Previously in the Darklyverse: Emmeline, under the Imperius Curse, managed to get a letter to Peter, who (in hiding as Scabbers at the Burrow) forwarded it to Mary. Frank filed for divorce from Alice. Sirius started spending full moons with Remus, who debated whether to forgive him.
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March 12th, 1982: Remus Lupin
"There's something up with Em," says Mary in a low, urgent voice.
Remus is with her and Alice at a Muggle café in London. Before Remus graduated, he never would have guessed how often he would meet his friends in Muggle spaces, but then again, there aren't a lot of wizard-only streets or villages in the country—where else are they going to go, if they don't plan on hitting The Leaky Cauldron or The Three Broomsticks for every meal out? Besides, it's safer to talk about anything war-related in Muggle spaces, where their words are effectively nonsense to outsiders listening in. In Wizarding Britain, they have to use Muffliato to avoid information getting into the wrong hands, and Remus knows from experience how annoying it is to have that used on you.
"She has seemed a little off the last few days," says Alice thoughtfully, stirring her coffee with a spoon. "We've all been stressed with the election—"
But Mary is shaking her head, "She's more than a little off. Look at this." She pulls a folded-up sheaf of parchment out of her robe pocket and brandishes it in Alice's face.
Remus scoots his chair around the circular table until he's sitting right next to Alice and can read over her shoulder. He raises his eyebrows. "Em sent you this?"
"Em sent Peter this," says Mary. "Look on the back."
Alice flips it over quickly. There, the name "Peter" has been written, crossed out, and replaced with "Mary," with a short note from Peter underneath it. The handwriting looks messier than Remus remembers Peter's writing to be.
And Remus knows that his concern in this moment ought to be for Emmeline—that these aren't the words of a sane, stable person—but all he can think is that Peter is back. Peter is back. Peter, who played up Sirius's concerns that Remus was the spy. Peter, who was the spy…
Alice seems to be thinking along the same lines as Remus is. "Em is in contact with Peter? Peter is in contact with you?"
"Not until this, and I don't think he and Em have been writing consistently. See what he says here about telling Em not to write him again? But never mind Peter for now—I know! But never mind him. There is something wrong with Emmeline."
"She could be having a psychotic break," Alice reasons. "It's not like she hasn't had mental health problems in the past."
"I don't think she's going crazy," says Mary, shaking her head again. "I think… Al, I think Em is under the Imperius Curse."
Alice's eyes widen. "What makes you say that, exactly?"
"Honestly, wasn't anyone else paying attention to that lesson of Bungs's in Defense Against the Dark Arts?" says Mary impatiently. "She feels good, better than ever, but something is telling her to act worried? She's hearing voices, and she doesn't want to disappoint those voices? Come on."
"The Imperius Curse does make you feel good," Remus muses. "Isn't it supposed to make you feel sort of, you know, vacant? Vacant and happy and eager to please the person who put you under it."
"'Vacant and happy' pretty much sums up the look that's been on her face the last few days every time she thinks I'm not looking," says Alice slowly.
"See? Imperius Curse," says Mary. "That's why I wanted to see both of you. You live with her. If we're going to confirm that she's under the curse and try to break it—"
"Our flat makes the most sense as a home base," finishes Alice.
"But I have a job now," Remus points out, "and this might not be resolved by the end of the weekend. The only one of us who isn't working is James, and he can't come back to Britain for anything."
"Okay, so then you two will get her to Vancouver, and then we'll start the usual process there," Mary concludes. "You'll have to warn Lily and James that we're bringing her there."
But Remus is frowning, a thought suddenly occurring to him. "Hold on a second. How could Em be under the Imperius Curse without us knowing about it? There should have been orb activity to alert us to the use of an Unforgivable."
Mary and Alice stop and think, too. "Maybe it's something else that's wrong with her?" says Alice timidly, but she doesn't sound like she really believes it.
"Then they've found a way to get around your orb," says Mary. Remus doesn't miss the way she says "your orb"—like it's something that's apart from her, even though she's in the Order. He can't really blame her for seeing Order business like the orb that way: she was out of the loop for so long…
"It's true that the orb hasn't pointed us to any instances of the Imperius Curse in weeks," says Alice. "We thought they were just rethinking their strategy, but it could be that they're circumventing it altogether. We'll have to put a team together to reexamine the spellwork. Who created the curse-identification spell in the first place?"
"James and Sirius and Sturgis," Remus answers swiftly. "It makes sense for them to be on the team, but we might want to choose a team leader other than them—someone who's got fresh eyes."
"Someone like who?" says Mary.
He smiles. "Someone like you."
Her first reaction is to laugh, as if she can tell he's joking, but the thing is, Remus isn't joking. She seems to get that after a moment, and her face goes stony. "You're kidding, right? I was rubbish at Hogwarts. I'm rubbish at everything that doesn't involve magical creatures or plants or, for some bizarre reason, Arithmancy."
But Remus thinks that Mary is smarter than she gives herself credit for. "You knew it was the Imperius Curse, didn't you? We'll catch you up on how to do spelling, and—"
"You say that like I've already agreed to it."
"What, don't you want to? It gives you something else to do in the evenings besides recruitment, you know, so that Cattermole doesn't start catching you out of the house at night on orb duty or raids again."
Mary rolls her eyes. "Yeah, but you don't want me on anything, well, academic. I'm not a very good witch."
"I agree with Remus," says Alice quietly. "You may need help with the legwork, but I think you notice things, and that's going to be valuable in a spelling team leader."
Mary looks from Alice to Remus and back again, but neither of them budges. "Fine," she finally gives in. "But I'll be happy to step down in a week when you all realize how useless I am."
"We'll see about that," Remus says, smiling.
"I'd better go," says Alice, reaching inside her bag for gold. "Can you cash me out, Mare? I don't have any Muggle money on me. I'm supposed to go over to Frank's to help put Neville to bed."
"Things are going okay on that front, then?" asks Mary politely as she, too, reaches for her wallet.
Alice's laugh sounds more like a scoff. "Frank's letting me visit Neville inside the flat, but he refuses to be in a room alone with me. It's all about Neville."
Remus doesn't know what to say. He wants to apologize for all of it—tell her he's sorry about the divorce, about losing custody, about her family not wanting her or maybe her not wanting her family—but what can he add that he hasn't already told her? "You go on. I'll see you at home later tonight. Mare, can you hang back with me for a minute?"
Mary accepts a handful of gold from Alice, then another from Remus, and tosses down enough bills on the table to cover the three of them. Once Alice has gone, kissing Mary on the cheek and waving to Remus, he turns to Mary with a small smile. "Isn't it, like, almost one in the afternoon in Alberta right now? Your lunch break is going to be over soon."
"Yes, but—I needed to talk to you. Have you had enough of my gay angsting for one lifetime? Be honest."
"If you know one thing about me," says Mary cheerfully, "you should know that I am always down for some gay angsting. How are things with Sirius?"
"Well," says Remus. He's been planning on bringing this up to Mary ever since he and Alice got her owl this morning, but now that she's here, in front of him, asking, he feels like his throat is closing up and all his words are falling out of his head. "They're…"
"Alice told me about you spending the full moon with him in February."
"Yes," says Remus helplessly.
"But he didn't come to your flat for the full moon this week."
The time difference between Remus's job in Alberta and his home in Edinburgh created some interesting complications. In theory, he thought at first that he could stay in Alberta until moonrise there and then Apparate to somewhere like Australia where the full moon had already ended, allowing him to skip transforming entirely. He took the day off at Jonker's, just in case, and hung out at Lily and James's house until moonrise in Vancouver before Apparating to Sydney, where his lycanthropy caught up with him and he transformed in broad daylight for about nine hours. "I wasn't home for this week's full moon, was I? I was testing out time zones to see if I could outrun it—though, as you know, that didn't work as well as I had hoped."
"Yeah, but you could have asked Sirius to go to Sydney with you after you got off work in Canada, and you didn't. Did it not go well at Hogwarts with him last month?" Mary continues.
"It wasn't bad," he explains. "We told Alice and Em that I was going there so that we could run in the Forbidden Forest, but we just stayed in his quarters the whole time. It was… a lot."
"A lot how?"
"Well, he petted me for a while, and then he changed into Padfoot and lay with me until we fell asleep."
"Padfoot?"
"Sorry—his Animagus form. We all gave each other nicknames, you know."
It sounds stupid when Remus says it out loud. After all, how intense can a bit of petting and lying side-by-side be? He can't figure out how to express the way his heart rate quickened when Sirius fisted his fingers into Moony's fur, scratching circles into his hide with long and gentle fingernails, moving fluidly up and down his back—the way Padfoot's breath warmed the back of Moony's neck and set his fur alight. It's not like it was sexual, not when Remus was Moony, but it was still intimate—too much so.
"But nothing happened?"
"I wouldn't call it nothing, but—we didn't get back together, and we didn't sleep together after I changed back the next morning or anything."
"So now you're scared," Mary concludes, "because you think it's going in that direction, and you—don't want it to?"
He lets out a breath. "I don't know what I want. He thought it was me, Mare. He treated me like—like trash, for so long, and now that I know why, he just… wants back in. And it's not like I don't want that on some level. I do want that on some level. But there's all this baggage, and I'm not just talking about the spy thing."
If Remus used to feel weird about talking to Mary about Sirius after they first got together, knowing that Mary couldn't be with Marlene—now that Marlene is dead, he feels positively ashamed of himself for whining about his love life to Mary. But—at the same time, he thinks Mary might appreciate being treated like normal, like Remus doesn't have to contort himself around Marlene's murder and Mary's years-long break from the Order. And he can use someone to talk to who sort of gets it.
"Rem?"
"Yeah?"
"I say this with love."
"Okay…"
Mary grins at him. "Get over it. Go seize the day. I'm serious."
Remus half-smiles in return, wishing it were that simple—but, of course, to Mary it would be.
Back at home, he and Alice wait until they can hear Emmeline snoring in the women's bedroom before they start making arrangements. Remus puts his head in the fire to talk to James, Remus explaining the situation and James assuring him that he and Lily will be ready for Emmeline's arrival in the morning. Thirty minutes later, Alice sneaks into the bedroom and emerges with two wands in hand—her own and Em's.
"So we're ready?" says Alice softly. "We'll get up while she's still asleep and Side-Along-Apparate her to the Potters'? Or, at least I'll get up—you'll still be awake at that point." Thanks to working in Alberta, Remus's sleep schedule is completely backwards: when he gets home from work every day, it's about two o'clock in the morning in Britain, and he doesn't go to bed until around eight A.M.
Remus says, "They've probably already got the Anti-Apparition spell set up on the nursery, so that they have somewhere to keep her. James says he'll ask Frank to take Harry for a few days—Harry can't leave Canada, obviously, but James will pay for a hotel for Frank and Harry and Neville. It's the least Frank can do with all the childcare James and Lily gave him before they moved to Vancouver."
It's awkward talking about Frank in front of Alice, but she brushes it off easily, or at least appears to. "Should we use Incarcerous before we Apparate or after?"
"After. Binding her would wake her up, and it'll be less of a struggle if she's still asleep. She should still be disoriented enough when we land that Lily or James can cast the spell."
"We should stay for the day," says Remus. "Give James and Lily a break. They'll almost certainly still have their hands full with her on Monday."
"As long as I don't get called into work, I can do that. Sirius and Mary would probably be willing to pitch in Sunday, too."
"I can't believe we didn't notice our roommate was under the Imperius Curse."
"I can't believe that we all had to find out from Peter."
Now that he knows Peter is reachable by owl, he can't shake the thought of contacting him—demanding answers. But he knows he won't. Imperius Curse or not, there's nothing Peter can do to redeem himself to him—not just for betraying them all, but for trying to frame Remus to Sirius—and Remus can't think of a single thing Peter could say that wouldn't just make Remus feel worse.