A/N: Well, longest chapter ever. Tell me what you think of this one, I'm not so sure about it myself. What are your gut feelings about the characterisation I've given Hestia Jones?
WARNING: just to be on the safe side, I thought I should warn that some parts of this chapter unsettled me when I was writing it. Nothing is mentioned by name, and probably most of you are completely desensitised to that sort of thing, practised fanfic readers that you are! But I'm Just being on the safe side.
Lost: Small Boy, Answers to Harry
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Sirius awoke slowly, wishing that he didn't have to. Jagged pains shot through his whole body. Being an auror had its ups and downs. This was definitely not one of the lighter sides of the career.
He could hear footsteps and voices through the ceiling above him, but nothing loud enough to interest him. His eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness, now, and he saw at once that he was not alone. The death eaters' bodies had been removed, but two new figures had been thrown into the makeshift dungeon, both bound and blindfolded as far as Sirius could tell.
"Hey," he whispered, "are you awake?"
One of the figures, who was lying on her back a few feet away, stirred and turned her sightless face towards him, "who is that?" it was a woman's voice, although he had already recognised that. What surprised him was that he knew the voice.
"Jones?"
"Black? Is that you?"
"Yeah," said Sirius, "in the flesh." He was relieved to hear friendly words, and at the same time, sorry to see the black-haired, rosy-cheeked young woman captured in such a position. Hestia Jones had just finished her auror training two years ago, and Sirius had worked extensively with her, in and out of ministry duty.
"Oh," she said, sitting up and rubbing her head. Her hands were tied in front of her, "I could hear someone breathing, but I couldn't tell who…I just thought I'd pretend I was still stunned."
"Yes, I imagine my breathing is that scary. Who is that with you?"
Hestia lowered her hands and felt around on the ground until she found the hand of the second prone figure, "it's Eddie. Eddie Perkins – from the muggle artefacts department, you know. I was at the ministry doing paperwork when the they attacked, and there were only three of us there, so he came to fight with us. But we were in the lower levels, so when your reinforcements arrived to help us we were already trapped. He was standing next to me – oh, crap, oh man…Sirius, he's bled so much. I don't think he's going to wake up."
She sniffed and clawed hopelessly at her blindfold, "it's too tight…"
"You'll have to undo it from the back," he suggested, wondering whether or not to comfort her about Perkins. The misuse of muggle artefacts office was on the same level as auror headquarters, but he knew the man only by acquaintance. He remembered that Perkins had stood up and spoken in a meeting about the plumbing about a month ago, but he didn't think that warranted Sirius' open grieving over him. And he didn't want to embarrass Hestia by mothering her.
"I can't reach the knot," her wrists were tied in such a way as to make it impossible for her to reach far enough over her head to untie to blindfold, "don't you have a spare hand?"
"Not really," he said, "but, look, come here and I'll give it a shot."
Hestia got to her feet and shuffled forward until she walked into the iron bench, cracking her shins. She swore loudly, "where are you?"
"Sitting right in front of you. My hands are tied to the water pipe above my head," Sirius told her.
"Well that's no good! Why didn't you tell me that before I broke my kneecaps?"
"I'm sorry. If you turn around and lean back, I'm sure I can get the knot."
Several more minutes of manoeuvring and useless instructions from Sirius ("move a little to the left – no, my left –") and they ended up with Hestia sitting practically on her fellow auror's lap. After a bit of wriggling, and Hestia pinching him whenever he got her hair caught in the knot, they managed to undo the blindfold and she pulled it off in relief. The two aurors looked at one another.
"We're not making it out of this one, are we?" Hestia asked finally. Sirius looked away, unable to answer.
"Tell me everything that has happened. You were captured at the ministry. Who else?"
"Yes, by the fountain," she nodded, "but not many of us were with me by that time. I know that Moody had called a retreat, so I think mostly they got away. I was trying to help Perkins, and I didn't see a stunner coming at me. I woke up in the room upstairs, so I haven't seen anyone else who was captured."
"You-know-who didn't lead the attack. Do you know why?"
"No. It sounds as if the death eaters got a bit confused towards the end – it sounded like he was supposed to turn up and didn't. So once they had overrun the ministry, a lot of them scattered. There was a woman upstairs-"
"Bellatrix. What did you hear when you were up there?"
"Bellatrix. She was in trouble with a man upstairs because she and someone named Avery killed another death eater named Laxman, because Laxman killed another death eater named Quirce. But Laxman had important information which he didn't tell anyone about before he died."
Sirius' heart leaped. Hestia continued, but he was listening with only half an ear. Laxman had died before he could impart his information to Avery and Bellatrix – that could only mean information about Harry. So Harry was still safe, still had not fallen into death eater hands – perhaps, Sirius thought suddenly, Avery and Bellatrix had not even connected Sirius with Harry.
"…we're still in London, I'm sure of it. I could hear the muggle cars when I was upstairs, so we must be a busy part of town. This seems to have been Laxman's apartment, but the other death eaters have taken it over."
"Anything else you picked up?"
"There's a fireplace. I felt the heat on my face, and I could hear it crackling. If they're keeping a fire burning, they must be using floo powder pretty regularly."
"That's good news," said Sirius, "that gives us an escape route if we can get to it."
Hestia nodded, "can you apparate? I think they've put a spell on me."
He shook his head, "we're in the same predicament."
The young woman sighed, "like in Romania last year. What a mess that was."
"Oh, yes. Romania. What a riot. I mean, what with trying to catching illegal smugglers and evacuate a village full of muggles who don't speak a word of English and still think witch burning is a good weekend hobby, I just about handed in my resignation on the spot. And then there were those dugbogs in the marsh-"
Hestia grinned at the memory, "Yes, and Diggle slipped into the water, and three of the things latched onto his ankle-"
"And he started screaming 'Crocodiles! Crocodiles!' Just as the dragon-poachers were walking by on the road above us."
Hestia and Sirius both collapsed into giggles, crying 'crocodiles!' together in a high-pitched voice. Sirius recovered first, wiping his mirthful tears on his shoulders, "oh, I've never seen Kingsley so angry in my life. Thank God Diggle isn't an auror, he would have been fired on the spot. It took us so long to convince him that there aren't any crocodiles in Romania!"
Hestia leaned against his leg to keep herself from falling over, "Yes, and then when we got back to camp he insisted on apparating to the nearest muggle town to buy a pair of wellington boots! And when we chased after him, Edgar Bones followed us, but he apparated right into the middle of a muggle funeral-"
"-on top of the coffin being carried down the street. I wish I'd had a camera with me."
"Wouldn't have done you much good, lying on your back in the gutter because you couldn't stand up for laughing, while an entire town of black-clad muggles chased Edgar down the road."
Sirius assumed a horrified face, "I was not lying in the gutter!"
Hestia laughed again, "you must have repressed the memory."
They talked about other adventures they had had for the next hour. Even the grimmest situations – a necromancer about to sacrifice Sirius for a dark spell by slitting his throat (Hestia, Emmeline Vance and Gideon Prewitt broke in and rescued him with mere minutes to spare) – finding the mangled bodies of two ministry workers stuffed in the closet of a suspected death eater – watching a fellow auror drown while they fought in vain to reach him – seemed tame and amusing compared to their current position.
"And that time when we were taking old MacDougall to Azkaban?" Sirius raised an eyebrow, "what happened up there?"
"You mean, when the portkey suspiciously stopped working, so we had fly him over on broomsticks? And then his sons turned up to rescue him."
"All I remember was shooting a spell and watching two bodies falling through the air, and having to take a wild guess at which one was you, which one I needed to catch."
"Lucky you guessed right," she shuffled around, her eyes sparkling, "ok, I'll tell you about that one, that was so exciting. There I was, a hundred feet above the churning ocean waves, rain just bucketing down around my ears, and there's this massive warlock on a broom in front of me, and the two of us are battling it out, wand to wand combat on broomsticks. He's firing stunner after stunner at me, and I'm dodging all of them, and trying to get a disarming spell in between. And suddenly he fires something at me, six blue shots that chase me through the air, and I'm flying off trying to get away but two of these things hit me in the back, like a couple of mad bludgers, and I slip off my broom and just manage to grab the handle as I go. Now I'm hanging a hundred feet up, my wand is spinning away towards the sea, and this guy points at me and shoots an incendiary spell, and obviously, I don't want to catch fire at two hundred feet, so, I let go-"
"You let go?" Sirius gaped at her, "that's why you fell?"
"Well, all I could think was, do I want to die from falling or do I want to burn to death? And I just picked the former."
"But – Hestia – it was raining! The incendiary spell wouldn't have worked!"
Hestia pulled a guilty face, "yeah, but I didn't think about that until afterwards, did I? Anyway, it worked out, because at that moment, your spell knocked him out, and you caught me before I got anywhere near hitting the water."
"And nearly broke my arms! What had you eaten for breakfast that morning, a tonne of bricks?"
"Hey, there's no need to get personal-" her voiced trailed off as the sound of footsteps on the stairs reached their ears. Sirius felt his heart begin racing once more. The door creaked open and a cloaked figure came into the room.
"You, girl, you're coming with me," the man rasped, and he pounced on Hestia, who wriggled away into the corner with a growl. As the man reached for her, she brought her arms up and smacked him in the face as hard as she could with her bound hands. The wizard staggered and touched his cheek, then brought back his fist and punched the young witch so hard she rolled onto the concrete floor and her head hit the ground with a thump.
"Leave her!" Sirius roared, kicking out at the man, but the wizard darted out of reach. He waved his wand, "mobili corpus," and Hestia was lifted up and levitated out the door. The man pointed his wand at Sirius as he left, "you watch or, or you'll be next," he laughed and slammed the door shut. It had happened so quickly.
"Hestia!"
He listened in vain for her voice – or her screams – but there was nothing.
"Hestia!"
No answer. Nothing.
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He was exhausted, but unable to sleep, and as the agonising wait turned from a few minutes into an hour, with nothing but Perkins' soft and ragged breathing to listen to, Sirius' thoughts became increasingly morbid as he admitted to himself for the first time that he was, in all likelihood, going to die soon, not quickly and not pleasantly, and there was nothing he could do to change it. What frustrated him the most was that he now seemed to have lost his only ally. Guilt tormented him at the thought of why Hestia had been taken. Somehow, it was his fault that she was suffering instead of him. These thoughts went on and on until he felt as if he was going mad.
Then the door was thrown open and Sirius blinked against the light as Hestia was pushed roughly into the dungeon and they were thrown into darkness once more. For a few moments there was silence, but for the quiet little sobs from the other side of the room.
"Hestia?" Sirius asked, "are you hurt? What did they do?"
"D-don't touch me, just don't," she said savagely, and the quiet sobbing continued.
Sirius understood at once what had happened and fury boiled up in him, "bastards! I'll kill them – I will, Hestia, I'll get them – those goddamn beasts…"
"Stop it," said Hestia, and he was quiet instantly. She sniffed once then said weakly, "I just don't want to talk about it now. Please don't," Sirius could see her shape shuffle across the floor until she was kneeling beside the prone figure still lying on the concrete.
"Poor Perkins," she said sadly, "and yet, he's lucky…oh!" she jumped, "he's awake!"
Sirius strained his eyes in the darkness and saw Hestia bending over the stricken ministry worker, holding his hand and whispering to him. Perkins coughed, and it sounded as if his lungs were filled with mud.
"Hello. Who's that?" Sirius heard his rasp.
"It's Hestia Jones, Mr Perkins. I'm an auror. You fought with us in the ministry, do you remember?"
"Miss Jones," Perkins coughed again, "you're a dear for sticking with me. Can't you turn on the lights so that I can see you?" He trailed off into muttering that Sirius couldn't catch.
Hestia paused, then said, "I'm sorry, Mr Perkins. But we're not in the hospital. I'm afraid – after you were hurt, the death eaters overwhelmed us, and they've got us now…"
Silence followed this, then Perkins said sadly, "ah, well, I've had a good run while it lasted. I'm sorry you had to go with me, Hestia. I hope you have a chance. I'm sorry to see a good girl go young."
"Th-that's alright, Mr Perkins. Is there anything I can do for you?"
"If you do get out of this…I mean to say, I won't…so could you tell…a few people…"
"Of course," Sirius listened silently while Perkins gave Hestia a number of names and messages for Perkins' family and friends.
When he was finished he said, "do you know, I think perhaps I have something for you."
"What's that, Mr Perkins?"
"In my…in the right pocket of my cloak, there is a bag of marbles – they were muggle marbles which someone tried to enchant into gobstones – but I'm afraid all they do is explode horribly. Some poor muggle boy got his hand blown off when he was playing with them. You have to throw them with reasonable force, but perhaps you could – find a use for them…ah, my chest is aching…"
Silence fell once more, "he's passed out again," Hestia said. Sirius saw her reach into Perkins' pocket and pull out a small leather bag.
"Three," she said, "do you think he meant it – he wasn't delusional from his wounds?"
"He seemed to be in his right mind," Sirius replied. Hestia put the bag of marbles into her pocket and came over to him. She knelt on the floor with her elbows on the bench and her chin balanced on her knuckles.
"Tell me what's going on," she said, and there was a coldness in her voice, "tell me now."
"What's to tell?"
Hestia's bound hands balled into fists, "don't you dare joke about this. Just don't. When they…when they questioned me, they kept asking, 'what does Dumbledore know about the boy?' And then they were asking, 'does he know the boy is alive? Is he going to try to take him back? When?' And I kept telling them, I don't know, I don't know anything, but they didn't stop…" she began to shake, and her head bent and was covered by her hands.
"Hestia, shush," Sirius wanted to put his arms around her, as he might have comforted a weeping Harry who had grazed his knee. Unable to hold her, he managed to lean down far enough to kiss the top of her head, "it's alright. I'll tell you what I can. But you must understand, this is more important than my life – than both our lives. I'm sorry you've been dragged into this, but I am willing to die to protect certain secrets."
Hestia wiped her eyes and leaned her head against his knee, "I'm an auror," she said, "this is what I chose."
"The boy the death eaters spoke of is my godson. He is four years old, and he has a task he must do that makes him more important than any other single witch or wizard in this war. Even Dumbledore would die for this child."
"This has something to do with a prophecy. They asked me what the prophecy meant."
"Yes, a prophecy, and murder, and a scar," Sirius said wearily, "but I'm sure they know all this already. All that matters is that they must not lay hands on my godson…"
Hestia's eyes widened, "but they already have him, upstairs."
Sirius' head snapped around he stared at Hestia, and all the colour that had been in his face drained away, "w-what?"
Hestia put her hands over her mouth, "they brought him in by floo powder while I was up there. A little boy, about four years old, looking terrified. Bellatrix said the dark lord had murdered his parents but was saving him for later…"
Cold, sharp ice slammed through Sirius' chest. No. No, it couldn't be true. There was a mistake. It must have been some other boy…
What did you expect? Did you expect him to be safe in that department store? Did you think the death eaters wouldn't retrace your steps – or did you hope by some miracle that he would escape by himself?
If I had gotten the message to Andromeda – If I hadn't waited to send the message –I shouldn't have gone into that department store in the first place…I shouldn't have even gone to London, I should have just gone to Moony's cottage…I shouldn't have left by floo powder: I should have taken James' broom…shouldn't have looked out the window and seen Him…shouldn't have trusted Peter…
…shouldn't have trusted Peter…
"Sirius?" Hestia touched his shoulder in alarm, "hey, it didn't look like they were going to hurt him. He was scared, but he wasn't hurt…Sirius, please don't break down now, I need you. Please…"
He couldn't hear her. The death eaters had taken Harry. He, Sirius, had failed his godson. He had failed Lily and James. He had even failed Dumbledore. They were dead, and soon Harry would die with them, and then there would be nothing that could stop Voldemort.
Voldemort. The name tasted caustic in his mind.
"Sirius, listen to me!" Hestia shook his roughly, "we're going to save him. Tomorrow, Avery is going to take me upstairs again. I know he will. And I won't fight, I won't give him an excuse to hex me. I'll just act like I'm broken already. And I won't talk."
Sirius shook his head, "doesn't matter now. Tell them everything you can, Hestia, maybe they'll spare you. Doesn't matter any more."
"No, I'm not going to talk because I'm going to have one of the exploding gobstones in my mouth," said Hestia, "and as soon as he's alone with me I'm going to spit it in his face with all the force I've got."
He raised his head, "you think that'll work?"
"It will work," said Hestia. She did not sound convinced, but she looked him in the eyes when she said it, "and I'll get the kid and I'll run. And any distraction you can give me will be enough."
Her eyes were steely and determined. She was an auror, and she was doing her duty for the good of wizard kind. And for Sirius.
"Then I'll get you a distraction," said Sirius, "if you can get me off this iron bench, I'll get them distracted, don't you worry."
"I'm not worried," said Hestia, reaching up to start working at the wire that bound Sirius' hands, "I've got you here."
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TBC