Anyways, I really hope you like this -- I'm not sure if it's as good as the last one, so I'm relying on your ever-wise advice -- and THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for all the glowing reviews I got last time! *smiles happily* Y'all are just wonderful, you know that? .. This one goes to you, and also to the lovely people at my forum, because you might recognize dear Aury. ^_^ Thanks for the nickname, Hon!
Sirius's heart leapt as he caught
sight of Harry, Ron, and Hermione approaching the stile. Those two
were good kids -- good for Harry, too -- and he liked them, if mainly because
they treated him with respect. Because they had believed he wasn't
lying. Because they weren't afraid of him still, unconsciously believing
he was a murderer even as their logic proved them wrong. Sirius had
almost forgotten what it was like to be an accepted member of society;
it was one of those things everybody took for granted, like the fact that
the sun rose in the east every morning or that the police would always
be there to protect you, not to drag you off to a cold cell for twelve
years and tell you to rot there.
"Hello, Sirius," said Harry's
voice behind his head. Sirius dropped back to earth and wagged his
tail, sniffing the delicious aromas of real, honest-to-God food. His godson was a wonderful person -- chicken! It was chicken! Sirius sniffed again for the sheer joy of it, even though the smell made
his stomach feel even more empty. The black dog trotted back to his
cave quickly: the sooner Sirius got there, the sooner he could dig into
that chicken.
Sirius's brain began to clear
as he dove into the chicken, and he could almost feel the relief of his
digestive system. No more rats -- at least for a time.
Only he was so caught up in
figuring out the mysteries of the Quidditch World Cup that he didn't notice
Ron's eagerness for his approval, didn't see that he ended up snubbing
him every time the boy came up with something. And then they had
to delve into Crouch .. and Sirius had to work very, very hard to control
his rage, and then his puzzlement. What was Crouch doing during
the World Cup? What was Crouch doing when he should have been
judging the Triwizard Tournament??
Finally talking got the better
of Sirius, and he transformed to see them off at the stile. Doing
a brisk jog around the village, Sirius managed to grab another Daily Prophet,
walk up the mountainside with it, and get back into his cave.
Except somebody was already
in it.
"Transform, and then put your
hands up!" a dark-haired woman ordered. She already had her wand
out and was pointing it at him. Sirius guessed her age -- somewhere
around thirty-five, but not a stranger to the troubles of the world. "Get inside the cave. Just because Harry Potter believes in you doesn't
mean I'm going to automatically forgive you for the deaths of sixteen people. I'm a better Auror than that."
Damn, Sirius told himself
as the panic rose in his chest. How the hell did I manage to stumble
into an Auror? And how did she know he was an Animagus? Had she been listening to him with Harry, Ron, and Hermione all this
time?
"I know you're Sirius Black. So get out of your dog disguise," she told him after a pause. What
could he do as a dog, anyway? Attack her and rip her apart? What would he do, eat her corpse? Sirius transformed, put up his
hands, and matched her cold hazel gaze with his own harsh eyes.
"Tell me what you are doing
here," she said in a low voice, and stepped back. She wasn't trembling,
but she was looking at Sirius like one would look at a time bomb with three
seconds left before the blow.
"And why do I owe you an explanation?"
Sirius replied, just as softly, his confidence returning somewhat. He couldn't kill her, but he might be able to keep her here, Auror that
she was. The one thing he could not do was return to Azkaban.
"You owe me an explanation,
Mr. Black," she answered testily, "because you are a convicted murderer
and I am an Auror who at this moment has a wand pointing straight at you. Talk."
Sirius closed his eyes briefly. What were his options? He could just lock her up, but with what? He could take her wand and threaten her, make her promise to keep her mouth
shut ..
Or he could tell her the truth. "I believe you have been misinformed," he began quietly. "I was not
responsible for sixteen deaths -- just two." Lily and James. My best friends. "One of them never happened, and the other thirteen
were all Pettigrew's."
Her eyes widened, and she sat
down, sensing that this was going to take awhile. She moved back
from him again, keeping her wand on him. Like a good Auror. Like an Auror who had just found out that Crouch had sent him to Azkaban
without a trial, and was willing to hear his explanation despite her fears. Right then Sirius knew he would never get that wand from her. She
had been trained, and she knew what she was about. He was betting
that there were no reinforcements on the way -- she wanted to hear his
side of it before she threw him to the lions. And that small bit
of respect, that minuscule consideration for another person's life, that
realization of the repercussions of her actions, reached inside Sirius
and strengthened him and made him think that he did, in fact, owe her the
truth.
She listened when he told her
what he had done, how he had switched Secret-Keepers at the last moment,
how it had all come out in the top room of the Shrieking Shack, how he
had believed that Harry might come and live with him, how he had narrowly
escaped getting the Dementor's Kiss because of his godson, how his godson
helped him again and gave him a hippogriff to escape with, how he had flown
to Barcelona and made his hideout there until this year, when he began
to notice the signs, and Dumbledore had owled him about the cave at the
edge of Hogsmeade. And he had remembered discovering it in his fourth
year at Hogwarts.
The Auror gulped and lowered
her wand shakily. It was the first time she had ever acted truly
unsteady. They sat there in silence for a long moment, the Auror
absorbing his story and Sirius accepting that there was nothing much to
be said.
"But --" she croaked after
awhile, and gripped her wand a little tighter, "you said you were responsible
for two deaths."
"I switched Secret-Keepers,"
he reminded her, daring her to question him again.
She looked into his eyes. "But that doesn't make you their murderer."
Sirius was searching his mind
for a reply when a rat scurried across the cave. He watched it go
with a slight smile on his face, reveling in the knowledge that he didn't
need it for food. The chicken was still in his stomach. He
glanced over at the Auror. To his surprise, she looked as though
she was fighting back a scream, grabbing her wand until the knuckles were
white, all her muscles tense. Sirius gave a start. Here he
was, despised criminal, who had been through the horrors of Azkaban, and
there she was, a trained Auror from the Ministry of Magic, cringing from
a rat. The terror in her eyes was so real, though, that he couldn't
laugh. She shook violently even after the rat had made its way across
the cave and vanished into a crack in the rock.
"It's just a rat," he said
lamely, attempts at comfort lost on him. She glared at him and he
was suddenly reminded that she could put him in Azkaban. He shut
his mouth and waited for her to calm down.
Her breath came in slow gasps,
but finally she gained control of her voice and trusted herself to whisper,
"I'm sorry." She was looking at the ground, and not at him, obviously
thinking of all the rats that could be making their way across this floor,
that were waiting behind folds in the solid rock to jump out and dig their
claws into her skin. She took a deep breath and looked him over again. She seemed to be thinking hard. Sirius sat back and pulled the Daily
Prophet nonchalantly off the floor where he had dropped it after his transformation.
Before he could read a word,
the witch was standing over him again. She gently took the Daily
Prophet out of his hands and held out her wand.
"Take it," she ordered. He did. "There. Now you're armed and I'm not. Want to
kill me, Sirius Black, or did I judge you right after all?" And
just when I thought this job was getting boring .. she told herself
with dry humor.
The Auror stood there, watching
him, and Sirius carefully avoided her gaze, still sitting on the ground. It brought back memories, to have the feel of a wand in his hand .. he
looked at it. It was about a foot long, made with ebony: a good,
impresive-looking wand for an Auror to have. With a slight jump he
realized he didn't even know her name. He looked up at her, opening
his mouth, about to ask her, and then their eyes locked again and he found
he couldn't say anything. She was afraid, he saw, afraid that he
would blast her into a million pieces, afraid that she had been wrong about
him and therefore wrong in all her preconceptions about human nature. She was afraid that he would see the easy way out of his problems and cast
a Memory Charm on her, erasing her life in one word.
Well, why don't you? a treacherous part of his mind whispered. One shout of "Obliviate!"
and all his problems would be over. The Ministry would think she'd
run into some minor bit of trouble and by the time they got around to investigation,
Sirius would be gone, in hiding somewhere else. While the wizarding
government had its uses, it was painfully slow about this sort of thing. Bertha Jorkins, for example, and that was possibly a more serious case. At least if he cast a simple Memory Charm, she'd still be alive.
But Sirius couldn't bring himself
to do it .. he was afraid, too. The fright in her eyes brought him
back to that cold night last year, where he had been an inch away from
the hissing, sucking breaths of the dark, cloaked Dementor's, awaiting
his Kiss. Sirius couldn't raise the wand. He couldn't kill
somebody so completely. He lowered the wand, and held it out to her,
looking away from the hazel depths again.
"Take it," he growled. "Take it."
She took the wand in amazement,
and glanced at him uneasily, recognizing who he really was, seeing him
for the first time. Sirius didn't look at her during this examination;
he couldn't stand pity. You've already done it to me, now go away.
The Auror pocketed her wand
and held out a hand. "I'm Aurelia Sands," she told him softly. Sirius raised his head and realized that there was no pity in her eyes
-- only respect, only sorrow that twelve years of his life had been thrown
away. He stood up and shook her hand. He wasn't smiling, but
he wasn't frowning either.
"Nice to meet you," he replied,
standard protocols returning to him slowly after a long rest in the back
of his mind.
"I'm not going to turn you
in," she said suddenly, still looking into his eyes. Why did she
have to do that? It made him uncomfortable. Like she
could see what lay beyond them. As if she was checking to make sure
he understood her promise.
He shrugged.
"I mean it, Sirius. I'm
not going to turn you in." He shrugged again. He knew that
she wouldn't. He knew she believed him. He knew she didn't
have the heart to send him to Azkaban, now.
"Do -- do you need anything?"
she asked. "I mean -- I can get you the Daily Prophets -- food --"
"And be discovered, coming
up here every day?" he returned, eyebrows raised. "No. My godson
might be able to get me something. And if not -- I don't really mind
living off rats. I mean, it's either that or --"
"You live off rats?" she repeated, shuddering and backing away from him again. Almost
as if she saw the surprise in his eyes at her actions -- she seemed so
in control one second, and then at the mere mention of the creatures she
went berserk -- she added defensively, "Everybody's afraid of something. My curse just happens to be rats."
"Not useful information for
an enemy," he remarked dryly, thinking of Wormtail.
She looked up. "You're
not an enemy."
Sirius rubbed his face and
Aurelia finally noticed that he was tired; she cupped her hands around
her elbows in a half-nervous gesture and said, "I was off-duty, but I better
get on Pettigrew's tail tomorrow." She gave a short laugh, remembering
that he was a rat. "This should be a challenge. I'll be back
tomorrow to ask you questions. And I'll be careful," she added,
a bite of impatience in her voice.
Mentally rolling his eyes at
the whole Auror obsession with questioning, Sirius watched her slip out
of the cave and listened for her crunching footsteps down the mountainside,
but there weren't any. He shook his head, too tired to deal with
any more disbelief at this moment. Why did she unsettle him so much? Why did he keep forcing himself to avoid her hazel eyes?
Sirius awoke at midnight with
a horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was the chicken,
he'd eaten too much, after days of feasting on uncooked rat whenever the
hunger pangs got too strong. His body had gotten used to the meager
rations, the raw meat, so when he gorged on that chicken of course it might make him sick ..
These thoughts ran through
his mind in a split second. And then he threw up. He hated
it. He'd done it plenty of times in Azkaban, of course, sometimes
after hearing the atrocities that some of the Death Eaters had committed
-- and enjoyed -- and sometimes just because of the maggots and fleas that
made their home in his lumpy gray soup bowl. At least this time he
had something to throw up, instead of dry heaves which he'd had more often
than not in prison. Still, it was an unpleasant feeling. His
mouth was burning with the tang of the acid from his stomach; cool, cleansing
water was what he needed right now. He changed into his black dog
form and trotted down to the river, letting the crisp night air calm him. For once he was thankful to be living in a small village; there were no
cutthroat gangs or drunk bums about, and the stars were beautiful.
He gulped the water hastily,
letting it wash the burn out of his mouth, and the black dog rolled in
the grass for a bit, enjoying the night for all it was worth. He
needed to think, anyway.
Sirius very strongly doubted
that Aurelia would turn him in. Yes, it was possible that
she could just be a very good actress, but he didn't think that was the
case. Something about her told him that she could be trusted. Besides, he'd taken all the necessary precautions, Harry would only worry
more if he changed hiding places, and Aurelia did believe him. He
assumed that she'd been listening the entire time he was talking with Harry,
Ron, and Hermione .. but how? Suddenly recalling how she had made
no noise going down the mountain, Sirius knew there was something she hadn't
told him. Many things she had not told him.
She wouldn't be the only one
doing the questioning tomorrow.