Challenge Ficlet: Crevasse (KS/SB) G (for the Valentine challenge)
Insanely rare pair. Brought about by a comment on my Kingsley poll thread, and as a present for rosie_red73 who begged me to write it. If you know of any more, both rosie_red73 and I would be grateful.
Crevasse
KS/SB - G
I'm not JKR as she'd die at the thought of this.
eumenides1 beta-ed, and also helped untangle my messy tenses.
...and the days pass and it gets no better, he knows he should tell someone. Tell someone I can't do this, can't keep this going. Arthur. Dawlish. But he doesn't, and he knows why he doesn't but he keeps it locked away, like the new photos he keeps hidden, camouflaged as menus, deep in a drawer, layers of papers, layers of lies, tissue paper yearning tucked away from the light. The walls mock him. The walls can keep his secrets.
Sirius looks at the sky, his mouth is open and his scarf whips behind him like a flag of truce.
Work: the one thing that is real in his life - the one thing that he clings to, the reality of an existence lived between smoke and reflection. The things he knew. The things he taught. All that he believes has become a shifting strata of deceit and self-deception. He hides what he did for the Order from his colleagues, and he hides what he feels from everyone.
Sirius dances with a girl with spiky hair. He's laughing but his eyes are sad.
He knows that the cracks are there. They will kill him in the end. They start small, these cracks of care. Nothing more than a thinness that you were hardly even aware of, like the first sign of bobbled wear on fabric. Scraped. A little worn. But you knew there were there, and beneath the tiniest of cracks lay Gehenna, huge and terrible. The destroyed live there.
Sirius walks away, forever, like an endless treadmill - his fingers entwined in Remus's. Peter runs through the landscape twirling and drunk. The picture shakes.
You feel, you are sloppy, you die. Emotion was a tool to an Auror. Nothing more. When the Ministry revoked the rules on Unforgiveables, you couldn't think, couldn't know, couldn't care who that was on the end of the curse. Husband, son, father, wife, mother, lover. You couldn't - because it meant you couldn't do the job.
You take the part of brain that cares and you wrap it in steel and you bury it deep, you hear me boy? D'you want scum, scum like him to know who you care about?
The lights dim; muffled voices say goodbye to their colleagues. A good day. It has been a good day. Any day without a death, right? Right. He waves away invitations - half meant - half not - to dinner, to drinks. "Shacklebolt is a worker," he hears Dawlish mutter as he closes the lift, "he'll be Minister before he's 50, mark my words."
He laughs, and his laugh echoes in the nothing. The cracks widen.
Sirius stands in the rubble, his hands by his side. He laughs. He laughs.
He opens the drawer and pulls out a folder of menus, says a word. His fingers shake as he touches the pictures. Recent, and most secret, for what would they say if they knew that he had pictures of his quarry taken this week? Sirius is looking into the camera. His hair is still ragged, his face thin, but it suits him. His cheekbones stark and beautiful. There are lines on the man that the boy didn't think he'd ever have, war wounds that Kingsley appreciates. His eyes are darkened, and reflect Kingsley's own. The paper is crinkled, as if it had been wet.
Sometimes it's easy to forget who took this picture.
Sometimes it isn't.
"I'll keep you safe" he whispers, hearing the curse that will kill him echoing somewhere near.
Sirius smiles.
and for a fraction of a lifetime, so does Kingsley.