The Charmer
It was never supposed to be her last auror mission.
Even still, the memory of it is muddled. Fire surrounds them. It licks up the clean air, spreading over the houses where children once played with toys. Families lived there once. The dark mark hangs in the sky, high above where the crescent moon sits. Through glassy eyes she sees the others running from it.
They said it was just embezzlers they were tracking. A group of low-lives who brought illegal potions across the boarder to chase a high. In her hometown so she could visit her mum before she left. They said it would be low risk.
They lied. They all lied.
Alice shoves her way through the crowds moving past her. Death Eaters in masks weave their way through the mass. She shoots spells without thinking. Red, blue, green. The colors dance behind her eyes. She screams until her throat is raw. Frank left long ago, she can only hope he's okay, because she's not sure she's coming back.
"Alice!" A voice calls from ahead of her. She keeps running. "Alice! Stop!"
It's Remus, she knows. His voice is as familiar as the ring of her guitar. He grew up here too.
Somebody dies in her peripherals. A father weeps over his daughter. She's only a child. Alice keeps running, and she runs right into Remus. There are tears streaming down her eyes, and sobs wreak through her as if they've come directly from her soul.
"My mums gone Alice." His voice breaks, "They both are."
Her mum is dead, Hope Lupin and Isobel Fortescue are dead. Her entire world crumbles. Right there, at her feet.
✼ ҉ ✼ ҉ ✼
A month later, hungover off firewhisky, Alice is summoned to a safe house to meet with Dumbledore. She has to apparate several times, always ending up in a place she didn’t intend.
She was deemed unfit to use the floo network after she had a breakdown when the flames consumed her.
When she finally lands just outside the apparation limit she makes her way up the hill where the safe house sits. It’s a lighthouse that’s been transformed to house the injured and supply the empty with handmade beer. Her guitar is on her back, covered in dirt and grime. In her hand is a small draw-string bag, sewed together with patches and tiny needles still stuck in it from where she’d started to fix a hole in the bottom. It has an expansion charm on it so she can carry her things.
She keeps most of her stuff on her nowadays, crashing at various friends’ places.
While she walks she takes her wand from her hair and grips it tight in her hand. A splinter sticks out where she’s picked at it. Daylight flickers and the sun sets in the sky, Alice has to fight the urge to check Dumbledores wards just in case.
When she knocks on the wooden door it shakes on its hinges. One of Molly’s brothers answers. She smiles at him, “Well Gideon, look at you!”
He beams and shakes his red hair out of his eyes. “Come on Al, it’s Fab. Remember? I’m the uglier one.”
Alice rolls her eyes and gives him a hug as she steps into the house. “S’ a pleasure as always Gid.”
“Ah-ah-ah,” Gideon puts his arm in front of her and swings around to block her path. She crosses her arms. “What is Franks middle name.”
Despite herself, she laughs, “Higgenpuff. Poor sod. Gideon, if I wanted to kill you I would’ve done it already.”
He just grins and leads her through the building. It’s been expanded inside. There’s a small wooden bar in the corner, and the lights have been turned low besides the bright white orbs near the hospital beds off to the side. Along the walls are photos of known Death Eaters; faces to look out for. There’s also a list of missing muggle-borns, their smiling photographs from school plastered by their names like a threat.
Alice lets her fingertips trace the red bricks along the wall as Gideon takes her up the stairs. The bumps in the walls keep her grounded. At the top there’s a lookout area, where Dumbledore stands. His hands are behind his back, and she feels uneasy at how ominous he looks. She can tell that he always tries to radiate serenity; but it never really worked on her.
Her mum always did say she was a great judge of character.
Gideon leaves her at the top of the stairwell with a pat on her back. She’s only been at this safe house once, and the lookout is a lot fuller now. It’s a circular building, but he’s still put couches along the walls. A small fire pit sits in the middle. The couches seem to be charmed to fit the walls perfectly, and it’s a little hard not to admire his spell work.
“Ms. Fortescue,” He greets, spinning around on his heel. “Or is it Mrs. Longbottom now? Hard to keep up these days.”
Dumbledores eyes glint behind his glasses. Despite her unease, she straightens her back and plasters an easy grin on her face.
“Ah, rumors fly.”
Technically, she is Mrs.Longbottom, but she’s rarely called that. Alice agreed to marry Frank a year ago while they were both drunk. They’d just completed their auror training, and he’d been complaining about Augusta, and how she was pestering him to settle down. They were already living together, so Frank had the bright idea that they get married. Especially because Augusta hates Alice, so the plan was to passively-aggressively spite his mum.
Alice just shrugged and said, ‘Well I got nothing better to do.’
It ended up working out though. They had their fun pretending to be in love. They even managed to convince most of their friends that, yes they’d been dating all along, and what do you mean this wedding is coming out of nowhere we’ve been talking about it forever? Remus never believed them but he didn’t ruin their fun.
”Am I in trouble?” She says with a coy smile as she plops down on the couch when he doesn’t respond. Slowly, he smiles and sits on an armchair beside her.
“We have a job for you, in The Order. I presume you’ve heard? It’s my understanding that they’ve deemed you unfit for the auror program.”
She might just fucking throw up her heart.
“A job?” Alice repeats blankly.
These days, the order is a tight ship. They don’t just let anybody in. Especially when there’s people turning to the other side at the drop of a hat.
“I understand that you’re quite the performer.” He gestures to her guitar with a single hand.
Outside their bubble, the wind rustles the grass. Below the water tumbled over itself.
It takes her a minute to understand exactly what he’s referring to, and what he’s asking of her. While she was in school he used to do little sets in the three broomsticks on hogsmade weekends. Sometimes she even snuck outside with the marauders and the girls to sing while drunk.
It feels like so long ago now.
Days where she wrote songs on a tattered notebook instead of doing her notes. The quiddich, charming her way to being a captain by popular vote. Having a new boy every week her sixth year.
Narcissa.
Singing for her. Braiding her hair. Sharing her bed. Kissing her.
Her, Her, Her.
”You want me to entertain?” She asks, unsure of how that would be of use.
“Morality is… low. One of my dear friends pointed out that the order may be more willing to fight if somebody can get them angry. Fighting, Alice, makes one tired. But a united voice makes people angry.”
She nods. “What else? Surely you don’t just want me to sing in pubs.”
”Clever girl.” He quips, smiling as if in a daze, “We need somebody to do undercover work. You could pose as a musician there too. There are a lot of fighters nowadays. But not as many performers.“
Performer. That word.
She isn’t stupid. Alice knows that if she takes the job she’ll be putting herself in jeopardy. It’ll draw attention to her that isn’t wanted.
But she knows that she could do it.
She’s lived and loved by her charm thus far, and she’s confident in her ability to draw out what she wants in people.
A manipulator, is what Narcissa called her.
Alice looks up at the man before her. Just a man, she thinks, that’s all he is.
“I’ll do it, under one condition.”
✼ ҉ ✼ ҉ ✼
The condition, of course, was that Frank also have a place in the order.
Even when they were kids they were a package deal. Whenever somebody decided to bully Frank she’d throw punches. When she got in trouble, he’d take the fall. When the aurors fired her, he quit.
Dumbledore had said that Frank was always welcome to fight with them.
So, two days later Dumbledore wrote to invite her to the next order meeting that night. At the bottom he wrote in tight, loopy letters that she would be performing afterwards.
Frank had been excited about being in the order. He’s restless these days. They joke that it’s why he’s a Hufflepuff, he’s too loyal for his own good. Frank is a pureblood but he fights like he has something to loose. Then again, they all do now.
He goes with her into her changing room and rolls a spliff while she tries on the dress Molly made for her. She went on and on before giving it to her about the fabric. Alice is starting to believe that after four kids she’s starting to go a bit stir-crazy.
The dress is beautiful though. It’s modest, because nobody has money to spare anymore. She thinks that it’s something Narcissa might’ve shook her head at. Perhaps it’s better for it then. It’s a dark maroon with gold vines embroidered onto it that falls just below her knees. Molly gave her flats to wear with it but she opted for boots instead, because it’s fucking cold in January, and warming charms only last so long.
“Y’ look like a Gryffindor mascot.” Frank says from the sofa, stoned and sprawled out with a muggle beer in his hand. He’s grown quite partial to them (and their easy access).
Alice flips him the bird. He just laughs.
”They’re going to know you’ve been smoking, y’ smell like you’ve gone through a fire.” She quips. He stares pointedly at the burn on her face and she glares.
“Everybody’s an alcoholic now Al’s. D’ I tell you pa started drinking? Couldn’t stand mum sober I su-“
He’s interrupted by the door opening. Lily peaks in wearily and sighs in relief when she sees Alice, fully clothed. “The meetings’ started love.”
Alice opens her mouth when behind her, Frank falls off the couch with a grunt. Rolling her eyes, she hauls him up off the ground. “Common big guy, let’s go.”
She pays his back solemnly in solidarity when he whines about his head. Lily leads them out into the living room of the pub they converted.
Sure enough, most people there are drinking. Moody is on a rocking chair in the corner with a flask in hand. Marlene and Dorcas are leaned up against the wall, heads pressed together over their cigarettes they’ve lit inside. Walking through the building is like walking through cold fire. Smoke hangs in the air as if to decorate the room, and nobody seems too bothered by it.
The vast quantity of it puts her a bit on edge, but it helps that it’s bloody freezing. She hasn’t gotten better around fire, breaking out in hives from anxiety every time she’s in contact with it.
She notices that Remus isn’t here, which isn’t usual now but it is unusual to see Sirius at an event where he isn’t. But there he is, head down over whisky at the bar while James and Lily chat next to him. It’s unsettling, seeing Sirius Black without his usual grin. He looks a bit of a wreak, honestly. Alice knows he and Remus got a flat together, and she feels a bit sick thinking about how severed he must feel with Remus gone on missions all the time.
Nobody ever really talks in certain terms about what Remus and Sirius have, but it’s not as if they don’t all know.
It’s just that nobody really talks about that sort of thing anyhow. There’s people who don’t like it on their side of the war, but saying it out loud would sound a little hypocritical wouldn’t it? The muggle world seems to be gaining a bit of traction, but she’s honestly a little glad that the wizarding ward is too occupied with the war to focus on people like them as well. The wizarding world is a bit slower with progress than the muggles are. Especially since some families are still doing arranged marriages.
Dumbledore walks into the pub and everybody falls silent. Like moths to a flame, they all stop what they’re doing and draw closer. The smoke is vanished with a wave of his hand, and the fifty or so people in the room crowd around where he stands in the middle. It’s concerning how much influence he has over everybody.
She barely hears the entire meeting. Dumbledore introduces her and Frank as new order members, and says she’ll be singing when everybody goes for drinks. From what she gathers people usually stay after meetings when the bar opens again. Things aren’t cheap with the war, especially alcohol, so people drink their livers dead from the shit Moody snags before heading off. People seem excited, James whoops loudly and beams at her. There’s something sad about him now, a weight to his shoulders. The last time she saw him was the joint funeral they had for her mum and Hope, because they’d been good friends. She heard his parents were in bad health, Dragon Pox she thinks.
Alice really does try to listen when they talk. It’s just that hearing about the last missions everybody went on, what happened, who died, it all floats through her head. She ends up leaning on Frank until it’s over as flashbacks periodically move through her.
Running through fire despite Remus’ pleas, holding her mums dead body.
Before she knows it, the meeting is over and Fabian has an arm around her. She’s walked over to a little makeshift stage, which is basically just a plank with an enlargement charm on it. The pinnacle of wealth. Alice feels herself smile and laugh the entire way, her body already preforming.
She walks up to the microphone stand, “Now Id ask how everybody is tonight but I know the answer is ‘shitty’ so I’ll hold off for all of our sakes.”
Theres a chorus of laughter and small yells of agreements littered throughout. Lily throws up her arms, a beer in one of her hands, and runs up to the stage.
“Drink, drink, drink!”
A chant breaks out. She grins, taking the bottle from Lily and popping the top off with her teeth. “The things I do for the lot of you,”
Alice tips her head back and downs the bottle, the room cheers louder the more liquid burns her throat. She’s a good drinker by now, having started well before it’s socially acceptable.
“Alright, who wants to hear a song?”
She smiles when they cheer in agreement. The room is rowdy, restless. Full of children who have seen more in the past two months than most people do in an entire lifetime. People who are desperate to live, desperate to die. Desperate to feel.
Which she supposes is why she’s here,
Make them feel something.
Alice takes her guitar off her back in one fell swoop. She strums the opening cords to ‘Nothing you can take from me’, a song she wrote when the war was still on the rise.
She thought a lot about what the first song should be. And in the end, she decided that it shouldn’t be about love, or sorrow.
In the end, she decided on what it is:
War.
✼ ҉ ✼ ҉ ✼
Her next meetings were much the same. They happened every week, for the past three weeks. In between meetings Dumbledore sent her on various undercover missions in England, because she knew the area well enough. He suggested Wales, but she refused. She isn’t ready to go home.
Foolishly, she feels that if she goes home she will be stripped bare. That everybody there will know she can’t stand to see fire, or speak of her mother.
The missions were easy. Most of what she did seemed to be talking to people while either getting information out of them, taking artifacts from their pockets, or occasionally bringing them in for questioning. He said that her international work, or her work outside of the country would be where she’ll have to take on fake identities.
Apparently Remus is doing undercover work as well, with Grayback and his wolves. (Which she doesn’t think he was supposed to tell her, but it’s not like she’ll say anything.) He came to the last meeting, much to Sirius’ glee.
Her first assignment outside of England is supposed to be infiltrating a coven of witches in France. The details of the assignment, she doesn’t know yet, but she’s almost itching to get her hands on them. Alice is often fed up with Dumbledore’s proclivity for secrets, and the way he looks as though he’s sure he knows better than everybody else. It’s exhausting.
So far, since her first she’s done three more meetings. She’s gotten better at listening. She’s started singing songs with muggle references in them.
They do that often during the war, she finds. Trying to honor muggle culture. In the pub where they have their meetings they’ve put posters of muggle musicians and actors on the walls. Many of which are Queen and Bowie (she suspects Sirius and Remus) but there’s also Abba and others even she hasn’t heard of. They have a stack of board games that they keep on one of the tables. There’s even a tiny box-screened tele in the corner with two patchy sofas from somebody’s living room pushed up in front of it.
They come back from missions that they can’t even bring themselves to speak about, and they do whatever they can to forget it.
The slaughterhouse five phrase is thrown around a lot: ‘so it goes’
They lost five people in a mission, so it goes.
Alice wakes up shaking every night, smelling the burning of her own flesh and hearing the cries of children in her ears.
So it goes.
Life is shit.
They sing, and they fight, and they prepare to die.
✼ ҉ ✼ ҉ ✼
It’s about two days later that Dumbledore calls her to Hogwarts to go over the terms of her mission. He tells her in the letter that it’s long term: a couple of months at most, and low risk. The coven is supposed to be an English group of women. They don’t take well to men, but they protect their own.
Alice apparates to Hogwarts, obviously.
As she walks through the corridors, she finds it hard to reconcile the care-free teenage girl weaved into the walls with whoever she is now. It’s almost as if she can hear it: the yells of the twins. The scolding Frank gave the boys after a prank.
Not only can she hear it, she can feel it. Alice can feel herself; as if it’s a completely separate entity. She can feel the desperation she felt to keep Narcissa when she passes the wall with the come-and-go room.
She found it in her fifth year, Narcissa’s sixth. Alice has always been restless in her skin; pacing ever the habit she’d gained from her pa. Though they never dated, Narcissa swore that she wasn’t like Alice. That she wasn’t a queer like she was. That this was the real world, one where she couldn’t be that.
But then Alice found the room, and inside they could be whoever they wanted. Narcissa never controlled the room. She’d said that Alice had a better imagination. So she always took them to the room Narcissa liked the most.
She goes there now; unable to stop herself. The room shifts into one she knows all too well. When she opens the door, it’s as if she’s gone home. The walls are lined with wooden bookshelves, filled with books written in French. The ones Narcissa used to translate for her, on those lazy days where they didn’t have classes, or obligations of any kind. The hardwood floor is covered in ornate carpets. Where the bookshelves end, the corner of the room meet with large floor-to-ceiling windows that curve up to meet the roof halfway.
What it shows of the outside is fake; there are no trees that healthy and green. None that tower over this part of the building so fantastically. It’s all an illusion, like the endless rays of sun that peek through the leaves. There are plush sofas squaring the corner in.
Instead of going there, Alice wanders to the other side of the room where the bed sits. A large, white, beautiful king sized bed with sheer curtains canopying its insides. Narcissa’s favorite painting sits upon the headboard, one of the few spots of color. Alice, at sixteen, made it so the room was exactly what Narcissa needed. It was clean, and pristine. A place where Narcissa could read and listen to classical music in the sunlight, and she didn’t have to worry about who she was or what family she’d come from.
At the time, Alice would’ve given Narcissa anything.
Her hamartia, her fatal flaw, is that she still would.
The secretary never seemed to bother Narcissa as it did her. She always felt, wholly and completely, as though she could never be anybody other than who she was. Her entire soul was Narcissa’s, and it was hard to leave it behind in one room. As far as anybody else was concerned, they didn’t even know one another. They met at night, they were born of night, and they died in the shadows. She always felt as though her friends were missing half of her, like there was a gaping whole where she should’ve been.
Can you not feel it? She wanted to ask. Can you not feel how empty I am without her? Can you not see?
Alice and Narcissa were always complicated, and often fickle. Sometimes they were friends, sometimes lovers, and most of the time they were nothing at all.
Narcissa never came back for her seventh year. She was betrothed to Lucius Malfoy, a man eleven years her senior, and Alice found out through a letter she’d written. It was short, but she’d known Alice would understand it with startling clarity.
“A,
I will not look back.
N.”
Before that summer, Narcissa had been all sorrow. She spoke of Lucius constantly, but she held onto Alice as if she were grieving something not yet gone.
“I see you’ve found the room of requirement.” Dumbledore’s airy voice causes her to whip around, clutching her chest. “I did not intend to frighten you, Alice. Though I did figure I’d find you here. Hogwarts has many secrets, as you must know, but I will say this is one of the more beautiful renditions of the room I’ve seen thus far.”
Alice would rather jam her wand into her eye than explain it to Dumbledore, still feeling rather defensive about their shared secret. So instead, she replies, “Do you have the case information?”
He nods as if he’s expected this and turns on his heel, leaving no room for argument. She nearly closes her eyes on the way to his office, but she’d rather not run into a first year, or fall down the stairs. It unnerves her slightly, being in Hogwarts. It’s supposed to be safe of course. Plenty of kids still live here. And everybody trusts Dumbledore. Even Frank is willing to put all of his faith in him, but she still can’t help but feel off kilter.
They get to his office and he offers her a bowl of lemon sherbets, she takes a handful and then four. Narcissa always used to poke fun at her sweet tooth, but every time they met in their room she always had something for her. Perhaps being at Hogwarts has gotten her a tad sentimental as well. Alice sits down on an uncomfortable leather chair and pockets the candies she can’t fit into her hand.
“The coven you’ll be infiltrating are English, but for your safety it’s best you adopt another accent. Can you do southern, perhaps?” He starts.
Alice clears her throat, “Howdy. R’ whatever they say.” Her accent isn’t that bad, she doesn’t think.
“Proficient.” Dumbledore compliments, “You will be posing as a singer from America. The location doesn’t quite matter-“
Alice cuts him off and pops a candy in her mouth. “Utah. S’ where the mormons are right?”
“Quite. But it would be unwise to say that you’re part of a muggle religion.”
”They’re blood supremracists then? Dunno if you’ve heard but m’ not exactly pure.”
Dumbledore leans back, interlinking his hands and studying her. “Yes,” he drawls “You will have to pose as a pureblood if that is quite alright with you.”
She nods. Alice has had plenty run-ins with purebloods in her life, so she’s pretty confident she can imitate their behavior for a couple weeks.
“Splendid indeed.” He rustles through his desk drawer and pulls out a short fold of parchment. “Your identity, Kathrine ‘Kathy’ Smith from America. A pureblood, attended the school of Ilvermorny, sorted into the Thunderbird house. I trust you’ve heard?”
Alice skims the parchment and looks back up, “What would you have done if I couldn’t do a southern accent?” She tries to joke but apparently he isn’t in the mood because he just raises his eyebrows as if to convey a joke of his own. She sighs, “Yes i’ve heard. I’ll call the muggles no-mag’s and rant about how great Massachusetts is. Now can I know why I’m manipulating my way into their lives?” She does her speech in an exaggerated accent, and when she’s done there’s the ghost of a smile on his lips.
He waits a moment. “There’s an amulet. We do not know the full extent of its power yet, but we believe it’s the reason the coven is still alive.”
“How so?”
”The coven has been around for a long time, and they’ve been close followers of Voldemort since his rise to power. We have a trusted source close to him that said that recently, one of the covens members betrayed Voldemort by helping somebody he wanted gone escape his clutches. Our source claims that the amulet is the reason he hasn’t found them; it keeps their location sealed from those with mal intent.”
“So you want me to get the amulet?”
“Quite. I believe it could serve a fair use, no?” Dumbledore inquires.
He isn’t wrong. There’s spells that hide one’s whereabouts, but none with a level of magic that strong, especially if it’s cloaking an entire group of people. It could help a lot with raids.
The rest of the meeting goes by quick, Dumbledore describes where she’ll be going. He was able to track them to a pub they frequent, and she was given a lesson on language translation spells so she’ll understand what they’re saying.
Before she knows it she’s apparating away, going on a mission she had no idea would soon change everything.