and Benjy, were safe. Word getting out that Frank had something to do with it puts a target on his back if any Death Eaters were to find out about it, and Alice knows that there's at least one in Hogwarts already—Regulus Black—even if Black apparently has enough empathy left for Sirius not to want other Slytherins to go around calling him or Remus faggots. (Remus hasn't brought up what happened with Black and Greengrass the other day, and Alice has followed his lead and failed to mention it, too.)

Even after Dirk turned Alice down when she invited him to join the Order last year, she felt secure in the knowledge that he valued her safety and didn't intend to spread around what she and the others were doing. But she can't say that she feels equally secure with Dana Madley, not even a little.

"Do me a favor, okay? Don't tell anyone that Frank had something to do with Millie and Elisabeth. If anything, try and discourage Madley from spreading it around. Can you do that for me?"

"But that's not fair," Dirk argues. "You can't just conceal huge parts of your life from me and then expect me to help maintain your secrets."

"I tried to include you a year ago when you turned me down. You can't blame me for not feeling comfortable giving you full updates on pieces of my life that you make it clear you don't approve of."

"Because I don't want you to get hurt! I don't want you to be the next one to follow Liz and Millie!"

"But you can't stop me from trying to make a difference. I'm in the Order, and I've been shortlisted for Auror training, and if you want to be a part of my life, then you're going to have to accept that."

"Maybe…" Dirk stops walking, and Alice follows suit. "Maybe I shouldn't be a part of your life, then. Maybe I should have gotten out of your life a long time ago."

Alice's hands are shaking. "So we're breaking up now? That's it?"

"That's it," says Dirk. He sounds a lot more confident than he looks, biting his lip and shifting his weight from foot to foot, and Alice feels like she's going to be sick. She and Dirk have had their problems, sure, but when she set foot on this patrol tonight, she wasn't expecting any of this to happen.

She wishes she could run away to the Gryffindor common room and avoid Dirk for—well, for the rest of her life, really—but they still have half an hour left of their patrol tonight, so she just purses her lips and resumes walking, trying to walk a straight line, trying to hold in the tears that are threatening to come.

Back in Gryffindor Tower, Alice is tempted to go straight up to the dormitory, but after some consideration, she looks around the common room, lights on James and Peter, and heads over to them. "She lives!" says James cheerfully, while Peter stops playing guitar, waves, and then starts plucking at it again.

"Yeah, I know I haven't been… I know I've been out of things for a while," Alice acknowledges. "But listen, we have bigger problems. Dana Madley might be spreading it around that Frank was involved in the deaths last year."

"Frank? I thought he was in the clear," says Peter, frowning.

"Yeah, well, apparently not. I asked Dirk to ask Madley to quash the rumor, but he didn't seem too amenable to helping. He seemed to be more or less on her side—about Frank keeping secrets from her."

"Dammit, Madley," scowls James.

"Glad you held out for Lily instead of trying to go out with Madley right about now, are you?" sniggers Peter.

"Poor Frank," Alice says. "He's got to be under so much stress right now."

"Poor guy," James agrees. "But Frank is tough. He'll get through it."

"Assuming that junior Death Eaters don't attack him first," Alice points out.

"They won't," says Peter fervently. "They wouldn't dare try anything here at Hogwarts. He's safe until graduation, at least, and after that, I'm sure Dumbledore will protect him as much as all of us."

"I knew he couldn't trust her," James bursts out. "I knew something like this was bound to happen eventually. I knew it the second he started dating her."

"Yes, well, what's done is done," says Alice. "Hopefully Madley keeps her trap shut, and so does Dirk."

"He's threatening to out us to the student body? I thought when he declined to join the Order that he agreed he wouldn't spread word around."

"Yeah, well, that was back when we were still together."

Peter frowns. "You and Dirk broke up?"

"Yeah. Tonight. It made finishing our patrol a lot more awkward, let me tell you."

"I'm really sorry, Alice," says James. "I know you two were together for a long time."

"It's all right. I think… I don't think I ever really loved him as much as he deserved."

She sort of keeps an eye on Emmeline all night, and when Mary tells Em goodnight and heads up to the dormitory, she tells James and Peter she'll catch them later and then heads over to sit with Em. "Mind if I sit here?" she asks, and Em shakes her head.

They mostly just sit there in silence, studying, but Alice is all right with that. She wishes she knew what to say to Em, beyond to tell her that Alice hopes she's okay and is here if Emmeline needs her for anything, but she knows that's exactly what everyone keeps saying to Em about it, and she's probably getting sick of hearing it. Still, it's kind of nice just sitting here—reminds Alice that she has people even when she doesn't always talk to them.

In the morning, when she wakes up, she finds that everyone has gone down to the Great Hall without her. She puts on her robes and steels herself for a day spent alone, once Transfiguration is over and she has no more classes the rest of the day.

But to her surprise, she bumps into Frank Longbottom on the way back from class en route to the library. "I heard about you and Dirk. I'm sorry," he says, falling into step with her.

"Thanks. I'm sorry about you and Dana."

"It's okay. I really cared about her—I still do—but she wasn't someone I ever felt comfortable sharing anything like the Order with, and that couldn't have lasted long, could it?"

"I guess not. I thought Dirk and I would be okay even though he didn't want to get involved in the war, but it turned out to just be too much for us, it seems."

"Yeah, things have been weird between me and Dirk ever since you told him about the Order," says Frank. "Not that I'm blaming you for messing up our friendship or anything! We're still mates and everything. It's just—something we can't really talk about, if I want to keep the peace."

"I was kind of wondering why we stopped going on double dates this year," says Alice, nodding. "I guess that makes sense."

Abruptly, she thinks back to last year, to the hot minute that she felt an attraction to Frank, and she wonders if now, without Dirk or Madley in the way, it might eventually turn into something. Nothing sudden—she needs space to move past what happens with Dirk, and she's sure Frank needs space, too—but maybe someday.

She supposes she'll just have to wait it out and see.