Previously in the Darklyverse: Frank filed for divorce from Alice, who moved in with Remus and Emmeline. Marlene's father, Caradoc Dearborn, went missing. After Millicent Bagnold was killed and corrupt Albert Runcorn filled in as interim Minister of Magic, the Order reluctantly backed Barty Crouch Sr. in the upcoming election. Dumbledore asked Mary, who had rejoined the Order despite disapproving of how Dumbledore is running it, to breed a basilisk in order to (unbeknownst to her) use its venom to destroy Voldemort's Horcruxes.

xx

February 12th, 1982: Alice Longbottom

The problem is, there are too many Dark wizards to catch and not nearly enough Aurors to go around. No, she thinks: there aren't even enough Aurors to identify whom the Dark wizards they're supposed to be catching are in the first place. But that's not it, either. They're badly outnumbered, sure, but Alice doesn't know if all the Dark wizard catchers in the world would be enough to identify and stop Voldemort and his followers under the administration of Albert Runcorn.

"I was thinking I would take another crack at Flume's intel," she tells Moody when he tracks her down ten minutes after she reaches the office that morning. "The last thing he remembers before he was Imperiused was being in the restroom at Honeydukes, right? I dropped his memory of it into the Pensieve, and I've been able to positively identify a couple dozen of the people he came into contact with within five minutes before and after the spell being cast. If Frank is done collecting Buckling's testimony—"

But Moody interrupts her before she can finish her thought. "Longbottom's requested a transfer—I've put him the Dearborn case. Proudfoot will fill you in on Frank's loose ends."

Several emotions rush through Alice all at once. Yes, working with her soon-to-be-ex-husband has been painful and uncomfortable, and a part of her is relieved to hear that she won't have to do it anymore, at least not as closely. It's a strange thing, setting aside their differences at work only for Alice to go home to Remus and Emmeline's flat every night, as though she doesn't have an eighteen-month-old at Frank's flat who probably still doesn't understand where Alice has gone. She feels like she's living a double life sometime—acting to Frank's face at work like everything's fine, and him paying her the same courtesy, only for him to serve her with divorce papers and carefully trade off Neville at Frank's mum's house so that Frank and Alice never come into contact.

When they're working, at least Frank respects her. When they're working, at least Frank treats her like there's a piece of him that still cares about her. And now, apparently, Alice doesn't even have that.

It's not as if she doesn't still love Frank. Of course she still loves Frank. She rushed into the marriage because she got pregnant too soon, and now she's paying for that, but it's not like she doesn't still have feelings for the bloke. You can't love someone, work with them, marry them, have his child, and then just—forget. Alice hasn't forgotten the attraction between them that they always danced around while she was with Dirk and he with Dana—the relief and joy she felt when they finally came face-to-face with their feelings.

Sometimes she regrets the way it all went down—wishes she had known herself better, been more careful, so that she wouldn't end up brokenhearted—but other times, she really, really doesn't. She's a terrible mother, maybe, bur that doesn't mean she doesn't adore her son. She's a terrible wife, certainly, but that doesn't mean she doesn't miss her husband. It's enough just to stare at her unsigned divorce papers every night and wish she could just go home.

But Alice can't go home. She doesn't even think that Frank would forgive her enough to take her back at this point, and anyway, it's not like when she was there, she was happy.

Or at least—that's what she should be feeling in this moment. But it hurts to feel it, so she concentrates instead on the fact that Moody entrusted Frank and not Alice with the case of Doc's disappearance.

She, Frank, and Moody are all in the Order together, after all. It's not like Frank cares any more about Doc than Alice does, and it's not like Frank is a better Auror than Alice is. She's been worried sick ever since Doc vanished, and she'd like nothing more than to work his case and find him—or if she can't do that, then at least bring him justice. Marlene is dead, and Doc has no family left to bring a body back to, but she thinks that a body would help the Order, at least—would help Lily and Mary and maybe even Alice herself. At least then they'd know what happened, instead of having to cling to this vain hope that maybe he'll turn up alive, letting it eat away at them until all that's left are the skeletons of their conviction, as if to say, here: come see how they've destroyed themselves in the looking.

Moody is looking at her expectantly, and she says, "I'll be in the field conducting interviews, but tell Proudfoot I'll track him down this afternoon, after my lunch with Crouch is over. He can fill me in then."

Lunch with Crouch, of course, is not something that Alice is looking forward to, but Mary refused to put her soul into managing another campaign, and anyway, he'd probably be suspicious of anyone besides the members of the Order he used to work closely with at the Ministry—namely Alice and Frank—trying to push the electorate to vote him back in as Minister. He's losing in the polls, and Alice wonders if she might have had a better chance at turning things around if she'd done what Mary had done for Lily and quit her job to manage his campaign full-time. But the Auror Office needs her here, too. It's so hard to weigh the disadvantages—whether Wizarding Britain would be worse off without Alice as an Auror or without a campaign manager for Crouch.

Crouch wouldn't be her first choice for Minister—he's too rash, too quick to make judgments without evidence—but he's an infinitely better choice than Runcorn or Malfoy, and at least him turning in his son rather than allowing himself to be blackmailed proves to the Order that he's got integrity. They need someone with integrity as Minister if they're going to have any chance in hell at saving Muggle and Muggle-born lives.

The one honest-to-goodness good thing that came out of Crouch's brief stint as Minister of Magic is that he was able to take down the Death Eater who tried to blackmail him into doing his bidding. Crouch was at least smart enough to wait until he had enough evidence to turn over Gibbon as well as his son. Gibbon was a Death Eater of only moderate rank, but he cracked under interrogation, and Alice's office was able to arrest a string of low-level operatives under his testimony.

Predictably, Crouch is moody and disagreeable at lunch. "I don't know why you and Mad-Eye are bothering," he tells her stiffly as he pushes salad around and around his plate, after twenty minutes of fruitless strategizing. "You think people are going to forgive a man who would turn in his own son? You think I even want this job? I don't care about power, Longbottom."

"And that's why we need you," she says patiently. "You care about saving the world. That's more than I can say for anybody else in the race. Wizarding Britain needs you, Barty. Just do the meet-and-greet in an hour, all right? I'll check in with you when I get off work about your speech tonight in Diagon Alley."

By the end of the day—after work and after Crouch's speech—it's almost nine o'clock, and Alice is exhausted. All she wants is to kiss Neville in his sleep and curl up in bed with Frank, but her husband won't be her husband for much longer, and she's not welcome in her own home. Back at Em and Remus's flat—which is her flat, too, now, she guesses, even if it doesn't feel like it—she tries to write Frank a letter, but she scribbles all the words out and rips up the parchment after ten minutes of trying.

It's strange, being back in this flat. The last time she lived here, she had this bedroom to herself, with Remus and James both in the other room. James wasn't married yet, and Remus was still dating Sirius, even on the verge of moving in with him. Now, she sleeps in a bed squeezed as an afterthought into what's become Emmeline's room. James might not ever be able to reenter the United Kingdom, and Remus seems terribly lonely one room over.

Alice used to spend most of her time at home shut up alone in this bedroom, not because she didn't like Remus and James but because she's just never really felt like she clicked with anyone, not even her best friends. Now, she's alone just as much in her room, even though she shares it, because Emmeline is always out talking with Remus in the living room. Alice knows she could join them if she wanted. She's not sure she wants to.

But tonight, Emmeline comes into the bedroom shortly after Alice gets home. "Ice cream?" she asks, holding out what's left of a quart with a spoon stuck in it. More than half of the ice cream is missing, some of it in a half-eaten bowl in Emmeline's other hand, the rest presumably with Remus.

"I thought ice cream at night was you and Remus's thing," says Alice. She holds out her hand, and Emmeline skips over and hands the quart to her.

"You live here, too, now, you know. You can get it on the tradition if you want to."

"You're just saying that because you feel sorry for me," Alice says, smiling.

"And you just visited me in the hospital because you felt sorry for me, but you didn't see me telling you no. It doesn't mean we're not also friends."

Alice digs into the ice cream. It's rocky road flavored, and it's good—she hasn't had any ice cream in an exceptionally long time. "Thanks, Em."

"It'll get easier," Em says, sitting down beside Alice on Alice's bed. "With Frank. You just have to get used to it."

"Did you get used to Peter going away?" Alice asks. She's not saying it to be cruel—she genuinely wants to know. "Did it really get easier?"

Emmeline smiles back. "I'll get back to you."

Alice's family are supposed to be the people she can turn to when she feels this way. She knows that's how it should work—if she's feeling down, if she's missing them, she ought to go to them. So how did everything get so messed up?

xx

She hears from Mary the next night, which is a surprise. James told Remus that Mary hadn't shown up for her scheduled orb duty earlier that week, and Alice was half-expecting Mary to drop back out of the Order after the story about the Horcruxes came out. She's not totally sure why Mary is writing to her about it, but then again, who else is Mary going to write to? Hunting the Horcruxes without Dumbledore was Sirius's idea, but she's not exactly going to write to Sirius after that fight.

Anyway, she says that Dumbledore tasked her with breeding a basilisk. Presumably, it's got something to do with the Hocruxes, but Mary doesn't know what. Mary hasn't got a great place to incubate the thing until it's born—she's a Daily Prophet columnist now; she doesn't have any kind of an outside space at work anymore in which to keep creatures—and she asks Alice for permission to keep the egg (and the toad that apparently has to sit on top of it) in her and Remus and Em's flat until it hatches and Mary can collect the venom and kill it.

Mary doesn't say anything else about the Order in the letter, besides mentioning at the bottom that she'll see Alice at the meeting the following weekend. So she's not out of the Order, then—not yet, at least. Alice is glad: Mary may be wrong about some things, but it's probably good for at least one person who's in on the mission to be skeptical of Dumbledore's grand plan.

Sunday evening is her time with Neville every week after she gets done with a long day of campaigning for Crouch. She always picks Neville up, and then drops him back off, at Augusta's house—Frank's idea, since apparently it's too painful for him to see her outside of work long enough to exchange the baby once a week. But this weekend, she stops knocking on doors an hour early and Apparates to Frank and Neville's flat—her old flat.

She appears outside the door and knocks. It makes her sad not to just appear on the inside, like she still belongs there, but the fact of the matter is that she doesn't, and it would be rude to just barge in.

"One second," she hears Frank shout from inside, and about thirty seconds later, the door opens. Neville is tailing Frank closely, and he immediately starts squealing, reaching out for Alice with his tiny pink hands; she reaches down and lifts him into the air, blowing him a kiss. For his part, Frank looks stunned, which Alice resents a little: it's not like they don't already see each other around all day at work.

"I was just about to take Neville to Mum's house," Frank says, his voice catching in his throat.

"I thought I'd come and get him here, for a change," Alice replies, setting Neville back down. Her voice sounds natural and easy, which is the exact opposite of how she feels. "How is he? Is he still on that squash kick?"

"He loves the stuff," says Frank, shaking his head. "I'd say that I could never understand it, but according to Mum, I went through a huge squash phase when I was his age, too, so I guess I don't have much room to talk."

She looks at Frank. Frank looks back. Then the silence is broken, mercifully, by the sound of Neville babbling to himself as he waves a purple kitten stuffy in the air. "Frank—"

"You shouldn't be here, Al." He says it gently, but it still stings. "You were the unhappy one, remember? Go—go live your best life."

"I missed you at work yesterday," Alice admits. "I know what we are—I know what I did—but I guess I just thought…" Frank's face is impassive. "We can be civil, can't we? We do it all day at work—or we have been until now, anyway. There's no need to trade Neville off through your mum. We're not teenagers."

Frank sighs. "Neville, why don't you go wait for Mummy in your bedroom? Mummy and Daddy need to talk for a minute."

"No!"

"Neville, go. Go on."

Neville blows a raspberry but toddles off to the nursery. All of a sudden, Alice can't meet Frank's eyes.

"Everything was fine," says Frank, "and then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly, Neville and I were apparently making you miserable, and instead of trying to work it out, you just—ran away. I wanted to work it out, Al. I don't believe in bailing on a good thing just because it gets rocky. Every good thing gets rocky at some point."

The last few months have forced Alice to accept that she's not the beacon of emotional maturity that she'd thought she was. She can't even say that they were doomed because they were too young: Lily and James married and got pregnant just when Alice and Frank did, and they're the picture of a functional marriage. No—Alice has emotional baggage, junk that she can probably only work out with practice, but practicing means messing up a lot along the way, and how is she supposed to put her family through that?

"I don't know how to do this," she mutters. "And for that, I'm probably not good for either of you, either."

"You haven't signed the papers," Frank says. Alice had been hoping he wouldn't bring that up. "Does that mean you want to come home?"

"I… no," she admits. Her shoulders slump forward. "Yes and no. It's—complicated."

"Your one-year-old son needs his mother," he reminds her. "That's not complicated."

"I can still be Neville's mother and love him and care for him without…"

"Without committing," says Frank. "You're saying that you want all the benefits of motherhood—the love, the loyalty from your child—without any of the responsibility. And the worst part is, I have to let you get away with it, because keeping you away will only hurt Neville even more."

And he clearly doesn't understand anything fundamental about Alice, because she wouldn't be so scared if she didn't take the responsibility seriously. It's because she wants to be better for Neville that she doesn't know how to try. She lets out a breath. "I understand about you transferring cases at the office. I do. But we should work on getting along outside of work. It won't be good for Neville to feel like he's being pulled between both of us."

That's not why she wants it, of course: Alice is too selfish for that. She wants to get along with Frank because she wants to be near him, because she feels like she ripped out a piece of her soul when she left him. But there's no need for Frank to know that. It'll only make this harder.

After deliberating silently for a moment, Frank allows, "All right. You can bring him back here at bedtime tonight, instead of dropping him off at my mum's, but you can't come in. Maybe—maybe someday, but not today."

"I'll sign the papers tonight," Alice promises. It takes all of her concentration to fix a smile in place for when Neville comes back from the bedroom.