Sirius looked around the Averys' empty drawing room with an appraising eye the morning after Moody's prophetic revelations. There probably wasn't a horcrux in the Averys' home, but if there were... it could be one of any number of their rare or unmarked books. It could be one of the spindly-looking gold ornaments. It could be one of the fine portraits on the wall Sirius had never paid attention to before. It could be Winston's armchair. Or the coffee table. Or the curtain pull. Or the iron poker by the hearth. Or one of the tiles comprising the hearth. Or... anything. The only way he would know for sure would be by testing every single item individually. Yes, he was right the first time. If Dumbledore took the prophesy seriously and decided to chase horcruxes in earnest, it was going to be a waste of his, the Order's, and everyone else's time and lose them the war to boot. Of course, cut off from everyone besides Moody's portrait, Sirius was not in a position to influence the Order's decision making on the matter. It was out of his hands.
Frustration and numb rage at the impossibility of it all rapidly replaced the self-recrimination, self-pity and despondency he first felt after his triple-murder. He would not delude himself regarding the nobility of his purpose anymore. He was a weapon, plain and simple. The only thing he was allowed to feel was grim determination to see through this task that he never should have chosen.
His rage manifested in his magic, unsurprisingly. His more technical spells were harder to control, while his curses blossomed in strength. He fought Rodolphus to a standstill for the first time in a practice duel simply by wearing the older, more experienced wizard down. The next time he accompanied Richard on their twice weekly muggle-baiting spree, Sirius leveled half a block with one blasting curse, after first summoning every single muggle out of the mostly empty church, parsonage, bookstore, and warehouse. Richard was impressed. So was Sullivan Travers, who had asked to come along. Travers was almost twice Sirius' age and had started the day complaining rather condescendingly about the Dark Lord's new restrictions on muggle-baiting by the Sacred Twenty-Eight. He had stopped throwing curses of his own halfway through, too distracted and rattled by their dizzying multi-town agenda and loud explosions. He left grumbling that Sirius had "taken all the fun out of the tradition."
Lord Greengrass complained about Sirius' methods as well when he invited himself along. He was even more annoying and disgusting than Travers. Apparently, he preferred to torture and kill muggles one at a time on his rural estate and to combine the activity with large amounts of alcohol. When the job was done and they had all returned to Richard's house, Greengrass declared he would at least find a good vantage point to watch the festivities in the last town. Nothing Sirius could say, neither reason nor orders nor threats, would persuade him against this foolishness.
Supremely irritated, Sirius told Richard he was going out to stock up on more cigarettes. Instead, he checked his watch. He was in luck. Moody was there. "Stay with me a bit," he said quietly. Then he followed Lord Greengrass' apparition trail back to a rooftop in that last village. The man was sitting in a very out-of-place leather armchair, drinking directly from a bottle of gin, and watching a handful of obliviators chasing down panicked muggles.
"What would you do if the Ministry folks found you up here like this, my lord?" Sirius asked.
Greengrass jumped at his unexpected voice, then chuckled and raised his bottle in acknowledgment. "What do you think? I'd say I saw the whole dreadful thing from a distance, but there were too many for me to intervene. And then I'd pay them to keep quiet. You'd be amazed how much you can get away with, so long as no one files that damned initial report, young Heir Black. Oh, yes. Any rumor, any smear against someone like us, it is only quickly-forgotten noise if you can avoid the all-important parchment trail."
"Oh? What have you gotten them to ignore?" Sirius asked.
"You name it - everything from smuggled non-tradeable goods to putting down a mudblood who had offended my niece. I don't know why the Dark Lord is so wound up about Yaxley and Flint getting arrested. So long as they're not sent to the dementors like Lucius, then in the long run, it's meaningless."
"Yes, well, in the short term, it's a problem." Sirius came level with him. "It is a good view up here. I'll grant you that. Avada Kedavra." Greengrass folded forwards silently, face still sporting his jaded grin. He was sitting a little too close to the low wall and tipped over the edge to fall to the street with a sickening crack of bones. The gin bottle shattered next to his chair. There were multiple startled shouts from the nearby muggles and obliviators. Sirius ducked down where no one on the street could see him. It wouldn't do to be spotted too soon. He hadn't exactly planned this through beforehand, and he definitely should have tried to catch the body to buy himself more time. He thought for a moment, then grabbed his watch. "Greengrass is dead, fell off a roof in Westwick with a little help, in Death Eater regalia. Someone needs to claim responsibility, preferably not me. And there's Ministry obliviators in town already."
"I didn't hear much of a duel."
"Nope."
"Then fake one with stunners, some fire spells, an Incarcerous, an Orbis, and whatever spells Greengrass used most recently, throw him off the roof, and get out of there," Portrait Moody said, then walked out of his frame. Sirius silently cast Muffliato followed by a dozen spells all around the rooftop, careful to keep the spell lights well below the lip of the flat roof. Then he used the Death Eater's wand to vanish the chair and broken glass, and cast a bunch more, darker curses. He left the Death Eater mask where it lay and dropped the incriminating wand. The moment Fleamont Potter appeared on the roof, back turned towards him, Sirius apparated away.
He picked up four cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of mead on the way home. He shared the mead with Winston and spent two hours tipsily proofreading the man's latest longwinded dissertation on blood purity before Voldemort summoned him. He suffered through two or three Crucios before the Dark Lord let him explain that he had indeed both ordered and threatened Lord Greengrass not to go back to the scene of the crime. Voldemort then had Sirius cast the Cruciatus on Greengrass' wife and each of his siblings and young children in turn, once Lady Greengrass had returned from the Ministry. Voldemort instructed him to back up his threats with actions in future, then forced Oliver Greengrass, the next oldest brother, to execute both his sister-in-law and the six-year-old Heir to the family seat, sparing only the four-year-old girl child of the lord's nuclear family. Sirius was dismissed.
Late that night, safe in the bathroom with the shower running, Sirius dared to open the watch again. He had to be even more careful in the Averys' house than he had at the Malfoys' or Lestranges', because Winston had no sense of his own or anyone else's privacy and thus had a bad habit of barging in at all hours of the day and night without knocking. The addled lord might not recognize what Sirius was doing as espionage, but he could easily mention it to someone who would.
Sirius wrote the names Henrietta and Honorius Greengrass in the foggy mirror to show Portrait Moody. The portrait glared at him and mouthed "we need to talk." Sirius wrote "noon." The portrait nodded. Sirius closed the watch, wiped the mirror, and undressed to wash.
"What the bloody hell happened?" Portrait Moody asked as soon as Sirius assured him they were alone the next day. Sirius was sitting with his back against a round barrow in Dorset, soaking up the meager winter sunlight.
"What do you mean what happened? Greengrass wanted to come muggle-baiting, and I killed him at the end of it when he decided to go back. There's nothing else to it. Don't worry, Avery wasn't there, so no witnesses. If you're asking what happened to Henrietta and Honorius, that was the Dark Lord taking out his anger on the family."
"I meant why did you kill him if he wasn't on to you? Especially out in the open right over the heads of the obliviators!"
"Hmm, let me think. Oh yes, because the opportunity was there, and I had just spent all day watching him torturing muggles and listening to him confess to torturing and killing Merlin knows how many other people over the years. He was an evil man."
"Yes, he was, but you took an incredible risk."
"My whole life is an incredible risk."
"You're risking more than your life, Sirius. You risked Fleamont's and Gideon's freedom."
"Gideon?"
"Gideon Prewitt. The auror who took the fall for you." Portrait Moody fairly growled at Sirius' surprised expression. The fabricated details of the murder hadn't made it to the morning papers. "The Order has had a protocol in place for this kind of thing for years. Our members are not licensed by the Ministry to kill, remember? They get caught in a lethal duel with someone as powerful as Greengrass, and they will definitely be charged with murder and must hope their plea of self-defense is accepted. Our auror members are the only ones who can get away with killing, legally speaking. It's extra tricky covering for you. I was unable to contact my real self, which is why I had to send Fleamont first. He claimed your kill as his own to protect your identity from Gideon, and then Gideon claimed it to protect Fleamont from prosecution as a vigilante."
"How does all that work?" Sirius asked, interested despite himself.
Moody irritably rattled off the protocol. Apparently, Gideon ran interference with the other Ministry workers looking over Greengrass' body while Fleamont re-cast a series of hexes and curses with Gideon's wand so as to fake the Priori Incantatem that would be taken in evidence for Gideon's official report. They were lucky that Greengrass' wand proved so damning as it was (besides what Sirius had added, the man had spent most of the afternoon casting Cruciatus and Flagrante curses at the hapless muggles), and doubly lucky that neither the obliviators nor Gideon had seen Sirius.
"And now Gideon is on administrative leave while myself goes through the motions of a formal investigation. Don't you dare do something like this again, Sirius," Moody ordered. "We don't have many aurors in the Order. We might not be able to protect you next time."
"Then don't bother. I'll figure it out on my own."
"Figure what out?"
"Alibis and cover stories for the Dark Lord. You can just find a random dead body. Or not find it. The Death Eaters deserve to know what it's like to fear mysterious disappearances." He could start a new collection of paperweights. Or maybe add to the stones at Casterligg. Or burn them, but that would smell worse.
"You won't need alibis if you refrain from recklessly killing Death Eaters and focus on tracking down the damned horcruxes instead, once we're ready."
Sirius snorted. "Yeah? Where would you like me to look for the horcruxes? What should I be looking for? How long do I sit idly waiting for Dumbledore to have an epiphany? At least I can find Death Eaters to destroy!"
"Easy there. We found one already, remember? And that was when we didn't even know about them."
"It literally had his name on it! And you're the one who found it at that. I was just your hands."
"What do you want me to tell you, Sirius? Dumbledore's working on it, but it's going to take time. He's reviewing every pensieve memory he can about the Dark Lord from when he was younger to figure this out. He's reading every Dark text about horcruxes he can find. Until then, you-"
"I could help with that," Sirius broke in. "I can help with the research. I've got access to loads more Dark books than he does, I'm sure of it. Just tell me what he needs." Research was still most likely a waste of time, but he wasn't going to win the tactical argument. He needed something to fill the empty hours besides intrusive thoughts about the innocent lives he'd taken anyway.
Moody frowned. "Promise me you won't needlessly kill like this again first, then we'll see."
It wasn't needless. "If you promise not to leave any more Order members where I've no choice but to murder them for my cousin's amusement, then we'll see. In case you forgot, I'm on the Inner Circle now, on the front lines of the violence. I'd at least like the tallies to stay somewhat even while Dumbledore's got his head stuck in the fucking pensieve."
"Dumbledore said it wasn't the plan to leave Edgar there. I double-checked after you told me it was you that killed him. Something must have come up on Edgar's end."
"Somehow, that's not reassuring. Look, I do get it. Springing something like this on you with no preparation time is both dangerous and not fair to the Order. I'll try to be more careful."
"'Be more careful' isn't quite what I said."
Sirius rolled his eyes. "If you're waiting for me to promise not to kill someone like Greengrass when I think I can get away with it scott-free, well, don't bother. I'm not going to promise that."
"Sirius, you are worth more than any Death Eater I could name."
"I'm really not," Sirius told him bleakly. "Don't you see? This prophesy thing, it's a distraction. While we're faffing about with horcruxes, my cousin will defang the Ministry's most successful policies, the Death Eater ranks will swell, the Order of the Phoenix and the aurors will keep losing members one by one, and the Ministry will fall. My best use is knifing through the opposition."
"Neither Albus Dumbledore nor myself believes that."
"Well, I do. And I'm going to keep doing what I'm good at until Dumbledore gives me something actually useful to do."
Moody closed his eyes a moment. When he opened them again, he said, "You are more than a killer, Sirius. Even if you're doing it at random, we need you to test for horcruxes when you can. Focus on objects with some intrinsic value, like books, musical instruments, and ornaments, enchanted or otherwise."
"There is no reason a horcrux would have to be made from something of actual value."
"Dumbledore knows that, but he's also read up on every historical horcrux he could, and not once did a Dark Lord or Lady choose to invest a piece of garbage with part of their soul. The only outlier was a very evil fig tree almost two thousand years ago in the Levant. It's a gamble, but we're betting on You-Know-Who's pride."
"I suppose," Sirius grumbled. If Voldemort was smart, he'd make at least one of his five horcruxes out of an old sock. If there was already a hole in the toe, no one would realize the yarn had since become indestructible. Hell, if Sirius was an evil maniac squirreling bits of his soul away, he'd probably use one of them to curse the shit out of a toilet seat or a random doorknob or something, just for laughs.
"Read up more on them too, if you must. See if anyone has come across a more efficient means of identifying them than the one you already know. But do it inconspicuously. The last thing we need is for You-Know-Who to be tipped off as to what we're up to."
Author's note: well, managed to make this chapter not entirely suck in time. It went through rather more metamorphosis than usual lol. I do kind of wonder what would happen if someone did make a horcrux out of a sock or a sponge or something. "Man, I hate doing dishes so much, but at least this fabulous sponge never falls apart or gets dirty or stinky..." Or a chef's knife: "it never loses its edge! It's perfect for slicing tomatoes! I'm a klutz though, to have cut myself three dozen times in the past year..." Maybe it wouldn't work because even if the magical theory is sound, the soul fragment itself once detached from the logical mind that thought this was a good idea goes hell no and resists entering the demeaning container. Thanks for the reviews, and you will get the next update on Saturday.