Chapter Text
Sirius Black stared into the cupboard in front of him and thought, ‘Animal, vegetable, mineral, or elixir?’ He just could not guess what the lumpy brown-green thing in the back, now crawling with white maggots, could have been. He had pulled out all the other things in the cupboard and discovered this pungent surprise. He thought that it might have once been a banana, but then again based upon what it looked like now it once could have been a baby lemur and he wouldn’t have known the difference. He shut the cupboard door, walked away, thought, Goddammit, Sirius, you’re an adult now, walked back, opened it up, and started to put his hand into the cupboard to pull out the disgusting mess.
Wait a minute, his brain objected. Aren’t you a wizard or something?
With his hand hovering in front of the… thing, he had a little argument with himself. And since he was alone, alone in the flat that was his alone, and not a soul could hear him, he had it aloud.
‘I can’t just transfigure it. The matter isn’t nice enough to transfigure into anything that isn’t disgusting. And I’m not sure what other spells would work on it. Obliviating it would just mean brown gunk all over the kitchen; using incendio would produce terrible smells and probably burn down the whole block.’ He put his hand on the front part of the shelf and saw the maggots heave. ‘I really don’t want to do this,’ he said, and if he caught himself wishing for a response, he quashed those feelings down hard. This was adulthood. It was 1979 and Sirius Black had been an adult living a basically autonomous adult life for nearly two years now. The problem was, it never seemed to get any easier. He stepped back from the shelf and looked into it with growing disgust. ‘This is your fault,’ he informed himself. He tried to sound stern, but it wasn’t convincing. Maybe he should go down to the shop, buy a newspaper, roll it up, and smack himself with it. ‘Bad dog,’ he added, for good measure. Still, he didn’t want to get any closer to it. He sighed, stepped back, and saw the time in the clock above the sink. He was going to be late for training if he didn’t hurry up. He grabbed his robes off their hook, his keys off the hook beside them, and ran out the door.
Sirius used the public Floo station down the street from his house. His flat wasn’t on the Floo Network, but the public station was nearby and he didn’t mind a walk in the morning. It was located in an access closet in the stairwell of the Chalk Farm underground station. Sirius glanced around the station, ducked into the closet, and queued with the usual three other Ministry employees who used the station to commute. They nodded at each other; two of them were reading the Daily Prophet. Sirius glanced at the headlines; doom and gloom as it had been for as long as he could remember: ‘Attacks on Apparators in Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall: new Death Eater tactics spell terror’ and ‘Should Thatcher be warned?’ were the two that caught his eye. Then it was his turn; he took his bag of Floo powder out of his robe, stepped into the fire, and a few seconds later stepped out of the grate and into the Ministry.
He queued again to go through the security checks, then for one of the lifts. He nodded to the usual familiar faces and headed into the big Auror office. He was in his third year as an Auror-in-training, and he had recently been given a nicer desk, further from the flow of traffic and with a view of the door.
Auror training was a lot like being an adult: it was difficult both in ways that Sirius could have predicted, and in ways that he could never have even imagined before they arose, ugly and hydra-headed, to make his life hell. Much like he’d known about such things as having to pay bills and learn DIY spells and keep a reasonably clean bathtub, he’d known that Auror training would require him to work long hours. He’d known it would be taxing mentally and physically, that he’d come home bruised and go to the Ministry bruised and spend all day in between those two points bruised too. He’d known that he’d have to learn a lot more, and he’d even had an idea that he’d have to learn to give in – just a little bit, not full-on submission, but a few compromises here and there – to an authority greater than himself. He had not, however, imagined the great aching void of loneliness that would come with being an adult, nor had he had any idea of the moral crises that would confront him during Auror training.
Two years into Auror training, they had moved on to the fieldwork stage and Sirius found that it was a lot harder than attending the endless lectures and hours of theory discussion that had marked his early days of training. He was now one of three to have graduated on to field work – two others having dropped out before making it to the end of their second year – and seemed, in some regards, to be on an accelerated track to becoming a full Auror. Mad-Eye Moody, the head of the Auror training programme, had taken note of him, and had shaken his hand when he’d received top honours for his theory exams. But once they moved into the field, and the clear-cut lines of what to do when became blurrier with real-life situations, he’d started to slip. The Aurors he shadowed described him as competent, but never inspired, unlike the rising star of his cohort, a former Ravenclaw who, despite two years of working closely with her, he felt he barely knew. He was okay in the field, but she was great. Lately he’d been trying to watch her to see what the difference was – he didn’t think she had anything on him in spell work, certainly not in transfiguration, and although she was obviously clever with problem solving, he was too.
What he’d seen would have troubled him if he’d had the time or energy to sit back and reflect upon it. Instead, caught up in the headlong rush of trying to actually be good at this Auror business, he found himself desperately jealous of her. The difference was that she didn’t hesitate. Someone would say, ‘Imagine there’s a farmhouse full of Death Eaters,’ and she would run in the door, wand out, spells blazing. Sirius would lay out a cautious plan that involved securing the house, checking for civilians, and then moving inside. He was worried about hurting someone who didn’t deserve to be hurt. Then she would point out that the Death Eaters would already know he was there by the time he’d done all this checking around, and they would have fled already – they could Apparate, after all, something that was seriously troubling the Aurors.
The Death Eaters had developed some sort of spell for dragging Apparating Aurors – or anyone else who might be fleeing from them – out of the air. Sirius, the former Ravenclaw, and the third member of their cohort – a drab-looking man in his thirties who had some truly impressive duelling skills – had been trying to solve the problem and had come up with a few work-arounds – advanced shield charms, wearing shielding amulets, or just shifting the angle of Apparition (making the end result less sure, but they were all master Apparators so no one had wound up splinched yet ). However, these were partial solutions and highly risky ones at that – they couldn’t be used by the average wizard. The Death Eaters still had the advantage, and until they could untangle the actual workings of whatever spell they were using, Apparition remained their domain.
So today, looking through his post, as Sirius thought about practising Apparating – he had gotten to a point where he could shift his angle at the final moment and land somewhere entirely different from his original projection – he thought about the irony that he was the cautious one in the field. He tried to imagine other people calling him cautious, but it didn’t sound right. The problem, he knew, was that he was too concerned about what one of his tutors called the ‘peripherals of the situation’ – in other words, anything or anyone that might fall between him and a Death Eater. Sirius knew that some of the Death Eaters who they brought in would be sent immediately to Azkaban without a trial. They were in a state of war, as the Minister for Magic had been emphasising throughout his party’s gruelling re-election campaign over the past few weeks, and sometimes you had to ‘fight fire with fire and curse with curse’. There were moves afoot to allow Aurors to use the Unforgivables in certain circumstances, and this worried Sirius deeply. They had already learnt the theory behind them, but, unlike the other two trainees, he was reluctant to cast them upon the animal subjects who they kept for spell experimentation. When he looked into their cages, the unreported Animagus inside of him made him want to recoil. Thus he had managed to avoid having to actually cast one of the Unforgivables, and this combined with his hesitancy and moral quibbles meant that he had become a decidedly mediocre trainee Auror.
‘Black.’
Sirius looked up from his post. Natasha, his chief tutor in fieldwork, was standing before him, her travelling cloak arranged about her shoulders. ‘We have somewhere to go,’ she informed him.