Previously in the Darklyverse: During one of the Order's first new raids, Lily was hit with Sectumsempra and taken to the Canadian hospital Zoudiams, where she used to work.

xx

December 5th, 1982: Lily Potter

When Lily opens her eyes, she doesn't know what she'd been expecting. Honestly, she'd thought that that Death Eater's Sectumsempra was going to kill her and was vaguely wondering whether she'd get to see her parents and James and Marlene again on the other side. She realizes straightaway that she's still alive—the pain coursing throughout her entire body tells her as much—but instead of waking up to Grimmauld Place, perhaps with Sirius or Remus or Harry hovering over her, she finds that she's in a room at Zoudiams Hospital in Alberta, she's been handcuffed to her bed, and the only person sitting at her side is her old mentor, Healer Leanna Kelpis.

"You gave us quite the shock, Lily," says Leanna, "and I'm not just talking about the fact that you almost died on me."

"What's happening? Why am I here? Did anybody die? Are they taking me back to Azkaban? What—?"

"One question at a time," Leanna says. Her smile does not extend to her eyes. "We're not sure what exactly happened to you or who else you were with before—the house-elf who dropped you off just said you just got hit with some relatively new British spell, Sectumsempra? But we do know you probably would have died if you hadn't had a team of Healers working on you."

"It's a pity I was the one who got cursed," Lily mutters. Her throat feels like sandpaper. "I worked out a treatment for Sectumsempra years ago. If it had been anybody else, I would have been able to save them on my own without a terrible amount of trouble."

"What do you mean, that you were the one who got cursed? What on earth were you doing that landed you alone on your deathbed in the hospital? When you stopped showing up for work—"

"I was avoiding arrest," she starts to explain, but Leanna is too quick for her.

"Yeah, no shit, you were avoiding arrest. When we got worried and started looking into what had happened to you, I almost got laughed out of your Ministry for not having read the headlines of your newspaper."

"You looked into me?"

This time, Leanna's smile is real. "You think I was going to let my most promising new Healer vanish without a trace and not look into her?—though, let me tell you, your Fidelius Charms made it interesting trying to have a conversation with anybody in Britain about your whereabouts."

Lily grimaces. "So—then you know I'm a fugitive."

"Yes."

"And you haven't turned me in yet?"

Leanna's lips fall. "Before we could do anything else, we had to save your life. Now that we have…" She clears her throat. "I don't know a lot about the political situation in Britain—all anybody really knows is that your previous Minister embezzled a bunch of funds from us—but thanks to that embezzlement, the public isn't holding your Ministry in very high esteem these days. Your Minister and his support staff are still under investigation, but they're almost certainly going to be arrested by our Ministry as a result of that investigation."

"Skip to the part where I didn't wake up in prison," says Lily.

"There's—well, we can't let you leave, obviously—" Leanna indicates Lily's handcuffs "—but we haven't… exactly informed your Ministry that we've got you here, either. Your house-elf—"

"Kreacher," Lily supplies.

"Right. On behalf of your friends, Kreacher submitted petitions to our Ministry. We're supposed to detain you here until a decision is made about whether to accord you or your friends asylum."

"Asylum?"

"It means—"

"I know what it means. I just—I didn't realize that was even on the table."

"And it probably wouldn't have been if you hadn't come close enough to dying that you needed to be sent to a hospital. I don't think the other vigilantes had the first idea what they were supposed to do to save you on their own."

"There was a battle," says Lily. She tries to struggle into a sitting position, but it hurts too much, and anyway, the angle at which her wrists are handcuffed means she'd be forced forward in bed, unable to slump back against the headboard. "We'd been working on a spell to detect usages of Unforgivable Curses in Britain, and we followed it to a couple of Death Eaters. We couldn't save everyone—one of the Muggles had already died by the time we get there—do you know if anyone else got killed?"

Leanna purses her lips. "I took out a subscription to your newspaper the night you turned up here. The next day, it reported one death—a No-Maj."

"Did they say anything about vigilante involvement?"

"No. They just said the murder was suspected to be at the hands of Death Eaters. Look—Lily—I'm sorry I'm the only one you got to wake up to. I'm sure some of your friends would have been here if they hadn't…"

"Been facing certain capture and arrest," Lily agrees. "I'm glad it was you. Out of everyone here, I missed you the most."

Leanna reaches forward and lays a hand on top of Lily's. "I can't stay long—I've been popping in to visit you in between patients throughout my shift all day, now that we've been expecting you to wake up soon—but I was hoping I would catch you when you first woke."

"That's fine. Can you just—adjust the handcuffs so I can sit up? Lying here just feels…"

"Vulnerable. Yeah. I'll move them back a couple of posts."

"Thanks."

Lily's head is swimming. Even if Kreacher's petition is granted to her—and that seems like a long shot—there's still the fact that any Death Eater who finds out where she is could Apparate to her and kill her, political asylum be damned, without the protection of the Fidelius Charm that's been keeping her safe at Grimmauld Place. In the meantime, how's she supposed to communicate with the rest of the Order? If she never sees Harry again—

But she's getting ahead of herself. One step at a time, she reminds herself, and the first step is just—surviving her hospital stay.

She wishes somebody from the Order—Sirius or Remus or Alice—were here with her to fill her in on what the hell's going on back in Britain. "How long have I been out?" she asks when Leanna's done adjusting Lily's handcuffs and helping her sit upright.

"Almost three days now," says Leanna. "It's Sunday afternoon. Your house-elf—Kreacher, was it?—would have submitted your asylum petition on Friday morning, so it probably hasn't really started to go through the system yet because of the weekend."

"Do you have any idea how long it'll take?"

"Two weeks, maybe three? They doesn't know for sure, but that's the timeline our Ministry gave us, anyway." Leanna obviously knows what Lily is thinking because she adds, "I know it's going to be a horribly boring time for you, being stuck in this bed with nothing to do and nobody to talk to and no hands and no wand, but we'll do our best to keep you from going completely out of your mind. I'll come keep you company after my shifts, and we can keep the WWN turned on so you have something to listen to when you're not trying to sleep, if you'd like."

"That would be great, Leanna, thank you. Is there any chance that electricity works inside Zoudiams? It would be great to bring a cassette player in here so I can listen to books on tape."

"None of those words mean anything to me," Leanna deadpans, "and ekliticy doesn't work here, but I could probably ask one of our No-Maj-borns to charm the stuff you're looking for to work magically for you. I'll bug Beatrice about it today."

"I knew you were my favorite for a reason," says Lily, smiling as best as she can. "I have one more favor to ask, if you don't mind?"

"Sure."

"If you still have a Daily Prophet subscription, can you keep an eye on the headlines and keep me posted on any further deaths or disappearances?"

Leanna doesn't report back about anything mysterious that night or the next day—but on Tuesday afternoon, when she stops in during her lunch break, she tells Lily that there's been another rash of deaths. "It was a family of No-Majes—a single dad and three kids."

"No wizard deaths? No purebloods? No one from the Order?"

"Nope," says Leanna through a mouthful of steak.

This means one of two things: either nobody from the Order showed up to raid the Death Eaters responsible, or the Order did show up and got their arses handed to them. Lily suspects and hopes it's the former: presumably, if anybody in the Order got captured or mortally wounded, it would make front-page news. Besides, it makes sense that the Order would hold off on going on any more raids with their best Healer out of commission and trapped on another continent.

She feels like she's going out of her mind from a few short days without knowing for sure that Harry is safe—without being able to see him. Is this what it feels like for Alice, Frank, Andromeda, and Ted, being at Grimmauld Place without having their kids with them? God, Lily can't even imagine what it was like when they were in Azkaban. Their anxiety about Neville and Tonks has got to have been compounded ten times over in the presence of dementors.

For the first time, Lily feels like she's starting to get how bad it must have been for everyone who did four months in Azkaban to be cut off from all sources of information—and Lily's not even completely shut out from the news or trapped with dementors the way the rest of the Order was. If she ever sees them again, she vows, she'll try harder to be there for Alice, whom Lily knows she's been sort of shafting lately. Hell, she'll even try harder with Remus, with whom things have been—complicated—ever since Lily found out about Sirius's prank.

Sure, Lily was spending pretty much all her time with Remus and Sirius (and, of course, Harry)—but there was a strain hovering just below the surface of those relationships that the three of them really weren't dealing with. She'd seen the way they kept looking at her. Hell, she'd seen the way everybody in the Order kept looking at her, like she was fragile—like she'd fallen apart—like she couldn't be trusted with the most basic of strategies or information. And she'd sort of been proving them right, hadn't she? She'd allowed Alice to take over most of Lily's Potions responsibilities, and she'd taken a backseat while Sirius had taken the reins on promoting their assassinations plan, and she'd even occasionally skipped out on meetings when they got heated in favor of heading upstairs to watch Harry sleep.

Most of the house had chalked all of her behavior up to the breakdown she'd had in front of Severus. As far as she knows, the only other person Sirius and Remus clued in about the prank business was Alice.

But she doesn't have the luxury of shafting her Order responsibilities any longer, not now that she's trapped in Alberta and may never see Grimmauld Place again. If Lily's future really is in Canada, she's got to step up, because it may fall to her to advocate for asylum for the rest of the Order—and she'll need to be on her guard if the Death Eaters suss out her location and come calling. And if she's denied asylum—if they say they're handing her back over to the British Ministry—

Two more weeks, Lily tells herself—maybe three. She's got two or three weeks to collect herself and formulate plans of attack, and then—it'll be time to put those plans to the test.