HP fic: To Thine Own Self Be True (1/3)
Title: To Thine Own Self Be True
Characters: Kingsley Shacklebolt, Sirius Black, Albus Dumbledore, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Alastor Moody, various Aurors and various members of the Order
Pairings: Kingsley/Sirius
Wordcount: ~ 25,000 words overall
Rating: R. Barely.
Spoilers: This was written way back when, in a time before HBP. It survived HBP and DH surprisingly intact, though there might be small things that don't make any sense anymore and that I might have missed when translating - it’s been a while. Set during OotP.
Beta: Thanks a million to lorrainemarker and millari, who provided me with exactly the kind of meticulous beta that this fic direly needed. Seriously, you guys rock.
Original version: Flugträume (German)
Summary: They say there is no such thing as a gay wizard. Especially amongst the Aurors. And the purebloods are the ones to say it loudest.
Author's notes: I learned British English in school. That stuck until I started writing fic in English, when my first fandom happened to be an American one. While I was trying very hard to keep the British / American English in this story coherent, I probably didn’t manage. Seeing as how trying to do so almost broke my brain, I’ll be happy if you feel like pointing out any wrongs in comments for educational purposes, but I can’t say I’d appreciate unproductive criticism on this front. Life sucks all without people acting like it’s important whether you use “crazy” or “bonkers.”
lls-mutant and safenthecity, this is for you (as are the two other parts of it, of course)! I meant to translate it for your birthdays, because you’ve both said - a long time ago - that you would like to read it. Of course, it’s entirely possible that you were just being polite, but in that case, this will be revenge because now you’ll have to read it to be nice. :p Anyway, thank you both for being wonderful people. Hope you like it! Merry Christmas!
Chapter 1: The Wizard
Kingsley Shacklebolt learnt that he was a wizard at nine.
It happened at a soccer game on a hot summer day. At nine, Kingsley was taller than most twelve-year-olds, playing keeper. Today, however, he wasn’t very good, and the other team had already made two goals because of him. The boys from the other team had been teasing him, calling him a stupid blackie. He was so frustrated that he wanted to cry. He really wanted his team to win. So when the ball shot towards the upper left corner mercilessly yet again, Kingsley jumped into a perfect parry, flying higher, and higher, while the ball froze in midair so he could pick it like a plum. Gently, he set down on the goal line.
There was deafening silence on the pitch. All assembled parents and players were staring at him. His mother sobbed once, then dragged him off the pitch. As soon as they were home, she called Kingsley’s father, talking to him in upset staccato until he agreed to come home. For two long hours, Kingsley worried about what he could have done wrong. Then, his parents called him to the living room and explained to him that his father was a wizard, and that he, too, would learn how to do charm work at the magic school of Hogwarts within just two years’ time.
For Kingsley, all this was very confusing if also quite cool, no matter he was sad that he wasn’t allowed to play soccer anymore (in Hogwarts, however, he’d learn about Quidditch. The grief would grow old and die). Instead, he soon found himself skimming through charms books and Wizarding encyclopedias, and his father gave him a children’s wand.
“Dad,” he asked his father one day after dinner, “How come you never told me that I’m a wizard?”
His father had sighed, looking older than he usually did. “The Wizarding world isn’t as safe a place as your world, lad,” he’d said, “We’re at war against a man who doesn’t like Muggles like your mother, and children of Muggles like yourself. You wouldn’t be able to defend yourselves there.”
So when Kingsley went to Hogwarts, joining the huge, exciting magic world, he sat down in the first row in class with boyish gravity to learn how to defend himself. It made a lot of sense to do so in his opinion; ever since he’d gotten his letter, his mother had been afraid for him. He was a Hufflepuff now, winning points for his house by being a dedicated pupil in class and a fair Beater on the pitch. And the war ended when he started his sixth year, anyway.
However, Kingsley had already reached two conclusions at this point: First of all, he wanted to be an Auror, like his father working at the Law Enforcement Squad, except better. Second of all, he had all kinds of reasons to watch out in the Wizarding world, because he wasn’t just a Half-blood. He was also gay.
It was a summer morning in 1993 when Kingsley came to work and was greeted by chaos. Memos were thrashing about nervously, Aurors were arguing in the hallways, while the door to Scrimgeour’s office stayed firmly shut. When Kingsley asked about the cause of all this, somebody just handed him the newspaper. It had made the headlines while he was asleep: Sirius Black had escaped from Azkaban.
Later, Kingsley would remember how he’d looked down at the photograph for a moment, at the escapee’s vampire face, as motionless as gaunt. It would sometimes lift its eyes to stare at its audience without blinking. Kingsley blinked, though, remembering, against his will, Quidditch in Hogwarts. Black had long finished school when Kingsley made the team, but he remembered the pliant Gryffindor Beater from his first year. He’d stared into the sky in wonder while that exuberant boy made Quidditch look like just another kind of magic. The murderer on the photograph might as well have been a different man.
But then Scrimgeour’s door opened, and the Commander of the Aurors limped out to drag Kingsley into his office. Amelia Bones was waiting there, eyeing Kingsley from top to bottom, when she wouldn’t ever have noticed him before even if he’d done a striptease in the middle of the DMLE.
“Kingsley Shacklebolt,” Scrimgeour had said as if exhibiting a valued piece of furniture. “Our best investigator since Moody retired. You give him a strand of hair, and he’ll tell you not just where it’s from, but also what the owner ate last. He’s an excellent duelist. His bat-bogey hex blows even you off your feet, ma’am. And he is perfectly neutral. Half-blood. No connections to the pureblood families whatsoever.”
Amelia Bones was still eyeing him suspiciously through her monocle. “When did you start your training, young man?”
“In 1983, ma’am,” Kingsley said. “I was part of post-war recruitment.” There hadn’t been that many Aurors left after the war, rows upon rows of empty desks waiting for new dragon fodder in the main office. Those who hadn’t died had quit as soon as they could do so in good conscience, running from bad memories and ghosts of lost comrades as far as they could. People had just wanted to forget.
“Excellent,” Miss Bones said, giving Scrimgeour a sharp nod.
It was the first and only time in Kingsley’s life that his Half-blood status had advanced his career.
A month later, Kingsley had found every photograph ever taken of Black, every letter he’d written that people hadn’t burned in fury, every status report Black had ever signed as an Auror. The wall of his cubicle was hung with shots of the best man dance at the Potter’s wedding; the supreme smirk of a victorious seventh year brandishing the Quidditch cup; the blank features of the proper pureblood on the family portrait; press photographs of the young Auror who’d been famous by virtue of not dying.
The veterans amongst the DMLE had started avoiding Kingsley’s desk.
Kingsley knew everything there was to know about this man but didn’t have the slightest clue where he was hiding. He went to speak to old friends of Black’s who slammed the door in his face, claiming they hadn’t known Black that well after all. He went to Azkaban to talk to the Lestranges, but they just laughed at him - if Black had ever even been close to any Death Eaters at all, they were either dead or bonkers now. His colleagues were quick to point out that Black had been assigned to Frank Longbottom's team, and Lydia Corday’s before that - the lost and the dead. He might have been a failure of the Aurors, but he wasn’t mine.
I’ve been dreaming of you last night, Black had written in a letter addressed to Remus Lupin at fifteen on the summer vacation. It provided a sharp contrast to his usual short, edgy letters, written in an impatient boy’s hand. You were the wolf and it was a full moon but your fur was red and gold, and you were calm, and allowed me to pet you. James looked it up in his textbook. He says it means we’ll win the Quidditch cup next year but I think it means you can stop worrying when you’re with us in Hogwarts. But I still worry when you aren’t in Hogwarts, I remember your shag. How are you holding up?
On Halloween of all days, Black broke into Hogwarts unseen, ravaging the portrait of the Fat Lady, but Kingsley knew as little about how he had managed to do so as he could find out how Black had managed to escape from Azkaban in the first place. He suspected that Lupin was holding back vital information, but if the teacher was lying, he was lying like a Slytherin.
Later that year, Black invaded the Gryffindor dormitory to threaten one of Harry Potter’s friends with a knife. Again Kingsley couldn’t figure out how he had done so, no matter why he had. Scrimgeour had to resort to vicious threats to protect Kingsley from the wrath of the Wizengamot; people were scared. Kingsley took it in his stride when Cadet Tonks was assigned to him to do his research, a clear message that he wasn’t doing well enough. He refused to comment on Albus Dumbledore’s words of concern and preferred to wonder why Black still hadn’t bothered stealing a wand. Either he was more insane than Kingsley believed, or he was a lot more powerful. Naturally, it was a common assumption that this man was as mad as a hatter, but Kingsley wasn’t so sure. You needed a sharp mind to escape from Azkaban. It was his job to assume the worst. Black had already proven to be dizzyingly sharp, and a sane Death Eater posed much more of a danger than a cackling one.
Left home for good, staying at James’, a messy note had informed Peter Pettigrew in 1976, a stain of what looked like tomato sauce splashed over it. Mr. Potter is helping me find a place to live. Then, doubly underlined: I hope I’ll live just long enough to bury them.
During the Lupin affair at the end of the year, Kingsley managed to piss off Severus Snape with his questions, to be criticized by the Wizengamot even more, and to bond over shared misery with newly graduated Auror Tonks. He didn’t have a personal life left, which was why his boyfriend left him - a Muggle who hadn’t liked being kept secret in the first place. While the rest of Headquarters traveled the country in preparation of first the world cup, then the Triwizard Tournament, Kingsley spoke to his witnesses again, thinking hard about unsolved riddles. He reached a conclusion that shook him to his core.
He reached this conclusion because Albus Dumbledore had stopped addressing the Black issue in the Wizengamot altogether; Remus Lupin didn’t just talk to him these days but also was convinced, now that he’d thought about it for a year, that Black had always wanted to holiday in Chile. It was a horrible conclusion, a conclusion too unbelievable to even be considered. But Kingsley didn’t give up on a hypothesis just because he didn’t like it. Also, thinking of Mike moving out from the apartment they’d shared, it wasn’t exactly the first shocking conclusion in his life.
Kingsley tried talking to Tonks about it, but Tonks had just recently drawn her own conclusions about the nature of their relationship with each other. Since Kingsley had had to decline the offer without much of an explanation, Tonks was only talking to him when she absolutely had to.
So he went to see Scrimgeour, who threw his hands up in horror. He’d have to send Kingsley to St. Mungo for a check-up, he said, and find a replacement, if the case was getting to him like that.
But then that tragedy at the Tournament killed poor Cedric Diggory, and Kingsley finally accepted that much was going on in the Wizarding world that he hadn’t any knowledge of at all.
Two days after the end of term, he went to Hogwarts to see Albus Dumbledore.
“Deny it all you want,” Kingsley said. “I know Black has to be innocent, and you know it as well. The only difference is that you know why.”
Albus Dumbledore gave him a long, serious look.
“Mr. Shacklebolt,” he said evenly, folding his hands, “Have you ever heard of an organization called the Order of the Phoenix?”
Sirius Black made the impression of a panther behind cage bars, crouched to attack, muscles flexing under shining fur and watching its spectators with dangerous vigilant eyes. Everything about him looked darker than it should be, drawing eyes as if there was something even more powerful to him than magic. Though all he did was get up from behind the kitchen table of 12 Grimmauld Place and shake Kingsley’s hand.
His palm felt hard and calloused, and Kingsley thought of twelve years of Azkaban, of two years of flight. He knew everything there was to know about this man except all the important things.
“I’m in charge of the investigation against you,” he said. “It’s an honor.”
“I’m sure it is,” Black said with a sardonic smirk. “It’s not exactly a pleasure to learn that you’ve been wasting two years of your time. Working for a corrupt government, no less. I hope it didn’t destroy all your illusions just yet.”
Sirius Black was a strange mix of the charming young bloke on the photographs, except not charming, and the motionless murderer on the search warrants, except not motionless. It was a mix that couldn’t be more different from the reckless enemy, the martyr hero he’d become in Kingsley’s head.
It was downright disappointing.
Chapter 2: The Pureblood
“What in hell’s name were you thinking, Tonks?”
Kingsley consisted of two hundred pounds of well-trained muscle and tended to tower even over Hippogriffs. His low, sonorous voice, used to screaming orders at cadets, didn’t make him an altogether unobtrusive person, either. So like most massive men, Kingsley had learned to move cautiously without breaking anything and to generally not stick out.
However, that didn’t apply when duty was involved. Kingsley had no sense of humor about duty, and he happened to be Nymphadora’s boss. When he threw the Black file onto her kitchen table, she visibly flinched. Though Kingsley didn’t care if she regretted having let him into her apartment. The grace period was over for Tonks.
“I’m sent on field duty once. I leave you alone with a case for only three days.” Every word was a whiplash. “I take two days to read up on your work because I trust you...” His voice became dangerously low. “Just to end up with a file as obviously fake as Hufflepuff’s beard. Give me one reason, Tonks, just one for me to not go to Scrimgeour and have you fired for good.”
Kingsley was in no mood to tolerate incompetence in the first place; this week had been pure misery. Scrimgeour had put him on Dawlish’s team, a team hunting vampires no less - and Kingsley hated vampires. That brat of a Nosferatu had almost bitten him in the shin, and when he’d gone to his favorite Muggle bar to cool off, he’d run into Mike. Now, topping everything that had happened before, he’d learned that Tonks had spiked his precious Black file with lies, lies obvious enough for even the Office for Muggle Artifacts to spot them from a mile away. The offense was two-fold: One, the betrayal. And two, the incompetence with which it had been executed. He’d thought they’d taught her better than that.
A strand of her pink hair transforming into shy dishwater brown, Tonks peered up at him. “You’d cover an Order’s member’s back?” she offered.
“Wrong,” Kingsley thundered. “I make sure that there are only competent people in the Order!”
“You like me too much to have me fired?”
Kingsley just stared her down darkly.
Tonks sighed, dropping the pretense. “You’ll let me serve you tea, and listen and realize that it’s an excellent idea?”
Kingsley rolled his eyes.
“Please?” she added.
The Auror gave in. Sigh heavy with frustration, he sat down on one of the two chairs in Tonks’ tiny kitchen. He waited impatiently while she stood up, bumping against a corner of the table, starting a search for something to transform into cups.
On general principle, it was a nice evening: cozy summer sun pouring through the pitched roof window, and the distant shouts of children, playing down on Diagon Alley, providing amicable background noises. In another world, he could be out to see a movie with Mike just now, Kingsley thought with longing. He could be in a pub, getting reacquainted with some of his Muggle friends, if he wouldn’t have to fear running into Mike. Instead, he was here, awaiting blackmail by tea.
When he cleared his voice as a warning that his patience was running low, Tonks turned to face him.
“I’m working on a plan to improve on humankind overall,” she said and threw him a beaming smile. “It’s a great plan, I thought about it for quite a long time. It will heighten the sense of community within the Order so that there’ll be a lot more enthusiasm for the cause, followed by greater efficiency, causing us to win the war. Once it breaks out, I mean,” she added thoughtfully. “Do you think it’ll break out soon?”
Kingsley snorted. Instead of answering, he just raised the Black file and waved it meaningfully. Even closed, it looked just as important and official as it was. Pitch black, magically sealed with multiple passwords, engraved with the Ministry’s crest and secured with a variety of Aurors’ charms. Black’s file was incredibly confidential. As a first year Auror, Tonks was blessed to be permitted to open it.
“Right,” Tonks said, returning her eyes to her tea preparations. “Do you remember how you talked to Professor Dumbledore about Sirius? When he said we had no time to take care of his legal situation now? See, I think he’s wrong. He could be, couldn’t he? He’s getting quite old. Surely he can’t have assumed we’ll have more time once the war breaks out, that would make no sense whatsoever. So I’ve been talking to Dung and he had some great ideas about how we could fudge Sirius’ case instead of just claiming he’s abroad.”
“Dung,” Kingsley said slowly. He must have misheard.
“Yes,” Tonks said. She waved her wand with too much enthusiasm, making the teapot jump with a clattering start. The water started boiling rapidly. “Dung knows a lot about how to fake evidence, did you know? We thought it wouldn’t hurt to start paving the way. No harm in preparing the acquittal, right?”
“Acquittal,” Kingsley said weakly. Ignoring the clanking of the cups for a moment, he reached for the file again to thumb through it. It had been so pretty before. All filed away methodically. Dozens of meticulous notes. Colored markers. All those things were still there but now, they were disfigured by the ugly elements. Slight changes of wording to encourage a reader to suspect that not all was what it seemed. Conclusions in the profile that had never been brought up before.
Tonks had found - or possibly invented - a respectable old witch who claimed that Sirius Black had been leading a calm, peaceful life as a ticket clerk on a Muggle racetrack for years, clearly not hating Muggles at all since he petted them lovingly on a regular basis. She cited the interrogation of a Muggle who’d survived Pettigrew’s curse - an interrogation that had never taken place - having him claim the supposedly dead Pettigrew had flown away afterwards on a Hippogriff. Or possibly on a winged pig, Kingsley wasn’t clear on that part. At almost every crime scene ever investigated on occasion of this case, she’d fudged findings of rat hair: Godric’s Hollow, the hallways of Hogwarts, Potter’s home in Surrey - the only place missing was Black’s cell in Azkaban. And if Kingsley were honest, Tonks hadn’t even been that incompetent about it. Those colleagues who knew as little about Muggles as herself would certainly be fooled for a while. However, the task was too much for a first year Auror to take on - it was madness for almost every Auror, frankly. She should have known better.
His cup came sailing through the air, hitting the tabletop hard. Kingsley repaired the crack on it with an absent-minded wave of his wand.
“Kingsley,” Tonks was saying. Kingsley looked up to see that she’d sat down on the other chair across the table, looking at him with intense, evocative brown eyes - her true eye color. “We can do something for Sirius. He needs people like us to do something for him. We became Aurors to protect men like him. He needs us and if we don’t do anything for him, he’ll still be stuck in Grimmauld Place ten years from now.”
Kingsley grimaced. In his opinion, Sirius Black could go to hell, but maybe he’d done that already and come back because he hadn’t been wanted there, either. Although Kingsley had only been in the Order for two months, he already knew that Black was trouble. First, he’d disagreed with everything and everybody, questioning all of Dumbledore’s plans. Most recently, he’d just been looming in the shadows, giving everybody dark looks and spreading a mood of impending doom. He was bad for the atmosphere in the house. He was terrible for morale. He carried a grudge against Snape and against Professor Dumbledore, apparently, as well. He upset Molly on a regular basis; he demanded a vote on everything although he didn’t ever do anything. He gave Kingsley a hard time by creating more work for him at the Ministry by sheer existence, and Kingsley was never sure if Black wouldn’t just lose patience one day, going on a stroll through London and getting Kingsley fired by not being in Chile.
Black was a menace, he was utterly useless. He caused more work than Grimmauld Place was worth. He endangered their mission, most likely risking Harry Potter’s safety in the process, influencing the sprog in Merlin knew which way. Before they’d settled on guarding the prophecy in the Ministry without the DMLE’s knowledge, he had proposed, in all seriousness, that they themselves could break into the Ministry and steal the prophecy with Potter’s assistance before You-Know-Who could do it himself. “You don’t win the match by guarding the goals,” he’d said, like war was just a game.
“I concur that it might have been a bad idea to start with the file, but I have other ideas, too,” Tonks said, counting them off. “Whenever there’s new evidence, we could make it look like Sirius can’t possibly have been involved. We can find excuses to question Order’s members, the ones with a good reputation, and they can make something up to exonerate him. We could even think about faking proof of his innocence since we’re at it anyway.”
Kingsley shook his head slowly, hoping to make the many long lines fall into the right pigeon holes. He’d only been away from London for few days but apparently, that had been quite enough for Tonks to lose her mind.
“Tonks,” he said helplessly. “Why the fatalism? Why the sudden... madness?”
All of a sudden, Tonks looked lost. “Well, because of Sturgis,” she said in a small voice. “And it isn’t madness.”
“Sturgis? Sturgis Podmore? What about him?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
This time, there was nothing fake about the lost look in Tonks’ eyes. “He was captured on guard duty, Kingsley,” she said. “They’ve convicted him to six months of Azkaban already, and nobody is doing anything about it. Although I’m sure they’d let him go sooner if Professor Dumbledore vouched for him.”
Kingsley had frozen. He willed himself to put the tea cup down before he could break it with his fingers. Sturgis Podmore. In Azkaban. Already. Kingsley had been to Azkaban, had interrogated prisoners there. The mists that covered the island alone were enough to make him shudder. He didn’t wish Azkaban on anybody.
“And I thought, what if that had been us.” Tonks swallowed, hard. “What if we’ll end up in Azkaban like Sturgis and Sirius. They’d just let us rot there as well. I thought, aren’t we worth anything to them? Are we betraying Scrimgeour and the Ministry just to be Dumbledore’s dragon fodder?” She was pressing her palms on the table flat, so hard her fingers turned white. “I’ll be damned if I don’t do anything for him although I could,” she said emphatically. “I’ll be damned.”
And Kingsley, who knew Tonks well, realized something: She wouldn’t let this go, no matter if he gave her an order or discussed it with her, or pleaded with her. She’d just go on doing it behind his back, manipulating the case and working not only against the Ministry, but also against him. Endangering herself, him, Black, maybe the whole Order - she might be good but she was still a beginner and she wasn’t that good. And she knew that herself, but that wouldn’t stop her either. She couldn’t let that stop herself.
If Kingsley went to Scrimgeour with it, and Scrimgeour got the truth out of her, they were all doomed as well. Truly, if he didn’t want to end up in Azkaban himself, he only had one choice.
He had to start working on Black’s exoneration himself.
Once upon a time, Kingsley’s mother had lovingly called her son a full-blown Half-blood. She had always loved the fact that Kingsley had never let go of his Muggle roots, never caring that the reason for him not to do so was his sexual identity. It had created a connection between them. While Abe Shacklebolt attended his Wizarding poker nights at the Hog’s Head (forever wondering why his son still wasn’t settling down and getting married to a nice witch), they’d go see the pictures together or visit a fair.
Kingsley needed the Muggle world. It was the place where you weren’t stared at as if you had horns and two heads if he casually mentioned that, by the way, he felt a lot more attracted to men and yes, that really existed, even amongst Aurors. Muggles even had pubs and a subculture where you’d meet men as feminine as they’d decided they wanted to be. In the Wizarding world, they didn’t even know the concept - or if they did, it was something that they vaguely pigeonholed as something to do with dirty restrooms behind Quidditch stadiums. Kingsley hadn’t even tried to explain to Tonks why he wasn’t interested in her like that - Tonks thought that a tolerant wizard petted Muggles.
Though being the kind of wizard who hid his robes in the closet after work to go browse the pubs in Muggle London, Kingsley also had made little contact with the die-hard pureblood Wizards who made up the core of Wizarding England - the old families. Thinking in terms of just magic had never become second nature to him. He’d never even had a single look at Gilderoy Lockhart’s omnipresent books on household magic, no matter that the writer was as hot as a Veela. Kingsley was aware of that at least - he was a Half-blood, not blind.
So when Bill Weasley asked him to uncurse an ancient chest at an Order’s meeting, he stayed behind at the kitchen table, staring at the object full of puzzlement. He was one of the people responsible if Weasley gave a useful new item to the Order, but he hadn’t broken a single curse in his life that hadn’t been spoken by a Dark wizard.
As an experiment, he pointed his wand at it and tried a simple circumvention charm. It didn’t even cause the chest to yawn.
“No need to even try Complecto on a lock of that age,” a voice remarked. Black was lounging in the frame of the door, an apple in hand, taking a bite.
Kingsley suppressed an eyeroll. He immensely disliked the fact that Black always lurked everywhere, no matter where you happened to be in 12 Grimmauld Place. It made him nervous. Every shadow seemed to have a life of its own in this house. However, his mother had also taught him manners while taking him to see the pictures. Kingsley didn’t walk around picking fights with people who’d just offered advice - even if they were being condescending gits about it. Bracing himself, he pushed the chest across the table towards Black and delivered an invite by way of a nod. “Feel free to do your worst.”
For a second, it looked like Black wanted to excuse the interruption and leave. Though then he just pulled himself up and moved closer. While speaking, he reached inside his robes and retrieved a wand. “Complecto was created in the first war, it doesn’t respond to anything older than Grindelwald’s era,” he said. “You have to use Flitwick’s revelation charms from sixth year, then look up each of the arcane patterns on a reference table. Here.” He tapped on the chest with the tip of his wand. “Deprecatio.” Thin red lines began to appear around the lock. “And Translucero Totalus.”
A second layer of blue nets appeared with a flash, just to melt away almost immediately. Black shrugged. “In theory, anyway. I can’t do it well with Remus’ old wand.”
Against his will, Kingsley gave him an appreciative nod. “Well, looks like I’ll have to go to the library, anyway. Finite Incantatem,” he ordered the chest, and the glistering red charm resolved. “I’m surprised you know about Cursebreaking?” he tried not to overemphasize on the you. Black had been an Auror alright, but one busy with war. At the time he’d signed on, cadet training had been a stub.
“Just have a look around.” Black gestured to include all of the house as if it was obvious. “If you’re here and you’re twelve, you break curses every day.” He gave Kingsley a sardonic smile. “If you survive the Blacks, you either end up a Death Eater or an Auror. Your department got that almost right.”
For a moment, Kingsley hesitated. He had a lot of work to do these days - acting like he was working on the Black file but fudging it at the same time, guard duty in the Ministry and the occasional task handed on to him by Bill Weasley. Sharing the workload wouldn’t hurt. And anyway, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to get a closer look at the man he was helping involuntarily. Black was just sitting around being useless anyway. If nothing else, it would provide him with new intel for the cause.
“Would you have time for a lesson tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.” Just for a second, Black’s features relaxed, startlingly so. He didn’t look like a criminal at all, but just like some companionable man in desperate need of something to do. “Bring Fiddle’s Index of Forgotten Curses. My schedule is inexplicably empty tomorrow.”
Three weeks passed.
A single evening hadn’t been enough to crack the complicated safety charms of the chest. So they’d met again. Since Weasley had already been standing at the ready with a triple cursed amulet, it thus became a regular event. The Cursebreaker brought in ever new items that might provide them with a surprise weapon in future battles, and the two of them spent Kingsley’s free evenings figuring out if that was true. Kingsley had a good understanding of the complex charm work they were doing, but Black brought to the table the necessary knowledge about the Dark Arts to pick up on the right cues. Soon, Kingsley understood that what he had thought to be attitude truly was the self-confidence of an experienced wizard who had used to be a soldier.
It still annoyed him sometimes. He’d chased after this man for two years. Black had escaped him with ease every time. He was powerful and he was competent, but he’d managed to escape from Azkaban due to a dizzying ability to calculate risks with the precision of a tightrope dancer - an ability that Kingsley, who also was powerful and competent, had just never had to develop. Every day after work, he’d sit in his apartment with the Black file in front of him, meticulously mixing truths with subtle little lies. Sometimes, he’d try and imagine what would have become of Black if he’d gotten his trial, if Dumbledore had said, “They told me he was secret keeper” instead of, “He was secret keeper.” Black wouldn’t be a shadow at Grimmauld Place. He’d be Kingsley’s superior, and possibly Scrimgeour’s - he’d held more fame in the first war than Scrimgeour - and that rubbed Kingsley in ways both startling and uncomfortable.
The many issues he had with Black didn’t go away (he was a mutinous cynic and a drunk) but they started coloring with mutual respect. Kingsley still thought that Black’s wild ideas for Order’s strategies were madness, but he soon realized that what he had thought to be a childish grudge held against some older Order’s members was just a badly concealed sense of betrayal. Black was stuck at a place he hated with a passion out of loyalty, forced to trust in the support of an Order that didn’t know how to handle him. For a man like him who preferred action over talk, Grimmauld Place basically was just another prison.
At one point when visiting his father, Kingsley talked the old man into giving him the sparkler amongst his captured wands. It was made of ebony with dragon heart string, almost like Black’s old one except longer. From that time on, the subtle charms came easier to Black, and the look in his eye when he remembered what it was like when magic came to you was worth it for Kingsley. A man like Black was just incomplete without a suitable wand.
So Kingsley shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next. Still, it hit him out of nowhere.
It was long after midnight when Kingsley entered Number Twelve after a late shift on guard duty. He was in hopes of finding somebody who’d trade shifts with him on short notice. While he was aware that Lupin probably wouldn’t even be home, it was likely that Black had stayed up late, ready to arrange for the change the next day.
The old mansion was covered in darkness and silence. The ground floor was empty except for the portrait of Phineas Nigellus, who took the time for a dig at Kingsley’s heritage before pointing him towards the drawing room.
The moment he touched the heavy door to push it open further, Kingsley heard quiet noises and muttering emanating from the room. Nobody answered his knock, so he entered. The first thing he took note of in the dim candlelight was an open bottle of Firewhiskey on a drawer. The second was Black, asleep on the sofa. The wizard seemed to have passed out drunk, hair unkept and robes half buttoned, and he was having a nightmare. It was easy to gauge what he was dreaming of - he was jerking defensively, and when Kingsley stepped closer, he could hear him muttering, “Don’t,” and then, “He’s in Hogwarts.” Even Kingsley found that creepy.
Without fuss, Kingsley bent over the wizard to call his name and grab his shoulder, shaking him hard.
He didn’t even catch a glimpse of the hand shooting up and grabbing his collar. One moment, he had been trying to wake Black, the next his back was making contact with the rug, hard. A slender shape was holding him down with an iron grip on his throat and a knee in his crotch. Black’s gray eyes were gleaming in the dark, his wand poised for attack, Moody style. He was breathing hard.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” Kingsley managed, trying to get up on instinct, but that was Black’s full weight holding him down. While unexpectedly strong, the man was a lightweight, skinny from Azkaban. Kingsley could have shaken him off without trouble. But he didn’t want to hurt him, and awareness was creeping up on Black’s face.
He shook his head very slowly. “Shacklebolt?” His voice was mostly a croak. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Trading shifts,” Kingsley said dryly. “Now would you kindly let me get up?”
Black snorted a laugh. Still, beyond the loosening grip of his hand on Kingsley’s throat, he didn’t make any move towards release. In the flickering candlelight, he looked gaunt, dark circles under his eyes. The smell of alcohol was hitting Kingsley’s face with each exhaled breath, and suddenly, he just felt pity for the wizard. Here and now, in the privacy of his own premises, Black was nothing but a wreck.
Though that didn’t change anything about the fact that his body felt warm and wiry through the thin robes - and again, nicely strong -, and it was everywhere on Kingsley’s, thigh against crotch. It was true, Black was a fairly attractive bloke under the scars of Azkaban. Kingsley didn’t usually let himself notice that. The touch felt good; he’d missed this during the long months of hard work, and his body was reacting to the offer. Oh in Merlin’s name, not now, he thought with a spike of panic, In the names of all gods, not here.
He was trying to get up again, with a more determined jerk this time around, but it was too late. Black intercepted the motion, forcing him back down, his thigh rubbing against Kingsley’s cock with purpose. Obviously, he’d noticed. “Don’t tell me you’re turned on by that, Shacklebolt.” He smirked. “What are you, a poof?” Smirk turning to grimace, he pushed Kingsley away and rose to his feet.
A surge of hot anger flared up within Kingsley. It wasn’t the insult - but it was the condescension. “Yes, that’s exactly what I am,” he said coolly. “And people less stuck-up than you call it gay. Why, scared that I’ll jump you?”
For a notable moment, Black didn’t answer, a still shadow amongst the shadows of Grimmauld Place, the light of the candles not reaching his face. But then he relaxed, shaking the tension out of his shoulders as if it was warm-up for sport, and Kingsley believed he saw him smirk through the darkness.
“No.” One fluid motion, and the wizard was right above Kingsley, staring a challenge at him. “It gets you off, that’s fair enough. Suck me.”
And, Merlin knew Kingsley didn’t have the slightest idea why he did it. But he went up onto his knees in front of Black and did him the favor.
Once he’d be done panicking later, Kingsley would admit to himself how hot it had been.
He was a friend of oral sex, no matter from what point of view. There was an immediate quality to it, intensely intimate, that couldn’t be reproduced in any other way. The world sharpened around him, tightening until it consisted of nothing but the feel of Black’s hand gripping his shoulder hard, the salty taste on his tongue, the cock in his mouth feeling heavier and larger and more there than it could possibly be. When Kingsley looked up, Black’s other hand was holding on to a drawer so hard he was trembling - so he wouldn’t fall - eyes closed, face tight, small jerks of his hips beyond his control. All about it was a turn-on - Kingsley on his knees in this house, the cock of one of the purest purebloods Wizarding England had left in his mouth. He’d spent the almost thirty years he’d lived separating these two parts of his world with a rigor that bordered on compulsion.
Nobody in the Wizarding world had ever known his secret, but now he was kneeling on the worn rug of 12 Grimmauld Place, and Sirius Black was pushing into his mouth, whimpering helplessly. It was an insane relief. It was an insane... insanity. And, hell, Black. Two years of flight and twelve years of Azkaban, he thought irrationally, and the thought shouldn’t arouse him at all, but - oh sod it. Fourteen years without sex - Kingsley would probably have died just from that.
But it was over quite as fast as it had started. Sirius’ hips jerked hard enough for him to loosen his grip on Kingsley’s shoulder; he made a strangled, desperate sound, and he came. Kingsley swallowed without thought, taking his time to let go, feeling as self-satisfied as a Grindylow after a catch. It had to have been the emotion in the room that had made the candles flicker so hard before, because now the light was more steady, illuminating Black’s face. Again, Kingsley was amazed how fast Black’s expression could change, in just a moment’s time, transforming him from England’s most dangerous criminal into a man who’d been a trusted comrade in arms and a best man.
But then, Black blinked, as if suddenly remembering where he was. The dark eyes focusing on Kingsley were unforgiving, vigilant, and extremely sober.
“The hell, Shacklebolt,” he said. “Get off me, fairy.”
Chapter 3: Ways To Keep It Interesting
Kingsley did not trade his shift that night. Even when Arthur approached him the next day to inquire if he was still looking to do so, he did not. Within twenty-four hours, he went to stand guard for the Order and worked a double in Headquarters, then went on guard duty again. When arriving at home afterwards, even the best wake-up charms wouldn’t have allowed him to stay on his feet any longer. He crashed to sleep through a day.
But even after the exhaustion and stress had worn off, the events at 12 Grimmauld Place hadn’t magically transformed into just a bad dream. His worst nightmare had become true in passing; instead of filling him with panic, he just felt bad about himself. Considering his usual bad luck, Black wouldn’t just have remembered everything exactly after sleeping off the Firewhiskey, but still meant every word of it.
Amongst Muggles, Kingsley had the luxury of laughing about homophobia. In the Wizarding world, it reminded him too much that he couldn’t be both - gay and magical - without creating a situation just as horrid as the one Remus Lupin was in, if he wasn’t terribly cautious. It wasn’t possible to have both.
However, when the Orders’ next meeting came along, none of his fears came to pass. When he stepped into the kitchen, Black was immersed in a discussion with Moody, not even pausing to look at Kingsley. He wouldn’t meet Kingsley’s gaze even once at the meeting, including the times he absolutely had to address him.
And so days passed and became weeks. There were more work and more stress. Kingsley had no time at all to contemplate what had happened - except he still did it every time he walked into Black. Kingsley would be insane to approach him about Weasley’s magic objects, and Black didn’t appear to plan on doing so himself. Bill had caught on to the wizard’s knowledge of magic devices, anyway, usually approaching him about them directly these days. It was the best solution for everybody, considering Black’s schedule was always empty to a point where he didn’t even need one. They coexisted without any interaction at all.
In late November, however, Tonks started getting impatient, appearing in Kingsley’s fireplace with curious eyes to inquire about the Black file. The subtle modifications of evidence that Kingsley had in mind were asking for more patience than she had in the first place. After the night he’d made such a terrible fool of himself, he’d thrown the file into a bottom drawer and just never looked at it again. Now, he was forced to continue. He just wasn’t ready to explain to Tonks why he hadn’t. Frustrated to his bones, he continued his work and started unobtrusively working Dawlish until the Auror signed a slip for him that confirmed Priori Incantado truly hadn’t been used on Black’s wand in 1981 before it was destroyed. It was just work, Kingsley told himself. It wasn’t personal. He did it because he had to. To accommodate Tonks. It didn’t matter at all whether his objective was called Black or Weasley or Great Helga Hufflepuff.
Though sometimes, he still paused to stare at the photographs surrounding him in his cubicle at work, dozens of incarnations of Black waving at him and waltzing with the bride, holding the Quidditch cup. All homophobes are closet gays, anyway, he’d think nastily, compensating for the embarrassment by imagining Black having bad sex with women all his life. But then he thought, two years of flight and twelve years of Azkaban, and his venom wore off, because the assumption that Black had been looking for anything but quick release while drunk was daring, he knew that. So he would force himself to not look at the photographs, and reach for the report on the breaking of Black’s wand again, making himself think of Black The Death Eater instead of a night that wasn’t permitted to happen to an Auror, ever, anyway.
Then, one day when Kingsley was just on his way to the fireplace after yet another Order’s meeting, Black told him to follow him. He said Lupin was looking for Kingsley, wanting to discuss a mission. They went down the hallway without saying a word. However, when they entered a small forlorn study, couch covered in sheets, no Lupin was in sight. Black closed the door behind them.
Kingsley’s expression turned to stone.
“Listen, Shacklebolt,” Black said, burying his hands in his robe pockets. Automatically, Kingsley took a breath. He couldn’t smell any alcohol. The other man had dark circles under his eyes again, but he seemed like he was keeping it together for a change. “I’m not one to make a mistake and to act like it never happened afterwards. I was drunk, and I... at night... I wasn’t myself. But that’s not an excuse. I shouldn’t have said what I said; it was unforgivable. I hope you can accept if I apologize, deeply and sincerely.”
To say this was surprising would have been an understatement. The apology stumped Kingsley. He’d tried to put the event away as something about which he should have known better, because wizards were wizards, and their sex ed had stopped improving in the middle ages. As a pureblood and a Black, this man in front of him thought gay sexuality to be something dirty and dark. Yet he was standing here, asking him for forgiveness in an old-fashioned way that suspiciously sounded like a pureblood formality.
He cleared his voice. “Alright,” he said stiffly. Fairy, he thought. Get off me. Asshole. “I’ll stay away from you, don’t worry. I doubt I’ll ever have to come over again at night. There’s no chance for it to happen again.” He knew that from the Muggles - men who thought themselves to be especially straight, making sure to sit an extra foot apart from you. You paid for other people’s insecurities. He’d take care never to trigger Black’s again; they’d have to work together in the war that was coming.
“What’s your problem, Shacklebolt?” He’d turned to leave, but the words made him pause. “You sound like Remus when we found out he’s a werewolf, and he was twelve. Don’t be so damn defensive. I told you I stand up for mistakes, didn’t I?”
Kingsley froze. “That thing you just called a mistake,” he said deliberately. “is an intrinsical part of my identity.”
Black sighed. “I’m talking of my behavior, you git, not of the thing itself.” Was that the best wording he could come up with? But still. “Now, look at me.” There was an expectation in his voice that the order would be followed, one usually used by superior officers at briefings, and Kingsley had turned around before he could think about it. Black had produced a bottle of Firewhiskey. A flick of his wand transformed an old quill and a paperweight into glasses. “Let’s have a drink.”
“Do you solve all your problems with alcohol?” Kingsley raised his eyebrows.
“No,” Black answered bitterly. “But I try.”
Sitting down next to Black on the sheet-covered couch, Kingsley thought it was an absurd situation. They had to be in the smallest room in the whole house - in the closet, he thought sourly. Sirius Black had indeed taken the spot on the couch furthest away from him, but it looked like he’d made a decision to overrule instinct by brains, holding on to it by force of will. Kingsley wondered if he’d reacted like this as well when he’d been twelve. At twelve, his disdain of werewolves had to have been deep and unquestioned, and it wasn’t an age when you were prone to pause and think.
They drank in awkward silence.
“So,” Black said, clearing his voice. “Gay, is the word?”
He wasn’t looking at Kingsley. Kingsley did him the favor and looked at his glass when nodding, making this a very manly conversation. “There’s homosexual, as well.”
“What, as in homunculus?”
Mostly as in ‘sex’, Kingsley thought. “As in homunculus.”
“Alright,” Black said. “So if you... if men, with each other... they’re homosexual?” Being a typical wizard, he chose the long complex word that sounded more like a charm.
Kingsley sighed to himself. He really wasn’t in a mood to calm down Black freaking out about a blowjob, but there was no way around it now. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Some men just try it out, just to go back to women. Or they just do it as long as there aren’t any women present.” Like in the army, he thought. Or in prison - Black was in prison. Or in Grimmauld Place, where Tonks is his cousin, and the other women are all married. “There isn’t a textbook where you can look up definitions. It depends on what you’d want to do if you had a choice. I could get married and have a simpler life, but I just don’t want to, I prefer men.” And one of the reasons I do is because they don’t want to have conversations like this one, he thought mockingly. “Other people just want both. It has all been done.”
A moment of silence passed. Since Kingsley had a feeling there still was a deep need for testosterone here, he didn’t look around, just hearing the sound of Black pouring himself another glass. He wasn’t used to drinking, feeling a little lightheaded already. When the bottle appeared in his line of sight, he still offered his glass. Maybe this wasn’t bad, he thought. Maybe he hadn’t compromised his life in the Wizarding world after all, but won a kind of friend. An unusual kind of friend. In an unusual and highly awkward way.
In the corner of his eye, he saw Black studying the content of his glass intently.
“Doesn’t it get ... boring ... after a while, with men?” he eventually asked. “Doing the same all the time?”
At first, Kingsley started, until he realized that Black had to think that the incident in the drawing room had been the thing. “Oh,” he drawled diabolically. “There are ways to keep it interesting.”
Silence.
“Anyway, I’m not gay,” Black eventually said with a lot of focus.
“So I noticed,” Kingsley said dryly. If Black caught on to the sarcasm, he opted to ignore it.
Maybe they truly were back to being friends. And if Black would have a need to bring up the topic again, Kingsley imagined that it could even be a rather amusing friendship.
They made their goodbyes that night with a date for the next Cursebreaking session. The next morning, Kingsley was glad to have written it down, because he was hazy on everything to come after the last glass. He went through his shift drinking sober-up potions. When the other Aurors noticed, they rolled their eyes knowingly, joking about long nights and women and other things Kingsley hadn’t ever wanted to picture.
In the Order, the mood was growing tenser with every report to arrive from Hogwarts. At the same time, life quieted down at Aurors’ Headquarters. Many of the Aurors, including Scrimgeour himself, had listened up when Albus Dumbledore told them his version of the Triwizard Tournament and poor Cedric Diggory’s death - if an Auror could listen to a claim that You-Know-Who was back but dismiss it out of hand, they’d chosen the wrong profession. However, nothing had happened at all ever since, and people were relaxing. It was a strain to stand by without warning them. Even Kingsley had no choice but to logically conclude in his file that all known Dark activity had been caused by Black roaming the streets. Maybe some of the few incidents really had happened because former Death Eaters felt inspired by the antics of Voldemort’s supposed right hand man.
In early December, Kingsley and Tonks still managed to make some progress in their work that Kingsley was quite proud of. Old Corey Carson - who’d spent five years in Azkaban after the war, returning with a cackle - had renewed his Dark Mark, brandishing it while running through a street in Brighton and throwing Cruciatus at random Muggles. Of course, he turned out to be so gaga when they caught him that he truly didn’t remember whether it had been his idea or somebody else’s. While the colleagues collectively pointed at Sirius Black, Kingsley managed to organize a ‘sighting’ of Black at the Chilean border. Tonks had to pass thirteen Apparation points to get there, sleeping through a day afterwards to recover.
It didn’t exactly earn him a promotion. Kingsley tried to explain to Scrimgeour, in depth, why they couldn’t do anything as long as Black stayed there. Wizarding Chile would not be amused if a European Auror showed up to chase their tourists. Scrimgeour eventually had to give in grumpily, but remained suspicious. Kingsley hadn’t ever been one to be stopped by procedural problems. When Scrimgeour had finally limped out of his cubicle, Kingsley had been sweating from fear.
So he was happy to take some days off mid December. Naturally, this was exactly when his Auror team caught him on guard duty.
Grimacing from pain, Kingsley stumbled out of the fireplace, crashing against the kitchen table.
“Black!” he barked. “Lupin!”
Mrs. Black started screaming in the hallway as an answer. Kingsley shut his eyes, trying to breathe deeply, holding himself up at the table with one hand while the other felt for the wound on his thigh. Everything was wet with blood - the artery had been nicked, and he couldn’t find the right point to apply pressure. He hadn’t been able to perform a Quick Healing charm, because it would have left traces for colleagues to spot. Kingsley had made a split second decision, taking the risk to black out before he could reach help at Grimmauld Place. It wasn’t complex witchcraft. He just needed somebody who could look at the injury and who wasn’t so... dizzy...
“Merlin’s name, Kingsley!” a rough voice said, an arm wrapping around his waist, holding him up. The tip of a wand made him light enough to hover, and he was levitated away. His vision blurred. When it cleared up, he just caught the last syllable of a wake-up charm.
He was bleeding onto the couch in the drawing room. Mrs. Black’s screeching had stopped. Somewhere below his belt line, Sirius was at work with narrow eyes.
“Hello Kingsley,” he said. “Consider yourself lucky that I used to do this once a month. How’s your vision? How many fingers?” He nodded when he liked the answer. “I used Salutaro, so you better wait before sitting up or you’ll get dizzy. Can you move your leg? I can’t reach it for the bandage.”
Belatedly, Kingsley grew aware that he wasn’t wearing his robes anymore; the leg of his trousers had been cut off at the seam. He started feeling dizzy again when he looked at the injury. Black had closed the cut with a stitching charm - first aid magic, a style that had gone out of fashion at the time they’d started calling Alastor Mad-Eye. But there was still blood drying all over, dark red clots dripping down his thigh when Black helped him angle the leg.
“Good,” the wizard said. “Ferula.” A bandage shot out of his wand and wrapped itself around the injured area. “Accio Pepper-up potion.” Sirius was wearing one of those ugly grey cotton nightgowns that purebloods insisted on sleeping in. He leaned against the leg of the couch while waiting for the healing potion to arrive from where ever it was stored. “What happened?”
“Invisibility cloak stopped working,” Kingsley said, his tongue heavy. He felt as weak as a baby. “The new one Weasley brought in. I had time to speak Moody’s chameleon charm, so they didn’t recognize me. I think they thought I’m you. But I didn’t have much time. Proudfoot fired a stunning curse at me. I could counter that one in time. But Robards knows that nasty chopping curse. I barely escaped.”
“Scindero.” Sirius nodded. “I remember.” The Pepper-up potion had arrived; Sirius caught it with ease. “You gave me quite the scare, showing up in the kitchen like that. First I thought Remus was back - he’s with the wolves again tonight. You should have seen yourself. Blood everywhere. You looked like shit.”
“How flattering.”
But Kingsley was grateful when Sirius put an arm around him, helping him to sit up carefully, without jerking. Magic was great for injuries, but he still had lost a lot of blood. And, hell, he was grateful that he had a couple of free days coming up at the Aurors. This kind of injury might even be enough for Snape to get off his potion brewing ass and substitute for him.
He tried to sit upright on his own doing, but Sirius was muttering something soothing under his breath, shifting his weight so that Kingsley could lean against his shoulder. The potion tasted bitter and sweet at once. He felt it starting to work the moment he’d swallowed, tickling his stomach warmly. Kingsley hated being weak and helpless. Though, there was something to be said about the Order’s comradry, too, he thought lazily. It felt nice to be supported by somebody who cared.
He liked the smell of cotton and magic and leather that clung to Black tonight, no trace of alcohol at all. He smelled a nice kind of clean.
Considering the rasping sound when their cheeks touched, they both needed to shave.
“So are gays allowed to kiss?” Sirius asked.
Kingsley gave him a disbelieving look. Instead of answering, he turned his head until their lips met.
on to part 2
Characters: Kingsley Shacklebolt, Sirius Black, Albus Dumbledore, Remus Lupin, Nymphadora Tonks, Alastor Moody, various Aurors and various members of the Order
Pairings: Kingsley/Sirius
Wordcount: ~ 25,000 words overall
Rating: R. Barely.
Spoilers: This was written way back when, in a time before HBP. It survived HBP and DH surprisingly intact, though there might be small things that don't make any sense anymore and that I might have missed when translating - it’s been a while. Set during OotP.
Beta: Thanks a million to lorrainemarker and millari, who provided me with exactly the kind of meticulous beta that this fic direly needed. Seriously, you guys rock.
Original version: Flugträume (German)
Summary: They say there is no such thing as a gay wizard. Especially amongst the Aurors. And the purebloods are the ones to say it loudest.
Author's notes: I learned British English in school. That stuck until I started writing fic in English, when my first fandom happened to be an American one. While I was trying very hard to keep the British / American English in this story coherent, I probably didn’t manage. Seeing as how trying to do so almost broke my brain, I’ll be happy if you feel like pointing out any wrongs in comments for educational purposes, but I can’t say I’d appreciate unproductive criticism on this front. Life sucks all without people acting like it’s important whether you use “crazy” or “bonkers.”
lls-mutant and safenthecity, this is for you (as are the two other parts of it, of course)! I meant to translate it for your birthdays, because you’ve both said - a long time ago - that you would like to read it. Of course, it’s entirely possible that you were just being polite, but in that case, this will be revenge because now you’ll have to read it to be nice. :p Anyway, thank you both for being wonderful people. Hope you like it! Merry Christmas!
Chapter 1: The Wizard
Kingsley Shacklebolt learnt that he was a wizard at nine.
It happened at a soccer game on a hot summer day. At nine, Kingsley was taller than most twelve-year-olds, playing keeper. Today, however, he wasn’t very good, and the other team had already made two goals because of him. The boys from the other team had been teasing him, calling him a stupid blackie. He was so frustrated that he wanted to cry. He really wanted his team to win. So when the ball shot towards the upper left corner mercilessly yet again, Kingsley jumped into a perfect parry, flying higher, and higher, while the ball froze in midair so he could pick it like a plum. Gently, he set down on the goal line.
There was deafening silence on the pitch. All assembled parents and players were staring at him. His mother sobbed once, then dragged him off the pitch. As soon as they were home, she called Kingsley’s father, talking to him in upset staccato until he agreed to come home. For two long hours, Kingsley worried about what he could have done wrong. Then, his parents called him to the living room and explained to him that his father was a wizard, and that he, too, would learn how to do charm work at the magic school of Hogwarts within just two years’ time.
For Kingsley, all this was very confusing if also quite cool, no matter he was sad that he wasn’t allowed to play soccer anymore (in Hogwarts, however, he’d learn about Quidditch. The grief would grow old and die). Instead, he soon found himself skimming through charms books and Wizarding encyclopedias, and his father gave him a children’s wand.
“Dad,” he asked his father one day after dinner, “How come you never told me that I’m a wizard?”
His father had sighed, looking older than he usually did. “The Wizarding world isn’t as safe a place as your world, lad,” he’d said, “We’re at war against a man who doesn’t like Muggles like your mother, and children of Muggles like yourself. You wouldn’t be able to defend yourselves there.”
So when Kingsley went to Hogwarts, joining the huge, exciting magic world, he sat down in the first row in class with boyish gravity to learn how to defend himself. It made a lot of sense to do so in his opinion; ever since he’d gotten his letter, his mother had been afraid for him. He was a Hufflepuff now, winning points for his house by being a dedicated pupil in class and a fair Beater on the pitch. And the war ended when he started his sixth year, anyway.
However, Kingsley had already reached two conclusions at this point: First of all, he wanted to be an Auror, like his father working at the Law Enforcement Squad, except better. Second of all, he had all kinds of reasons to watch out in the Wizarding world, because he wasn’t just a Half-blood. He was also gay.
It was a summer morning in 1993 when Kingsley came to work and was greeted by chaos. Memos were thrashing about nervously, Aurors were arguing in the hallways, while the door to Scrimgeour’s office stayed firmly shut. When Kingsley asked about the cause of all this, somebody just handed him the newspaper. It had made the headlines while he was asleep: Sirius Black had escaped from Azkaban.
Later, Kingsley would remember how he’d looked down at the photograph for a moment, at the escapee’s vampire face, as motionless as gaunt. It would sometimes lift its eyes to stare at its audience without blinking. Kingsley blinked, though, remembering, against his will, Quidditch in Hogwarts. Black had long finished school when Kingsley made the team, but he remembered the pliant Gryffindor Beater from his first year. He’d stared into the sky in wonder while that exuberant boy made Quidditch look like just another kind of magic. The murderer on the photograph might as well have been a different man.
But then Scrimgeour’s door opened, and the Commander of the Aurors limped out to drag Kingsley into his office. Amelia Bones was waiting there, eyeing Kingsley from top to bottom, when she wouldn’t ever have noticed him before even if he’d done a striptease in the middle of the DMLE.
“Kingsley Shacklebolt,” Scrimgeour had said as if exhibiting a valued piece of furniture. “Our best investigator since Moody retired. You give him a strand of hair, and he’ll tell you not just where it’s from, but also what the owner ate last. He’s an excellent duelist. His bat-bogey hex blows even you off your feet, ma’am. And he is perfectly neutral. Half-blood. No connections to the pureblood families whatsoever.”
Amelia Bones was still eyeing him suspiciously through her monocle. “When did you start your training, young man?”
“In 1983, ma’am,” Kingsley said. “I was part of post-war recruitment.” There hadn’t been that many Aurors left after the war, rows upon rows of empty desks waiting for new dragon fodder in the main office. Those who hadn’t died had quit as soon as they could do so in good conscience, running from bad memories and ghosts of lost comrades as far as they could. People had just wanted to forget.
“Excellent,” Miss Bones said, giving Scrimgeour a sharp nod.
It was the first and only time in Kingsley’s life that his Half-blood status had advanced his career.
A month later, Kingsley had found every photograph ever taken of Black, every letter he’d written that people hadn’t burned in fury, every status report Black had ever signed as an Auror. The wall of his cubicle was hung with shots of the best man dance at the Potter’s wedding; the supreme smirk of a victorious seventh year brandishing the Quidditch cup; the blank features of the proper pureblood on the family portrait; press photographs of the young Auror who’d been famous by virtue of not dying.
The veterans amongst the DMLE had started avoiding Kingsley’s desk.
Kingsley knew everything there was to know about this man but didn’t have the slightest clue where he was hiding. He went to speak to old friends of Black’s who slammed the door in his face, claiming they hadn’t known Black that well after all. He went to Azkaban to talk to the Lestranges, but they just laughed at him - if Black had ever even been close to any Death Eaters at all, they were either dead or bonkers now. His colleagues were quick to point out that Black had been assigned to Frank Longbottom's team, and Lydia Corday’s before that - the lost and the dead. He might have been a failure of the Aurors, but he wasn’t mine.
I’ve been dreaming of you last night, Black had written in a letter addressed to Remus Lupin at fifteen on the summer vacation. It provided a sharp contrast to his usual short, edgy letters, written in an impatient boy’s hand. You were the wolf and it was a full moon but your fur was red and gold, and you were calm, and allowed me to pet you. James looked it up in his textbook. He says it means we’ll win the Quidditch cup next year but I think it means you can stop worrying when you’re with us in Hogwarts. But I still worry when you aren’t in Hogwarts, I remember your shag. How are you holding up?
On Halloween of all days, Black broke into Hogwarts unseen, ravaging the portrait of the Fat Lady, but Kingsley knew as little about how he had managed to do so as he could find out how Black had managed to escape from Azkaban in the first place. He suspected that Lupin was holding back vital information, but if the teacher was lying, he was lying like a Slytherin.
Later that year, Black invaded the Gryffindor dormitory to threaten one of Harry Potter’s friends with a knife. Again Kingsley couldn’t figure out how he had done so, no matter why he had. Scrimgeour had to resort to vicious threats to protect Kingsley from the wrath of the Wizengamot; people were scared. Kingsley took it in his stride when Cadet Tonks was assigned to him to do his research, a clear message that he wasn’t doing well enough. He refused to comment on Albus Dumbledore’s words of concern and preferred to wonder why Black still hadn’t bothered stealing a wand. Either he was more insane than Kingsley believed, or he was a lot more powerful. Naturally, it was a common assumption that this man was as mad as a hatter, but Kingsley wasn’t so sure. You needed a sharp mind to escape from Azkaban. It was his job to assume the worst. Black had already proven to be dizzyingly sharp, and a sane Death Eater posed much more of a danger than a cackling one.
Left home for good, staying at James’, a messy note had informed Peter Pettigrew in 1976, a stain of what looked like tomato sauce splashed over it. Mr. Potter is helping me find a place to live. Then, doubly underlined: I hope I’ll live just long enough to bury them.
During the Lupin affair at the end of the year, Kingsley managed to piss off Severus Snape with his questions, to be criticized by the Wizengamot even more, and to bond over shared misery with newly graduated Auror Tonks. He didn’t have a personal life left, which was why his boyfriend left him - a Muggle who hadn’t liked being kept secret in the first place. While the rest of Headquarters traveled the country in preparation of first the world cup, then the Triwizard Tournament, Kingsley spoke to his witnesses again, thinking hard about unsolved riddles. He reached a conclusion that shook him to his core.
He reached this conclusion because Albus Dumbledore had stopped addressing the Black issue in the Wizengamot altogether; Remus Lupin didn’t just talk to him these days but also was convinced, now that he’d thought about it for a year, that Black had always wanted to holiday in Chile. It was a horrible conclusion, a conclusion too unbelievable to even be considered. But Kingsley didn’t give up on a hypothesis just because he didn’t like it. Also, thinking of Mike moving out from the apartment they’d shared, it wasn’t exactly the first shocking conclusion in his life.
Kingsley tried talking to Tonks about it, but Tonks had just recently drawn her own conclusions about the nature of their relationship with each other. Since Kingsley had had to decline the offer without much of an explanation, Tonks was only talking to him when she absolutely had to.
So he went to see Scrimgeour, who threw his hands up in horror. He’d have to send Kingsley to St. Mungo for a check-up, he said, and find a replacement, if the case was getting to him like that.
But then that tragedy at the Tournament killed poor Cedric Diggory, and Kingsley finally accepted that much was going on in the Wizarding world that he hadn’t any knowledge of at all.
Two days after the end of term, he went to Hogwarts to see Albus Dumbledore.
“Deny it all you want,” Kingsley said. “I know Black has to be innocent, and you know it as well. The only difference is that you know why.”
Albus Dumbledore gave him a long, serious look.
“Mr. Shacklebolt,” he said evenly, folding his hands, “Have you ever heard of an organization called the Order of the Phoenix?”
Sirius Black made the impression of a panther behind cage bars, crouched to attack, muscles flexing under shining fur and watching its spectators with dangerous vigilant eyes. Everything about him looked darker than it should be, drawing eyes as if there was something even more powerful to him than magic. Though all he did was get up from behind the kitchen table of 12 Grimmauld Place and shake Kingsley’s hand.
His palm felt hard and calloused, and Kingsley thought of twelve years of Azkaban, of two years of flight. He knew everything there was to know about this man except all the important things.
“I’m in charge of the investigation against you,” he said. “It’s an honor.”
“I’m sure it is,” Black said with a sardonic smirk. “It’s not exactly a pleasure to learn that you’ve been wasting two years of your time. Working for a corrupt government, no less. I hope it didn’t destroy all your illusions just yet.”
Sirius Black was a strange mix of the charming young bloke on the photographs, except not charming, and the motionless murderer on the search warrants, except not motionless. It was a mix that couldn’t be more different from the reckless enemy, the martyr hero he’d become in Kingsley’s head.
It was downright disappointing.
Chapter 2: The Pureblood
“What in hell’s name were you thinking, Tonks?”
Kingsley consisted of two hundred pounds of well-trained muscle and tended to tower even over Hippogriffs. His low, sonorous voice, used to screaming orders at cadets, didn’t make him an altogether unobtrusive person, either. So like most massive men, Kingsley had learned to move cautiously without breaking anything and to generally not stick out.
However, that didn’t apply when duty was involved. Kingsley had no sense of humor about duty, and he happened to be Nymphadora’s boss. When he threw the Black file onto her kitchen table, she visibly flinched. Though Kingsley didn’t care if she regretted having let him into her apartment. The grace period was over for Tonks.
“I’m sent on field duty once. I leave you alone with a case for only three days.” Every word was a whiplash. “I take two days to read up on your work because I trust you...” His voice became dangerously low. “Just to end up with a file as obviously fake as Hufflepuff’s beard. Give me one reason, Tonks, just one for me to not go to Scrimgeour and have you fired for good.”
Kingsley was in no mood to tolerate incompetence in the first place; this week had been pure misery. Scrimgeour had put him on Dawlish’s team, a team hunting vampires no less - and Kingsley hated vampires. That brat of a Nosferatu had almost bitten him in the shin, and when he’d gone to his favorite Muggle bar to cool off, he’d run into Mike. Now, topping everything that had happened before, he’d learned that Tonks had spiked his precious Black file with lies, lies obvious enough for even the Office for Muggle Artifacts to spot them from a mile away. The offense was two-fold: One, the betrayal. And two, the incompetence with which it had been executed. He’d thought they’d taught her better than that.
A strand of her pink hair transforming into shy dishwater brown, Tonks peered up at him. “You’d cover an Order’s member’s back?” she offered.
“Wrong,” Kingsley thundered. “I make sure that there are only competent people in the Order!”
“You like me too much to have me fired?”
Kingsley just stared her down darkly.
Tonks sighed, dropping the pretense. “You’ll let me serve you tea, and listen and realize that it’s an excellent idea?”
Kingsley rolled his eyes.
“Please?” she added.
The Auror gave in. Sigh heavy with frustration, he sat down on one of the two chairs in Tonks’ tiny kitchen. He waited impatiently while she stood up, bumping against a corner of the table, starting a search for something to transform into cups.
On general principle, it was a nice evening: cozy summer sun pouring through the pitched roof window, and the distant shouts of children, playing down on Diagon Alley, providing amicable background noises. In another world, he could be out to see a movie with Mike just now, Kingsley thought with longing. He could be in a pub, getting reacquainted with some of his Muggle friends, if he wouldn’t have to fear running into Mike. Instead, he was here, awaiting blackmail by tea.
When he cleared his voice as a warning that his patience was running low, Tonks turned to face him.
“I’m working on a plan to improve on humankind overall,” she said and threw him a beaming smile. “It’s a great plan, I thought about it for quite a long time. It will heighten the sense of community within the Order so that there’ll be a lot more enthusiasm for the cause, followed by greater efficiency, causing us to win the war. Once it breaks out, I mean,” she added thoughtfully. “Do you think it’ll break out soon?”
Kingsley snorted. Instead of answering, he just raised the Black file and waved it meaningfully. Even closed, it looked just as important and official as it was. Pitch black, magically sealed with multiple passwords, engraved with the Ministry’s crest and secured with a variety of Aurors’ charms. Black’s file was incredibly confidential. As a first year Auror, Tonks was blessed to be permitted to open it.
“Right,” Tonks said, returning her eyes to her tea preparations. “Do you remember how you talked to Professor Dumbledore about Sirius? When he said we had no time to take care of his legal situation now? See, I think he’s wrong. He could be, couldn’t he? He’s getting quite old. Surely he can’t have assumed we’ll have more time once the war breaks out, that would make no sense whatsoever. So I’ve been talking to Dung and he had some great ideas about how we could fudge Sirius’ case instead of just claiming he’s abroad.”
“Dung,” Kingsley said slowly. He must have misheard.
“Yes,” Tonks said. She waved her wand with too much enthusiasm, making the teapot jump with a clattering start. The water started boiling rapidly. “Dung knows a lot about how to fake evidence, did you know? We thought it wouldn’t hurt to start paving the way. No harm in preparing the acquittal, right?”
“Acquittal,” Kingsley said weakly. Ignoring the clanking of the cups for a moment, he reached for the file again to thumb through it. It had been so pretty before. All filed away methodically. Dozens of meticulous notes. Colored markers. All those things were still there but now, they were disfigured by the ugly elements. Slight changes of wording to encourage a reader to suspect that not all was what it seemed. Conclusions in the profile that had never been brought up before.
Tonks had found - or possibly invented - a respectable old witch who claimed that Sirius Black had been leading a calm, peaceful life as a ticket clerk on a Muggle racetrack for years, clearly not hating Muggles at all since he petted them lovingly on a regular basis. She cited the interrogation of a Muggle who’d survived Pettigrew’s curse - an interrogation that had never taken place - having him claim the supposedly dead Pettigrew had flown away afterwards on a Hippogriff. Or possibly on a winged pig, Kingsley wasn’t clear on that part. At almost every crime scene ever investigated on occasion of this case, she’d fudged findings of rat hair: Godric’s Hollow, the hallways of Hogwarts, Potter’s home in Surrey - the only place missing was Black’s cell in Azkaban. And if Kingsley were honest, Tonks hadn’t even been that incompetent about it. Those colleagues who knew as little about Muggles as herself would certainly be fooled for a while. However, the task was too much for a first year Auror to take on - it was madness for almost every Auror, frankly. She should have known better.
His cup came sailing through the air, hitting the tabletop hard. Kingsley repaired the crack on it with an absent-minded wave of his wand.
“Kingsley,” Tonks was saying. Kingsley looked up to see that she’d sat down on the other chair across the table, looking at him with intense, evocative brown eyes - her true eye color. “We can do something for Sirius. He needs people like us to do something for him. We became Aurors to protect men like him. He needs us and if we don’t do anything for him, he’ll still be stuck in Grimmauld Place ten years from now.”
Kingsley grimaced. In his opinion, Sirius Black could go to hell, but maybe he’d done that already and come back because he hadn’t been wanted there, either. Although Kingsley had only been in the Order for two months, he already knew that Black was trouble. First, he’d disagreed with everything and everybody, questioning all of Dumbledore’s plans. Most recently, he’d just been looming in the shadows, giving everybody dark looks and spreading a mood of impending doom. He was bad for the atmosphere in the house. He was terrible for morale. He carried a grudge against Snape and against Professor Dumbledore, apparently, as well. He upset Molly on a regular basis; he demanded a vote on everything although he didn’t ever do anything. He gave Kingsley a hard time by creating more work for him at the Ministry by sheer existence, and Kingsley was never sure if Black wouldn’t just lose patience one day, going on a stroll through London and getting Kingsley fired by not being in Chile.
Black was a menace, he was utterly useless. He caused more work than Grimmauld Place was worth. He endangered their mission, most likely risking Harry Potter’s safety in the process, influencing the sprog in Merlin knew which way. Before they’d settled on guarding the prophecy in the Ministry without the DMLE’s knowledge, he had proposed, in all seriousness, that they themselves could break into the Ministry and steal the prophecy with Potter’s assistance before You-Know-Who could do it himself. “You don’t win the match by guarding the goals,” he’d said, like war was just a game.
“I concur that it might have been a bad idea to start with the file, but I have other ideas, too,” Tonks said, counting them off. “Whenever there’s new evidence, we could make it look like Sirius can’t possibly have been involved. We can find excuses to question Order’s members, the ones with a good reputation, and they can make something up to exonerate him. We could even think about faking proof of his innocence since we’re at it anyway.”
Kingsley shook his head slowly, hoping to make the many long lines fall into the right pigeon holes. He’d only been away from London for few days but apparently, that had been quite enough for Tonks to lose her mind.
“Tonks,” he said helplessly. “Why the fatalism? Why the sudden... madness?”
All of a sudden, Tonks looked lost. “Well, because of Sturgis,” she said in a small voice. “And it isn’t madness.”
“Sturgis? Sturgis Podmore? What about him?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
This time, there was nothing fake about the lost look in Tonks’ eyes. “He was captured on guard duty, Kingsley,” she said. “They’ve convicted him to six months of Azkaban already, and nobody is doing anything about it. Although I’m sure they’d let him go sooner if Professor Dumbledore vouched for him.”
Kingsley had frozen. He willed himself to put the tea cup down before he could break it with his fingers. Sturgis Podmore. In Azkaban. Already. Kingsley had been to Azkaban, had interrogated prisoners there. The mists that covered the island alone were enough to make him shudder. He didn’t wish Azkaban on anybody.
“And I thought, what if that had been us.” Tonks swallowed, hard. “What if we’ll end up in Azkaban like Sturgis and Sirius. They’d just let us rot there as well. I thought, aren’t we worth anything to them? Are we betraying Scrimgeour and the Ministry just to be Dumbledore’s dragon fodder?” She was pressing her palms on the table flat, so hard her fingers turned white. “I’ll be damned if I don’t do anything for him although I could,” she said emphatically. “I’ll be damned.”
And Kingsley, who knew Tonks well, realized something: She wouldn’t let this go, no matter if he gave her an order or discussed it with her, or pleaded with her. She’d just go on doing it behind his back, manipulating the case and working not only against the Ministry, but also against him. Endangering herself, him, Black, maybe the whole Order - she might be good but she was still a beginner and she wasn’t that good. And she knew that herself, but that wouldn’t stop her either. She couldn’t let that stop herself.
If Kingsley went to Scrimgeour with it, and Scrimgeour got the truth out of her, they were all doomed as well. Truly, if he didn’t want to end up in Azkaban himself, he only had one choice.
He had to start working on Black’s exoneration himself.
Once upon a time, Kingsley’s mother had lovingly called her son a full-blown Half-blood. She had always loved the fact that Kingsley had never let go of his Muggle roots, never caring that the reason for him not to do so was his sexual identity. It had created a connection between them. While Abe Shacklebolt attended his Wizarding poker nights at the Hog’s Head (forever wondering why his son still wasn’t settling down and getting married to a nice witch), they’d go see the pictures together or visit a fair.
Kingsley needed the Muggle world. It was the place where you weren’t stared at as if you had horns and two heads if he casually mentioned that, by the way, he felt a lot more attracted to men and yes, that really existed, even amongst Aurors. Muggles even had pubs and a subculture where you’d meet men as feminine as they’d decided they wanted to be. In the Wizarding world, they didn’t even know the concept - or if they did, it was something that they vaguely pigeonholed as something to do with dirty restrooms behind Quidditch stadiums. Kingsley hadn’t even tried to explain to Tonks why he wasn’t interested in her like that - Tonks thought that a tolerant wizard petted Muggles.
Though being the kind of wizard who hid his robes in the closet after work to go browse the pubs in Muggle London, Kingsley also had made little contact with the die-hard pureblood Wizards who made up the core of Wizarding England - the old families. Thinking in terms of just magic had never become second nature to him. He’d never even had a single look at Gilderoy Lockhart’s omnipresent books on household magic, no matter that the writer was as hot as a Veela. Kingsley was aware of that at least - he was a Half-blood, not blind.
So when Bill Weasley asked him to uncurse an ancient chest at an Order’s meeting, he stayed behind at the kitchen table, staring at the object full of puzzlement. He was one of the people responsible if Weasley gave a useful new item to the Order, but he hadn’t broken a single curse in his life that hadn’t been spoken by a Dark wizard.
As an experiment, he pointed his wand at it and tried a simple circumvention charm. It didn’t even cause the chest to yawn.
“No need to even try Complecto on a lock of that age,” a voice remarked. Black was lounging in the frame of the door, an apple in hand, taking a bite.
Kingsley suppressed an eyeroll. He immensely disliked the fact that Black always lurked everywhere, no matter where you happened to be in 12 Grimmauld Place. It made him nervous. Every shadow seemed to have a life of its own in this house. However, his mother had also taught him manners while taking him to see the pictures. Kingsley didn’t walk around picking fights with people who’d just offered advice - even if they were being condescending gits about it. Bracing himself, he pushed the chest across the table towards Black and delivered an invite by way of a nod. “Feel free to do your worst.”
For a second, it looked like Black wanted to excuse the interruption and leave. Though then he just pulled himself up and moved closer. While speaking, he reached inside his robes and retrieved a wand. “Complecto was created in the first war, it doesn’t respond to anything older than Grindelwald’s era,” he said. “You have to use Flitwick’s revelation charms from sixth year, then look up each of the arcane patterns on a reference table. Here.” He tapped on the chest with the tip of his wand. “Deprecatio.” Thin red lines began to appear around the lock. “And Translucero Totalus.”
A second layer of blue nets appeared with a flash, just to melt away almost immediately. Black shrugged. “In theory, anyway. I can’t do it well with Remus’ old wand.”
Against his will, Kingsley gave him an appreciative nod. “Well, looks like I’ll have to go to the library, anyway. Finite Incantatem,” he ordered the chest, and the glistering red charm resolved. “I’m surprised you know about Cursebreaking?” he tried not to overemphasize on the you. Black had been an Auror alright, but one busy with war. At the time he’d signed on, cadet training had been a stub.
“Just have a look around.” Black gestured to include all of the house as if it was obvious. “If you’re here and you’re twelve, you break curses every day.” He gave Kingsley a sardonic smile. “If you survive the Blacks, you either end up a Death Eater or an Auror. Your department got that almost right.”
For a moment, Kingsley hesitated. He had a lot of work to do these days - acting like he was working on the Black file but fudging it at the same time, guard duty in the Ministry and the occasional task handed on to him by Bill Weasley. Sharing the workload wouldn’t hurt. And anyway, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to get a closer look at the man he was helping involuntarily. Black was just sitting around being useless anyway. If nothing else, it would provide him with new intel for the cause.
“Would you have time for a lesson tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.” Just for a second, Black’s features relaxed, startlingly so. He didn’t look like a criminal at all, but just like some companionable man in desperate need of something to do. “Bring Fiddle’s Index of Forgotten Curses. My schedule is inexplicably empty tomorrow.”
Three weeks passed.
A single evening hadn’t been enough to crack the complicated safety charms of the chest. So they’d met again. Since Weasley had already been standing at the ready with a triple cursed amulet, it thus became a regular event. The Cursebreaker brought in ever new items that might provide them with a surprise weapon in future battles, and the two of them spent Kingsley’s free evenings figuring out if that was true. Kingsley had a good understanding of the complex charm work they were doing, but Black brought to the table the necessary knowledge about the Dark Arts to pick up on the right cues. Soon, Kingsley understood that what he had thought to be attitude truly was the self-confidence of an experienced wizard who had used to be a soldier.
It still annoyed him sometimes. He’d chased after this man for two years. Black had escaped him with ease every time. He was powerful and he was competent, but he’d managed to escape from Azkaban due to a dizzying ability to calculate risks with the precision of a tightrope dancer - an ability that Kingsley, who also was powerful and competent, had just never had to develop. Every day after work, he’d sit in his apartment with the Black file in front of him, meticulously mixing truths with subtle little lies. Sometimes, he’d try and imagine what would have become of Black if he’d gotten his trial, if Dumbledore had said, “They told me he was secret keeper” instead of, “He was secret keeper.” Black wouldn’t be a shadow at Grimmauld Place. He’d be Kingsley’s superior, and possibly Scrimgeour’s - he’d held more fame in the first war than Scrimgeour - and that rubbed Kingsley in ways both startling and uncomfortable.
The many issues he had with Black didn’t go away (he was a mutinous cynic and a drunk) but they started coloring with mutual respect. Kingsley still thought that Black’s wild ideas for Order’s strategies were madness, but he soon realized that what he had thought to be a childish grudge held against some older Order’s members was just a badly concealed sense of betrayal. Black was stuck at a place he hated with a passion out of loyalty, forced to trust in the support of an Order that didn’t know how to handle him. For a man like him who preferred action over talk, Grimmauld Place basically was just another prison.
At one point when visiting his father, Kingsley talked the old man into giving him the sparkler amongst his captured wands. It was made of ebony with dragon heart string, almost like Black’s old one except longer. From that time on, the subtle charms came easier to Black, and the look in his eye when he remembered what it was like when magic came to you was worth it for Kingsley. A man like Black was just incomplete without a suitable wand.
So Kingsley shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next. Still, it hit him out of nowhere.
It was long after midnight when Kingsley entered Number Twelve after a late shift on guard duty. He was in hopes of finding somebody who’d trade shifts with him on short notice. While he was aware that Lupin probably wouldn’t even be home, it was likely that Black had stayed up late, ready to arrange for the change the next day.
The old mansion was covered in darkness and silence. The ground floor was empty except for the portrait of Phineas Nigellus, who took the time for a dig at Kingsley’s heritage before pointing him towards the drawing room.
The moment he touched the heavy door to push it open further, Kingsley heard quiet noises and muttering emanating from the room. Nobody answered his knock, so he entered. The first thing he took note of in the dim candlelight was an open bottle of Firewhiskey on a drawer. The second was Black, asleep on the sofa. The wizard seemed to have passed out drunk, hair unkept and robes half buttoned, and he was having a nightmare. It was easy to gauge what he was dreaming of - he was jerking defensively, and when Kingsley stepped closer, he could hear him muttering, “Don’t,” and then, “He’s in Hogwarts.” Even Kingsley found that creepy.
Without fuss, Kingsley bent over the wizard to call his name and grab his shoulder, shaking him hard.
He didn’t even catch a glimpse of the hand shooting up and grabbing his collar. One moment, he had been trying to wake Black, the next his back was making contact with the rug, hard. A slender shape was holding him down with an iron grip on his throat and a knee in his crotch. Black’s gray eyes were gleaming in the dark, his wand poised for attack, Moody style. He was breathing hard.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” Kingsley managed, trying to get up on instinct, but that was Black’s full weight holding him down. While unexpectedly strong, the man was a lightweight, skinny from Azkaban. Kingsley could have shaken him off without trouble. But he didn’t want to hurt him, and awareness was creeping up on Black’s face.
He shook his head very slowly. “Shacklebolt?” His voice was mostly a croak. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Trading shifts,” Kingsley said dryly. “Now would you kindly let me get up?”
Black snorted a laugh. Still, beyond the loosening grip of his hand on Kingsley’s throat, he didn’t make any move towards release. In the flickering candlelight, he looked gaunt, dark circles under his eyes. The smell of alcohol was hitting Kingsley’s face with each exhaled breath, and suddenly, he just felt pity for the wizard. Here and now, in the privacy of his own premises, Black was nothing but a wreck.
Though that didn’t change anything about the fact that his body felt warm and wiry through the thin robes - and again, nicely strong -, and it was everywhere on Kingsley’s, thigh against crotch. It was true, Black was a fairly attractive bloke under the scars of Azkaban. Kingsley didn’t usually let himself notice that. The touch felt good; he’d missed this during the long months of hard work, and his body was reacting to the offer. Oh in Merlin’s name, not now, he thought with a spike of panic, In the names of all gods, not here.
He was trying to get up again, with a more determined jerk this time around, but it was too late. Black intercepted the motion, forcing him back down, his thigh rubbing against Kingsley’s cock with purpose. Obviously, he’d noticed. “Don’t tell me you’re turned on by that, Shacklebolt.” He smirked. “What are you, a poof?” Smirk turning to grimace, he pushed Kingsley away and rose to his feet.
A surge of hot anger flared up within Kingsley. It wasn’t the insult - but it was the condescension. “Yes, that’s exactly what I am,” he said coolly. “And people less stuck-up than you call it gay. Why, scared that I’ll jump you?”
For a notable moment, Black didn’t answer, a still shadow amongst the shadows of Grimmauld Place, the light of the candles not reaching his face. But then he relaxed, shaking the tension out of his shoulders as if it was warm-up for sport, and Kingsley believed he saw him smirk through the darkness.
“No.” One fluid motion, and the wizard was right above Kingsley, staring a challenge at him. “It gets you off, that’s fair enough. Suck me.”
And, Merlin knew Kingsley didn’t have the slightest idea why he did it. But he went up onto his knees in front of Black and did him the favor.
Once he’d be done panicking later, Kingsley would admit to himself how hot it had been.
He was a friend of oral sex, no matter from what point of view. There was an immediate quality to it, intensely intimate, that couldn’t be reproduced in any other way. The world sharpened around him, tightening until it consisted of nothing but the feel of Black’s hand gripping his shoulder hard, the salty taste on his tongue, the cock in his mouth feeling heavier and larger and more there than it could possibly be. When Kingsley looked up, Black’s other hand was holding on to a drawer so hard he was trembling - so he wouldn’t fall - eyes closed, face tight, small jerks of his hips beyond his control. All about it was a turn-on - Kingsley on his knees in this house, the cock of one of the purest purebloods Wizarding England had left in his mouth. He’d spent the almost thirty years he’d lived separating these two parts of his world with a rigor that bordered on compulsion.
Nobody in the Wizarding world had ever known his secret, but now he was kneeling on the worn rug of 12 Grimmauld Place, and Sirius Black was pushing into his mouth, whimpering helplessly. It was an insane relief. It was an insane... insanity. And, hell, Black. Two years of flight and twelve years of Azkaban, he thought irrationally, and the thought shouldn’t arouse him at all, but - oh sod it. Fourteen years without sex - Kingsley would probably have died just from that.
But it was over quite as fast as it had started. Sirius’ hips jerked hard enough for him to loosen his grip on Kingsley’s shoulder; he made a strangled, desperate sound, and he came. Kingsley swallowed without thought, taking his time to let go, feeling as self-satisfied as a Grindylow after a catch. It had to have been the emotion in the room that had made the candles flicker so hard before, because now the light was more steady, illuminating Black’s face. Again, Kingsley was amazed how fast Black’s expression could change, in just a moment’s time, transforming him from England’s most dangerous criminal into a man who’d been a trusted comrade in arms and a best man.
But then, Black blinked, as if suddenly remembering where he was. The dark eyes focusing on Kingsley were unforgiving, vigilant, and extremely sober.
“The hell, Shacklebolt,” he said. “Get off me, fairy.”
Chapter 3: Ways To Keep It Interesting
Kingsley did not trade his shift that night. Even when Arthur approached him the next day to inquire if he was still looking to do so, he did not. Within twenty-four hours, he went to stand guard for the Order and worked a double in Headquarters, then went on guard duty again. When arriving at home afterwards, even the best wake-up charms wouldn’t have allowed him to stay on his feet any longer. He crashed to sleep through a day.
But even after the exhaustion and stress had worn off, the events at 12 Grimmauld Place hadn’t magically transformed into just a bad dream. His worst nightmare had become true in passing; instead of filling him with panic, he just felt bad about himself. Considering his usual bad luck, Black wouldn’t just have remembered everything exactly after sleeping off the Firewhiskey, but still meant every word of it.
Amongst Muggles, Kingsley had the luxury of laughing about homophobia. In the Wizarding world, it reminded him too much that he couldn’t be both - gay and magical - without creating a situation just as horrid as the one Remus Lupin was in, if he wasn’t terribly cautious. It wasn’t possible to have both.
However, when the Orders’ next meeting came along, none of his fears came to pass. When he stepped into the kitchen, Black was immersed in a discussion with Moody, not even pausing to look at Kingsley. He wouldn’t meet Kingsley’s gaze even once at the meeting, including the times he absolutely had to address him.
And so days passed and became weeks. There were more work and more stress. Kingsley had no time at all to contemplate what had happened - except he still did it every time he walked into Black. Kingsley would be insane to approach him about Weasley’s magic objects, and Black didn’t appear to plan on doing so himself. Bill had caught on to the wizard’s knowledge of magic devices, anyway, usually approaching him about them directly these days. It was the best solution for everybody, considering Black’s schedule was always empty to a point where he didn’t even need one. They coexisted without any interaction at all.
In late November, however, Tonks started getting impatient, appearing in Kingsley’s fireplace with curious eyes to inquire about the Black file. The subtle modifications of evidence that Kingsley had in mind were asking for more patience than she had in the first place. After the night he’d made such a terrible fool of himself, he’d thrown the file into a bottom drawer and just never looked at it again. Now, he was forced to continue. He just wasn’t ready to explain to Tonks why he hadn’t. Frustrated to his bones, he continued his work and started unobtrusively working Dawlish until the Auror signed a slip for him that confirmed Priori Incantado truly hadn’t been used on Black’s wand in 1981 before it was destroyed. It was just work, Kingsley told himself. It wasn’t personal. He did it because he had to. To accommodate Tonks. It didn’t matter at all whether his objective was called Black or Weasley or Great Helga Hufflepuff.
Though sometimes, he still paused to stare at the photographs surrounding him in his cubicle at work, dozens of incarnations of Black waving at him and waltzing with the bride, holding the Quidditch cup. All homophobes are closet gays, anyway, he’d think nastily, compensating for the embarrassment by imagining Black having bad sex with women all his life. But then he thought, two years of flight and twelve years of Azkaban, and his venom wore off, because the assumption that Black had been looking for anything but quick release while drunk was daring, he knew that. So he would force himself to not look at the photographs, and reach for the report on the breaking of Black’s wand again, making himself think of Black The Death Eater instead of a night that wasn’t permitted to happen to an Auror, ever, anyway.
Then, one day when Kingsley was just on his way to the fireplace after yet another Order’s meeting, Black told him to follow him. He said Lupin was looking for Kingsley, wanting to discuss a mission. They went down the hallway without saying a word. However, when they entered a small forlorn study, couch covered in sheets, no Lupin was in sight. Black closed the door behind them.
Kingsley’s expression turned to stone.
“Listen, Shacklebolt,” Black said, burying his hands in his robe pockets. Automatically, Kingsley took a breath. He couldn’t smell any alcohol. The other man had dark circles under his eyes again, but he seemed like he was keeping it together for a change. “I’m not one to make a mistake and to act like it never happened afterwards. I was drunk, and I... at night... I wasn’t myself. But that’s not an excuse. I shouldn’t have said what I said; it was unforgivable. I hope you can accept if I apologize, deeply and sincerely.”
To say this was surprising would have been an understatement. The apology stumped Kingsley. He’d tried to put the event away as something about which he should have known better, because wizards were wizards, and their sex ed had stopped improving in the middle ages. As a pureblood and a Black, this man in front of him thought gay sexuality to be something dirty and dark. Yet he was standing here, asking him for forgiveness in an old-fashioned way that suspiciously sounded like a pureblood formality.
He cleared his voice. “Alright,” he said stiffly. Fairy, he thought. Get off me. Asshole. “I’ll stay away from you, don’t worry. I doubt I’ll ever have to come over again at night. There’s no chance for it to happen again.” He knew that from the Muggles - men who thought themselves to be especially straight, making sure to sit an extra foot apart from you. You paid for other people’s insecurities. He’d take care never to trigger Black’s again; they’d have to work together in the war that was coming.
“What’s your problem, Shacklebolt?” He’d turned to leave, but the words made him pause. “You sound like Remus when we found out he’s a werewolf, and he was twelve. Don’t be so damn defensive. I told you I stand up for mistakes, didn’t I?”
Kingsley froze. “That thing you just called a mistake,” he said deliberately. “is an intrinsical part of my identity.”
Black sighed. “I’m talking of my behavior, you git, not of the thing itself.” Was that the best wording he could come up with? But still. “Now, look at me.” There was an expectation in his voice that the order would be followed, one usually used by superior officers at briefings, and Kingsley had turned around before he could think about it. Black had produced a bottle of Firewhiskey. A flick of his wand transformed an old quill and a paperweight into glasses. “Let’s have a drink.”
“Do you solve all your problems with alcohol?” Kingsley raised his eyebrows.
“No,” Black answered bitterly. “But I try.”
Sitting down next to Black on the sheet-covered couch, Kingsley thought it was an absurd situation. They had to be in the smallest room in the whole house - in the closet, he thought sourly. Sirius Black had indeed taken the spot on the couch furthest away from him, but it looked like he’d made a decision to overrule instinct by brains, holding on to it by force of will. Kingsley wondered if he’d reacted like this as well when he’d been twelve. At twelve, his disdain of werewolves had to have been deep and unquestioned, and it wasn’t an age when you were prone to pause and think.
They drank in awkward silence.
“So,” Black said, clearing his voice. “Gay, is the word?”
He wasn’t looking at Kingsley. Kingsley did him the favor and looked at his glass when nodding, making this a very manly conversation. “There’s homosexual, as well.”
“What, as in homunculus?”
Mostly as in ‘sex’, Kingsley thought. “As in homunculus.”
“Alright,” Black said. “So if you... if men, with each other... they’re homosexual?” Being a typical wizard, he chose the long complex word that sounded more like a charm.
Kingsley sighed to himself. He really wasn’t in a mood to calm down Black freaking out about a blowjob, but there was no way around it now. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Some men just try it out, just to go back to women. Or they just do it as long as there aren’t any women present.” Like in the army, he thought. Or in prison - Black was in prison. Or in Grimmauld Place, where Tonks is his cousin, and the other women are all married. “There isn’t a textbook where you can look up definitions. It depends on what you’d want to do if you had a choice. I could get married and have a simpler life, but I just don’t want to, I prefer men.” And one of the reasons I do is because they don’t want to have conversations like this one, he thought mockingly. “Other people just want both. It has all been done.”
A moment of silence passed. Since Kingsley had a feeling there still was a deep need for testosterone here, he didn’t look around, just hearing the sound of Black pouring himself another glass. He wasn’t used to drinking, feeling a little lightheaded already. When the bottle appeared in his line of sight, he still offered his glass. Maybe this wasn’t bad, he thought. Maybe he hadn’t compromised his life in the Wizarding world after all, but won a kind of friend. An unusual kind of friend. In an unusual and highly awkward way.
In the corner of his eye, he saw Black studying the content of his glass intently.
“Doesn’t it get ... boring ... after a while, with men?” he eventually asked. “Doing the same all the time?”
At first, Kingsley started, until he realized that Black had to think that the incident in the drawing room had been the thing. “Oh,” he drawled diabolically. “There are ways to keep it interesting.”
Silence.
“Anyway, I’m not gay,” Black eventually said with a lot of focus.
“So I noticed,” Kingsley said dryly. If Black caught on to the sarcasm, he opted to ignore it.
Maybe they truly were back to being friends. And if Black would have a need to bring up the topic again, Kingsley imagined that it could even be a rather amusing friendship.
They made their goodbyes that night with a date for the next Cursebreaking session. The next morning, Kingsley was glad to have written it down, because he was hazy on everything to come after the last glass. He went through his shift drinking sober-up potions. When the other Aurors noticed, they rolled their eyes knowingly, joking about long nights and women and other things Kingsley hadn’t ever wanted to picture.
In the Order, the mood was growing tenser with every report to arrive from Hogwarts. At the same time, life quieted down at Aurors’ Headquarters. Many of the Aurors, including Scrimgeour himself, had listened up when Albus Dumbledore told them his version of the Triwizard Tournament and poor Cedric Diggory’s death - if an Auror could listen to a claim that You-Know-Who was back but dismiss it out of hand, they’d chosen the wrong profession. However, nothing had happened at all ever since, and people were relaxing. It was a strain to stand by without warning them. Even Kingsley had no choice but to logically conclude in his file that all known Dark activity had been caused by Black roaming the streets. Maybe some of the few incidents really had happened because former Death Eaters felt inspired by the antics of Voldemort’s supposed right hand man.
In early December, Kingsley and Tonks still managed to make some progress in their work that Kingsley was quite proud of. Old Corey Carson - who’d spent five years in Azkaban after the war, returning with a cackle - had renewed his Dark Mark, brandishing it while running through a street in Brighton and throwing Cruciatus at random Muggles. Of course, he turned out to be so gaga when they caught him that he truly didn’t remember whether it had been his idea or somebody else’s. While the colleagues collectively pointed at Sirius Black, Kingsley managed to organize a ‘sighting’ of Black at the Chilean border. Tonks had to pass thirteen Apparation points to get there, sleeping through a day afterwards to recover.
It didn’t exactly earn him a promotion. Kingsley tried to explain to Scrimgeour, in depth, why they couldn’t do anything as long as Black stayed there. Wizarding Chile would not be amused if a European Auror showed up to chase their tourists. Scrimgeour eventually had to give in grumpily, but remained suspicious. Kingsley hadn’t ever been one to be stopped by procedural problems. When Scrimgeour had finally limped out of his cubicle, Kingsley had been sweating from fear.
So he was happy to take some days off mid December. Naturally, this was exactly when his Auror team caught him on guard duty.
Grimacing from pain, Kingsley stumbled out of the fireplace, crashing against the kitchen table.
“Black!” he barked. “Lupin!”
Mrs. Black started screaming in the hallway as an answer. Kingsley shut his eyes, trying to breathe deeply, holding himself up at the table with one hand while the other felt for the wound on his thigh. Everything was wet with blood - the artery had been nicked, and he couldn’t find the right point to apply pressure. He hadn’t been able to perform a Quick Healing charm, because it would have left traces for colleagues to spot. Kingsley had made a split second decision, taking the risk to black out before he could reach help at Grimmauld Place. It wasn’t complex witchcraft. He just needed somebody who could look at the injury and who wasn’t so... dizzy...
“Merlin’s name, Kingsley!” a rough voice said, an arm wrapping around his waist, holding him up. The tip of a wand made him light enough to hover, and he was levitated away. His vision blurred. When it cleared up, he just caught the last syllable of a wake-up charm.
He was bleeding onto the couch in the drawing room. Mrs. Black’s screeching had stopped. Somewhere below his belt line, Sirius was at work with narrow eyes.
“Hello Kingsley,” he said. “Consider yourself lucky that I used to do this once a month. How’s your vision? How many fingers?” He nodded when he liked the answer. “I used Salutaro, so you better wait before sitting up or you’ll get dizzy. Can you move your leg? I can’t reach it for the bandage.”
Belatedly, Kingsley grew aware that he wasn’t wearing his robes anymore; the leg of his trousers had been cut off at the seam. He started feeling dizzy again when he looked at the injury. Black had closed the cut with a stitching charm - first aid magic, a style that had gone out of fashion at the time they’d started calling Alastor Mad-Eye. But there was still blood drying all over, dark red clots dripping down his thigh when Black helped him angle the leg.
“Good,” the wizard said. “Ferula.” A bandage shot out of his wand and wrapped itself around the injured area. “Accio Pepper-up potion.” Sirius was wearing one of those ugly grey cotton nightgowns that purebloods insisted on sleeping in. He leaned against the leg of the couch while waiting for the healing potion to arrive from where ever it was stored. “What happened?”
“Invisibility cloak stopped working,” Kingsley said, his tongue heavy. He felt as weak as a baby. “The new one Weasley brought in. I had time to speak Moody’s chameleon charm, so they didn’t recognize me. I think they thought I’m you. But I didn’t have much time. Proudfoot fired a stunning curse at me. I could counter that one in time. But Robards knows that nasty chopping curse. I barely escaped.”
“Scindero.” Sirius nodded. “I remember.” The Pepper-up potion had arrived; Sirius caught it with ease. “You gave me quite the scare, showing up in the kitchen like that. First I thought Remus was back - he’s with the wolves again tonight. You should have seen yourself. Blood everywhere. You looked like shit.”
“How flattering.”
But Kingsley was grateful when Sirius put an arm around him, helping him to sit up carefully, without jerking. Magic was great for injuries, but he still had lost a lot of blood. And, hell, he was grateful that he had a couple of free days coming up at the Aurors. This kind of injury might even be enough for Snape to get off his potion brewing ass and substitute for him.
He tried to sit upright on his own doing, but Sirius was muttering something soothing under his breath, shifting his weight so that Kingsley could lean against his shoulder. The potion tasted bitter and sweet at once. He felt it starting to work the moment he’d swallowed, tickling his stomach warmly. Kingsley hated being weak and helpless. Though, there was something to be said about the Order’s comradry, too, he thought lazily. It felt nice to be supported by somebody who cared.
He liked the smell of cotton and magic and leather that clung to Black tonight, no trace of alcohol at all. He smelled a nice kind of clean.
Considering the rasping sound when their cheeks touched, they both needed to shave.
“So are gays allowed to kiss?” Sirius asked.
Kingsley gave him a disbelieving look. Instead of answering, he turned his head until their lips met.
on to part 2