Journals
Summary: Draco researches the death of the Potters, only to discover it had deeper involvement with himself.
Spoilers: PS/SS; CoS; PoA; GoF; RL/SB; RL/LM
Disclaimer: I just helped write two HP fan fics, one was minor slash the other not yet slash. The comedic basis for these stories was somehow mixing with my original, far more serious stuff, and the two melded into this. However I must warn that not a single named character belongs to me. No, they belong to JKR, Scholastic Books, WB, and some British thingies. It's based on a very big scene from PoA, probably the most important, and if you haven't read that then you're completely lost about this story and missing out on all my favorite characters' shining moments. Anyway.-.-|| I do not own this, and review, flame, whatever.
Prologue:
London, England.
1981
I was sitting at the park to finish another script. I have several. I'm at that point where I realize I'm a incredible writer, I just need to find the one story I really want to write.
It's funny. A thousand and one lesser ideas and I can't find one I really like. So I write them all down. Maybe if I write enough I can find my story hiding underneath them all. Like finding tender for a fire.
So I write. I write everything. Because they will help me be great. Because one day I will find my story. And I need to write it down well. So I write. For practice. For experience.
Frankly, I write to shift through the shit.
But it's not enough. So I travel. At first it was merely to public places. Parks, museums, subways, restaurants. But that didn't help at all. So I decided to travel the world two weeks ago. Last week I went to Sydney. This week I'm in London with a ticket for Seoul tomorrow. I still go to public places. I need sparks.
If writing things down is my way to find tender, then traveling is my flint.
And on August 23rd, 1981, I got my sparks. * * *
A man ran up to me as I was writing. He was about 5'10, average weight. Kind of stocky, not quite fat, not quite buff, but looked like he could handle himself decently, but not too well. Maybe benched 100lbs, but not more than 150. Medium blonde, small black eyes.
"You have to help me, please, he's trying to kill me!" he begged, eyes pleading.
At first I thought he was paranoid or schizophrenic, but his eyes were honest and frightened. I was confused because no one had ever said that to me before. So I simply asked, "Who?"
He looked at me, no doubt surprised that I'd asked that. ".You wouldn't know him," he finally said.
Well. I'd heard some schizos were pretty convincing.
A dog barked, causing the man to turn his head quickly. There was a large black dog running up and barking. The man turned back to me, very pale.
"Help me! Do you have a weapon?"
"You think the dog wants to kill you?"
"He's no dog, just help me!"
I gave him my Swiss army knife. He was pretty amusing- I'm easily amused- and I thought it'd be funny to see his reaction.
He took it, watching the dog.
Huh. The dog really was coming over here.
"He killed Lily and James. He tried to kill Harry, too. He killed his master. He could never kill Remus, but now he wants to kill me," the man whispered in fear.
The dog?
The man suddenly turned and ran. The dog followed, still barking.
What the hell was going on?
I had to find out. Damn my insatiable curiosity.
The man ran to the street. He stopped because of the heavy traffic, but the dog was still in pursuit. He was desperate for escape, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wand.
A wand?
He held it up, shouting in Latin. The cars stopped, and he wove through them, putting the wand back into his pocket.
That dog was still in pursuit.
The drivers got out, following the man and the dog. I didn't want to be left out.
When I caught up there was a small crowd gathered around them. The dog had the man pinned against a double-decker bus. The dog snarled and the man grew even paler.
My, what big teeth you have.
"S-Sirius! You-know-who's dead, you don't have to serve him anymore!"
The dog barked again. The man held my knife out.
"I'm brave, I know it! That's what the hat told me!"
The hat? Good Lord. He was psychotic.
Maybe I was too, because at that moment the dog turned into a man. This man was tall, lean, and had long dark hair. He looked like he could handle himself a lot better than the first man, and he was mad.
"Brave, Peter? When you can't even say your master's name?"
"My master? What are you talking about?"
"Voldemort, Peter! Don't you dare lie to me! Not when I told James to switch to you! Not when I can see the Death Eater tattoo on your arm!"
The man held his arm up, showing a black skull with a snake interwoven in. "This? No, Sirius, you don't understand, this is-"
"I understand enough, Peter Pettigrew! I understand you broke our promise! I understand you served under the most evil wizard of time! I understand you were single handedly responsible for the deaths of two of our closest friends!"
"No! Sirius, it wasn't me, I wasn't the one!"
Sirius? Good name for the dog, but for the. What was he, anyway?
"Their secret was in your soul, Peter. You sold them out. For how much, Peter? How much did Voldemort give you to kill your best friend? His wife? To orphan their thirteen month old child?!"
"I didn't get anything!"
"I promised James I'd take care of Harry- And I will! Right after I've killed you, Wormtail!"
"No! Harry's safe, Sirius!" His eyes shifted with a new emotion. A sort of clarity.
"You killed them. James trusted you most, you would be the one- How do we know he ever switched?"
"What? Are you saying I killed James and Lily Potter? A man I loved like my own brother? A woman I walked down the aisle on her wedding day? I orphaned my Godson, who I loved as my own because you know I'll never have my own?"
Peter laughed, but it was one of those laughs that points out irony. "Moony was the only one who didn't know. Him and that Malfoy idiot. But everyone else knew, even Snape. You really cared about Moony. Loved Remus more than you loved any of us. You were completely in love with Remus Lupin, and you call me a coward for not saying V-V-Voldemort when you couldn't even tell a kind, caring, understanding guy like our Moony that you loved him!"
Sirius's hands clenched into fists. "Don't you dare talk about Remus!"
"Was that your price, Sirius Black?"
Sirius looked startled. "What?"
"Voldemort- He supposedly had a cure for lycanthropy. Nothing could have made Moony- Remus- happier than to be cured. If you made it where he no longer had to be a werewolf. And you- If you gave him the cure, you could then explain just how willing you were to be with him, just how much you cared, and he'd probably be a lot more responsive because of what you did, wouldn't he?" Sirius just looked shocked.
"How low can you get, Padfoot? Orphaning Harry so you could finally get the backbone to tell Moony how you really felt since our first year at Hogwarts!"
Hogwarts? Was that some sort of mental hospital? Or a school?
"I would never kill James and Lily just to admit that to Remus! Not for something so trivial as my own cowardice!" His voice was cold as he glared at Peter. "But you're right- to cure Remus, to stop him from feeling the pain of transforming- Yes. I would have killed James and Lily, and even little Harry, if it meant Remus wouldn't go through another torturous full moon."
Peter was sobbing, but Sirius merely glared even sharper at him.
"But Voldemort had no such cure!"
Peter snapped up, his eyes also angry despite the tears. "You were a Code- Breaker for the Ministry, Sirius! You knew that Voldemort's newest strategy was to recruit lycanthropes with the promise of a cure! You knew! Werewolves like Moony just had to join him! But Moony was a pacifist, so he wouldn't. Yet, brash, impulsive, desperate Sirius Black?"
"Was a Code-Breaker, highly trusted by the Ministry of Magic and Dumbledore himself!"
"Does Remus know? Does he even suspect? Can he ever believe you were the one to sell out James and Lily?"
"You killed them, Peter Pettigrew!"
"James and Lily, Sirius! How could you?"
The man growled. Peter sobbed again, as if seeing now there was only one way to survive. He took my knife and hid it in his right palm. Sirius saw it too, but I might have been the only other one to watch him cut off his index finger. Sirius grabbed his own wand- Wands?- and held it out when Peter, his own hidden on his left side, blew up a sewer main. The resulting explosion was huge, but I couldn't take my eyes off of Peter as he transformed into a rat and ran into the sewers.
It hit me then. Wormtail. A rat. And Padfoot, like a dog's foot. The dog. And the werewolf, Moony. Ha ha. Wonder what James was.
Sirius just started to laugh maniacally. I turned to him, and he kept laughing as if something completely ironic and entirely his fault had just happened.
"So. Are you guys some kind of wizards?"
He just kept laughing. I decided to leave him alone. * * *
Twelve people had died. The newspapers were right, it was a sewer main explosion, they just didn't realize it had been caused by a Wizard. But how could they? As Sirius just stood there laughing, six men and four women suddenly appeared. I felt I should leave, so I walked over to my rental car, put my tape recorder underneath, and walked into a nearby- and closed windowed- store to buy paper. I had to write this down. After they'd all left, I sat down and listened to my recording to match it to what I'd watched from my hiding place in the store.
One wizard looked around. "Muggles! You'd think they'd learn not to stick around!"
"Leave 'em be, Curilius."
He just kept laughing. One of the male wizards walked up to him.
"Blimey, it's Sirius Black. Of all the people."
"What, Fletcher? Didn't think he had it in him?"
"It's not that, Davis, it's just-"
"Sirius was one of the top wizards of his year. A bit of a slacker, quite the prankster, but still rather brilliant at the art."
"I know, we graduated together, except he was in Gryffindor and I was a Ravenclaw, but still. It's like Dumbledore, y'know?"
"Why?"
"I dunno, just. He had the power, sure, but. Not the mind set. Not a killer."
"You're wrong, Fletcher. Look at this. He's a killer if I ever saw one."
Sirius had kept laughing the whole time. It wasn't hard to see a killer laughing like that.
"Alright, let's bring him in." One of the women grabbed his wand, snapping it in two. He started to ramble on nonsense words.
"I'm going to Azkaban. Me. The guilty one ran away, but I'm going to jail. Peter went down the sewer, just like a little rat. He got away, and I'm taking his place. No, get off me." He shrugged a man off. "I have to stay. I'm innocent. Peter ran away, I have to kill him, he killed James."
Another wizard tried to restrain him, but Sirius shrugged him off too. "I don't want to go, I have to stay and take care of Harry. I promised James. I have to stay. Remus needs me, Harry needs me, I promised James, I have to stay. I don't wanna go to Azkaban. I don' wanna go to Azkaban. I don' wanna go t' Azkaban. Don' wanna go t' Azkaban. Don' wanna go. Don' wanna go. Don' wanna. No no no, I can't go I promised James I'd stay. I promised. Let me go. Please let me go. Remus needs me. Remus needs me to tell him. I wanna stay with Remus and Harry. Wanna be with Remus an' raise Harry. I wanna raise Harry Potter. Wanna be with Remus. I love him. I need to be with him. I love him. I love you, Moony, I'll get out, I don' wanna go. No make me go, no wanna go t' Azkaban. Lemme go. Harry. Harry." he rambled on like this, probably even more as he went away from the recorder.
Two of the men had grabbed him beneath the shoulders and dragged him away. The other wizards began asking questions to people, writing things down then casting a spell and walking away. Probably a mind-wiping spell.
When done, they vanished.
I knew what I had. I had a story that would be huge.
Shame. I'd been looking forward to Korea.
Summary: Draco researches the death of the Potters, only to discover it had deeper involvement with himself.
Spoilers: PS/SS; CoS; PoA; GoF; RL/SB; RL/LM
Disclaimer: I just helped write two HP fan fics, one was minor slash the other not yet slash. The comedic basis for these stories was somehow mixing with my original, far more serious stuff, and the two melded into this. However I must warn that not a single named character belongs to me. No, they belong to JKR, Scholastic Books, WB, and some British thingies. It's based on a very big scene from PoA, probably the most important, and if you haven't read that then you're completely lost about this story and missing out on all my favorite characters' shining moments. Anyway.-.-|| I do not own this, and review, flame, whatever.
Prologue:
London, England.
1981
I was sitting at the park to finish another script. I have several. I'm at that point where I realize I'm a incredible writer, I just need to find the one story I really want to write.
It's funny. A thousand and one lesser ideas and I can't find one I really like. So I write them all down. Maybe if I write enough I can find my story hiding underneath them all. Like finding tender for a fire.
So I write. I write everything. Because they will help me be great. Because one day I will find my story. And I need to write it down well. So I write. For practice. For experience.
Frankly, I write to shift through the shit.
But it's not enough. So I travel. At first it was merely to public places. Parks, museums, subways, restaurants. But that didn't help at all. So I decided to travel the world two weeks ago. Last week I went to Sydney. This week I'm in London with a ticket for Seoul tomorrow. I still go to public places. I need sparks.
If writing things down is my way to find tender, then traveling is my flint.
And on August 23rd, 1981, I got my sparks. * * *
A man ran up to me as I was writing. He was about 5'10, average weight. Kind of stocky, not quite fat, not quite buff, but looked like he could handle himself decently, but not too well. Maybe benched 100lbs, but not more than 150. Medium blonde, small black eyes.
"You have to help me, please, he's trying to kill me!" he begged, eyes pleading.
At first I thought he was paranoid or schizophrenic, but his eyes were honest and frightened. I was confused because no one had ever said that to me before. So I simply asked, "Who?"
He looked at me, no doubt surprised that I'd asked that. ".You wouldn't know him," he finally said.
Well. I'd heard some schizos were pretty convincing.
A dog barked, causing the man to turn his head quickly. There was a large black dog running up and barking. The man turned back to me, very pale.
"Help me! Do you have a weapon?"
"You think the dog wants to kill you?"
"He's no dog, just help me!"
I gave him my Swiss army knife. He was pretty amusing- I'm easily amused- and I thought it'd be funny to see his reaction.
He took it, watching the dog.
Huh. The dog really was coming over here.
"He killed Lily and James. He tried to kill Harry, too. He killed his master. He could never kill Remus, but now he wants to kill me," the man whispered in fear.
The dog?
The man suddenly turned and ran. The dog followed, still barking.
What the hell was going on?
I had to find out. Damn my insatiable curiosity.
The man ran to the street. He stopped because of the heavy traffic, but the dog was still in pursuit. He was desperate for escape, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wand.
A wand?
He held it up, shouting in Latin. The cars stopped, and he wove through them, putting the wand back into his pocket.
That dog was still in pursuit.
The drivers got out, following the man and the dog. I didn't want to be left out.
When I caught up there was a small crowd gathered around them. The dog had the man pinned against a double-decker bus. The dog snarled and the man grew even paler.
My, what big teeth you have.
"S-Sirius! You-know-who's dead, you don't have to serve him anymore!"
The dog barked again. The man held my knife out.
"I'm brave, I know it! That's what the hat told me!"
The hat? Good Lord. He was psychotic.
Maybe I was too, because at that moment the dog turned into a man. This man was tall, lean, and had long dark hair. He looked like he could handle himself a lot better than the first man, and he was mad.
"Brave, Peter? When you can't even say your master's name?"
"My master? What are you talking about?"
"Voldemort, Peter! Don't you dare lie to me! Not when I told James to switch to you! Not when I can see the Death Eater tattoo on your arm!"
The man held his arm up, showing a black skull with a snake interwoven in. "This? No, Sirius, you don't understand, this is-"
"I understand enough, Peter Pettigrew! I understand you broke our promise! I understand you served under the most evil wizard of time! I understand you were single handedly responsible for the deaths of two of our closest friends!"
"No! Sirius, it wasn't me, I wasn't the one!"
Sirius? Good name for the dog, but for the. What was he, anyway?
"Their secret was in your soul, Peter. You sold them out. For how much, Peter? How much did Voldemort give you to kill your best friend? His wife? To orphan their thirteen month old child?!"
"I didn't get anything!"
"I promised James I'd take care of Harry- And I will! Right after I've killed you, Wormtail!"
"No! Harry's safe, Sirius!" His eyes shifted with a new emotion. A sort of clarity.
"You killed them. James trusted you most, you would be the one- How do we know he ever switched?"
"What? Are you saying I killed James and Lily Potter? A man I loved like my own brother? A woman I walked down the aisle on her wedding day? I orphaned my Godson, who I loved as my own because you know I'll never have my own?"
Peter laughed, but it was one of those laughs that points out irony. "Moony was the only one who didn't know. Him and that Malfoy idiot. But everyone else knew, even Snape. You really cared about Moony. Loved Remus more than you loved any of us. You were completely in love with Remus Lupin, and you call me a coward for not saying V-V-Voldemort when you couldn't even tell a kind, caring, understanding guy like our Moony that you loved him!"
Sirius's hands clenched into fists. "Don't you dare talk about Remus!"
"Was that your price, Sirius Black?"
Sirius looked startled. "What?"
"Voldemort- He supposedly had a cure for lycanthropy. Nothing could have made Moony- Remus- happier than to be cured. If you made it where he no longer had to be a werewolf. And you- If you gave him the cure, you could then explain just how willing you were to be with him, just how much you cared, and he'd probably be a lot more responsive because of what you did, wouldn't he?" Sirius just looked shocked.
"How low can you get, Padfoot? Orphaning Harry so you could finally get the backbone to tell Moony how you really felt since our first year at Hogwarts!"
Hogwarts? Was that some sort of mental hospital? Or a school?
"I would never kill James and Lily just to admit that to Remus! Not for something so trivial as my own cowardice!" His voice was cold as he glared at Peter. "But you're right- to cure Remus, to stop him from feeling the pain of transforming- Yes. I would have killed James and Lily, and even little Harry, if it meant Remus wouldn't go through another torturous full moon."
Peter was sobbing, but Sirius merely glared even sharper at him.
"But Voldemort had no such cure!"
Peter snapped up, his eyes also angry despite the tears. "You were a Code- Breaker for the Ministry, Sirius! You knew that Voldemort's newest strategy was to recruit lycanthropes with the promise of a cure! You knew! Werewolves like Moony just had to join him! But Moony was a pacifist, so he wouldn't. Yet, brash, impulsive, desperate Sirius Black?"
"Was a Code-Breaker, highly trusted by the Ministry of Magic and Dumbledore himself!"
"Does Remus know? Does he even suspect? Can he ever believe you were the one to sell out James and Lily?"
"You killed them, Peter Pettigrew!"
"James and Lily, Sirius! How could you?"
The man growled. Peter sobbed again, as if seeing now there was only one way to survive. He took my knife and hid it in his right palm. Sirius saw it too, but I might have been the only other one to watch him cut off his index finger. Sirius grabbed his own wand- Wands?- and held it out when Peter, his own hidden on his left side, blew up a sewer main. The resulting explosion was huge, but I couldn't take my eyes off of Peter as he transformed into a rat and ran into the sewers.
It hit me then. Wormtail. A rat. And Padfoot, like a dog's foot. The dog. And the werewolf, Moony. Ha ha. Wonder what James was.
Sirius just started to laugh maniacally. I turned to him, and he kept laughing as if something completely ironic and entirely his fault had just happened.
"So. Are you guys some kind of wizards?"
He just kept laughing. I decided to leave him alone. * * *
Twelve people had died. The newspapers were right, it was a sewer main explosion, they just didn't realize it had been caused by a Wizard. But how could they? As Sirius just stood there laughing, six men and four women suddenly appeared. I felt I should leave, so I walked over to my rental car, put my tape recorder underneath, and walked into a nearby- and closed windowed- store to buy paper. I had to write this down. After they'd all left, I sat down and listened to my recording to match it to what I'd watched from my hiding place in the store.
One wizard looked around. "Muggles! You'd think they'd learn not to stick around!"
"Leave 'em be, Curilius."
He just kept laughing. One of the male wizards walked up to him.
"Blimey, it's Sirius Black. Of all the people."
"What, Fletcher? Didn't think he had it in him?"
"It's not that, Davis, it's just-"
"Sirius was one of the top wizards of his year. A bit of a slacker, quite the prankster, but still rather brilliant at the art."
"I know, we graduated together, except he was in Gryffindor and I was a Ravenclaw, but still. It's like Dumbledore, y'know?"
"Why?"
"I dunno, just. He had the power, sure, but. Not the mind set. Not a killer."
"You're wrong, Fletcher. Look at this. He's a killer if I ever saw one."
Sirius had kept laughing the whole time. It wasn't hard to see a killer laughing like that.
"Alright, let's bring him in." One of the women grabbed his wand, snapping it in two. He started to ramble on nonsense words.
"I'm going to Azkaban. Me. The guilty one ran away, but I'm going to jail. Peter went down the sewer, just like a little rat. He got away, and I'm taking his place. No, get off me." He shrugged a man off. "I have to stay. I'm innocent. Peter ran away, I have to kill him, he killed James."
Another wizard tried to restrain him, but Sirius shrugged him off too. "I don't want to go, I have to stay and take care of Harry. I promised James. I have to stay. Remus needs me, Harry needs me, I promised James, I have to stay. I don't wanna go to Azkaban. I don' wanna go to Azkaban. I don' wanna go t' Azkaban. Don' wanna go t' Azkaban. Don' wanna go. Don' wanna go. Don' wanna. No no no, I can't go I promised James I'd stay. I promised. Let me go. Please let me go. Remus needs me. Remus needs me to tell him. I wanna stay with Remus and Harry. Wanna be with Remus an' raise Harry. I wanna raise Harry Potter. Wanna be with Remus. I love him. I need to be with him. I love him. I love you, Moony, I'll get out, I don' wanna go. No make me go, no wanna go t' Azkaban. Lemme go. Harry. Harry." he rambled on like this, probably even more as he went away from the recorder.
Two of the men had grabbed him beneath the shoulders and dragged him away. The other wizards began asking questions to people, writing things down then casting a spell and walking away. Probably a mind-wiping spell.
When done, they vanished.
I knew what I had. I had a story that would be huge.
Shame. I'd been looking forward to Korea.
