Previously in the Darklyverse: Controlled by Death Eaters, the Ministry imprisoned most of the Order for vigilantism after Peter turned himself in as a spy. Death Eaters orchestrated the murders of Emmeline, Mary, and James.

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September 20th, 1982: Frank Longbottom

On okay days, he thinks about Neville.

Not his memories of Neville—he can't seem to conjure up any good ones, and when he tries, Frank just remembers the tantrums and the long nights after Alice left when Neville cried himself out screaming for his mother. In Azkaban, you have to be careful—monitor your thoughts and track which ones lead you into a downward spiral—because once that starts, there's no coming back from it for a long time. Frank doesn't know exactly how long, of course. He obviously doesn't have a clock or a watch, and although he can sort of tell the time of day judging by how much light is filtering into the corridor outside his cell, it's been hard to count the passing days when he's been entirely distracted by the hellscape that is his mind.

But like he said, you can game the system a little bit if you know where to direct your brain. Trying to remember days he shared with Neville leads to ruin, but if he focuses on the fact that Neville is growing up without a mother or a father—that Frank is missing out on the new words he learns and the changes in his face and body—he can visualize Neville as he remembers him, and the sense of loss is coupled with another sense, one, strangely, of comfort: at least he remembers how his son used to look and speak. If he really tries, he can even think about Neville living with Mum in Frank's absence and, tangentially, reassure himself that Neville probably hasn't been killed and isn't being abused in any way.

That's the thing about dark thoughts: if you play them right, you can find ones with a better half, a brighter half. As long as you don't lose sight of the miserable part, you can find a little solace in the other side. Maybe Neville doesn't understand where his parents have gone, but at least that means he still has love for them. Maybe Frank will stay stuck in this jail cell long enough that Neville forgets him, but at least that means the good parts happened—that their love for each other was real.

When he's just coming out of a dark episode, and he doesn't trust himself to play the game for Neville, he thinks about Alice instead. Alice is a safer topic because, right up to when Hit Wizards dragged them all out to Azkaban, all his thoughts of her were already tinged with despair. Frank is already used to the way it feels to love Alice without being able to have her, to remember happier times while feeling the loss of her like a missing limb. If he allows his mind to wander to her, he can while away hours regretting the way they left thing and have his head feel close to normal—feel almost like he's out in the real world living through any other day.

He wonders if she's still alive somewhere in this prison—they've lost people already, but then again, the only people Frank knows have died are the ones who were older, whose health was already frailer. Elphias Doge and Dedalus Diggle both used to be somewhere in Frank's corridor, and they each in turn stopped responding to others' feeble attempts at conversation what feels like weeks ago. (Or has it been months? Frank can't be sure.) The stern-faced human guard who brings Frank his meals twice a day wouldn't tell him what happened to them, but what else besides death could it have been? It's not like there's a concrete reason that Azkaban would want to split them up.

The only person left who's responding to Frank is Peter Pettigrew. He suspects that there are others within earshot of his cell—he hears moaning sometimes that doesn't sound like it's coming from Pettigrew next door—but apparently, nobody else is up to speaking at all. It's not that he and Frank talk much—it's hard to maintain a conversation when you're drowning in a mental sequence of doomsdays and worst-case scenarios. Still, it helps to have somebody to talk to, even if it's just a little each day: it makes Frank feel a bit more like himself.

If he can only have one person for company in this hellhole, he wishes it were Sturgis, to whom Frank has gotten pretty close across the last four years of being in the Order together, or Kingsley, who joined the Order recently but whom Frank already knew from Hogwarts and the Auror program. They're two of the ones who are closest in age to Frank—Kingsley was one year ahead of him, and Sturgis graduated from Hogwarts only three years before Frank did. Unlike almost everybody else from the Order in Frank's age range, the two of them aren't dead, spies from or to the Death Eaters, Frank's ex-wife, or one of Frank's ex-wife's best mates. Peter Pettigrew, on the other hand—he and Frank were never all that close, and after the number of deaths Pettigrew is probably responsible for, Frank would have been just fine never speaking to the man ever again.

But they're here in adjoining cells, a meter thick of concrete separating them, and Frank is desperate enough for company that he eventually gave in to Pettigrew's weak attempts to talk. Like now. "Frank, are you there?" Pettigrew says in a scratchy voice.

"Yeah, I'm here. I'm up." It's a little shocking how little Frank's voice sounds like his own anymore.

"I was just thinking about… well, I could use somebody to help me take my mind off things."

"I'm not your therapist," Frank grumbles, but he knows he'll keep responding. It's an okay day, a Neville and Alice day, and he's got enough presence of mind to be grateful for some conversation (or as grateful as it's possible to be when you're surrounded by dementors).

"I didn't mean it," says Pettigrew. "Nobody was ever supposed to get killed because of me, and I didn't know that turning myself in was going to get everybody else locked up in Azkaban."

Frank sighs. They've been over this—it started as threats to Pettigrew's friends, escalated into threats to Pettigrew himself, and eventually morphed into something he kept going because he made excuses for why everybody deserved to be ratted out (no pun intended). But he felt guilty, and eventually he dealt with that guilt by taking himself to the authorities—and, inadvertently, blowing the cover of everybody in the Order along with him. Hearing the same old story over and over again used to make Frank feel a little flare of anger every time—and he savored that anger, clung to that anger, because at least it was a break from misery—but nowadays, it's old news, and Frank doesn't feel anything. The only thing Pettigrew's apologies really do is make Frank think about all the people who died last year, and he knows better than to indulge that particular line of thought.

"Really, Pettigrew, I don't give a shit. Tell me something you haven't already told me a thousand times."

There's a pause while Pettigrew seems to mull this over. It lasts so long that Frank actually thinks Pettigrew has gotten buried in his own mind again and forgotten their conversation, but he finally says, "Being in here makes me feel closer to Emmeline."

Frank can feel himself starting to slip away—Pettigrew's silence left him inside his own head again, and remembering all the people Pettigrew had killed brought back flashes of seeing Gideon and Fabian's lifeless bodies on the ground, pale and still with eyes that were still open. "What?" he says, struggling to concentrate on what Pettigrew is saying. "Why? Because the dementors make you think about her?"

"Because she had depression. If I feel this way, then I can feel what she felt."

Frank is dimly aware that—if he were at all emotionally invested in Pettigrew's psychology, and if he weren't surrounded by dementors right now—he might find this vaguely interesting to unpack, but his brain has started replaying what he remembers of Liz and Millie's deaths, and he can feel his okay day slipping right through his fingers. On bad days, all he can see are his friends' corpses—Alice losing blood on the Potters' kitchen table time and time again as Lily worked her wand and tried to keep her clinging to life. On bad days, all he can hear are screams.

"Frank? Frank, stay with me. You're not back there. You're in Azkaban. Remember?"

If Frank had more presence of mind right now, he'd bark at Pettigrew that it's his fault Frank is in Azkaban in the first place—that it's rich of Pettigrew to do whatever he can to try to make Frank forget about deaths and near-deaths that Pettigrew is responsible for. But he doesn't.

He's trapped.

Because he's drowning, when dinner arrives, he hardly notices that the stern-faced man is gone. In his place is another wizard, one whose face Frank barely registers as familiar, even as he ever so slowly coaxes Frank to eat all his porridge. It's not until hours later, when the wizard is long gone, that Frank manages to pull himself together and process what he's just seen.

What is Reginald Cattermole, widower of Mary Macdonald, doing wearing an Azkaban guard's robes and feeding Frank his meals?