alt_severus | Order Only: Private message to Alice and Hermione

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I regret to inform you that Miss Granger and I have finished testing the last of the candidate antidotes on our guests, and none of them have been successful. The only piece of fortunate news is that although our attempts were unsuccessful, they were likewise not fatal: they simply had no effect.

Miss Granger: at this point you are likely as frustrated as I. I propose we take several weeks to catch up with the workhorse brewing that has been neglected lately, and return to the task in the new year in the hopes a rest will produce a breakthrough. If you or I have that breakthrough before the schedule calls for it, we can return to our work, but I believe we are at the point where we are not seeing the forest for the trees. I will finish my bench notes by tomorrow; kindly do the same with yours by the end of the week while your observations are still fresh in your mind.

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From:

alt_severus

Two decades ago it would have been unthinkable that I could not undo Rookwood's work, even when he was at his most arcane. Two decades ago it would have been impossible for Bellatrix to produce a curse I could not unravel eventually.

If I know I have lost that much, what did Azkaban take from me that I cannot even remember I once had?

From:

alt_severus

What are we missing?

From:

alt_alice

We're functioning with only a very small portion of the puzzle. It's like trying to solve a murder case that's a decade old with only the barest of evidence remaining at hand.

What you've been able to accomplish with so little to work from is a marvel.

Yes, we're clearly missing something. And we can start chipping away at it, especially since we didn't know it was missing until now.

It'll come. It'll take a little longer than it would otherwise, because you're working with next to no resources, and we keep interrupting your work with various fires that need putting out which can't help. But you'll get it sorted. You will. I have every faith.

The sheer amount of energy that it took to put all those people to sleep in the first place is nearly unimaginable. We're dealing with things on a massive scale, things we've never encountered before.

We're also dealing with a paranoid, secretive lot who tend to create all sorts of modifications on things that make it difficult to replicate. They want control. They want it exclusive. That suggests they set it up to use materials only they can access, but the materials have to be plentiful enough to wake a few thousand people on fairly short notice. Or that it's a truly obscure solution that only a handful of people would have knowledge of to begin with.

From:

alt_severus

I am well aware of the nature of our opponents. You forget that two decades ago I was one of the paranoid, secretive lot working to safeguard the advances I had made. (As to that, it occurs to me that since my cover has well and truly been blown, there are a number of curses and useful support spells that I may now teach you without raising uncomfortable questions: Miss Perks reminded me several months ago that my potions are still in use among the Death Eaters, and I do not doubt that my charms and curses are, as well. We will simply need to be careful that the children do not learn them in such a way as to raise questions, as many of them are quite distinctive.)

I suppose it is the discussion of Azkaban, this week, that has me in such a strop. For all that I have told you nearly everything of my late, lamented career as Albus's double agent, I was still vague about the circumstances under which I was commended there: the Dark Lord told me He wished to bait Albus into staging a breakout, that having been rescued from durance vile it should quiet the last of Albus's doubts about my true loyalties; it was His plan, or so He told me, that He would arrange just enough weakness in Azkaban's defenses to allow Albus and the Order to stage a rescue. For all I believed — and still do believe — He had not realised in which direction my true double-agenthood ran, my techniques of shielding my mind meant it took far too long for the Dementors to eat away the hope that in that, at least, He had not been lying.

Part of me wishes to champion the idea of an assault on the fortress immediately — no one ought be forced to spend one more day in there than we can help — and part of me, the small and petty part I do not wish to acknowledge, wants to know why Lucius Malfoy is worth freeing while I was not.

…It appears I have not forgiven Albus as much as I told you that I have. My apologies; I do not mean to make you into my agony aunt unprompted. (Do not, under any circumstance, apologise to me again. That none of you knew the arrangements Albus and I had made is in no way your fault; we kept it secret for a reason.)

I have been working under the assumption that it is the obscure solution, rather than the obscure materials — for the very reason you name, that they did not have any trouble waking a collection at short notice. Perhaps it is time to re-examine my entire collection of premises from the very beginning.

From:

alt_alice

Dedalus Diggle is there right now. Sturgis was for slightly longer than you were, and was recaptured and Kissed. I assumed they'd both died in the war, and the thought

When I learned of Sturgis, it kept me up for days.

And it is deeply unsettling that Dedalus should be there still, and that this entire time, he's been suffering as we mourn his death.

I am uncertain if we could've realistically mounted an escape at the time, but Merlin, Severus, if we'd have known there were three of our people in there

three.

When he fled, Albus left us all rudderless, without any knowledge of how to proceed. He kept key pieces of information to himself, and he abandoned us. We were left to attempt to survive as wanted fugitives, and the fact that we were able to not only survive, and it took us years to get to this point, where we have the ability to even start mounting a credible offence.

Make no mistake, I am bloody furious that Narcissa Malfoy has put us in this position, and am attempting to make the best use of it as possible. And the more I learn of Albus, the more grateful I am that he is no longer in charge.

That man.

That... that man.