Emma rolled her eyes as the boys squabbled over wrapping paper. There wasn't much point in reminding the twins that their mother would be furious if they gave Ron firewhiskey. In fact, it would probably just encourage them. Instead, she focused on the report she was finishing before she went with them to Hogsmeade.

They'd been lucky she had the day off work, both at the Ministry and with the Order. Fred didn't realize just how lucky he was on that count, because she still hadn't found the right time to tell him that she was effectively spying for the Order.

"Spying" made her sound far more involved and important than she felt, but then, if she found herself too much more involved or important she would have to tell Fred. Or at least tell him something, some part of what was happening.

"Right," Fred said, and Emma jumped slightly, nearly ripping the roll of parchment she was leafing through. "How does it look?"

Emma glanced up at the parcel he held up for her consideration and fought the urge to laugh.

Floppy was the best descriptor for it, and he would be lucky if the wrapping lasted the journey to Hogsmeade, much less all the way to Ron.

"Love, that's terrible," she said with a small smile. "Try actually using the Spell-o-tape, yes?"

He made a slightly indignant, slightly bewildered sound and unwrapped the gift, beginning afresh. Emma watched him work for a moment before turning back to her report.

Something very uncomfortable was happening at work, and Emma wasn't certain, but she thought that Snape had something to do with it. There were several disagreeable Ministry workers who were beginning to watch her in the corridors, and she'd seen one of them talking to Umbridge quietly in the lift, both of them stopping when Emma approached.

His name was Yaxley, and while Emma hadn't looked into the matter, she was fairly certain that he was a Death Eater. She'd been looking for an opportunity to talk to Severus Snape about the matter, whether or not it was his doing, because he was the only person who would know for certain what was wanted with her. She certainly hoped it wasn't something about the forged papers she switched out for Dumbledore, because if Dumbledore had her take such a risk it was obviously important that she not be Muggleborn.

It didn't take too much imagination to guess why.

"What's so important in that report, anyway?" George asked as he struggled with the tape. "Haven't you read it about three times? What's it all about?"

"Nothing you'd care about," she said honestly, coaxing the parchment into a neat roll again and re-sealing it for interdepartmental passage. "Just some very boring memos about legislation that might not even be passed."

Legislation she hoped wouldn't be passed. The things it suggested about the rights of humanoid magical creatures made her skin crawl. She knew none of it was true, at least where werewolves were concerned, but in an environment of paranoia people saw demons everywhere. They lived in just the right climate where Emma wasn't sure what would happen, and her concern with the matter was more than just sympathy for humanoid magical creatures like Remus and their loved ones – like Tonks – but also the knowledge that the next step would be the dehumanizing of Muggles and Muggleborns in paranoia-driven legislation. She'd seen drafts of such legislation in Umbridge's papers when giving a departmental review in the sickeningly pink office, and Emma was keeping a very close eye on everything coming out of the Magical Creatures department as a result.

"What about now?" Fred asked in his most childish voice, and Emma looked up at the parcel once more.

He'd made an improvement, but she was still worried that he'd done a rather haphazard job. It would probably make the journey, though, and was it really worth putting him through the whole process again? She dipped her quill in the nearest inkwell and pursed her lips thoughtfully. If she asked him to do it again, she ran the risk of his losing all patience and simply wrapping the whole thing in tape.

As it was only going to get less attractive with further attempts, Emma nodded, and looked down at the sealed scroll, carefully addressing it to the next department head in line, blowing it dry before placing it on top of her work bag.

"Done, then?" George asked, doing exactly what she'd expected Fred to do next, which was simply taping the entire package, regardless of whether or not the tape was doing any good. She raised an eyebrow at the eyesore but decided to let it go before she wasted all day trying to get them to do the thing properly.

Emma stood, smoothing her skirt and nodding that she was, indeed, finished. She crossed to the sofa, where they were making a weak attempt to deal with the mess they'd made in their labor.

"Are we meeting anyone else in your family?" she asked. "Arthur didn't get work off, did he?"

They shook their heads.

A wizard's coming-of-age was a very important moment. Ron would be given a pocket watch, for example – a traditional seventeenth birthday gift. Emma actually wasn't sure what the traditional gift was for a girl who'd come of age, but she supposed she'd find out next year, when Ginny's birthday came round.

"Let me just sort out my hair, then," she said happily, "and I reckon we can go."

She ducked into her bedroom and glanced at the mirror, flicking a few strands of hair out of her eyes and smoothing some stray hairs back into place. It wasn't terrible, of course, and Ron wouldn't mind, but if Emma was going to be seen in public she'd rather not look like she'd just rolled out of bed. Better safe than sorry.

Emma pulled her cloak on as she dashed back out to the kitchen, where the twins were arguing over who'd done a better wrapping job. She had just opened her mouth to tell them off when an owl began to tap impatiently at the windowpane. George tossed his taped-up parcel on the counter and hurried to let it in.

"For you, Em," he said, holding out the letter. "Hogwarts seal."

Emma frowned, snatching it out of his hand, glancing briefly at the spiky writing on the front before tearing open the envelope. The emerald ink was short, concise, and slightly cryptic. She let her eyes graze the instructions from Snape and carefully translated it to the discussion she'd had with Kingsley when he gave her the scroll.

"Shit," she breathed, and the boys both looked at her like she'd grown a second head. Emma pulled the roll out of her bag and carefully tapped the seal, which fell off the parchment in a single piece, bouncing as it hit the counter. Emma smoothed out the roll and set the letter beside it, pondering how she could make the modifications on such short notice. The important thing is that it wasn't going through Umbridge or any known Death Eaters on the way through its path to activation.

Carefully, she ran her finger down the lines, looking for keywords she could shift, things she could replace without making the page look awkward. She found a word she could alter, tapped it with her wand, and watched the ink vanish from that spot.

"Are you altering that?" George asked, hurrying forward, but Emma looked up with a glare to stop him in his tracks.

"If you don't shut up and leave me alone," she said coldly, "I will alter your memory. Are we clear?"

Fred and George exchanged nervous looks as she turned back to the page, carefully tapping the letters she needed to copy, seeing them appear in the blank space. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps because they recognized that she was doing something very important, the twins remained utterly silent as she worked through the report, shifting half a dozen other words to change the meaning of the legislation.

Instead of restricting freedoms, it now guaranteed them in a subtle way. To get another act pushed through, it would take Umbridge months, maybe even a year if they played their cards right, and it was very hard to undo freedoms once they were done.

Legally, that is.

Once freedoms were taken, however, it was nearly impossible to restore them again without almost revolutionary force, and it was better if it never came to that.

With a careful hand, Emma gently rerolled the parchment and reattached the seal so that the address on the outside lined up correctly. She then licked her lips and asked Fred to use one of the shop owls to send it back to the Ministry. While he was doing that, she turned over Severus Snape's letter and wrote a swift reply.

Done as ordered. Two weeks at most. Might have bought six to twelve months.

She folded the letter, sealed it, and sent it back to Hogwarts.

After taking a deep breath and settling herself again, Emma looked up to find both twins staring at her once, both looking decidedly uneasy.

"What?" she said as innocently as possible.

"Order work?" Fred asked gently.

"Yes," she said, pursing her lips. "It's not on your father's chain of approval, and Kingsley had to report on the contents. I was the only person to make the changes."

"I thought you said it wasn't likely to be passed," George said slowly.

"Now it has every chance of being passed, and a good thing, too," she said, adjusting her cloak and putting away her quill.

Emma was about to suggest that they get a move on, but she noticed that they were looking at her like a couple of gaping fish.

"What?" she said again, this time slightly irritated.

"Who are you and what have you done with my wife?" Fred said nervously.

"What are you talking about?"

"He's talking about how you've gone all Muggle spy film," George said with a quirked eyebrow. "Hardly a word about what you're doing, why you're doing it, threatening me when ask questions. It's not like you, Emma."

It might have been a moment of truth, standing there, being confronted on her actions. Had her behaviors changed so drastically? Was it a bad thing? After all, as Snape had suggested, bravery without a bit of secrecy and subtlety would get her nowhere by dead. But keeping secrets from Fred and George, was that really her? Was it wise?

Both pairs of nearly-identical eyes stared at her with such concern that for a moment she wanted to break down and tell them everything, but Emma took a deep breath and got a hold on herself.

"It's really nothing," she said calmly. "I've just decided I don't like this dress. D'you mind if I take a few minutes and change?"

They exchanged nervous glances, but just as George was saying that Ron would only be just waking up, anyway, Emma was already pushing her way into the bedroom, pulling off her cloak, pulling off her dress. She opened the doors of the closet when the door to the bedroom opened a little behind her.

"Well, that's unfair," Fred said, smiling weakly as she faced him. "I can't talk to you when you look like that. I can't think of words."

Emma fought the urge to roll her eyes, knowing that he would take such an act the wrong way with everything that had just happened. Instead, she quickly and silently pulled on a soft blue dress and ran her fingers through her hair.

"Let's sit," he said, sitting down at the foot of the bed. Emma did as directed, her heart pounding a little more than she would have liked. She'd done nothing wrong, nothing he wasn't doing from time to time. "Emma, I'm getting the sense that there's something you're not telling me, and I no longer think it has anything to do with your matchmaking plans." She licked her lips, planning to tell him nothing. Finally, though, he said, "Emma, I'm worried about you."

No, the moment of truth had finally come, but there were degrees in everything. She pursed her lips looking up at him, her eyes scanning the freckles on the bridge of his nose.

"You should worry," she said softly. "It's a war. But you don't need to worry more about me than anyone else in your family. If anything, worry about Ron. He's the one at the eye of the storm."

Fred's lips twisted into a surprisingly bitter grin and he said, "One thing about growing up in a family as big as mine, Emma, is that you learn that you have an unlimited capacity to worry about everyone you care about in excess. I worry about Ron constantly, have done since first year. And I worry about Harry, because he's basically family, and Hermione, and Lee. But you, you're my wife, and I love you, and I worry about you more than I worry about my own mother, or about my own life." Emma shivered, glancing at the bedroom door.

"There are things you don't tell me as well," she said, whispering, fairly certain that George was pressing his ear to the door. "How many times have you left in the middle of the night for some dangerous mission, back before dawn, never waking me, never saying a word?" Fred's eyes darkened and he tried to look away, but she put her hand on his chin and he stopped turning.

"Emma, it's a war."

"You think I don't know that?" she said darkly. "You think I don't know that every time I do what Mad-Eye or Kingsley or Snape or Tonks or Dumbledore asks of me that I'm putting my life on the line?"

"Then why do you do it?" he asked, his voice slightly strained.

"Why do you?" she almost screamed, jumping to her feet and crossing to the window. He frowned at her, brow furrowed with confusion and frustration. Why couldn't he just understand! "Fred, I can't live in a box. I'm not made of glass. You want to fight this war because it's the right thing to do. So do I. Can't we just make a deal, no questions we don't want the answers to, and not to ask the other to do something we aren't willing to do ourselves?"

She watched his throat shift as he swallowed, taking in her words, weighing his options, perhaps. Finally, he licked his lips and said, "Emma, I'm afraid."

"So am I," she whispered back from across the room, her voice sounding small in the stillness.

"So," he said, his voice quaking, "what…what do we do?"

Why was she the one who had to come up with all of the answers? How was it her job to take care of both of them? Hadn't he promised to take care of her?

He tried that, she reminded herself. This was why they'd gotten to this point in the first place. She found she didn't really want to be taken care of, even by Fred. She wanted to be able to stand on her own two feet. Especially because…because if something happened to him, she didn't want to crumble. She needed to know that if he were gone, she would be okay.

"We carry on," she said, raising her eyebrows, meeting his weary gaze, "as we have done. We fight as we've been fighting. And every night, we say what we can say, what we can hear, and we thank Merlin we're both alive."

He shivered, more of a twitch than anything, and Emma felt immensely guilty. So many things she hadn't told him. How could she tell him that she'd woken up every time he left and used the opportunity to practice the Animagus transformation Remus had given her the book for? How did she say that Snape was probably planning to use her for some particular project?

No, there were many things she would not tell him. Not unless she had to. After all, she didn't know where he and George went when they went on missions, either. Fair's fair.

"I don't like it," he said, standing and slowly crossing to her. "But I can't say I've got a right to complain. I certainly can't think of any better situation."

Emma nodded, looking up in his eyes, thinking how far they were now from the young, smitten teenagers sharing a first kiss. It seemed like worlds ago, whole lifetimes away from where they were, standing in their bedroom, so many secrets between them. She knew he didn't love her any less, and she certainly didn't love him any less, but everything was different.

He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her into a hug. She let her arms snake around his neck and rested her chin on his shoulder. She closed her eyes, visualizing the animal that was beginning to form in the mirror when she practiced. A few more sessions and she would have full ability to transform at will. She decided to do as Sirius and his friends had done, in present climate, and not tell the Ministry, not register her form.

Which she was almost certain would be an otter.

"I love you," Fred whispered.

"Love you too," Emma muttered into his neck, feeling one of his hands move to smooth her hair.

Just as she thought maybe she would kiss his neck, the door to their bedroom burst open and they jolted apart, startled by George's unusual behavior of entering their room without knocking. To Emma's surprise, he looked actually afraid.

"George, what is it?" she asked.

"Letter from Mum," he said, voice strained. "We need to go now."

"Go where?" Fred asked, already pulling out his wand like he was getting ready for battle. Emma was pulling on her cloak.

"Hogwarts. Ron's in a bad way."