May 24th, 1982: Frank Longbottom

He knows she came back to the British Ministry as fast as she could, but Frank's still a little annoyed with Alice for having made a detour to Canada after work today in the first place. Of course, he can't really explain his sense of urgency in a way that would make sense to her or anybody else. The whole Order has long since accepted that Doc is not just missing, but dead; an extra hour before Frank and Alice track down his cadaver isn't really going to affect anything that matters; Doc's next of kin was Marlene, and she was murdered even before Doc was.

But solving this case—solving this case is the only good Frank can do with his whole damn title and privileges at the Ministry, even if he's got to operate outside the law to do it. He has to do something. And he may not have known Doc well, but they put their lives on the line for each other every time they went out on a raid together. Hell, if Doc were here now, Frank still would—and he has a responsibility to Doc to do what he can to respect him (or, at least, his memory).

He never really understood that about Alice and her friends until he started working Doc's case. Even outside of Order business, the Gryffindors pretty routinely would do anything for each other—but a lot of them aren't actually that close when it comes to living out the mundane parts of their lives. How many times when they were together did Alice express to Frank how lonely she was, especially watching all of her friends have a best friend when she didn't? Lily and Mary both had Marlene, even when it got complicated; Emmeline had Peter, at least until he fessed up and left; Sirius and Remus had James and, some of the time, each other. Alice was always the one left scrambling to find her place and, more often than not, not finding it at all and burying herself in her career. And yet she routinely, constantly congregated toward them, sacrificed for them, gave herself away to them—many a time almost died for them—and they did the same for her. They'd die for each other, even if they didn't know how to live for each other.

It makes some kind of sense to Frank now as he's memorized the last moves of Doc's life and relentlessly sought to uncover where he disappeared to. Frank barely knew Doc socially, really, but they were both members of the Order, and Frank has an obligation to him. It just took him until now to realize how connected you can feel to a person, how well you can learn and know them, without actually belonging in that person's life.

"How'd it go at the Ministry?" Frank asks when Alice rejoins him in his cubicle.

"Interesting. Runcorn's been embezzling Canadian funds. There was this whole taskforce the missing money was supposed to go toward developing." Sounding harried, Alice pushes her hair out of her eyes. "I have more digging to do to build a timeline on Britain's end, but we're getting close to a resolution."

"That's good. You'll get him in the end. I know you will," says Frank distractedly. "Ready to go? It's a tossup as to whether Jugson is still at work, back at home, or stopping off to terrorize some Muggles, but we'll find out before long."

"And you're thinking we'll stake out his house until either he arrives or the orb points Lily and James to a raid we need to go on to steal him away from?"

Frank grins. He and Alice did always work together well enough that it felt like she could read his mind.

xx

Luckily for them and for whichever poor Muggles would otherwise have been tortured and murdered tonight, Jugson does come directly home about half an hour later. When they hear the crack, Frank and Alice are hiding under Disillusionment Charms in the loo, which they'd figured was the least likely place that Jugson might choose to Apparate into. Tensing, Frank tries to look out for what's visible of Alice's edges so that he doesn't trip over her following her out into the living room.

It's easy, too easy, to get Jugson talking under the influence of the Veritaserum—but as it turns out, the whole encounter is distinctly unsatisfying and anticlimactic. "I killed him," Jugson says in a flat voice a few seconds after he wakes from the Stunner they'd put on him. "We'd figured out that most of our Imperiuses were being broken by the same person. It took a long time, but I was able to put a tracker on the curse so that I'd get information when it was broken. The information pointed me to Dearborn. There was no point killing the Muggle, but Dearborn was still outside her home and hadn't yet Disapparated when I caught him."

"Where's the body?" says Alice softly. Frank doesn't know how she's managing it—speaking softly, that is. He feels like he's about to blow his top with rage and anticipation.

"You won't find it. I blasted it to bits with a Reductor Curse."

"Why?"

"Because of the tracker I'd put on the Imperius Curse. It linked me to the person who broke the curse, but it also linked that person to me. It wasn't worth the risk that someone might figure that out and trace it back to me."

Head swimming, mouth dry, Frank asks, "And did you teach this tracking spell to any of your Death Eater friends?"

"No. Dearborn managed to Obliviate it out of me before I killed him." It's a credit to Lily's Veritaserum-making skills that Jugson says this without a trace of resentment. "I've been working on rebuilding it from scratch. I'm close, but I haven't finished."

Frank and Alice exchange a look, and the disapproval on her face tells Frank immediately that she knows what he's thinking again—and doesn't like it one bit this time. "We have to, Al," Frank mutters. "We have to. He's about to give the Death Eaters a massive advantage over us the second he finishes this thing, and under the circumstances that we got this information out of him, none of it will be admissible to the Wizengamot. He can't be held accountable legally for Doc's murder or anything else we might be able to get him to confess."

"Frank, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking—"

"That we kill him and be done with it?"

"It's not right. It's murder. There has to be some kind of legal recourse we can take."

And there is no legal recourse, but that doesn't mean there isn't another way. Frank sighs. "Let's just—let's just wipe his memory? Of everything—his whole life. We can make it so that he doesn't even know what a Death Eater is, let alone that he's one of them."

Alice frowns. "We're so far outside our purview as Aurors here. It's bad enough that we have no legal case against him, but if we wipe his memories—take away who he is—he's still a person. What's next? Showing up randomly in the homes of all the known Death Eaters to Obliviate them, too?"

"Why not? How many people are they going to kill in the meantime if we don't?"

"But Frank—"

It's definitely not how Frank imagined closing Doc's case, with no body in sight and the offending Death Eater's memory removed so that he can't testify one way or another. They're going to have to go to Moody in the morning and ask for a new case assignment without being able to tell almost anyone in the rest of the department, let alone the public, that Doc's disappearance has been solved and isn't simply being abandoned as a cold case.

Frank had expected to feel something more than this numbness upon confirming that Doc really is dead. Then again, Alice had probably expected that Frank wouldn't be so quick to contemplate murder.

Lost in his thoughts, Frank doesn't see coming the next thing that happens. It's all a blur: one second, he's looking at Alice and wringing his hands, and the next, Jugson has made a grab for Frank's wand. Frank shouts in surprise and scrabbles desperately for it, but it's too late: Jugson's already Disapparated.

Well, that's one way to solve his and Alice's dilemma. "Damn it," Frank cusses, and he kicks the wall so hard that the plaster breaks.

"I must not have given him enough Veritaserum," Alice sighs. "Just—let's just get out of here. We can talk about this, but we shouldn't stay. We have no idea who could pop in for a visit—or when Jugson might come back. You're unarmed. It's not safe."

"Yeah," grouses Frank. "Can you Side-Along-Apparate me back? I'll have to stop by Ollivander's in the morning."

It's the hardest thing in the world to suck in all his emotions when he picks Neville up from the Potters' house ten minutes later. Normally, Frank does an okay job compartmentalizing work as work and family as family, but tonight, he can understand why Alice has always struggled with it. The Order member Frank has spent months tracking down is definitely dead, and there's no closure he can give to Doc's surviving family, no justice he can serve on the job, no news he can share with the Prophet to honor Doc and discredit Jugson. How is Frank supposed to shove that aside and just—?