January 23rd, 1983: Reginald Cattermole
It's eight o'clock on Sunday evening, and Dumbledore is running out of time.
Reg doesn't know what to do with his hands. He knits a little, folds laundry a little, washes all the dishes that he and his roommates have piled up over the last week. He does it all the Muggle way, hoping that keeping his hands busy will keep his mind busy, too, but it doesn't.
Dumbledore is running out of time.
"We don't cut deals with terrorists," Sirius had said the last time the Order voted. "We've got no reason to trust that they'll uphold their end of the agreement. For all we know, even if we all turn ourselves in, they'll kill all of us and Dumbledore anyway, and then none of us will be able to do anything to try and make things better. We're not negotiating with the Death Eaters, and that's final."
He'd had a point. It's rare for Reg to agree with Sirius about anything related to the war, but the Order is of no use to anybody if the Order doesn't exist anymore—if they let the Death Eaters win this one. Sirius won the vote—and Reg voted with him.
It's eight o'clock on Sunday evening, and the British Ministry is assassinating Dumbledore tomorrow if everyone in the Order doesn't hand themselves over.
Still, they can't just sit there. Can Reg really sit here and allow Dumbledore to die without even lifting a finger to try to save him? It doesn't feel right to be safe here on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, knitting and cleaning for lack of anything better to do, and to permit anybody to die for him, let alone the bloody leader of the resistance. Reg wasn't in the Order until after Dumbledore was in Azkaban—he never had a personal relationship with him—but Reg can still remember being at Hogwarts as the war unfolded around him and feeling like he'd be safe as long as he was there with Dumbledore, like Dumbledore's protection made Hogwarts an oasis where Mary would be safe, at least until she left.
And yet—it's partly because of Dumbledore that Mary got killed. By nature, anybody he brought into the resistance was his responsibility, and so many of his charges—
—but Reg can't afford to think like that. Think like that, and he starts to second guess his decision to help the Order, to become a part of it, at all.
The clock strikes nine. Three more hours, and Dumbledore will be out of time. Reg will be out of time.
He can hear Sturgis and Kingsley talking in low voices in their bedroom, but Reg has no desire to join them. He's not sure where Dung is—he's not in the bedroom he shares with Reg, nor in the living room or kitchen or bathroom, and Reg can't hear him talking to Sturgis and Kingsley. Reg finds himself wondering vaguely whether Dung has already started making connections in the criminal underbelly of Wizarding Canada—whether he's out right now procuring stolen cauldrons or something to sell on the black market.
He's going to lose his mind and his shit if he stays in this flat for one more minute. He's got to go, if only to give himself the illusion of doing something.
So he grabs his keys and goes out the back way, locking up Muggle-style behind him. It's raining. Droplets pelt his face, drench his robes, and collect in his shoes; it occurs to him that he should have put on his cloak before leaving, but he doesn't double back for it. Let him get wet and cold, wind whipping his face raw and water sloshing around in his shoes. At least he can guarantee that he won't die tomorrow, at least not for political reasons. At a damn minimum, he ought to appreciate that he's still alive to feel uncomfortable.
It's January in Canada, which means the ground is positively covered in snow—or, at least, it was. Over the last few days, the temperature has hovered just around freezing, which means that the snow has melted and refrozen as ice several times over. It's beginning to melt again now, thanks to the rain, but not entirely. In the first ten minutes of his walk, Reg slips on patches of ice and nearly falls four times.
He should slow down if he doesn't want to brain himself on the sidewalk, but he does not slow down. He wishes he had even a pinch of athleticism to speak of—that he could burn off some of this awful tension in a run—but, in this weather, he'd knock himself to the ground in seconds if he tried, even if he did have the capacity to run for more than twenty seconds at a time.
Reg's flat is near Vancouver, where Lily and James used to live when they were in hiding and where most of the Order has congregated in order for them to all live in the same time zone. Keeping their work schedules straight is a bit of a pain for those members of the Order who work in other provinces, but at least everyone living in British Columbia makes planning Order meetings a little more straightforward.
It had surprised Reg at first to learn that Canadian witches and wizards generally live in highly Muggle-populated areas. After all, their Ministry and hospital are located way out in the wilderness away from Muggles: you'd think that they'd be consistent and choose to isolate themselves in their homes, too. As it turns out, however, the Canadian magical community isn't entirely Muggle-averse: they congregate in large numbers far away from Muggles but otherwise isolate themselves from each other in order to better blend in in their everyday life.
As such, Reg passes a whole lot of Muggles as he roams the streets, all of them giving him strange looks for his unkempt hair and thin, soaked robes. He thinks about how they'd look at Dumbledore, who looks much too old and eccentric to pass for a Muggle, if he were here, and Reg feels sick with himself.
The next time he slips, he really does fall, and flat on his face at that. Dull throbs of pain shoot up his nose, his knee, and the heel of the hand with which he breaks his fall. He raises his good hand to his face and feels blood.
He'll have to get Lily to teach him a simple Episkey this week, he decides. They've all got to learn to be less reliant on her to fix their every little ailment—and the big ones, too, whenever they start getting involved in the war effort again.
He could take out his wand and half-arse a remedy, but there are Muggles around, and Reg has no desire to violate the Statute of Secrecy. Sighing, he struggles upright and turns back around for home.
By the time he gets back to his flat, it's a quarter past ten. He was out for longer than he thought—Dumbledore has less time than he thought.
He comes in through the front this time and finds that Sturgis and Kingsley have migrated out to the living room. "What happened to you?" says Sturgis, raising his eyebrows, while Kingsley rushes forward and starts fussing over Reg's face.
"I fancied a walk, but I slipped."
"Yeah, no kidding, you slipped. What were you even doing out in this weather?"
Reg shrugs. "I couldn't do nothing. I just… I couldn't do nothing."
Kingsley casts a quick Episkey. There's only a hint of pain that remains after, but when Reg raises his hand to his nose, it feels crooked. "You'll have to get Lily to do it properly. Sorry, mate."
"All good. I'll see her tomorrow at Zoudiams—I'll ask her then."
"That's right," says Sturgis as Reg and Kingsley join him on the couch, "your Healer training starts tomorrow, doesn't it?"
"It's not Healer training," Reg mumbles. "It's just a program to get licensed to administer Healing potions during home care under direction of a Healer."
Sturgis waves this off. "Same difference. How long does it go for?"
"Three weeks. If I pass—"
"You'll pass," Kingsley assures him.
"If I pass, then there's another three weeks to get certified to handle patients with infectious diseases. Then I'll just have to register with the hospital and wait to get matched with my first patient."
"That's brilliant. You'll be great."
"Yeah," says Reg distantly. He's thinking again about how he gets to have a future when Dumbledore doesn't.
Kingsley and Sturgis exchange looks. "We're thinking about him, too," says Kingsley softly, "but there's nothing we can do now. Even if it were a good idea to meet their demands, it's too late now to try to convince the whole Order to turn themselves in."
"All I've done all evening is wait. All I can think is that…"
Sturgis reaches forward and squeezes Reg's knee. "Do you want to go and wait at Sirius's with us? We were thinking it might help to, uh…"
"You two go on. I don't want… I don't know if I can be around people right now."
So Sturgis and Kingsley Disapparate, leaving Reg alone in the flat to wait for—something. Anything. He goes on another obsessive cleaning binge, scrubbing at the grime at the bottom of the bathtub, but it's no use: the anxiety is climbing higher and higher inside of him the closer it gets to midnight.
Ten-thirty. Ten-forty-five. Eleven. Dung, who's obviously drunk, stumbles in the door around twenty past eleven and barely says hello to Reg before shutting himself up in their bedroom; Reg can hear him knocking things over before he finally (presumably) makes it to his bed.
Finally, at a quarter to midnight, Reg can't take the tension anymore. Before he can talk himself out of it, he grabs his wand and Disapparates for Sirius and Remus's flat.
Remus answers the door, looking haggard and resigned. "We can't do this to him," Reg croaks.
"Come inside," says Remus.
Reg follows him in; Remus pours him a mug of hot tea while Sirius conjures another chair to cram around the kitchen table. When Reg sits down, Sturgis wordlessly reaches over and wraps him in a tight hug.
"We're awful people," says Reg when Sturgis finally lets go.
"Cost of saving the world, I suppose," Sirius answers, unsmiling.
They don't talk much. Everybody, Sirius especially, keeps looking at the window as if expecting news of Dumbledore's demise to arrive any second. Britain won't contact them directly: technically, it's the Canadian Ministry whom they asked to terminate the Order's asylum. Will Death Eaters wait until morning to execute him, or will they do it at midnight the moment the date changes? Will they inform Canada right away? Will Canada inform the Order as soon as they know, or will the Order have to find out what's happened from the Veritaserum in a day or two?
Eleven to midnight. Ten to midnight. Nine to midnight. The time is passing much too fast and yet much too slowly, too. Reg can't tear his eyes away from the window. A day from now, how much is Reg going to regret that he just sat here doing nothing when he could have been trying to save Dumbledore? For the moment, Dumbledore is alive—but, without anyone from the Order coming to save him, he's as good as dead. His fate is sealed. Does he know that he's about to be slaughtered? Have the Death Eaters been lording it over him that nobody's coming to rescue him, or does he think, sitting in his cell this very moment, that he's safe—or, at least, as safe as he can be in Azkaban?
Two minutes to go—one minute—and then—
At midnight, nothing happens.
"It's going to take time for them to go through with it," Remus says hoarsely at four minutes past midnight. "We shouldn't expect to hear anything right away."
This is it, Reg keeps thinking. They've done it now, and it's too late. There's no going back; all there is to do is wait to hear the consequences of their actions.
How is this real life? How did Reg become the kind of person who would allow—?
And then it occurs to him that this is how Mary and her friends must have felt the night Liz and Millie got killed back when they were at Hogwarts. People were dying, and they couldn't stand by any longer.
He misses his wife. If only she were here so he could tell her that he's always loved her, that he's starting to understand—
All this time, Reg has been the reluctant leader, asking himself over and over why he won't walk away from the Order. He keeps telling himself he's doing it for Mary's memory, only because he owes her, but—
It's a quarter to one before Reg accepts that he needs to give up waiting and go get some sleep if he doesn't want to be miserable at the first day of his licensing class tomorrow. "Come get me up if you hear anything," he tells them, and then he's gone.
He goes straight to bed, tries to focus on Dung's heavy breathing and lull himself to sleep, but Reg is still wide awake by the time four o'clock rolls around and he hears a crack in the living room. Dung doesn't wake, just snorts and rolls onto his stomach, but Reg flies straight out of bed and pads out in his slippers. It's Sturgis and Kingsley and—Reg's stomach turns over—Sirius.
"What's happened?" he says in a hush that has nothing to do with respecting Dung's sleep cycle.
"They did it," says Sirius. "He's dead. And—and Canada declared war on Britain."