"Look at you all grown up!!" beams Peggy Sr., gazing delightedly. She was, if she's honest, a little worried that taking her fifteen-year-old daughter at her word that she was all grown up, mom, god, I don't need you hovering over my shoulder while I do the safest thing in the bloody world, go do something useful and leave me alone would be, you know, wildly irresponsible, especially with a very stupid war in the process of breaking out, but she'd have meant it and been right, at that age, and of course she would have dropped this whole operation and come back the minute she was summoned, and in fact Peggy Jr. did not at any point call her, so. "Of course I believed in you but I am still very impressed that you won your war all by yourself, love." 

She is possibly blushing furiously now. Embarrassing. "I mean, really it was Dumbledore's war and Evans and Potter won it for him, I just - you know - helped." 

"Yes, yes, but you didn't need my help. How were your NEWTs?" 

"Same as yours." 

"Excellent. What're you planning to do next?" 

"That was um. Sort of what I was hoping to ask your advice on actually." 

"Oh, yeah?" She really is all grown up and not just a little taller. "Why, what's the trouble picking?" 

"Everyone else in the Order who lived is... having babies and planting gardens and writing books and building government coalitions and things and I just. I don't want to? I kind of... miss the war." 

She has absolutely not admitted this to anyone else but she thinks maybe her mother will understand. 

"Ah." 

She gathers her daughter's hands into her own, sympathetically, and stares down at them for a minute, and then sighs. 

"Well. If you were literally anyone else I would advise you to try to find a hobby, or possibly a therapist, but if someone had told me that when I was twenty I'd've probably hexed them, so. You want to try to contact my old friend Dottie? Suspect she's in Afghanistan right now and could find you something useful to do if you can find her." 

There is probably something terribly wrong with her that this prospect makes her feel about ten times better. But whatever it is it's wrong with them together, so maybe that's all right. 

"Yeah, I'd - I'd really like that, actually, thank you." 

So she rattles off a bunch of last known one-time-owl-addresses, and passwords, and advisories about her friend's general, you know, being evil.

"....and you are therefore recommending her to me why?"

"Ah, that would be because her evil is currently pointed towards the Soviet government since they stopped giving her money."

"Right. So, uh, you used the word 'friend', does that mean if she starts being evil in a less convenient direction you'll be mad at me if I kill her?"

"Nah. But be warned, I tried pretty hard and did not manage it."

"Yeesh, okay, consider me warned. Oh, speaking of warnings, heads up if you ever get done this project and go back to our house, I fucked up resetting the wall of knives situation in like sixth year, there's axes now and the passcode's the same but backwards." 

"Axes," she giggles, charmed. "Good to know." She glances at the sun. "And I think our time's up. I love you."

"Love you too."

And off she goes to fight a different war.

Ten years later, there's a very polite knock on the Carters' door.

"What on Earth do you want."

"Rest of the Order's dead. Did you know you are a bloody impossible person to get hold of?"

"Yes, I work very hard on thORDER'S WHAT?"

(approximately a week prior...)

Voldemort has been cackling with villanous glee for a solid, like, five and a half minutes. 

Peter really thought he would feel good about this and he's sort of resignedly surprised to realize that he's not, actually. It feels awful. James' kid is lying dead on the ground, looking exactly like him, and it doesn't feel like winning because he is the strongest Marauder after all. It mostly feels like a sort of creeping sick feeling in his gut that somewhere he's fucked up and it's much, much too late to go back. 

"So uh, boss," says - damn, is that Rookwood, he thought that fucker died at St. Augustine - one of the Death Eaters, once the cackling has reached a low, horrrible giggle. "What's the plan?" 

"Why, my dear friends," says Voldemort, smiling a wide horrible smile with way too many teeth (wasn't he supposed to be human again? wasn't that the point of this ritual? maybe he never was, really). "The plan is that we go to Hogwarts." He gestures at the glittering golden trophy, lying abandoned next to the Hufflepuff boy that Harry had arrived with, sparkling with magic yet unactivated. "My most loyal servant, you see, has given us a gift." 

Once in a multiverse, sometimes stupid evil plans actually work.