Worth a Thousand Words by starscribe
Chapter Notes: This is my first fanfic...hope you enjoy it.
oops, almost forgot--all these characters and the world of Harry Potter are respectfully borrowed from JKR!
Kingsley Shacklebolt sighed and sat back in his chair, wearily rubbing his eyes. A mess of maps, transcripts and sundry documents littered his desk, and the hum of Aurors at work around him pounded painfully in his skull. They were no closer to catching the murderer Sirius Black than they had been on the day he escaped Azkaban. Never in his career as an Auror had Kingsley had so little success completing a job. It was as though the man had vanished from the face of the earth. And every day that went by without result was one more night Kingsley drifted off into troubled dreams, knowing the man he was responsible for catching was at large and a threat to wizards and muggles alike. Bleakly, he stared around his cubicle. From every inch of available space, Sirius Black stared back at him, blinking out of the hundreds of photographs that had been meticulously hunted down and tacked to the walls.
Giving up the maps he had been marking as a bad job, Kingsley stood, pacing his office restlessly. It was only fifteen minutes until he was off and there was no point in staying late again. Since the night two years ago when Black had inexplicably escaped Hogwarts (and Kingsley had been promoted to the head of the search), there were virtually no new leads. With an inward groan, the memory of that night surfaced like a bad aftertaste. Fudge had come raging back to the Ministry, bowler hat askew and in near hysterics over the botched job. The news of the Ministry’s embarrassing failure had been splashed all over the Daily Prophet for days. Though he would never say so, Kingsley could not help but feel that had he been in charge of the operation, things might have turned out differently. In an uncharacteristic moment of bitterness, Kingsley scowled at a clipping of Fudge making a statement to the Prophet. How on earth the Minister could have been foolish enough to leave a criminal like Black in an unguarded room…
But there was no help for that now. No help and no leads. And with unsettling rumors of aroused activity among Voldemort’s supporters seeping through the grapevine, it was of more importance than ever to re-capture Black. As he had found himself doing increasingly over the last weeks, Kingsley turned his attention to the photographs and clippings plastered over his walls. It was a mismatched collection in no particular order, a collage of a life. There were new pictures and old pictures, wanted posters and baby photos. Black as a young child, Black with his family, Black with his friends, at school, on holidays, in news articles…Kingsley stared at each in turn, hoping as always to make some sense of the murderer, to find some clue to the man. He viewed it as a puzzle, something to piece together. Making up his mind suddenly, he circled the cubicle, carefully plucking pictures from various spots on the walls. Quickly shuffling them into order, he sat once more at his desk and summoned his last powers of concentration. Ruefully aware that his superior Rufus Scrimgeour would think he was wasting his time, he nevertheless began to turn the photographs over. Studying each one with care, he searched for inspiration, willing himself to see something new. And, as had happened every time he performed this fruitless exercise, he was again visited with the nagging feeling that he was missing something.
There was Black as a small child, an old, bent photograph that had been found in a raid of one of his relative’s estates, forgotten among family records. The three-year-old Black grinned mischievously up at him, brandishing a stuffed dog and tugging at the fussy dress clothes he was wearing.
There was Black at nine, standing stiffly before a grim-looking hearth in a family portrait. Behind him stood his parents, haughty and forbidding. Next to him on a chair sat his brother, clearly pampered and blissfully untroubled. Narrowing his eyes, Kingsley looked closer. Sirius alone appeared out of place. His hand was laid protectively but uncertainly on little Regulus’s shoulder, his young face closed and stubborn, unable to hide the lost look that crept into his eyes. Kingsley moved on.
Next came a series of pictures taken at Hogwarts. Some were only undistinguishable fragments, clearly taken as jokes; nearly all of them featured the same three schoolmates. James Potter. Peter Pettigrew. Remus Lupin. In every image Sirius Black was unmistakably happy, full of energy, full of laughter. Staring at picture after picture of the playful, affectionate foursome, Kingsley found it hard to believe that one day the handsome, grinning young man would grow up to cause the death of two of his three friends.
Flipping to the next picture, Kingsley came upon one he had often looked at before. This too had been salvaged from other records of the notorious Black family, and it was the last one anyone had been able to find of Black before he left his home. It was an updated family portrait taken when Black was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. Sirius Black did not often appear in this particular picture; his photo-self was forever stalking out of the frame, or else being dragged forcibly back by the image of his father. Today he planted himself in open rebellion in the middle of the picture, and Kingsley was free to study his likeness as he pleased. Here the happy, carefree youth of Hogwarts was gone. Sirius Black stood, erect and glaring, defiance etched in his face. No longer was there any sign of a connection between the Black brothers; Regulus stood loyally next to his mother, his thin face sullen. Scrutinizing the young man that would one day become a murderer, Kingsley thought that beneath the challenge he could see a note of pain hidden in the boy’s carefully guarded eyes.
Sighing, he sifted through the remaining photos, all of which pictured Black during his seventh year or else after Hogwarts, all of which told the story of a confident and caring young man. Setting down a picture of a radiant Black at the Potter’s wedding, Kingsley placed it next to the final photograph in his stack, the one that had been taken upon Black’s arrival at Azkaban.
If he had not known better, Kingsley would have said they were two different people. In the former, Black’s face was brimming with joy and jubilant laughter, his love for the couple next to him as clear as printed words. In the latter, the man facing the camera was completely unrecognizable, his face drained of the characteristic charm and fearless energy Kingsley had come to expect of old pictures. Here Sirius Black stared nakedly into the camera, his gray eyes wide, stunned, empty. His glossy black hair fell in disarray over his face and a nasty bruise discolored one eye. He looked as though he had no idea where he was or what he was doing; the card with his prison number was held slackly in his hands. Kingsley needed to go no further. The next photograph was the current wanted poster, and the Auror knew each detail of that by heart.
The story made little sense, he mused. There was no sense of continuity, no transition from faithful friend to cold-blooded killer. Staring from the laughing young man to the lost soul before him, Kingsley Shacklebolt mulled over all he knew of Sirius Black and wondered for the hundredth time what crucial piece of the story they were all missing. An irrational, persistent voice in his head insisted if he could find this, it would help him find Sirius Black.
“Shacklebolt.”
Kingsley looked up, the photos slipping from his hands. Mad-Eye Moody was standing in the doorway of his cubicle, his bright blue magical eye whizzing around in his head, the other trained on Kingsley. Kingsley frowned faintly, wondering what the ex-Auror was doing in the Ministry tonight. He stood.
“Yes?”
“I have some theories on the Black case that I want to talk over with you. Free tonight?”
His alerted instincts relaxing, Kingsley repressed the urge to sigh. He had a great deal of respect for the legendary Alastor Moody, but a throbbing headache was building behind his eyes, and listening to the paranoid ex-Auror’s far-fetched theories was not going to help. He could almost hear his bed at home calling him.
“Could it wait until morning? I have rather a lot on my plate at the moment.” He gestured to the maps and transcripts littering his desk, hoping Moody would not be offended.
Moody set his jaw, his magical eye apparently scrutinizing the occupant of the neighboring cubicle through the wall. “‘Fraid not. It’s a bit urgent.” Something crept into his scarred face, and in his exhausted state Kingsley would almost have said it was ironic amusement. If he had not known Moody. But the old Auror was already talking again, and his next words blotted the notion from Kingsley’s mind.
“I think we might have a sighting on our hands.”