Previously in the Darklyverse: The Order began kidnapping Ministry officials sent to do Death Eaters' bidding in Canada. Sirius proposed to Narcissa that she help capture Death Eaters without killing them to assist the Order. Mistrust grew between delegates Lily and Reg and the Canadian Ministry.

xx

January 30th, 1983: Lily Potter

"I don't like it," says Lily.

She's sitting in her living room with Alice and Sirius, the latter of whom just got back from seeing Narcissa at Andromeda and Ted's house. (Lily assumes, of course, that this is after Sirius checked in with Remus, who's watching the Aurors they've taken prisoner in their flat.) Neville is with Frank today, while Harry is occupied playing with blocks in the kids' room. Lily and Alice share a two-bedroom house, which means they've each got a single bed in the master bedroom and Harry and Neville share the other when Neville is here. It's a little weird—reminds Lily of the dormitory back at Hogwarts, only all three of her other roommates are dead now—but she has to say, she likes sharing a room with Alice, just like she liked sharing with Harry at Grimmauld Place. It would be much, much too quiet and too sad to have a room all to herself without James in it.

"Taking all the Death Eaters prisoner?" says Alice with a frown. "We don't exactly have room for that. Everybody's flats and houses are practically full to capacity with kidnapped Ministry officials already."

"Just hear me out," says Sirius levelly. "We've got two problems, right? We've got to figure out how to capture them—what Narcissa needs to do to get them to us—and we've got to figure out where to put them. If we make two task forces—I was thinking one group could grab some land in the middle of remote Canada and make it Unplottable and all that—give us a bigger place to put everyone we've taken in—and the other could work on finding or creating a spell to basically Stupefy everyone except the caster within a certain radius, so that Narcissa can use it to incapacitate all the Death Eaters at a meeting and then Apparate them somewhere near, but not within, the Unplottable, Apparition-proof place. We should be able to take it from there."

But Lily's not so sure. "If we can't find a spell to do it, it could take months to develop one like that. And how are we supposed to—to build a prison in the wilderness? I know you two and Remus are good at Transfiguration, but James was the one who…"

She doesn't finish her thought. It's too hard still sometimes to talk about James. Sirius's eyes soften, and Alice reaches over to rub Lily soothingly on the knee as she says, "Well, we've got McGonagall, haven't we? We couldn't ask for anybody better to handle building construction."

"I know it's not perfect," says Sirius. "Believe me, I know that. If it were up to me, we'd assassinate the lot of them—" Alice frowns at this but doesn't protest "—but Narcissa's not willing to do it, so we needed to find a way that we could actually convince her to help us. This was the best she and I could come up with."

Lily tears her eyes away from Sirius to look at Alice, who is the absolute picture of war-worn worry. Lily twists her lips; Alice shrugs.

"Okay," Lily acquiesces. "Okay. But we need to get on this now—like, today. Every day that passes before we pull this off is a day that more people—Brits, Canadians, Muggles—are dying."

"We should start," says Alice, "by getting everyone in the Order on board with this so that we can divide into teams as soon as possible. Sirius, you and Sturgis have the most spell-writing experience from working on the curse-identification orb. Can you two spearhead that team? Lily and I can investigate Unplottability, anti-Apparition spells, Muggle-Repelling Charms…"

"McGonagall and Remus can lead the prison construction effort," adds Sirius, "and Reg…"

There's an awkward pause. Reg may be one of the leaders of the Order, but everybody knows that he isn't all that talented at magic.

Lily suggests, "Can we ask him to find us a location somewhere to use as a base? He might also be willing to, you know, project manage—keep everybody on task, make sure everybody knows what they need to be working on."

"Okay," says Sirius. "This is good. This is fine. We can do this."

He sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as he is Lily or Alice, which doesn't instill a whole lot of confidence in Lily, but what else are they supposed to do? It's like Sirius said: they can't make Narcissa do anything she doesn't want to do. The Order's ability to stop the Death Eaters from here in Canada is limited.

It takes a couple of hours for Alice and Sirius to make the rounds to everyone in the Order while Lily stays home with Harry. She suspects he can tell she's acting tense, but he's a little too young to ask outright what's wrong, for which she's grateful. How is she supposed to talk to her two-year-old son about how it feels to carry the weight of a war on her shoulders?

At least Lily and Alice aren't housing any British soldiers here. One thing the Order could easily agree on was not to saddle any of the households that have children with prisoners.

When Alice returns, she's got a bag slung over her shoulder filled with books that she starts to pile onto the kitchen table. Lily leaves Harry to his coloring to join her. Alice says, "I stopped by the wizarding library and picked up everything I could find that might have spells we can use on the land Reg secures. He's happy to research locations and project manage everything, by the way."

"Great. Do we know yet who all is working on what?"

"The Weasleys, the Tonkses, Moody, Agatha, and Mundungus all agreed to help McGonagall and Remus," says Alice, "and Kingsley, Frank, and Dirk all volunteered to help with spelling."

"Wait a second, Dirk offered to help? I thought he wanted to stay far away from everything Order-related."

Alice shrugs. "It's not like he'll be in the middle of the fighting, will he? Anyway, I think he's starting to realize that he can still contribute without being…"

"Rash like us," finishes Lily. "Yeah, but it still surprises me a little. I mean, if Canada catches any of us at literally anything we're doing…"

"That raises another one of those long-term questions, though, doesn't it? We don't exactly have a plan for what to do with all these prisoners. We can't just hide them all from every government forever. We can't give them back to Britain if we don't want them under the Death Eaters' control, and we can't turn them over to Canada if we want them to live."

"One problem at a time," Lily sighs. "The first thing is getting Britain out from Death Eater rule, and the first step to doing that is… well, to be frank, kidnapping the lot of them and dealing with the repercussions later."

"We'd better get started," says Alice. "We've got a lot of work to do."

xx

Lily and Reg's next meeting with the Canadian Ministry is the following morning. Reg comes over an hour early to catch up over tea while Alice wrangles Harry in the kids' room. "I've pinned down some land we can use," he tells her solemnly, "and McGonagall's team have constructed a rudimentary building there, but we're talking really rudimentary—like, it's one big room and a couple of bathrooms, basically. Where are you and Alice at with fortifying the building?"

"We're as far as we can be when we've only been practicing the spells for a day," Lily sighs, "but give us a building, and we can fortify it. To practice, we've already made this house Unplottable and put a temporary anti-Apparition spell on it last night, which we thought would be the two most important pieces to learn this early."

"Do we have time to Apparate out there and do the same to McGonagall's building? We should really, really transport everyone over there before we go to this meeting in case things go south for us."

So Reg stays behind to watch Harry while Lily and Alice Disapparate for the coordinates he shares with them. He's not kidding that the building is rudimentary: Lily wouldn't be surprised if magic is the only thing preventing it from falling entirely apart. The wood isn't rotted or anything, but it's basically just a giant wooden shack furnished with nothing but a few chamber pots. "We'll have to set up some proper plumbing in here, and soon," Alice remarks. "With the number of prisoners we're holding, even before you add on Narcissa's Death Eaters, this place is going to smell awfully foul awfully fast if we don't give people anyplace to shower."

"Never mind that. Do we set up the anti-Apparition now or after everyone's Stupefied and moved the people we've captured? We need to be able to get them inside, obviously."

Alice shrugs. "After, I think. I know you've got a meeting to get to, but the Stunners should last long enough for me to get the wards up before anybody wakes. I'll start sending out Patronuses with the coordinates."

"Work quickly," says Lily. "We don't know what the Canadians are going to throw at me and Reg in this meeting."

She's nervous about it, she's not going to lie: there's a lot going on that they're hiding from Canada right now, and the Canadians are probably hiding just as much from the Order. Sure enough, the first thing out of Minister Barlow's mouth at the start of the meeting is, "All of you know that we're coming up on almost a week now of drastically reduced nighttime attacks. This has freed up our people to be more aggressive on British land—but if it seems too good to be true, that's probably because it is. We received a letter from Malfoy last night threatening to escalate the violence if we continue to conceal from the public the true number of British witches and wizards we've killed or taken captive."

"We're not concealing anything," protests Tremblay. "They're the ones who've been lying low. What they've been plotting instead of attacking us—"

"That's the thing," says Barlow. "I don't think they have been lying low. I think Britain has been sending just as many people over here to fight during their working hours as they were when we first declared war, and I think something—or someone—has somehow been intercepting them."

Don't look at Reg, Lily tells herself firmly. If she looks at Reg, she's going to give away in her face exactly what the Order has been up to—that they're the ones responsible for the interception Barlow is talking about. It's not like anyone in this room can't put the pieces together on their own, but if she confirms it—

"Our British liaisons wouldn't happen to know anything about that," Barlow goes on, looking directly at Lily, "would you?"

She allows herself a glance at Reg, who widens his eyes and raises his eyebrows. Does she lie? She can't lie, not if she doesn't want to dig herself into a hole that she won't be able to get out of when the Order inevitably gets caught harboring prisoners behind Canada's back. But how does she look Barlow in the face and tell the truth?

Reg solves her dilemma for her. "We've been stationing ourselves in key positions overnight to guard those of you we believe are most at risk. We're protected by asylum, so there's nothing anyone from Britain can do to hurt us if we're there when they come for you."

Barlow raises an eyebrow. "And the missing Brits?"

"We have them," says Lily evasively.

"You have them where, exactly?"

"Well, we couldn't just hand them over, could we?" she protests. "None of these people are Death Eaters. They're British Ministry officials who got dragged into a war they didn't want, and if we turned them over to you—"

"I see," says Barlow thinly. "You trust us enough to ask us to house and feed and free you, but not enough to believe we would treat anyone we captured humanely—not enough not to interfere in a war that, frankly, no one asked you to fight in."

"This was already our war," fumes Lily. Reg is stamping on her foot, but she doesn't care. "Some of our best friends—my husband, Reg's wife—are dead because of this war. One of those people, Emmeline Vance—her parents were killed by Death Eaters. We gave up our whole lives for this war—"

"Don't you see, Lily?" Tremblay pleads. "No one asked you to do that. Your government didn't ask, and we certainly didn't—"

"Then why invite us to these meetings at all? Why give us asylum? Why bring us here only to treat us like we're…?"

Barlow closes her eyes and exhales through her nose. "We appreciate the Canadian lives you've probably saved by defending us at night, but you need to hand over the Brits you've taken prisoner for us to decide what to do with them."

Lily and Reg look at each other again as Reg says, "And if we don't?"

Lily's attention is so focused on Barlow and Tremblay that she almost, almost doesn't notice the Investigator, Malcolm Gere, who gingerly pulls his wand from his pocket and, presumably, aims it at them under the table. "Reg—"

She pulls her own wand out of her pocket, but before she can Disapparate, it goes flying out of her hand and into Gere's. This is it, she's thinking—they're going to be imprisoned as war criminals, and it's all going to go to hell—but then Reg grips her wrist firmly in his weak hand, takes out his wand with the other, and Side-Along-Apparates her out of there.

They end up in the woods; Lily can see their ramshackle little prison in the distance. "Oh my god," she croaks, stumbling on her feet. "Oh my god."

Reg steadies her. "I thought it would be safer to come here than to go to the home of anybody in the Order. You think everybody's made it here by now? Did we give them enough lead time?"

"I hope so. Will anyone in the Canadian Ministry be able to trace us here?"

"I don't think so. No one outside the Order knows that we're doing this, let alone our location. Well, I guess Narcissa knows, but…"

It's all going to come down to Narcissa, Lily realizes, even more so now that the Order's going to have to go back into hiding. They've got nowhere to go, and their only hope of this war ending hinges on the wife of the Death Eater running Wizarding Britain.

She hopes they can trust Narcissa. She really, really hopes they can.