Shades of Grey

By: Orii15

Chapter One

White-Out--The Only Way to Correct Mistakes in Pen Without Starting a Small fFre, or Feeding the Paper to a Small Animal

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and though the prospect makes me absolutly misereable I feel I must take this opportunity to state that I never have and never will and that I'm not claiming any kind of ownership by publishing this fanfiction. However, I remain stubbornly determined that Tim Black is mine no matter who everyone else belongs to.

A/N: Thanks to everyone who reviewed last chapter and especially to Ramses who has been reading this fic since before I re-wrote it. I'm sorry you had to wait so long in between, but I had a lot to fix. I wasn't going to post this chapter yet because there wer another couple of scenes I wanted to add onto it, but I got a really terrible writer's block on them and so I decided to put up what I had incase anyone was waiting for it. It's not as long as the Prolougue, but the difference is only some 300 words and Chapter Two is proving to be a real pain to write so you know it'll be real long.

Anyways, I'm done talking, y'all probably skipped this part anyways, didn't you?

--Orii

It didn't take very long for Leah and me to pack up our things and move from our small flat in Ireland to a smaller but slightly more expensive one in London. We really didn't have very much by way of material possessions and even in the tiny flat it surprised me how open everything was after we moved in all our furniture. Leah had been reluctant to move us back, she kept saying she thought changing schools was a compromise to my education, but she was just saying that. We both knew I that couldn't—wouldn't—go back to Flinn's now.

Hogwarts life certainly seemed more exciting than life at Flinn's, where the event of the day was usually me. In fact in the last four years they'd been home to the sorcerer's stone, the heir of Slytherin, an attack by an infamous murderer (my father) and the Triwizard Tournament. I thought all this activity would probably distract the other students from me, after all Harry Potter went there so what interest could the illegitimate son of a wanted criminal hold for the students? Leah was less optimistic, she never said it out loud to me, but I kept catching her thinking that sending me to a big school like Hogwarts could only lead to another incident like what happened at Flinn's on a larger scale.

Leah was only mollified to the prospect of our living in England when she got her old job back as an Auror. Leah had been working as an Auror in England ever since she graduated from Hogwarts, but when we'd moved the Irish branch of the ministry would only give her a desk job as a glorified secretary in their Auror's office. She hadn't liked it—Leah was one of those people who despised paperwork of all kinds, and most especially other people's paperwork—but she'd learned to slog through it, with the help of the occasional Firewhiskey with dinner. The prospect of finally being back on the job seemed to put Leah into a much better mood. The summer found her waking earlier than she might have liked but singing in the shower and coming home late, but usually with a smile or at least a feeling of having accomplished something.

My summer was slightly less eventful. It consisted mostly of books and Occlumency. There wasn't much to do in our flat, and at first Leah didn't want to leave me by myself all day, but alone is what I do best. It was almost a comfort after spending so long at Flinn's where I was surrounded by people all the time. I enjoyed being alone with my thoughts on those days. It was a pleasant change I wanted to be able to keep once I entered Hogwarts, which is the reason I spent a half my time sitting in our flat with my eyes closed, clearing my head and the other half trying to hold up the barrier I created. Of course I couldn't know whether my Occlumency was working or not when I was shut up in our flat and so I started wandering all around our neighborhood, seeing how long I could last.

At first I stayed close to our building, playing it safe in case I had to run back to the isolation of our flat, but as the days went on I started building up more of a tolerance and I went farther and farther. I still couldn't block out every outside thought for longer than half an hour at a stretch, but I discovered there was a kind of half-shielding I could do that let me tune out the thoughts I was hearing until they were at a tolerable level. After I started to get the hang of holding up that shield I practiced conjuring it faster and faster until I could do it in a matter of seconds. I'd never made the kind of kind of progress with Occlumency I made in those two months at Flinn's where I'd been practicing it for almost a year, but in London I had hours and hours to spend all by myself to clear my mind if I needed them and I think that helped me to move farther when I was around people.

After the first week or so, Leah and I made an unspoken pact not to try and talk about anything I'd done during the day over dinner, because it bored us both so thoroughly we were likely to end up asleep with our faces in our food. Instead Leah told funny stories about her work, and on the evenings when she came home particularly late but smiling for my sake she usually made up funny stories about her work and tried to pass them off as the real thing. About half-way through the summer I noticed that she was consistently coming home later two or three nights a week deep in thoughts I couldn't understand. One night she saw me staring at her, trying to understand what was going on inside her mind—I don't usually use my SCL to snoop, but it's not often an advantage for me and so when it is I try to get as much use out of it as possible—and she blocked me. I'd never known Leah knew Occlumency, though I probably should have guessed since she was an Auror, but she'd never blocked me from hearing what she was thinking before.

I must have looked shocked and hurt because Leah came to sit next to me on the couch.

Guilt. Anxiety. "Sorry, Tim. I just have a lot to think about—and a lot to tell you—and I'm not sure if you're ready to hear it yet."

I concentrated on figuring out what she was feeling, since that was all I could sense from her with her thoughts blocked. "Did I do something? Do they not want me at Hogwarts anymore?"

Surprise. "Nothing like that." She sighed "I guess I should just tell you everything now, you'll get to it sooner or later anyways. I can't block you forever. It's harder to keep you out than I thought." She ran a hand through her hair, short and brown, but not without hints of silver, and stopped blocking me. "I can't explain everything to you, there are things only a Secret Keeper can tell you, but I'm going to say all I can, alright?"

I nodded.

"Okay." Another hand through her hair, 'How do I explain this to him?' "You know Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore are talking about Vo—you-know-who—returning at the end of last year?"

I nodded again but didn't add the part about how the newspapers were all talking about how Dumbledore had gone senile and Harry Potter was an attention-hungry lunatic. I didn't think Leah would appreciate that, and she knew already anyways.

"It's true. Everything they've been saying, it's true. He's back."

I felt kind of like I'd had the breath knocked out of me. He was back. You-Know-Who had always seemed like a name in a textbook to me, albeit a name in a recent text-book who was always described as the most terrible dark wizard of all time, but I'd always over looked that detail was because of the sentence that followed it. 'Defeated by Harry Potter in 1980', and then came the elaborate praise of Harry Potter as the savior of the Wizarding World. It had seemed like a closed subject, another story with a happy ending, every Dark Wizard died eventually. There were still would-be Death-eaters hanging around but they were in hiding or incarcerated or on the run (like my father) and therefore not a real threat. It's funny how two words in the right context can rip your world apart.

Concern. "Are you okay, Tim?"

I nodded "It's just—well, scary actually. Especially when you say it so calmly."

"I know. It's terrifying. That's why I joined the Order." She saw the question on my face before I got a chance to say it "The Order of the Phoenix is a secret society run by Albus Dumbledore that works against You-Know-Who and his followers."

"You're working against Sirius Black then?"

Discomfort. Guilt. "No, not really." A guilty smile played on her lips "Actually it's the opposite. Sirius Black is in the Order and I work with him."

"I don't understand."

Another sigh. "I know it sounds…impossible…but he's innocent. The whole thing, it was an elaborate framing."

"If he's innocent, why isn't anyone working to clear his name?"

"They don't have the evidence. Peter Pettigrew, the boy they all say he murdered, he's responsible for Sirius being put in Azkaban, but he's with You-Know-Who. There's no case without Pettigrew, just a murderer and what will sound to everyone like a phony testimony. They'd just throw him back to the dementors."

"Have you been talking to Sirius a lot lately?"

"As much as I can, after Order meetings, at first I was furious with him, but you can't honestly blame him for anything that's happened."

I wasn't so sure about that, but I didn't tell Leah. She was really happy to have found my father after almost fourteen years and I wasn't going to be the one to ruin it for her. "Can I meet Sirius? Would the Order let me see him?"

Relief. Delight. "I think I could arrange something. They can't not let him see his own son, after all. I've told to him a lot about you, he's curious."

Curious. In the days in between my talk with Leah and the day I was going to the Headquarters of the Order it was harder for me to clear my mind, for once because my own thoughts didn't want to stop. My half-shield became harder to conjure and I had to stay in the flat more because I wasn't used to walking around without it anymore. I tried to keep busy and not to think too much about Sirius Black, but I couldn't help but think about him. In a way he was responsible for all the torments I'd had to put up with at Flinn's and for my SCL too probably—I couldn't think of any experience that could have been more traumatic for Leah during her pregnancy with me than having her fiancé arrested—but somehow I didn't want to blame him. Not yet.