March 22nd, 1982: Frank Longbottom

"Do you ever get the impression that the Order isn't telling us everything?" asks Kingsley.

It's lunchtime, and he, Frank, and Sturgis are in the heart of Muggle London, looking awfully out of place in their black robes and boots—though they've all at least had the good sense to shed their wizard's hats for the occasion. It's nice having Kingsley in the Order: he and Frank were friends in Ravenclaw at Hogwarts and still work in the Auror Office together to this day. Of course, the most interesting part of having Kingsley on board is that new faces always seem to pick up on dysfunctional aspects of the organization that those members who've been in it for years tend to dismiss.

"'Get the impression?'" echoes Sturgis. "Dumbledore's been on a leave of absence for how many months on some mysterious mission he won't tell the rest of us about? And now Emmeline's inexplicably gone off with him, and she's not talking, either, at least not to those of us who aren't Gryffindors from the class of '78."

Frank raises his eyebrows. "You can come right out and accuse them, you know. It's not doing anybody any favors to talk around it."

"Well, you would know. You married one of them. Did Alice ever let you in on their secrets when you were together?" Frank doesn't answer. "Didn't think so."

He knows exactly what Sturgis is talking about, and it used to drive him crazy when Alice would come home from seeing them with her eyes downcast, all the while refusing to explain what revelations from them had her acting so distant. Frank knows that he wasn't entitled to know everything about her life, let alone her friends' lives, just because he was her husband—but she told them all about him whenever they were having problems and even when they weren't, didn't she? Hell, he even encouraged it, not liking the idea that Alice would be trapped in her head without an outlet like she was usually so wont to do.

She's his ex-wife, he reminds himself. Divorcing her was supposed to help him let go of any lingering resentment he may have felt for her. So why is he still so worked up about it?

"We'd better get back, Frank," says Kingsley gruffly. "Savage is going to start wondering where you are if you're gone much longer."

Sturgis smirks. "Has she really got you on that tight a leash? We've barely been here for half an hour."

"Yeah, but I ditched her this morning while working the Dearborn case," admits Frank, "and she's already pretty suspicious of where I'm getting my leads from."

Doc has been missing for almost two months now, and Frank and his partner, Agatha Savage, are still no closer to finding where he's gone or if indeed he's still alive somewhere. He likes Agatha, but she can be too curious for her own good—especially when the leads Frank has been following are all related to Doc's Order work, and Frank knows it isn't safe to loop anybody in the Auror Office in on any vigilante business. It was one thing when Mary, who isn't an Auror, was able to feel out Kingsley's willingness to break the law a bit for the greater good—but if Frank fesses up to Agatha that he's using illegal connections to work Doc's case, and Agatha shares that information with literally anyone outside the Order, Frank could find himself facing Azkaban imprisonment for a long, long time. Besides, Kingsley had voiced support for vigilantes in the past: Agatha, to Frank's knowledge, has done no such thing.

Back at the office, Frank finds Agatha holed up in a conference room with a case map, a timeline, and a frown. "Where were you?" she asks him. "I haven't seen you since we got in at eight."

In reality, Frank's been tracking down and interviewing everyone whose Imperius Curses Doc broke in the week before his disappearance to see if any of them have a clue where he might have gone, but he can't tell Agatha any of that. Instead, he says vaguely, "I was following up on a few things, but nothing's panned out like I was hoping it would. How are things going back here?"

"Not great," Agatha groans. "I think we need to shift gears. We've been spending all this time poking around in Dearborn's Auror work, trying to figure out whether he was onto any Death Eaters who may have targeted him, when I think we should be focusing on his personal life—starting with the fact that he was incredibly secretive about it."

Frank's heart sinks. "You think?"

"Of course I think. I mean, starting with his niece—you knew Marlene McKinnon, didn't you?"

"A bit," he hedges. "She was in my year at Hogwarts, but in Gryffindor."

"Did she ever talk about how precisely they were related?"

Frank knows now that Doc was really Marlene's father—Doc himself shared this information with the Order after Marlene's death—but nobody outside the Order is supposed to know about that. "Technically, I think they were distant cousins, but—"

"Well, he was Muggle-born, but she was pureblood, so unless there was a Squib somewhere in the family tree, that doesn't make sense. He was single, so they wouldn't have been related by marriage, either. But they obviously knew each other from somewhere—she lived with him from when she left Hogwarts until her death, didn't she? And then, just months after she dies, he goes missing?"

"Mmh."

Agatha rolls her eyes at him. "We've been thinking this whole time that McKinnon and her family were killed because she was a Hit Wizard and they were collateral damage, but that's not what I think happened. I think they were both mixed up in the same thing—that whoever took her out took him out, too."

"It's a stretch," says Frank noncommittally.

"It's better than anything we've got so far," presses Agatha. "Proudfoot was working the McKinnon case before we left it cold, and I've already spoken to her about it. Marlene hadn't made any recent arrests of suspected Death Eaters, but she was also pretty cagey with her personal life—and guess what else? When we first started the McKinnon investigation, Proudfoot interviewed Dearborn—protocol, you know, since they lived together and were family—and Dearborn said she was best friends with Lily Potter."

It takes a second before Frank realizes why exactly Agatha probably thinks this is significant. "The Minister of Magic candidate?"

"Exactly. She even volunteered for her campaign. And Evans—Potter—whatever—was an outspoken supporter of vigilantes. Part of her campaign platform were promises to legitimize the existence of vigilantes—you know, collaborate with them on cases and give them immunity in exchange for handing over critical information and evidence that could incriminate Death Eaters."

Shit. When Agatha brought up Lily, Frank had started to relax, thinking she was on the wrong track—that Marlene's death was somehow some kind of conspiracy spearheaded by one of Lily's political rivals, maybe Malfoy, who'd run in the same election and also lost. But if Agatha's connecting Lily and Marlene (and Doc) to vigilantism—"So just to be clear…"

"If Potter herself wasn't a vigilante, maybe she developed the platform she did in an effort to protect her best friend. Maybe Marlene McKinnon was a vigilante, and Dearborn knew about it—maybe even let his niece suck him into it—and—"

"Let's just take a breath here, Savage," Frank interrupts. Agatha falls silent and positively glowers at him. "That's a lot of logical leaps to make just because of who Dearborn lived with and who his niece was friends with, and just because Potter wanted amnesty for vigilantes doesn't have to mean that she had a personal stake in them."

"Maybe, but it's not like we have any other leads that have panned out, have we? If we follow this through—"

"Okay," says Frank, thinking fast. "You know, let me just—let me talk to Alice. We both were in the same year at Hogwarts with Marlene and Lily, but she was in Gryffindor with them—she knew them a lot better than I did. If there's anything to be suspicious of, she'll know."

"Yeah. Yeah, all right," Agatha acquiesces. "In the meantime, I'm going to compare our case map to Proudfoot's for the McKinnons—see if I can make any connections."

"Right. Meet back in an hour?"

"Sure. Take this with you—maybe Abbott can shed some light on some of it." She passes Frank an overflowing file.

The last thing Frank wants to do right now is talk to his ex-wife while they're on the clock about all the times they and their friends have broken the law, but what else is he going to do? At the very least, talking to Alice will buy him an hour, and at best—maybe they can think up a way to put Agatha on the wrong path.

He doesn't feel good about it. He won't just be wasting Agatha's time if he manages to dissuade her: he'll be actively obstructing the investigation of a comrade who is missing and might well be running out of time the longer they go without finding him. But what's he going to do? If he allows the Auror Office to discover that Doc and Marlene were both vigilantes, it could be the undoing of the entire Order of the Phoenix, and then where would Britain be?

Alice is with Moody when Frank finds her at the other end of the office. "Great," he says. "We should probably all be here for this."

It hurts, looking at Alice, but it's not as bad when they're at work as it is when they're dancing around each other at home, trading Neville off. "What's up?" she asks politely, glancing from Frank to Moody and back again.

"Savage," he says in a low voice. "She thinks Marlene's death and Doc's disappearance are connected—and she thinks it has something to do with vigilantism."

He casts a quick Muffliato and fills them in in a low, urgent voice. By the time he's finished, Alice is wiping sweat off her forehead, and Moody is scowling. "Alastor, can't you just transfer Savage to another case?" Alice asks finally. "If we can keep her away from the investigation—"

"On what grounds?" Moody points out. "We can't leave it as a cold case, not when it hasn't even been two months and he was one of us, and she's going to get suspicious if I take her off it the second she thinks she's had a breakthrough."

"So we frame it as Alice having an in by way of having been in school with Marlene and Lily," suggests Frank. "She could dig around undercover, couldn't she, if they were so close and had so many mutual friends? At least, that's all we need Savage to think."

"Yeah, but Savage is going to want to work the case with me, isn't she?" says Alice. "And even if she doesn't—if she asks to follow up and realizes we're not making the progress she thinks we should be making—"

And then Frank has an idea—a terrible, sickening, cruel idea that he doesn't even want to say out loud—but Savage is onto them, and what else is he going to do? "Mad-Eye could always say you wanted to work with me specifically. She knows we only just finalized the divorce, and we're obviously still in each other's lives, and…"

He doesn't want to look at Alice, but he can't help himself. A shadow crosses her face, and then she says, "Yes. Yes, let's go with that and take it one day at a time from there. Alastor?"

Moody nods and swipes a hand over his mouth. "I'll let Savage know."

And then—then it's just Frank and Alice. He shuffles uncomfortably. "I'm sorry. I know this is going to make it… harder on both of us, and if you don't really want to work with me—"

"No, it's good," she whispers. "It means we can actually compare information and share leads on Doc's case in order to actually investigate what really happened."

"Don't get your hopes up," Frank can't help but mumble. "It's not like Savage and I have made much headway, and I haven't gotten very far in what I've been able to do without her around, either."

"We'll find him," swears Alice. "We will. Even if all that's left to find is his body, we'll…"

He flashes back suddenly to the conversation he just had with Sturgis and Kingsley about his ex-wife—to her conviction to keep Order secrets with her fellow Gryffindors and leave everybody else out of them. "If we're going to be partners in this, we're going to need to be able to trust each other to share everything we come up with. If you have a lead on Doc, you have to be open with me about it."

"And you think I won't be?"

"I think," says Frank, "you have a long history of reserving certain secrets for your best mates, and I don't think I've ever, ever, been one of them."

Alice brushes her hair out of her eyes. "It's not that I was ever closer to them than I was to you or Dirk or the other Ravenclaws," she breathes. "It's not. They just… the nine of us, we had a way of… the world always narrowed around us, especially after sixth year."

"I was there, too, when Liz and Millie died. It wasn't all on the nine of you, but you all shut the rest of us out like…"

Alice bows her head. "That wasn't on you, though. That was on us."

"It was just as much on Dorcas as it was on you, but—"

"No, it wasn't. We were—we instigated it all. If it hadn't been for us, Dorcas never would have wanted in, and she never would have said what she did that led to…"

Alice always does this—acts like the weight of the world is on her shoulders, hers and those of her friends, when people like Frank are screaming to share the burden, to be seen. He sees Alice, so why hasn't she ever, ever seen him?