The Reluctant Auror
Title: The Reluctant Auror
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Disclaimer: All Rowling's, except for the characters who aren't.
Pairings: Gen (OFCs, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Albus Dumbledore)
Word Count: 2151
Notes: Written for my au_bingo card. Prompt - Alternate History: Someone never died
The dust cleared enough at least that Kingsley could make out a pair of jean-clad legs dangling through a hole in the ceiling.
"Artemis!" he shouted.
Coughing, then a weak, "Here."
Carefully, the Auror picked his way across the debris that filled the first floor of Phinias and Matilda Rangolf's home. A misstep brought his foot down on top of a child's toy that let out a mournful squeak as he staggered to recapture his balance. "Are you injured?"
"I'll live," his partner called down. Her voice sounded stronger, not as choked with dust. "I'm going to need you to come over here. The Rangolf girl is still alive--I'll hand her down."
"Why don't you use the bleeding stairs?" he grumbled, mostly to himself.
But she heard him anyway. She had frighteningly good hearing when her ears weren't ringing from explosions. "Because that's where the Death Eaters' bodies ended up, and I don't want to carry the kid past that."
Kingsley positioned himself directly under the gaping hole and held up his arms (which, like his dark purple robes, were gray under a fine coating of plaster). Artemis Moon sat right on the edge, dressed in Muggle jeans and a red Gryffindor Quidditch jumper. "What happened to your robes?" he asked. She'd been wearing a set of black, professional-looking ones when they'd first responded to the distress call at the Rangolfs'.
She just rolled her eyes and lowered a black-wrapped bundle into his waiting arms. It was a girl-child, about five years old, wrapped in Artemis' missing robes. Her hair--dusty with plaster--was probably honey-brown when clean and hung in loose curls down her back. Her eyes were wide and fearful. She studied Kingsley for a moment, sizing him up the same way he would a criminal, and then let out an all-mighty howl.
"Shush, shush," Artemis called down. Then she dropped, landing with a small grunt and raising a cloud of dust. "It's okay, little Miss Witch, Kingsley may be ugly, but he's one of the good guys." She gave him a cheeky smile as she took the child from him and balanced her on one hip. The girl's screaming stopped instantly.
His partner had a nasty gash along the right side of her face. A deep purple weal like a burn scar cut across her cheekbone, and there was blood seeping into her short brown hair from a notch in her ear.
"What's this, Moon?" Kingsley said, taking hold of her chin and twisting it so he could see the wound more clearly.
She jerked her chin out of his grip. "The curse that almost got me, Shacklebolt."
Whatever he intended to say to that was lost as a shouting rose up outside.
*
Voldemort was dead, killed when a curse he'd aimed at the Potter baby rebounded on him. The whole wizarding world was celebrating, it seemed.
Not Artemis. When a witch paused long enough in setting off violet snapdragon-shaped fireworks from the end of her wand to explain what was going on, Kingsley's partner had whispered, "James is dead?" like one in shock and sat down hard on the curb, the Rangolf child still in her arms. She hid her face in the little girl's curls and didn't lift it even when the child began to pat her head in an innocent gesture of comfort and sympathy.
Howler, Artemis' tawny owl, found them maybe three quarters of an hour later, a scroll lashed tightly to his leg. The broad-chested bird landed on the Rangolf garden gate and looked at Kingsley with expectant eyes. He unknotted the scroll and studied the seal.
"It's from Dumbledore," he said, holding the roll of parchment out to his partner.
Artemis lifted her head then, freeing one hand to take it from him. Kingsley carefully ignored the wet tear tracks cutting through the dust on her face. They'd been chasing Death Eaters together for months now, and he had never seen her show more emotion at the scene of a murder than the slight tightening of her jaw in anger. Tears were uncharacteristic of her. But she had been friends with Potter, back at Hogwarts. Had recently taken time off to attend his baby's christening.
"Let's see what Uncle Albus has to say," Artemis said to the child, her voice only a little thick, as she unrolled the scroll. The little girl leaned in closer, pressing her cheek against Artemis' so she too could see the parchment.
Artemis read silently, in spite of her audience. Her hazel eyes reached the bottom of the roll and then flicked back to the top, rereading it again. Then she crumpled the parchment tightly in her first. Kingsley waited. After many months of working together, he had come to respect his younger partner enough to let her speak in her own time.
When she did talk, her eyes were focused on something in the middle distance, in the middle of the street or maybe just in the recesses of her mind. "The Potters were going into hiding." Her voice, when she spoke, was rough but strong. "They had entrusted their hiding place to a Secret Keeper. That person betrayed them and led Voldemort straight to their home in Godric's Hollow. Harry lived; James and Lily didn't." She stopped, chewing absently on her lower lip. The little girl was huddled against her shoulder, looking up at Artemis with wide blue eyes.
"Who was the Secret Keeper?" Kingsley asked.
Artemis looked up at him. "Harry's godfather, Sirius Black."
*
It was almost a week before he managed to track her down so they could speak face-to-face. No matter how many times Albus Dumbledore turned down the minister's post, he was still a vital member of the wizarding world's government. He found her finally in the middle of packing up her office at the Ministry.
"Hello, Uncle Albus," she said as she set a small pile of books into the cardboard carton Kingsley had given her. It had the name of a Muggle grocery stenciled on the side, but considering that she'd already loaded half her personal library into it, he doubted it counted as a Muggle artifact anymore. "I take it you've heard about my resignation."
"I did, Artemis," Dumbledore replied as he settled into her desk chair (well, not her chair for much longer--the furniture stayed with the office). "The Minister seems to think I can change your mind."
Into the box went her set of ink pots and a handful of quills (some of them with broken nibs and tattered plumes). "The Minister thought wrong--my mind's made up. Lemon drop?"
Her uncle took the offered candy and popped it in his mouth. "That's what I told him, but I did promise him I would try," Dumbledore said around the sugary hard yellow sphere.
"I can't, Uncle Albus."
"You're tired." His eyes, as always, were bright and kind, but Artemis could see fatigue in the lines around them, almost buried in his magnificent beard and hair.
"Tired and sad,” she agreed. The last thing into the carton before she sealed it was a very mundane cactus that Kingsley had given her, swearing that not even she would be able to kill the prickly little plant. "I just can't do it anymore, uncle, and with You-Know-Who gone, they won't need me."
"There is still a great deal of work to be done rounding up Death Eaters."
"And plenty of other Aurors to do it--others who are better at being able to discern which Death Eaters followed Voldemort because he coerced them and which went along because of their alliance to the Dark Arts." Maybe she closed the box with a bit more force than was truly necessary, being the cardboard, but she didn't care. Her face still stung and the hole in her ear throbbed, but Artemis scarcely noticed either over the ache that filled her chest, making it feel almost impossible to breathe.
"You cannot blame yourself for what happened with Lily and James and Sirius. There was no way you could..."
"...have known?" she finished for him. "I knew Sirius better than anyone except maybe James and Remus, Uncle Albus. And it wasn't just Lily and James but Peter Pettigrew and twelve Muggles too--I should have known! What does it say about my fitness as an Auror that I can't recognize a Death Eater when he's sitting right beside me at my godson's christening? No, Uncle Albus, you can tell the Minister that you tried, but even you can't change my mind."
He studied her for a moment, sucking absently on his lemon drop as he did. Clearly, he thought she was making a mistake, but she didn't care. She couldn't keep coming here day after day, questioning every decision she made. Not with this ache that threatened to consume her.
"What will you do instead?" Dumbledore finally asked.
Artemis nodded to the sofa. "Someone needs to look after her." Huddled under her work robe (the one she used to keep wadded up in her desk to appease Kingsley, who didn't approve of her penchant for Muggle fashion) was the Rangolf child. Her name was Amelia, and she was almost four years old. All attempts to turn up living relatives willing to take her in had failed--Matilda had been a squib from a Pureblood house that had disowned her when her lack of magical powers had become apparent; Phinias was from the Continent. The Ministry was still making inquiries of its sister governments in Belgium and France, but it was doubtful they would turn up more than a few distant cousins.
"The Ministry said that if they can't find any relations by the end of the year, then they will give me the chance to adopt her." Her stomach felt a little queasy at the thought of raising a child (it wasn't something she'd given much thought to until six days ago when Amelia had come flying out of the children’s ward at St. Mungo's with a clean bill of health and straight into Artemis' arms), but there was a little thrill there as well.
"Where do you plan to live? Your London flat, Artemis, while...lovely isn't the best place to raise a child."
She smiled at that, dropping down on the arm of the sofa and soothing a hand over Amelia's curls. "I used some of Mother's money and bought a house out in the country. It's near the Weasleys' new place and the Lovegoods. Come on, sweetie, time to wake up."
Amelia whined and pressed her face into the back of the sofa.
"We're going to see our new house. Come on--get up, get up, get up!"
Artemis' childhood hadn't exposed her to many small children. She'd been passed back and forth between her uncles, neither of whom knew how to deal with children under the age of eleven. When she was very small, there had been a house elf named Smessie, borrowed from the kitchens of Hogwarts, but Smessie had gone back to her old job when Artemis was eight. After that, she roamed the halls of Hogwarts. In the mornings, various professors taught her non-magical things like reading and writing, picking up where Smessie left off. She had to be in her bed chamber (a small room adjacent to Uncle Albus') by nine o'clock each night, but other than those obligations, she was free to do whatever she wanted as long as she kept out of mischief.
She'd snuck into the students' classes, hiding in the back. Without a wand, there was a limit to what she could do in classes like Charms and Transfiguration, but history classes and Muggle Studies...those she could follow along with just fine. She started turning in homework assignments with the first years in the History of Magic and Herbology when she was nine. The Herbology professor (what had her name been? She'd retired right before Artemis' official first year) had accepted the scrolls and damaged plants with a conspiratorial wink and smile. It was doubtful if Professor Binns even noticed that she wasn't an actual History student.
Having a small child, barely past toddling, was going to be a challenge. And no matter how hollow and in pain she was, Artemis loved a challenge.
"It sounds like you've put a great deal of thought into this," Dumbledore said. He didn't mention that she had never touched the trust fund he had set up when she turned seventeen and took over custody of her mother, Ariana. The money was supposed to pay for Ariana's hospice care at St. Mungo's, but there was enough to pay for her treatment for the next two hundred years five times over. Uncle Albus knew Artemis would never take money directly from him, so he padded her mother's care fund.
"Yes, uncle, I have."
Part 2
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Disclaimer: All Rowling's, except for the characters who aren't.
Pairings: Gen (OFCs, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Albus Dumbledore)
Word Count: 2151
Notes: Written for my au_bingo card. Prompt - Alternate History: Someone never died
The dust cleared enough at least that Kingsley could make out a pair of jean-clad legs dangling through a hole in the ceiling.
"Artemis!" he shouted.
Coughing, then a weak, "Here."
Carefully, the Auror picked his way across the debris that filled the first floor of Phinias and Matilda Rangolf's home. A misstep brought his foot down on top of a child's toy that let out a mournful squeak as he staggered to recapture his balance. "Are you injured?"
"I'll live," his partner called down. Her voice sounded stronger, not as choked with dust. "I'm going to need you to come over here. The Rangolf girl is still alive--I'll hand her down."
"Why don't you use the bleeding stairs?" he grumbled, mostly to himself.
But she heard him anyway. She had frighteningly good hearing when her ears weren't ringing from explosions. "Because that's where the Death Eaters' bodies ended up, and I don't want to carry the kid past that."
Kingsley positioned himself directly under the gaping hole and held up his arms (which, like his dark purple robes, were gray under a fine coating of plaster). Artemis Moon sat right on the edge, dressed in Muggle jeans and a red Gryffindor Quidditch jumper. "What happened to your robes?" he asked. She'd been wearing a set of black, professional-looking ones when they'd first responded to the distress call at the Rangolfs'.
She just rolled her eyes and lowered a black-wrapped bundle into his waiting arms. It was a girl-child, about five years old, wrapped in Artemis' missing robes. Her hair--dusty with plaster--was probably honey-brown when clean and hung in loose curls down her back. Her eyes were wide and fearful. She studied Kingsley for a moment, sizing him up the same way he would a criminal, and then let out an all-mighty howl.
"Shush, shush," Artemis called down. Then she dropped, landing with a small grunt and raising a cloud of dust. "It's okay, little Miss Witch, Kingsley may be ugly, but he's one of the good guys." She gave him a cheeky smile as she took the child from him and balanced her on one hip. The girl's screaming stopped instantly.
His partner had a nasty gash along the right side of her face. A deep purple weal like a burn scar cut across her cheekbone, and there was blood seeping into her short brown hair from a notch in her ear.
"What's this, Moon?" Kingsley said, taking hold of her chin and twisting it so he could see the wound more clearly.
She jerked her chin out of his grip. "The curse that almost got me, Shacklebolt."
Whatever he intended to say to that was lost as a shouting rose up outside.
*
Voldemort was dead, killed when a curse he'd aimed at the Potter baby rebounded on him. The whole wizarding world was celebrating, it seemed.
Not Artemis. When a witch paused long enough in setting off violet snapdragon-shaped fireworks from the end of her wand to explain what was going on, Kingsley's partner had whispered, "James is dead?" like one in shock and sat down hard on the curb, the Rangolf child still in her arms. She hid her face in the little girl's curls and didn't lift it even when the child began to pat her head in an innocent gesture of comfort and sympathy.
Howler, Artemis' tawny owl, found them maybe three quarters of an hour later, a scroll lashed tightly to his leg. The broad-chested bird landed on the Rangolf garden gate and looked at Kingsley with expectant eyes. He unknotted the scroll and studied the seal.
"It's from Dumbledore," he said, holding the roll of parchment out to his partner.
Artemis lifted her head then, freeing one hand to take it from him. Kingsley carefully ignored the wet tear tracks cutting through the dust on her face. They'd been chasing Death Eaters together for months now, and he had never seen her show more emotion at the scene of a murder than the slight tightening of her jaw in anger. Tears were uncharacteristic of her. But she had been friends with Potter, back at Hogwarts. Had recently taken time off to attend his baby's christening.
"Let's see what Uncle Albus has to say," Artemis said to the child, her voice only a little thick, as she unrolled the scroll. The little girl leaned in closer, pressing her cheek against Artemis' so she too could see the parchment.
Artemis read silently, in spite of her audience. Her hazel eyes reached the bottom of the roll and then flicked back to the top, rereading it again. Then she crumpled the parchment tightly in her first. Kingsley waited. After many months of working together, he had come to respect his younger partner enough to let her speak in her own time.
When she did talk, her eyes were focused on something in the middle distance, in the middle of the street or maybe just in the recesses of her mind. "The Potters were going into hiding." Her voice, when she spoke, was rough but strong. "They had entrusted their hiding place to a Secret Keeper. That person betrayed them and led Voldemort straight to their home in Godric's Hollow. Harry lived; James and Lily didn't." She stopped, chewing absently on her lower lip. The little girl was huddled against her shoulder, looking up at Artemis with wide blue eyes.
"Who was the Secret Keeper?" Kingsley asked.
Artemis looked up at him. "Harry's godfather, Sirius Black."
*
It was almost a week before he managed to track her down so they could speak face-to-face. No matter how many times Albus Dumbledore turned down the minister's post, he was still a vital member of the wizarding world's government. He found her finally in the middle of packing up her office at the Ministry.
"Hello, Uncle Albus," she said as she set a small pile of books into the cardboard carton Kingsley had given her. It had the name of a Muggle grocery stenciled on the side, but considering that she'd already loaded half her personal library into it, he doubted it counted as a Muggle artifact anymore. "I take it you've heard about my resignation."
"I did, Artemis," Dumbledore replied as he settled into her desk chair (well, not her chair for much longer--the furniture stayed with the office). "The Minister seems to think I can change your mind."
Into the box went her set of ink pots and a handful of quills (some of them with broken nibs and tattered plumes). "The Minister thought wrong--my mind's made up. Lemon drop?"
Her uncle took the offered candy and popped it in his mouth. "That's what I told him, but I did promise him I would try," Dumbledore said around the sugary hard yellow sphere.
"I can't, Uncle Albus."
"You're tired." His eyes, as always, were bright and kind, but Artemis could see fatigue in the lines around them, almost buried in his magnificent beard and hair.
"Tired and sad,” she agreed. The last thing into the carton before she sealed it was a very mundane cactus that Kingsley had given her, swearing that not even she would be able to kill the prickly little plant. "I just can't do it anymore, uncle, and with You-Know-Who gone, they won't need me."
"There is still a great deal of work to be done rounding up Death Eaters."
"And plenty of other Aurors to do it--others who are better at being able to discern which Death Eaters followed Voldemort because he coerced them and which went along because of their alliance to the Dark Arts." Maybe she closed the box with a bit more force than was truly necessary, being the cardboard, but she didn't care. Her face still stung and the hole in her ear throbbed, but Artemis scarcely noticed either over the ache that filled her chest, making it feel almost impossible to breathe.
"You cannot blame yourself for what happened with Lily and James and Sirius. There was no way you could..."
"...have known?" she finished for him. "I knew Sirius better than anyone except maybe James and Remus, Uncle Albus. And it wasn't just Lily and James but Peter Pettigrew and twelve Muggles too--I should have known! What does it say about my fitness as an Auror that I can't recognize a Death Eater when he's sitting right beside me at my godson's christening? No, Uncle Albus, you can tell the Minister that you tried, but even you can't change my mind."
He studied her for a moment, sucking absently on his lemon drop as he did. Clearly, he thought she was making a mistake, but she didn't care. She couldn't keep coming here day after day, questioning every decision she made. Not with this ache that threatened to consume her.
"What will you do instead?" Dumbledore finally asked.
Artemis nodded to the sofa. "Someone needs to look after her." Huddled under her work robe (the one she used to keep wadded up in her desk to appease Kingsley, who didn't approve of her penchant for Muggle fashion) was the Rangolf child. Her name was Amelia, and she was almost four years old. All attempts to turn up living relatives willing to take her in had failed--Matilda had been a squib from a Pureblood house that had disowned her when her lack of magical powers had become apparent; Phinias was from the Continent. The Ministry was still making inquiries of its sister governments in Belgium and France, but it was doubtful they would turn up more than a few distant cousins.
"The Ministry said that if they can't find any relations by the end of the year, then they will give me the chance to adopt her." Her stomach felt a little queasy at the thought of raising a child (it wasn't something she'd given much thought to until six days ago when Amelia had come flying out of the children’s ward at St. Mungo's with a clean bill of health and straight into Artemis' arms), but there was a little thrill there as well.
"Where do you plan to live? Your London flat, Artemis, while...lovely isn't the best place to raise a child."
She smiled at that, dropping down on the arm of the sofa and soothing a hand over Amelia's curls. "I used some of Mother's money and bought a house out in the country. It's near the Weasleys' new place and the Lovegoods. Come on, sweetie, time to wake up."
Amelia whined and pressed her face into the back of the sofa.
"We're going to see our new house. Come on--get up, get up, get up!"
Artemis' childhood hadn't exposed her to many small children. She'd been passed back and forth between her uncles, neither of whom knew how to deal with children under the age of eleven. When she was very small, there had been a house elf named Smessie, borrowed from the kitchens of Hogwarts, but Smessie had gone back to her old job when Artemis was eight. After that, she roamed the halls of Hogwarts. In the mornings, various professors taught her non-magical things like reading and writing, picking up where Smessie left off. She had to be in her bed chamber (a small room adjacent to Uncle Albus') by nine o'clock each night, but other than those obligations, she was free to do whatever she wanted as long as she kept out of mischief.
She'd snuck into the students' classes, hiding in the back. Without a wand, there was a limit to what she could do in classes like Charms and Transfiguration, but history classes and Muggle Studies...those she could follow along with just fine. She started turning in homework assignments with the first years in the History of Magic and Herbology when she was nine. The Herbology professor (what had her name been? She'd retired right before Artemis' official first year) had accepted the scrolls and damaged plants with a conspiratorial wink and smile. It was doubtful if Professor Binns even noticed that she wasn't an actual History student.
Having a small child, barely past toddling, was going to be a challenge. And no matter how hollow and in pain she was, Artemis loved a challenge.
"It sounds like you've put a great deal of thought into this," Dumbledore said. He didn't mention that she had never touched the trust fund he had set up when she turned seventeen and took over custody of her mother, Ariana. The money was supposed to pay for Ariana's hospice care at St. Mungo's, but there was enough to pay for her treatment for the next two hundred years five times over. Uncle Albus knew Artemis would never take money directly from him, so he padded her mother's care fund.
"Yes, uncle, I have."
Part 2