November 10th, 1982: Alice Abbott
The first time she sees Neville after getting arrested, he's holding Augusta's hand in the hallway by Sirius's front door. His face is still screwed up into a grimace from how it felt to Side-Along-Apparate onto the doorstep of Grimmauld Place, but his expression clears when he lays eyes on Alice and Frank, and he immediately cries, "Mummy! Daddy!" and toddles forward.
When Alice crouches down to scoop Neville up into her arms, she's crying, but they're not bad tears, not like the kind she used to cry in Azkaban. "My baby," Alice declares. "My beautiful baby boy."
"Thank you so much for bringing him with you, Mum," she distantly hears Frank say above them. "Come on—I'll take your cloak—let's find somewhere to sit so you can catch me up on business."
"And you're telling me we're surrounded by people right now?" says Augusta skeptically. "I can only see the two of you."
"I—can't answer that, literally," he answers, and Alice can hear the smile in his voice. "Just—let me say hi to Neville."
It's entirely unfair, Alice thinks, that Frank is letting her dominate Neville right now—after she abandoned their family back when she had the chance to keep them—just because she had a harder time than he did recovering from Azkaban. So what if she was a blubbering mess of hallucinations? Who cares if it took her a few weeks to start speaking in full sentences and eating on her own? It doesn't change who she is or what she did. Frank is the one who wanted Neville, who stayed for him, who was raising him before he and Alice got themselves locked up in Azkaban, and it should be Frank who gets to hold him first and spend time with him while Alice takes Augusta's report.
But this is Frank—good, self-sacrificing Frank—so he just swoops down to pepper kisses all over Neville's cheeks for a long, happy moment before he leads Augusta up the stairs. "Mummy sad?" Neville asks Alice, biting his lip like seeing Alice cry is going to make him cry, and Alice knew how much she's missed him, but she doesn't think the full immensity of how alone she's been without her sweet, sensitive son hit her until this moment.
"I'm not sad, sweetie. I'm just happy to see you. Sometimes, grownups cry because they're happy. Come on—Harry's here. You want to see your friend Harry again, don't you?"
"Harry!" repeats Neville, beaming and clapping his hands. "Mummy, Daddy, Harry!"
"Yes," Alice laughs, "yes, we're all here to see you. Come with Mummy! Harry's so excited to spend time with his best friend."
As much as it's killed her having to go without seeing Neville for all these months, Alice is glad he's with Augusta outside Grimmauld Place, living a life that at least passes for normal in these entirely abnormal times. Every time she's ever envied Lily for getting to have Harry here with them in hiding, Alice has reminded herself that Harry, just like Lily and Sirius, hasn't left this house in five months—up until the Azkaban breakout, Harry only had the two of them, Reg, and Kreacher for company, without a single person his own age around to play with him. She hopes Augusta has found kids with whom Neville can go on playdates—maybe the Weasleys. Molly and Arthur's youngest boy, Ron, is Neville's age—maybe he could keep Neville company sometimes, help fill in some of the void left when Harry went into hiding.
Augusta and Neville stay for a good three hours. Alice knows she should go back to Frank's bedroom and hear Augusta's update for herself, but she can't bring herself to tear herself away from Neville and Harry, who are overjoyed to see each other. Frank comes downstairs to play with Neville, too, after the first hour, and it feels like far, far too little time passes before it's time for them to say goodbye.
"We'll see him again soon," Frank promises her after Augusta takes Neville's hand and leads him out onto the front step. "Mum will come back next week, I promise."
"You shouldn't let me monopolize him like that," Alice says quietly. "You're the one who…"
"Loves him? Al, I know you love him. Just because you didn't stay doesn't mean you don't…"
"Frank, about that… you shouldn't forgive me. I…"
He puts his hands on her shoulders and looks intently at her. "There's a difference between forgiving and forgetting. I haven't forgotten, and I never will, and we're never going to—be what we used to be again. But—none of that means that I can't or shouldn't forgive you. You were doing your best, okay? We just… we did what we had to do."
They haven't really talked about what they're doing now—they just sort of went from Azkaban to gravitating toward each other all the time. She sees the way he still looks at her—like she's everything to him, but also like she stole something from him that he's never going to get back—and Alice knows, knows, that no matter how much time they spend together, what they had before is dead. But—she thinks she's okay with that. She thinks it might be better this way, with them caring for each other without all the expectations she can't measure up to.
Life at Grimmauld Place is—weird. There's no other word for it. Coming fresh off the heels of Azkaban, it's jarring to suddenly jump from near-isolation to total communal living with barely any privacy to speak of. Even in a house as big as this one, it's not like Alice has her own bedroom she can retreat to when she wants to get away from everyone: she's sharing with Reg, and he tends to start to worry and then follow her in there if she tries.
The whole time Reg and Mary were together, Alice never thought particularly much of him. Sure, Mary spoke highly of him, but Alice always thought he was a bit of a dunderhead: he was never anywhere near the top of their class, and before joining the Order, he worked Magical Maintenance at the Ministry. Anyway, Mary herself admitted eventually that she wasn't in love with him, that she was in love with Marlene, and after that, Alice always thought him a bit of a fool not to realize his wife didn't reciprocate the feelings he presumably had for her.
Now, though, having had Reg hold her hand and spoon-feed her her meals in Azkaban—having him check in on her and hold her and care for her even now that they're on the outside—Alice feels ashamed of herself for the way she used to see him. What good is it to be talented in lessons if you're not a good person? And Reg is a good person—might be the best person living in this house right now. He didn't just grit his teeth through his weeks working in Azkaban; he looked painstakingly after every prisoner in that place while tolerating whatever demons he had to battle in the constant presence of dementors, and he did it every day with gentleness and a smile. He gave up everything in his life just to help them—and for what? Out of loyalty to a wife who didn't love him? Alice was there herself when Remus told Reg that Mary was gay, told him before he busted them all out, and yet he still did it—still got them free.
But she doesn't feel like it's her place to ask him invasive questions about his loyalties or his values. He saved her, not the other way around, and he doesn't deserve for Alice to pry into his motives or make him feel like his efforts aren't appreciated. She does appreciate him, even if she's too broken to show him just how much.
"Did you enjoy seeing Neville today?" he asks her that night when he comes into their room while she's changing into pajamas. Alice is long past the point of feeling embarrassed to dress in front of Reg, not after he helped her use the bathroom and shower every day in Azkaban; she sort of hunches her shoulders and turns away from the door so he doesn't get a full view of her, but she continues shedding her underwear and reaching for the clean pair that Lily Geminioed and sized for her when she first arrived here.
"Yes, of course. I screwed up with him before Azkaban, but—I never want him to think I left because I don't love him. I do love him—so much. It hurt to say goodbye at the end of the visit."
"You'll see him again. Augusta will be back every week for reports and new assignments, and I'm sure she'll keep bringing Neville along."
"About that," Alice hedges, "are we going to talk about those assignments at the next meeting? It's just—now that the body's out there, we haven't really given our liaisons much to do besides bring us copies of the Prophet and update us on what people are saying out there."
"We… yeah. Yeah, Lily and Sirius want to call another meeting for tomorrow night, actually, to start planning."
Lily and Sirius spearheading the Order now that everybody's out caught Alice by surprise a little, but she supposes it makes sense: they're the ones who recruited Reg to help orchestrate the breakout, the ones who got everyone safe and organized and directed the conversation toward strategy after everyone settled in, and they're more up-to-date than anyone but Reg inside this house on what's going on in the world, since Reg was at least able to bring them news before he had to join them in hiding. Alice would have expected Dumbledore to be the one to fall back into his leadership role, but Dumbledore's not here, of course: Reg didn't manage to get him to swallow his Portkey. Alice thinks her cell was near his in there—she can't be sure, but she thinks she remembers hearing his voice in the first few days before she really started to descend into madness—and she wonders with a pang how he's holding up in there.
Honestly, Dumbledore has seemed lost to Alice even before Azkaban—back when she and her friends went behind his back to orchestrate the destruction of the Horcruxes almost entirely independently of him. She knows he was aware that Sirius looked at Slughorn's memory before delivering it to Dumbledore, but—from Dumbledore's perspective, he was out there hunting Horcruxes with Em and saving the day right up until Em informed him brusquely that the others had finished the job for them and there was nothing left to do but wait for the Sword to be destroyed and for Snape to obtain the ones in Lestrange's and Malfoy's possession.
Dumbledore would have gone out of his mind with the way Sirius and Lily are structuring the Order—everything communal, no secrets between anyone. He was always one for carefully manipulating situations and selectively sharing information with the people he thought needed to know it, it seems to Alice.
"Meeting tomorrow sounds great," she says. Her nightgown is fully on at this point, and she straightens up and scoots back onto her bed so she can look Reg in the face. "I'm sure everyone will feel eager to have somewhere to go from here."
But Reg frowns and mumbles, "I wouldn't be so sure of that."
"Why not? What do you know?"
"Just—Lily and Sirius's plans. They're not… I don't…"
But no matter how hard Alice probes, Reg doesn't say another word about any of it for the rest of the evening.
The next day takes an age to go by before meeting time. Alice busies herself helping with the cooking and talking to Reg, Frank, and Kingsley; she even seeks out Kreacher at one point and asks him if there's any cleaning he'd appreciate her help with, to which he predictably seems to have no idea how to react. It's around seven o'clock by the time Peter has been fed and the rest of them settle into the dining room. Septimus, Cedrella, Augusta, and Vector aren't joining them: they've each only been looped into one or a few people's Fidelius Charms, so it wouldn't make much sense to try to bring any of them into the conversation.
The atmosphere isn't exactly what Alice would call relaxed—it never is at meeting time—but in a few minutes, she won't think any of them are prepared right now for what Lily's about to tell them after calling the meeting to order. "We know all of you are wondering how we can take a more active role in the resistance while we're all under Fidelius Charms," she says, and Alice notices that Lily's voice is shaking—wonders idly why. "And—well, we've listened, and we have some thoughts."
"Speak for yourself," Reg says. He mutters it, but the room is so quiet that Alice can easily hear him. "You and Sirius have some thoughts. I certainly don't share them, and I don't think most people will, either, when they hear them."
"Thoughts like what?" asks Snape. His tone is innocent—silky with a hint of curiosity—but Lily still shoots him a glare.
"Thoughts like they want us to start leaving the confines of the Fidelius Charms at night," says Reg, his voice starting to rise now, "so that we can make assassination attempts on known Death Eaters."
For a few seconds, you could hear a pin drop—and then all hell breaks loose.