Previously in the Darklyverse: The Order agreed to loop several outsiders, including Professor Vector, Frank's mum, and Arthur's parents, into some of their Fidelius Charms. War Stories continued after the Hogwarts Order graduated. Lily kept Voldemort's corpse after killing him, and the Order made plans to reveal it publicly.

xx

October 28th, 1982: Septima Vector

She's in her quarters, knitting in the sagging armchair by the hearth, when the house-elf appears with a crack. At first, Vicky thinks he's one of Hogwarts's, but that can't be right: they dress themselves in neat, clean tea towels, and this one is wearing tattered grey rags and the most resentful scowl she's ever seen on an elf. "Can I help you?" she asks him, uncrossing her legs and laying down her needles.

"And the blood traitor speaks," the elf mutters rapidly as he bows so low that his nose scrapes the ground. Vicky raises her eyebrows. "Oh, my poor mistress, she would be so ashamed to see the business Master Sirius sent Kreacher to do, but Kreacher lives to serve the noble house of Black, even if it is besmirched in filth…"

"Pardon me, but who are you? And—did you say Sirius Black?"

She tries not to get her hopes up too high: she may know by now that Minerva and young Sirius Black were vigilantes together, but just because both have gone missing doesn't mean that they're together or that this elf can point her to her partner. She still can't believe that Minerva spent god knows how many years helping wage a war without bothering to tell Vicky she was involved, but none of that matters now. The Prophet says Minerva is out of Azkaban, and if Vicky has a lifeline to her—

"Kreacher is here to tell Septima Vector where to meet Kreacher tomorrow, for Young Master and his friends would like to speak to the blood traitor, yes, and—"

"What friends? Is Minerva with you? Can you take me to her?"

"Young Master has bound Kreacher to silence and servitude—"

Her heart is racing; sweat is pooling in her palms. For almost five whole months, she's been praying for the faintest whiff of news about Minerva—good news, bad news, even the knowledge that the Ministry had gotten to her and fed her to the dementors for good, if only so Vicky could know that Minerva was in a place where she no longer had to live in fear. It's been five months of reading the Prophet cover to cover, dodging her coworkers' pitying looks staff meetings and the Great Hall, as if avoidance can protect her from admitting that Minerva is really gone—five long months of reading statements from Malfoy promising equally that You-Know-Who will be stopped and that the vigilantes will be brought to justice, fearing what exactly he thinks justice for Minerva will look like. And now—

She has so many questions that she doesn't even know where to begin. How has Sirius (and Lily Potter, for that matter) evaded capture all this time, and where are they hiding? Is Minerva with them? Are all the vigilantes together somewhere, or have they splintered across the country or globe? How long has Minerva been in the organization, and how much more time will pass before their side wins and You-Know-Who is taken down?

Because the light has to win—You-Know-Who has to die. If it doesn't go the way it needs to, and Minerva gets herself killed or Kissed—

"What friends are you talking about?" she demands now. "Whom am I meeting? Where are we going? When do I get to see Minerva again?"

The elf—Kreacher, she gathers—scowls again. "Kreacher cannot—"

"Yeah, I know Kreacher cannot," Vicky mutters. "Just tell me where to go, and I'll be there."

xx

Without Minerva or Dumbledore, Hogwarts is a mess, although Pomona has at least managed to find a replacement professor for Transfiguration as well as one for her own classes—continuing to teach Herbology while acting as Headmistress, especially now that the promotion may well now be permanent, would have been unsustainable. Vicky hasn't yet let go of the hope that this will all get sorted out in six months or a year or five, and the lapsed professors will return, but given that it's been five months since they were removed from their posts and they haven't regained any public favor, that's starting to look less and less likely.

Public sentiment about the vigilantes who apparently call themselves the Order of the Phoenix has been—weird, and it all comes to a head the next night during their second War Stories meeting of the year. Since Minerva isn't here to do it, Vicky has been advising the group along with Horace, who reluctantly agreed to work with her when she insisted that what the school needs right now is for its Head of Slytherin to make a stand. "The Muggle-borns in this school don't know whom they can trust," she'd told him, "and they could really use somebody in leadership in your house to stand up and say that we're not going to tolerate any of the prejudice going on out there inside our own walls. They need you, Horace. You can do some real good here."

So they've come down together to the Great Hall, where the group's leader, Helen Brown, is sitting on top of the High Table with her arms folded and her chin held high. "No notes?" asks Vicky—Helen usually comes pretty prepared with topics to guide the conversation.

"Please. It'll be enough just to try and make myself heard. The vigilantes who've been sitting in Azkaban since June—some of whom are some of the very people who founded this student group, by the way—just orchestrated a mass breakout. Dumbledore's the only one still stuck in there. Any hope I had of a structured agenda for today escaped with them."

They held an emergency meeting the night after the Prophet broke the story of the breakout, but Vicky suspects it may have done more harm than good for the vigilantes' reputations. Nobody here wants Voldemort to remain in power, but the group is pretty divided about whether the Ministry was right in apprehending the people who were singlehandedly responsible for turning over countless Death Eaters and saving so many Muggle and Muggle-born lives—whether they should have shown them leniency. And Vicky can't blame them.

On the one hand, you've got Helen, who just found out in June that her best friend, Meredith McKinnon, was killed by Death Eaters last year not because her sister was a Hit Wizard (as previously believed) but because that sister was a member of the Order of the Phoenix. As far as Helen is concerned, Marlene and Meredith were martyrs—singled out for fighting the good fight and by association—and their deaths would be in vain if the wizarding world sat down and allowed Marlene's allies to go to Azkaban or, now that they've broken out, be sentenced to death if caught.

Helen's not the only one who feels that way: some of the Slytherins who were also friends with Meredith are in the same boat, and so are most of the Muggle-borns and even some of the half- and pure-bloods in the group. But almost half their number feel that the vigilantes should have been focusing their efforts on reforming the legal system and providing funding and support to the Ministry, who could have fought the Death Eaters with much more legitimacy.

When the news broke months ago, just before the mass Azkaban sentencing, that the Minister at the time had in fact been embezzling foreign aid meant to help in the war, it only divided War Stories further. Some of their number took it as a sign that the vigilantes were right not to trust the government. Others believed that, while vigilantism was never the answer, it's the fault of the Ministry that the Order of the Phoenix was formed in the first place—that the entire system is corrupt beyond repair, that there's no hope.

The whole point of War Stories is supposed to be to give people hope—to empower them to take action and make choices when they graduate that will help with the war effort. But now, Vicky's not so sure that much of anything will help with the war effort. If the Ministry is focusing its attention on locking up some of the only people who ever made a difference—if the country has been gripped by terror for a decade now with no end in sight—

It makes her sympathize with Minerva—better understand what motivated her to do the things she did that she kept secret from Vicky for so long—but it also makes her want to find her and shake her and demand to know what she was thinking, putting herself at risk of imprisonment and death to try and help a society that doesn't want her help. At a certain point, isn't it better to give up, to wait out the storm with the people you love and try not to get caught in the crossfire? Wouldn't the world be a better place if Minerva were safe in it?

As it turns out, Helen is right: she has no need for an agenda—but not for the reason that she thinks. It's only five minutes into the meeting when Marshall Fawley, in a manner that Vicky finds entirely unnecessarily dramatic, storms into the Great Hall brandishing a copy of what looks like a magazine. "You all need to shut up and look at this," he announces, jogging up to the High Table and thrusting the thing into Helen's hands.

"The Quibbler? Really, Marshall? Everyone knows that the Quibbler is—"

"Page seven," says Marshall breathlessly.

Helen flips to page seven. She stares at it for a long moment; about six different emotions cross her face in the span of ten seconds, and Vicky wonders what exactly is in that paper that's got her so—

"You-Know-Who is dead," Helen says. "According to this, he's been dead for over four months."

She pulls out her wand and mutters something; the centerfold blows up to about triple its original size, and she holds it up for everyone to see. There's an article that begins in a column on the righthand side of the page, but the majority of the thing is taken up by a glossy photo of a corpse sprawled across the front steps of Gringotts. The thing is unmistakably Lord Voldemort—the translucent skin, the slits for nostrils, the unseeing red eyes—and affixed to the front of the building above the entryway to the building is a large black banner that declares, LORD VOLDEMORT | TOM RIDDLE: D. 11 JUNE 1982. There are people hovering on either side of the body, but no one seems to want to get too close; Vicky can see them raising their hands to cover their mouths as they whisper to one another.

"This says that the Prophet is refusing to report on it," says Marshall, "but whoever tried to submit this image to the Prophet started sending it around to other outlets instead, and, well, the Quibbler picked it up. The author alleges that there are accounts of eyewitnesses later claiming not to remember having seen it, including the person who took the photograph—that the Ministry is using Memory Charms on everybody they can track down who knows the body is there. But the thing is, it's supposedly still there. They think they used a Permanent Sticking Charm or something on the body and the banner."

Murmurs break out across the hall. Scowling, Helen says, "If it's still there, then why can't they find anybody who remembers it?"

"They're not letting anybody into Diagon Alley, apparently. That part, at least, is in the Prophet—it mentioned this morning that they've blocked it from Apparition and sealed off all the fireplaces. The Prophet said it's because somebody with spattergroit was traced to having been there just before getting diagnosed—that it's a security measure—but the Quibbler isn't buying it, and neither am I."

"Yeah, but the Quibbler is trash, and everybody knows it," contends Lloyd Yetis, a half-blood from Ravenclaw. "Who's to say that this isn't just another one of Xenophilius Lovegood's crackpot theories?"

"I guess we'll find out when Diagon Alley reopens and they've taken a big chunk out of its stairs and façade," says Elmira Antwork, smirking.

"Yeah, but why would the Ministry be Obliviating people who've seen it?" another student chimes in. "And if You-Know-Who has been dead for that long, why haven't we heard about it before now? Why hasn't anything gotten better?"

Rumors fly for the next hour, but Helen and Vicky seem to come to the same conclusion: if the Ministry is covering up news like that, then the Ministry and the Death Eaters are working together. More than anything, she just wants to see Minerva—needs to see Minerva.

Just a few more days, she tells herself. She just needs to get through the next few days, and then Minerva will explain everything.

She shows up at the agreed-upon rendezvous point on Sunday, but to her disappointment, Minerva isn't there to greet her—it's Kreacher again, who uses some sort of house-elf magic to confirm that she's alone before Mad-Eye Moody and Sirius Black reveal themselves. Moody and Black are Minerva's Secret-Keepers, they tell her—Vicky can only see her if they share Minerva's location with her. Moody says she's living at the old Black family home—but when she tries to ask about everybody else in the Order, whether Moody and Black and the rest of them are with Minerva there, they're unable to answer. Vicky wonders whether Fidelius Charms still work on somebody who's figured out the secret—apparently, she's about to find out.

But when she Apparates to number twelve, Grimmauld Place, the only person she can see there is the one person she cares about—the one she's been aching for all this time. "Minerva," says Vicky in a choked voice.

And then they're embracing, and Vicky is sobbing into her partner's shoulder. "I have been so worried about you," she cries, actually stamping her foot a couple of times in frustration. "How could you do this, Minerva? How could you do these things and keep this secret without telling me?"

"I'm sorry. I—I was trying to protect you."

"Protect me? At what cost? You could have been killed without me ever knowing why. You could have gotten the Dementor's Kiss. You could have—"

"I know," Minerva sighs. When Vicky pulls back, Minerva looks anguished. "Dumbledore asked for my help when he first started the Order—before it was even called the Order, before we were working with the kids—and I had to do it, Vick. I just didn't want you to…"

"Yeah, that's another thing," says Vicky. "It's not just that you should have told me what you were doing. If you wanted to join this organization, we should have made that decision together. It affects both of us."

"Vicky, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't…"

Vicky purses her lips and shoves her hands in her cloak pockets. "I'm sorry about Azkaban. That must have been awful for you."

"It's all right. When I started this, I knew the risks."

"But I didn't," Vicky retorts before she can stop herself.

Minerva looks away. "But you didn't."

They're speaking in hushed voices, but in an instant, Vicky begins to hear shrieking coming from somewhere behind Minerva, deeper in the entrance hall. "SCOURGE OF THE HOUSE OF MY FATHERS! TRAITORS! IMPURE DEMONS! IF ONLY—"

"Sorry about her," says Minerva rather matter-of-factly. "She just—I know you can't hear it, but she's just been woken up. Let's go into the bedroom."

"Who is that? What is that?"

"Black's mum. She passed away a few months ago, but she lives on through her portrait."

"Some lady," Vicky chortles.

Minerva's room is ornately decorated and only slightly gone to seed; the curtains are a little moth-eaten and vibrating minutely. She perches on the edge of the far bed, and after a pause, Vicky settles in beside her, rubbing her hands on her knees. "So what now?" she asks Minerva, feeling a little cranky. "Is this the part where you ask for my help to take down the Death Eaters?"

"Well… yes."

Vicky sighs. "It's not like I have much of a choice, is it?"

"You do have a choice." Minerva looks stunned. "You can back out right now, if you want."

"Minerva, as long as you're in this—as long as you can't come home—that means I'm in this, too. I'm not saying I'm glad you did this or that I don't wish you were safe at Hogwarts with me, but—I can't let you just waste away in this house while the people you fought so hard to save keep dying."

Minerva kisses her full on the mouth for a second before collapsing against Vicky. It's so like her: she puts up a tough front, but in Minerva's moments, Vicky wonders just how well she's holding it all together. "Did the Prophet run the story? About Voldemort dying?"

Vicky flinches. "No, but the Quibbler did. I don't know how many people know about it, but the War Stories kids are pretty divided about whether it's true. You know what this means, don't you? If You-Know-Who has been dead all this time, then the Ministry—"

"The Death Eaters are in control of the Ministry," says Minerva. "Lucius Malfoy is a Death Eater, and so, we suspect, are a number of his support staff and others in instrumental positions. For all intents and purposes, the Ministry of Magic and the Death Eaters are one organization."

"And he's really dead? The Death Eaters are really—governing themselves?"

"Yes. Lily Potter killed him. The body is real—I've seen it up close."

"The Ministry is trying to cover it up," Vicky tells her. "We think they've been Obliviating everybody who's seen it. Diagon Alley has been closed temporarily."

"Of course it has," Minerva sighs. "Look, Vicky… I'm sorry about this. I really am. But I can't do anything from here—nobody from the old crowd can do anything—without outside help."

"Right," says Vicky. "Right." She can't even begin to express how much she doesn't want to do any of this—but it's Minerva, and Vicky would give anything for Minerva. "Just tell me what you need me to do."