January 31st, 1983: Agatha Savage
As prisons go, it's not a very nice one. In their defense, even with McGonagall on their side, the team building the thing had barely a day to cobble it together before they moved everyone over—and it's a good thing they did when they did because, if they hadn't, the Order would all be locked up in a Canadian prison and the Aurors would probably all be dead by now. The building is basically a big one-story box subdivided into numerous rooms, all of them gray and shabby and bland. McGonagall said that the magic to build multiple stories is complicated and could lead to the top levels caving in and crushing them all if they didn't take the proper time to get the architecture right, and one thing the Order hasn't had in a long time is time.
Since she, unlike the rest of the Aurors, isn't considered a flight risk, Agatha has her wand and is free to roam the building when she's not sharing a cramped room with McGonagall, Arabella, and Moody. She knows that not all of the Aurors realize this. They haven't been letting them communicate with each other, at least not outside of groups of roommates they've lumped together, and they've wiped the memories of Aurors who were with Agatha at the time of their imprisonment, so word hasn't circulated among the prisoners that Agatha isn't exactly one of them. But she still feels self-conscious every time she leaves her room, as if she's going to get caught and found out and exposed as having been in the Order all along. She has, of course, been in the Order all along—or at least long enough that the British Ministry won't forgive her if the Death Eaters win the war.
It's a good thing that Sirius apparently owns an odd little house-elf and that the magic protecting the prison doesn't apply to it. If not for that, they'd have no way of getting access to food or drink. For his part, Kreacher isn't exactly thrilled to be back in active service to Sirius—Agatha can hear him perfectly audibly muttering about blood traitors and disgrace every time they're in the same room.
They're trying to make imprisonment as painless as possible for the Aurors. Sometimes, Agatha overhears other Order members delivering food to the Aurors and telling them that all of this is temporary—that they know the Aurors aren't their enemies but can't give them their wands or let them leave as long as they're still service-bound to Malfoy's administration. It seems like the Order is constantly sending Kreacher out to pick up books or games or decks of cards to give the Aurors (and themselves) something to do in this place, but it's as grueling for all of them as it is for Agatha to be trapped in the same grey walls every day, waiting for something—anything—to change.
She wonders how any of them could stand it when they were stuck at Grimmauld Place for all those months. She wonders how much worse it was to be in Azkaban with dementors that wouldn't let their demons lie.
They're not getting the news—they can't risk anybody tracing them to this location. Agatha has to learn from the others the spell that blocks owls from being able to find you. The trouble with this, of course, is that it means they have no reliable way to communicate with Narcissa Malfoy. They can't physically go to Britain to see her, and, with the company Narcissa keeps, they can't exactly send talking Patronuses and risk having any Death Eaters overhear their messages.
It's trouble because it means they need a way to pass along to Narcissa the spell, whenever they finish it, that will Stun all the Death Eaters—a way to share their location with her—a way to schedule a date for her to deliver the Death Eaters to them. The best solution they've come up with has been for Andromeda to write encoded letters to Narcissa, including one with instructions on how to send a talking Patronus reply—not that Narcissa has actually sent a Patronus since receiving the incantation for it.
To Agatha's understanding, it's going fast but not fast enough for Sirius and Sturgis's team, who are working on the mass-Stunner spell. They're hoping to have it working by the end of the fortnight, but god only knows how many more witches, wizards, and Muggles alike are all going to be dead by the time they get there.
For want of anything better to do, Agatha spends most of her time with Remus, who co-led with McGonagall the team that built the prison in the first place. Agatha's Conjuring is a little rusty, but Remus is patient and kind and happy to improve upon the attempts she makes to make this place a little livelier to look at.
Today, their project is to construct windows and hang them with drapes. Agatha has the easier job, adding windows in the Order's rooms. Remus, on the other hand, is going into the Aurors' rooms and trying to create, lock, and reinforce windows without the Aurors busting out through said windows, stealing his wand, or making a break for it.
Building windows in a makeshift prison that's illegally confining most of her coworkers. When Agatha joined the war effort, this wasn't what she had in mind.
"It wasn't much better when we were in Britain where the action was," confides Remus when he comes to check her handiwork in between rooms of his own. "I mean, yeah, we were helping people directly, but we still had the frustration of knowing that there was somebody dead for every person we managed to save—and the Death Eaters kept coming. Innocent people kept dying, and so did our friends working with us. We were outnumbered. It was a losing game, and we all knew it."
"At least you were where the action was," says Agatha, twisting her lips. "When I compare what we're doing here to what it was like to be an active Auror… before Pyrites told us all we had to hunt Order members and Canadians, anyway."
Remus smiles thinly. "The biggest thing I've learned since Malfoy's administration took over is that war isn't all about fighting on the ground. It's not all hands-on dueling and rescuing innocents, and it's not all going to make you feel like you've accomplished anything important, even if it is important. A lot of it—a lot—isn't glamorous. It's horrific decisions made behind closed doors, and it's stooping to do things and deceive people in ways you never could have imagined would be necessary. Believe me, all of us have felt useless ever since Azkaban, and it was nobody's dream to hide out in a foreign country when British Muggles and Muggle-borns are still dying in droves."
"I hate hiding, and I hate that we have to take Aurors captive as if they're the problem."
"I know," Remus sighs, "but if we don't, they'll be forced to keep fighting, and—"
"I know," she interrupts. "I get why it's necessary, but that doesn't mean I have to like it."
If you ask Agatha, the rest of the Order has been far too quick to accept that this is their new reality, at least until they get the spell done and sent to Narcissa. Even once they've captured the Death Eaters, what next? Does the Order turn the Aurors loose and replace them with Death Eaters? Is Agatha going to spend the rest of her life standing guard over an illicit prison, hoping that the Canadian Ministry doesn't find them and murder all the prisoners and probably the Order, too?
Is the Order any freer than the Aurors and Death Eaters they're imprisoning?—because Agatha certainly doesn't feel free, not here and not now.
They don't really have a room big enough to fit the entire Order and their children, so they eat their meals scattered across numerous rooms, and Sturgis and Sirius's team gives little status updates that trickle across the prison like ripples on the Hogwarts lake. Tonight, feeling rather fed up with the adult Order and its members' refusal to plan ahead, Agatha eats dinner with the older kids who don't need help getting their food down—Tonks and most of the Weasleys.
Here, the situation is reversed. Agatha wants the kids to feel untroubled, doesn't want them to take the burden of war onto themselves, but they've had a much harder time adjusting to life in the makeshift prison in the Canadian woods than their elders have. Sure enough, Percy has barely finished telling off the twins, Fred and George, for throwing baked beans at him before Charlie turns to Agatha and asks very seriously, "You were an Auror before we came here, weren't you?"
"I was," she agrees, feeling very conscious of the way even Fred and George put down their sticky hands and listen raptly.
Charlie continues, "Is it weird knowing that a bunch of other Aurors are in a jail you're helping run?" He sounds curious, yes, but also anxious, as if he knows what's on the flip side of his question—that none of them can guarantee how long this jail will be in place and, especially, that the Order is just as trapped inside it as the Aurors are.
"Very weird," she answers carefully. "They're not bad people—they were just doing their jobs. But we have to do our jobs, too, and that means locking some people up to save as many lives as we can."
"What happens next?" asks Bill intently. "Mum and Dad won't tell us what the plan is."
"We know it's got something to do with the Minister's wife," adds Tonks, "because she showed up at our house a couple of times right before we came here, but my mum and dad wouldn't say why, either."
"Was it weird meeting her?" asks one of the twins—Agatha isn't sure which.
The other twin jumps in, "Did you sneak any itching powder into her robes?"
"I wish," says Tonks rather melodramatically, "but Mum wouldn't let me anywhere near her after she showed up."
Agatha is rather hoping that this line of conversation will distract the kids, but she's out of luck: they all look at her expectantly again. She doesn't want to disrespect Molly and Arthur's or Andromeda and Ted's wishes to limit what their children know about the war, and she especially doesn't want to trouble them with Order business. Then again, they're clearly already troubled—she can see it in the anxious lines of their backs whenever she sees them, hear it in the high pitches of their voices.
"We don't have it all figured out yet," she says eventually, hating the Order, hating herself. "We think we know our immediate next step, but we can't predict how things will snowball from there."
"And what's our immediate next step?" echoes Percy solemnly.
In the end, she doesn't say, partly out of respect to their parents and partly because she doesn't want to scare them with the news that they're about to be living under the same roof as a bunch of murderers. All of the Order are prisoners here, too—Agatha is sure of that now—but the least she can do is not make any minors feel any more afraid of their current situation than they already are.