Harry Potter and the New Start: Auror
Hello everyone. Thanks so much for all of the reviews! See, not half as long a wait as last time. The fact that I have a snow day definitely helps though.
-------------------------------Emerald's Palace
Sirius stared at the ceiling, sleep not coming to him. His mind still wandered, hardly focusing on one thought for long. He kept coming back to that look in Remus's eyes, that look of shock. Could Remus, after everything, believe in him again?
But more importantly, did Remus even believe him? Sirius's mind begged to know the answer, for his piece of mind. He'd already created fantasies about being declared free, able to renew his friendship with Remus and raise Harry in their world again.
He could not return without knowing though, and there was really only one way to know. He could be back before morning, before Harry ever knew that he was gone. Resolve formed and Sirius knew what he had to do.
Gently, he detangled himself from his godson. He'd get Boo to sit with Harry until he returned, he'd only be gone an hour at the most. It would be fine. There was a point that he and James used to apparate to when they worked as Aurors, it was hidden from view and Sirius doubted that anyone knew of it.
Just as he apparated, the very second, a small pair of hands grabbed his leg. "Siri, no!"
-------------------------------Outside the Auror Headquarters
Sirius felt the world lurch around him and then stop, much like the standard feeling of apparation. This time, however, he'd had a companion. Sirius didn't even wait for the world to right itself before he knelt down to his godson. "Harry! Are you alright?" he asked, somewhat frantically.
The little boy looked a bit stunned. "I didn't want you to go." Harry mumbled in a daze. Apparation was a shock to anyone's system if they didn't know now how to do it themselves.
"I know, baby, but I had to. Are you okay?" Sirius asked, running his hands down Harry's arms and sides to check for an injury that he knew wouldn't be there.
Harry nodded, coming back into himself a bit more. It wasn't everyday he was suddenly apparated out of his bedroom after all. He pushed his godfather's hands away from him and asked, "Where are we? Why did you have to come here?"
Sighing, Sirius stood up. He picked Harry up and set him on a rock to sit on, and then hopped up onto it himself. "This is an apparation point your father and I used to come to after work. We're almost at the Auror Headquarters." He explained. Harry seemed about ready to repeat his second question when Sirius answered it without prompting. "I wanted to see what the aurors and Dumbledore were doing about Remus seeing us. If they believed what I said or not."
"If Remus believed you or not." Harry translated easily. He really did know his godfather quite well. He turned to look intently at Sirius, looking older than he actually was. "Okay," He said finally, "We'll go check."
Sirius shook his head, "Too risky for you, Emeralds, I'll apparate you back." He said, jumping down from the rock.
"NO!" Harry shouted, pushing back from Sirius and away from his open arms. "I want to see them. I want to see the aurors that are making you stay away!" He yelled, again seeming far older than he should have been.
"Harry, you can't come." Sirius stated firmly. He again tried to scoop the little boy up, but Harry pushed away further on the flat surface of the massive rock. "Harry." He tried again, but with no success.
The little boy had pushed himself as far back as he could, "I want to see them, Siri. Please, we'll only stay a bit." He promised.
Sirius looked towards where you could almost see the building the aurors met in, then back at Harry. "When I say we go, we go Harry."
Harry knew better to argue with that tone of voice coming from Sirius. He nodded, pleased he'd won. "Okay, Sirius." He crawled forward and allowed Sirius to pick him up and put him back on the ground. They walked forward slowly, creeping through the trees.
It was almost dead of night, so no one could even see through the blackness. And Sirius knew that the aurors had almost no protection against him. There were wards for dementors, wards for other creatures. And there were wards for people carrying the dark mark. Sirius did not fall into any category. He also knew that no one but aurors themselves knew of the location of the secret headquarters. Not even the Minister, not even Dumbledore. They were probably not thinking of the Sirius Black they knew before the deaths of Lily and James. They would forget that he'd know the location all along.
And as he stepped closer with Harry's small hand in his, he knew he was right. They crouched in the bushes by the window, listening in to the argument inside the room.
"Come on, Tonks, don't start up again." A man groaned. Sirius recognized the nickname instantly, it was his cousin Andromeda's daughter – Nymphadora. She was younger than him, but at this age she would have probably been in her first year of being an auror.
A woman's sigh reached his ears and then a chair scraping. Another man piped up. "You heard Dumbledore, Black and Harry Potter disappeared. But the real question is why would Black drag everything to light again? We'd just stopped the search. Why open it up again?"
"He wanted to prove that he could outsmart us?" Someone piped in.
Another responded, "To tell us he still has James's son?"
Sirius's teeth clenched, they made him out to sound like an overtly stupid and arrogant bad guy. The kind you saw in muggle comic books. It seemed that along with ignoring the fact that he'd left his family for their dark ways, and that James and Harry meant the world to him, they'd also decided to ignore his basic personality. He and James had been arrogant, but not that bad. That was Voldemort levels.
He'd been ignoring the conversation for quite a bit of time, but Harry tugged on his arm. He listened in again when Remus's name had been mentioned.
"Poor Lupin. Black came up with all this stuff to spew at him. That he was innocent and Peter Pettigrew had committed his crimes. What a load of bull." Someone snorted. Sirius held his breath. "Luckily Dumbledore talked him down, got all those doubts from his mind."
Harry watched as Sirius's eyes closed sadly.
-----------------------------Elsewhere in the Area Around the Headquarters
Peter ran as fast as he could, which was a pretty good pace. He covered land quickly, remembering all that James had told him for finding the headquarters of the aurors. He still remembered what James had said.
"Okay, Peter, you have to remember all this. If anything happens, anything at all, you have to run to them. Voldemort will be looking for Sirius, but since you're our secret keeper now you need to have someplace to run if he figures out the plan. If you can't get to Dumbledore, then go to the aurors. Paying attention, Wormtail?"
He had been paying attention, even though he hadn't looked like it. Useful information - that was what James had been talking about. Exactly how to get to the aurors in case of an emergency.
Of course, this was an emergency, but he wasn't going to talk to them. He was going to listen to them. He needed all the information they had on Sirius' location. All of it.
-----------------------------Outside the Headquarters
"When we find Black, I say we just kill him outright, none of this trial stuff. He obviously knows how to get out of his Azkaban cell." One of the huskier sounding men chimed from what had to be another part of the house-like building.
Harry felt like he'd just been hit. They couldn't hurt Sirius! He didn't do anything wrong. They were just being stupid and blind. He felt a rush of anger swell up in him, but he kept listening. Sirius had gone a little pale, but Harry couldn't tell in the dark. Sirius wanted to take Harry away from there, so he wouldn't hear more. But at the same time, Sirius himself wanted to know exactly what they had to say.
The man continued. "The Dementor's kiss even, but we can't wait. I hope that the Minister will just authorize it. Suck that bastard's soul right out, if he even has one."
There was a general noise of agreement through the room, though the woman – Tonks – had nothing to say.
At all of that, little Harry could take no more. He started softly crying, tears slowly streaming down his face, as he made no noise. Sirius sensed it though, just as Harry always knew when his godfather was upset or lost in memories. They had heard what they came to hear, that Remus did not believe in Sirius. There was no point in staying.
Sirius grabbed Harry's hand and led him away. The little boy went willingly, no longer wanting to hear these aurors who had no clue. They were wrong, Sirius wasn't bad or evil. Harry was hardly paying attention to where they were going, but the felt himself being picked up and seated on that rock again. Sirius leaned forward and held his godson.
It was all the reasons he'd kept Harry away from the wizarding world, all wrapped into one hour in time. People's mistrust of others, betrayals, dementors, refusing to accept others and their choices, so many things that were unpleasant. But at the same time, Sirius had been describing humanity. He could not keep Harry away from that, he couldn't shield him from every unpleasant thing in the world.
But having it harshly thrown in his face was quite another thing.
"Shh, Harry, what they say doesn't matter." Sirius told him, whispering in his hear as he smoothed the boy's long – unruly – hair from his face.
Harry pushed back just far enough so he could look at Sirius but stay in his arms. "That's not true!" He cried. "They can send you away, back to the bad place. They want to!"
"No, they can't Harry. They can't find us. They don't know where we are. They still don't, you heard them." Sirius pointed out as he smiled sadly at Harry. He hated seeing tears in the emerald eyes of his godson, but that was all his planned day of fun seemed to have achieved.
"You don't know that."
Sirius looked down like he'd been slapped. He knew that, of course, eventually, his word would no longer be all that Harry needed. Harry believed him with the childlike innocence that came from his worship of his godfather. And that was going to end. Sirius's word was not the be all end all of Harry's life. That was just a little bit of the innocence that Sirius had prayed to preserve, stripped away.
Thickly, Sirius nodded, "No, I don't. They could capture me one day. The next time we go out, maybe. But I know that they can't get us at home." Sirius said with finality.
"But…" Harry started, but Sirius laid a gentle hand across the protesting child's lips.
"Say it Harry, say exactly what I told you about our house." Sirius insisted. There was no one around, no one to hear them. All of the aurors were in the building, and no one ventured this far into the forest. They were safe.
And Harry seemed to believe that. So he started talking. "We live in a special house. No one can see it, and if they step foot on it's land then the castle will make their other foot land at the end of the property." Harry said, quoting Sirius word for word. "Emerald's Palace is known only to the ones we want it to be known to. No one else knows of it, we are safe."
"Perfect, baby." Sirius praised. He gathered the boy back up into his arms
-------------------------------In the Trees
Rats were not capable of smiling, but Peter was close to it. He wasn't sure how it had happened, but the moment Harry had started talking of their home, the information of it had slowly trickled into his mind. It really was the perfect hiding place.
Or, it had been the perfect hiding place.
Dun-dun-dun. Not good, hu? Thanks again to reviewers, and I hope you all had a Merry Belated Christmas, along with all the other goodies of the season.
Luvguurl: I've got to tell you, I had no idea how to respond to your review. I'd like to start off by telling you ALL REVIEWERS ENCOURAGE ME TO UPDATE. Not just one of you. The reason GNatgirl got that special thanks is because she gave me a really good idea about how to continue. The review helped a lot, and really got me going again. So I felt she deserved a special thanks. You're the only one that had a problem with it. Next, I'd like to say I've been writing a long time, and I have many other stories. I love reviews, but all authors do. They don't go to my head, as I'm pretty used to some sort of response. You also stated that I've changed, in a bad way. Tell me, how is it that you can come up with a statement like that? You don't know me. You get an authors note at the beginning and end of a chapter, but that IS NOT enough to base any ideas of me off of. I do not appreciate that you would claim I've changed, when you do not know me, let alone well enough to claim that my personality has been altered. As for the cuss I used, this is PG-13. If you check my bio, I state that there isn't anything too awful in my stories, just an occasional curse – which is the reason behind the rating, so I can swear when I want to. If you do not like this, then I would not read stories in a rating above PG. I'd like to point out, that I don't know about you, but I don't review stories to get special recognition. I do it to encourage the author. There are many reviewers who have been reviewing this since the start of the story. They haven't kicked up a fuss, they just take the thanks I give at the start of each chapter and continue reading. I'm sorry if you're upset with my response, but I was upset by your review, so we're even. And I'm sorry if you felt left out. I'm also sorry to all the people who got excited by the scroll bar, only to finish and see this whopper of a paragraph. But I really felt that I should respond.
Stars Enchantress