October 1st, 1982: Lily Potter

"So we're doing this now?"

Like usual, Reg sounds exasperated, and Lily can't quite tell whether he even wants to be here—why he's going along with any of this. The only thing she can think of is that he's helping her, Harry, and Sirius out of loyalty to Mary, but even that—she admitted to Reg last month that Mary was gay, and at first she'd thought that she'd for sure lose him after that, but he just said Alice and Remus had already told him and shut down any further discussion of it.

"I mean, that's really up to you," Lily tells him. "How are mealtimes going? Do you think you can get them all to get it down?"

"Some more than others. It'll basically be like—I mean, imagine trying to get two-year-old Harry to swallow a pill when he's in the middle of a temper tantrum. They're starting to trust me more, but it'll take a few hours to get to everybody if I'm going to make sure they all swallow it."

"What time do you start delivering breakfast?" asks Sirius gruffly.

"First thing—usually around eight."

"So we can set them to go off around…?"

Reg ponders this for a moment. "Honestly, even if everybody's done by, say, eleven in the morning, I think we should delay them until after I've gone home for the evening. It'll be bad enough for us when there's a mass Azkaban breakout just two weeks after I started working there—we already know I'm going to have to join everyone here, but that will be easier to do if I'm not on the scene of the crime when it goes down."

There's the issue that they've been talking around for months now: Reg is her and Sirius's connection to the outside world, and the second he enacts this plan that will surely be perceived as linking him to the Order, his cover will be blown, and they'll lose their source of information. She knows it, Sirius knows it, and Reg knows it. He's already probably being surveilled by the Ministry because his wife was in the Order: this breakout is going to lose him his job, his home, and his freedom.

Sirius says, "Is it going to be a problem that they're activated that much later than they've been ingested? If anybody takes a dump—"

"I did some research on that," says Reg, wrinkling his nose, and Lily has a sudden vision of him looking disgusted while poking around the physiology section of a Muggle library, "and it takes a few days for anything to pass out of your system after you eat it. We should be okay."

"Are you sure you want to do this, Reg?" Lily asks now. "There's no coming back from it, and…"

"God, Lily, don't encourage him," Sirius mutters.

Reg purses his lips and laces his arms together. "If this is what the world is now, I don't want to keep living in it. I'm never going to clear Mary's name if the only people active in the resistance are the three of us."

Lily and Sirius look at each other. "Okay then," she says. "We can't do it tomorrow—the full moon is tomorrow night, and Remus hasn't been taking his potion—but we can do it on Sunday. We've been practicing the spell to make Portkeys. Can we test one tonight? Sirius and I shouldn't leave, obviously, but we can make one that points to your flat for you to take and make sure that it's working smoothly."

Reg grimaces a little. "You'd better point it somewhere else—somewhere deserted. Gilderoy will get suspicious if I come home by Portkey tonight instead of Apparition."

Just then, they hear the sound of crashing dishes and giggling coming from the kitchen. Lily makes to get up, but Sirius pats her knee and stands up faster. "I'll get him. You stay here."

Having Sirius here to help with Harry has been a blessing, as far as Lily is concerned. When she misses James so much that she feels like she can't breathe, it's a godsend to have somebody else who can shoulder the burden of parenting for a while as she tries to pull herself together. She's technically a single mom now, but she's not really doing it alone, and for that, she's enormously grateful.

"So how many of these do we need to make? Have you been able to compare our roster to what you've seen on the inside?" she asks Reg.

"Yeah, I've been checking it. We've lost three people—Elphias Doge, Dedalus Diggle, and Aberforth Dumbledore—but everybody else seems unharmed, at least physically. So that's—"

"Sixteen people," Lily finishes.

"Well, seventeen," says Reg. He looks nervous. "There's also Peter Pettigrew."

She frowns. "Pettigrew? But he's not even on our side anymore. He—"

"But I can't just leave him in there," Reg pleads. "You've never been around a dementor, Lily, let alone dozens of them—you don't know what it's like. It's hard enough for me to stomach being there nine hours a day, seven days a week, and I at least get nights off to recuperate. If we let Pettigrew go—"

"If we let him go, who's to say he won't go straight back to the Death Eaters and beg for forgiveness?"

"You said he abandoned them when he could have turned your family over, and he didn't. They probably hate him as much as the Order does."

It's hard to hear—not just the reminder that Peter almost caused the Potters' deaths, but the blunt fact that the Order hates him now. Does Lily hate Peter? It's so hard to reconcile her memories of the bumbling, sweet, perceptive boy she befriended with the knowledge that Marlene and others are dead because of him.

"Yes," she continues, "but that was before he handed almost the entire Order of the Phoenix over to the Ministry—which you and I both know is the same as handing them over to the Death Eaters. They'd probably welcome him back with open arms."

"Then we can keep him prisoner here," Reg argues. "Something. Anything. Don't you think he's done his time? He doesn't have to go free, but he doesn't deserve the dementors. Nobody deserves the dementors."

"Are you saying that if Voldemort were still alive, he wouldn't deserve—"

"If You-Know-Who were still alive, then he would deserve to be tracked down and killed, or to be locked up with Grindelwald in Nurmengard, but not Azkaban. You don't understand, Lily. Nobody deserves Azkaban."

"Who doesn't deserve Azkaban?" asks Sirius, who's just come back into the room with Harry on his hip.

"He thinks we should release Pettigrew," says Lily apologetically.

Sirius raises his eyebrows. "Absolutely not. We're not giving him a Portkey, and that's final."

Reg takes a deep breath. "Well, I'm not giving any of them to anybody until you do. I feel bad enough that we can't free every last person in that prison—the least we can do is get Pettigrew out and keep him here."

They'd talked about freeing everyone, but where would the other offenders go? They couldn't give them Portkeys taking them elsewhere in the wizarding world without them getting tracked down and imprisoned again or, worse, killed. They couldn't send them to the wilderness or to the Muggle world: they wouldn't be able to survive without their wands or their right minds. And if they brought them all here, to Grimmauld Place, they'd risk giving dozens of people access to Order secrets that they could turn around and report to the Ministry the second any of them got out.

Lily gets up and allows Sirius to hand Harry to her; she bops his nose with her finger and savors the sound of his laughter. Adjusting to life at Grimmauld Place was hard on Lily and Sirius—he wasn't thrilled to return to the childhood home that carried so many awful memories, and she wasn't happy to shut herself up in yet another house, after the year and a half she spent trapped in Godric's Hollow. But Harry loves it here—loves following Kreacher around and exploring every last nook and cranny of the house. For her part, Lily is just glad that the house carries enough distractions to occupy Harry's attention and keep his mind off of his father's absence and what his mother and godfather have been plotting.

They talk around the issue for a good ten, twenty minutes, but Reg doesn't budge. "Fine," Sirius finally spits. "Fine. But we're locking him in the attic, and he's never coming out."

"Fine by me," says Reg a little frostily. "Let's try the test Portkey, then. Does the spell take long?"

"Not at all," says Lily. "I just need the address of where you want to go."

He rattles it off, and she pulls out her wand. "Beads?" she asks, and Reg reaches into his robe pocket and pulls out a glass vial full of little black beads. He tips one out into her open hand, and she points her wand at it and mutters, "Portus."

Between the two of them, Lily has been doing most of the magic. She doesn't envy Sirius, who lost his own wand when Lily took it with her to Malfoy Manor and who instead has been using the one Lily took off of Voldemort's corpse. This reminds her of the major wand problem they're about to have, and she asks Reg, "So is the plan still to break into Jonker's and steal all the wands we're going to need?"

"Yeah. I can Apparate there before work on Sunday morning—it'll be nighttime in Alberta, so the place should be locked up—and Apparate here to drop them off before I head into Azkaban."

"Listen, Reg…"

She wants to thank him, to put into words how much it means to her that he's giving up his entire livelihood to help her struggling family and friends run from the law with nary a plan in sight to dismantle the whole corrupt government against which they're fighting, but everything she can think to say sounds cheesy and stupid. He's watching her expectantly, though, so Lily says, "I hope you know that I know that you're saving our arses."

After a pause, Reg just answers, "Don't feel bad. I'm not doing it for you."

But what is he doing it for?