Previously in the Darklyverse: Agatha got into contact with Frank about secretly joining the resistance from her Auror post in Britain. Death Eater Pyrites, who became Head Auror after Lucius Malfoy was appointed Minister, tasked the Aurors with working against the Canadians.

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January 8th, 1983: Agatha Savage

It's been five days since Agatha heard from Longbottom and found out that the entire Order of the Phoenix has been given political asylum in Canada.

It's taken a lot longer than she would have hoped for this news—and what Agatha already knew about Death Eaters controlling the Ministry—to leak out around Wizarding Britain. Agatha did what she could to circulate the Vancouver newspaper that Longbottom sent her, but that wasn't much: dissenting from the Ministry line at work could easily get Agatha fired—or imprisoned or murdered, if she's being honest with herself, now that Death Eaters control the Ministry. She showed the thing to Reaney, who believed her, and she duplicated it so that she could mail it around anonymously to some key places like the Prophet that she'd hoped would spread it more widely. She received no response—unsurprisingly, since she sent the thing anonymously—but she'd hoped that word would leak back to her, whether in a newspaper or just in gossip, that somebody had picked up the story and started to distribute it. They hadn't.

"I'm not surprised. We know the Ministry is leaning on the Prophet, for one thing," Longbottom tells her the next time he Flooes in. It's the second time she's spoken to him face-to-face since she sent him that Patronus. The first time his face appeared, unannounced, in her fireplace, she just about had a heart attack. He'd implied in his return letter that he might arrange a meeting soon, but she'd been expecting some advance notice, not for him to interrupt her bedtime cross-stitching at one o'clock in the morning by hollering at her to come out of her bedroom and into the living room. He didn't mention during that conversation when he'd be back, but she'd guaranteed him that she's always home alone and awake between the hours of ten and midnight, for the next time he was able to come calling, so his appearance tonight wasn't such a shock.

"Even so," Agatha argues, "aren't there any—you know—conscientious dissenters at the Prophet? Isn't there somebody who would see news like that and feel compelled to share it?"

"Maybe they're just doing the same thing you're doing with the Aurors." Longbottom has a point here: Agatha's done what she can to spread whispers, but she hasn't done anything that would immediately jeopardize her job. "I'll come back in a couple of days to check in on what they've got you doing, by the way: Canada officially contacted Britain yesterday to inform them that they've given us asylum. I know right now they have all hands on deck trying to hunt us down, and there won't be much point in that anymore now that Britain's going to know exactly where we are."

"They told Britain where you are? Doesn't that mean that Death Eaters can just Apparate to Canada and murder you all?"

"Well, asylum is magically binding." He inhales a mouthful of soot here and spits it out, hacking, before he continues, "It doesn't stop them from being able to find us or interact with us, but it does mean that they can't Side-Along-Apparate us back to Britain or cast any spell on us that will result in harm or death."

"Interesting. So you're pretty much immune to Avada Kedavra? I thought there were no known survivors of that curse."

"Well, there are no known survivors where there wasn't older magic blocking the spell's effectiveness. Asylum is one example. Horcruxes are another—that's how Voldemort lived when Dorcas Meadowes tried to kill him."

"Horc-what? And who's Dorcas Meadowes?"

Longbottom shakes his head. "Never mind. She used to be in the Order, and Horcruxes were the thing Voldemort made in order to keep himself immortal—some of us had to destroy them all before Lily could kill him. Look, my point is, we're safe as long as we don't leave Canada. It's why I didn't Floo my whole body over here: if the rest of me is still over there, I should still be protected in case I had tried to contact you and you'd been lying in wait to try to murder me or something—not that I think you'd want to murder me, but—"

She shakes her head. "I get it. You can't trust anyone these days. I haven't even told Proudfoot about… any of this, not since I really started to investigate the state of things."

"That reminds me," says Longbottom. "If you're serious about this—about trying to help—then we should cast a Fidelius Charm to hide the fact that you're involved in the Order of the Phoenix. It'll take Lily about a week to brew the potion that goes with it, but if you Floo or Apparate over here, we can cast it after that. Alice offered to be your Secret-Keeper."

"And what exactly is it that I'm supposed to be doing to help again?"

He sighs. "We don't know yet, exactly. Canada seems intent on involving themselves in the war effort, but they're still figuring out what exactly they want to do, which means we're still figuring out what our position is in relation to theirs. In the meantime, just be careful, okay? It's not going to help anybody for you to get yourself locked up or killed."

"Yeah, I know. I'll keep my head down. Thanks, Longbottom."

"Call me Frank," he says, grinning. "If we're going to be doing highly illegal things together, we ought to be on a first-name basis."

"Right. Thanks, Frank."

When Frank leaves, the house feels empty—too empty. She wishes she could talk to Proudfoot or her sister or her mum about any of what she's been doing the last few weeks, but she knows she can't, not if she wants to make absolutely sure that Death Eaters don't come to kill her.

How did this become Agatha's life? She knew what she was signing up for when she decided to become an Auror, but she had no idea what was in store when she made the decision to go to Xenophilius Lovegood and investigate that photograph of You-Know-Who's corpse lying on the front steps of Gringotts. If she had known, would she have done it differently? Saved herself? Or would she have felt compelled to go through with her investigation anyway? She's a Ravenclaw, after all, and she usually can't help but go after the truth even when she has to risk everything to do it.

As it turns out, she doesn't have to keep a lid on the news that the Order has come out of hiding and moved to Canada for long. Pyrites calls an early-morning meeting on Monday and announces it himself—but with a spin on it that can only come from the Death Eaters.

He doesn't breathe a word of accusation that Death Eaters might have coopted the Ministry. As Agatha stands there with her knees shaking and sweat soaking her armpits, he says, "The Ministry isn't going to stand for this kind of interventionism, for Canada's insistence on interfering in our ability to carry out justice. Remember: they're providing asylum to people who broke two dozen laws and then busted themselves out of prison when we tried to hold them accountable for it. The Minister and I will be holding another press conference later today with our reply to this grave overreach after we relay it to Canada, but I wanted you to hear from me personally first how the Ministry will be responding: we're telling the Canadian Ministry that, if they don't return the criminals to us within the fortnight, we'll be executing Albus Dumbledore, the sole vigilante remaining in Azkaban."

Agatha hears a few gasps. Dumbledore enjoyed enough popularity before his imprisonment that most people still hold him in high esteem, even if they think his actions were misguided. But nobody speaks, not even to mutter to each other—they're probably afraid of getting fired if they show anything but support for this measure.

"In the meantime," continues Pyrites as matter-of-factly as if he hadn't just dropped a bomb on the whole room, "we'll be redirecting Auror efforts from finding where the vigilantes had gone into hiding—obviously we know where they are now, at least generally speaking—and onto tracking the movements of the vigilantes and Magical Law Enforcement officers in the Canadian Ministry. Now that they have asylum, there's nothing we can do to capture the vigilantes if and when we do find them, but we can still trace their movements—find out exactly how they and the Canadian Ministry intend to retaliate moving forward. Use your Stealth and Tracking training, people. This is all hands on deck. I have specific assignments for you if you'll bear with me here…"

She's hoping to be partnered with Proudfoot, but instead, Pyrites pairs Agatha off with Dawlish. She tries to hide her disappointment as she fights through the throng of Aurors to find him. It's not that she suspects Dawlish is a Death Eater or anything, but he's always been quick to toe whatever line his superiors present to him, and Agatha is sure that, if she tries to voice even the slightest hint of dissent about the Ministry's plans to execute Dumbledore, she'll be reported to Pyrites and fired by lunchtime.

She doesn't know whether she's relieved or horrified that Pyrites asks them to trail Canadian Ministry officials rather than vigilantes. She'll have to Floo to Frank's flat tonight, warn him that Aurors are going to be tailing everybody just as soon as they can find them—and to make sure that nobody in the Order discusses Agatha joining them anywhere that Aurors could overhear it, since she's not protected by a Fidelius Charm yet. She wonders how exactly the Fidelius Charm will work to hide the involvement of the few pairs of eyes the Order still has in Britain. If Order members are talking about, say, Augusta Longbottom, will they find themselves unable to speak when they're in the presence of somebody from the Auror Office, or will the Aurors just be unable to hear the conversation? What about if someone from Britain Flooes or Apparates over for a conversation?

The really, terrifyingly interesting part doesn't even occur to her until near the end of the workday. Daytime shifts in Britain correspond to the middle of the night through the morning here, depending on what part of Canada you're in; after a long night of breaking into the Canadian Ministry to look up home addresses and get familiar with the locations of popular wizarding haunts, Agatha and Dawlish are now tailing a pair of Investigators during their lunch break. The two have been working a case unrelated to the situation in Britain all morning, but first of the two, a woman named Aileen Cleary who's got a hunched posture and bright red highlights in her hair, is just digging into her egg salad sandwich when she offhandedly mentions the ultimatum the Canadian Ministry received from Death Eaters this morning.

Underneath their Invisibility Cloak, Agatha and Dawlish look at each other. For a second, Agatha finds herself wondering when exactly Death Eaters contacted Canadian officials, but then she realizes—

"Don't you mean the British government?" asks her coworker, Malcolm Gere, who's got sharp eyes and a lisp.

Cleary shrugs. "What's the difference? We all know they're functionally the same entity."

"According to the Order, they are," says Gere darkly.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

He shrugs. "It wouldn't be the first time the Brits have lied to us. Look what happened when we tried to give them aid—their Minister went and embezzled it."

"Yeah, but these guys aren't from their Ministry—not most of them, anyway, and the ones who were affiliated with it don't work there anymore. They're probably even more pissed at their Ministry than we are."

"Assuming they're not lying about having been to prison in the first place," Gere retorts. "Look, I'm not saying we know for sure, but I think it would be incredibly naive to assume good faith from these people. Can you believe Tremblay's even letting them in on strategy meetings? I don't like the looks of that Potter woman. I'm not a purist, but…"