The Turning of the Tide

If dead weight had a sound, this would be it.

It's low, nearly too low to hear, a steady hum that reverberates in the back of his skull. Relentless. He rubs at his temples but it doesn't stop, not even for a second. He shakes his head until he's dizzy, and covers his ears and hums under his breath when no one is looking, trying to smother it or drown it, or both. Nothing works.

It hasn't let up once in the five days that he's been rooted to the hospital bedside, as the torrent of reporters and Ministry workers come and go and the snow falls in howling flurries outside the room's sole window. Security has learned that he won't be moved, and the healers have become accustomed to tiptoeing around him. The pitying look in their eyes makes him suspect they think he's gone mad. Sometimes he's not so sure they're wrong.

He eats when they put food in front of him, and sleeps now and then when they turn out the lights. He's here when they change the poultices, and when they cast their spells, and he's here when the prospect of Moody waking up becomes an "if" instead of a "when."

Hours are spent waiting, contemplating which would be the worse fate: this terrible sound droning on between his ears for the rest of his life...or silence.

He slouches down in the stiff chair, crossing his arms over his chest. The minute hand on the hospital clock moves in useless circles, the hour hand stuck stubbornly on "comatose." He closes his eyes and listens hard, but try as he might, he's unable to turn the endless ticking and the shallow grate of Moody's breathing into anything more than it is.

And it makes him laugh, just for a moment--a hoarse breath of a sound--recalling that he found it a bother at first, that little whisper in his ear, day and night, everywhere he went. Quiet and rough like the soft scrape of the tide against the shingle.

Salt water over stone, that's what he pictures when he thinks of Alastor Moody.

Kingsley Shacklebolt was a few weeks shy of his nineteenth birthday the morning they turned him loose from the academy. 1981 was only a few days old, winter already past its welcome, wet and grey. He was six months out of Hogwarts: he was still a virgin, he had never killed a man, and the official gilt-stamped card tucked inside his breast pocket proclaimed that he had just been apprenticed to the most famous--or infamous, however you saw it--operative in the whole of the Auror division.

All he had with him were the clothes on his back and the regulation-size duffel bag slung over his shoulder, packed with more or less everything he'd taken with him to his training barely a week after he'd sat his last exam at Hogwarts. He hadn't gone home the evening before, preferring to stay one more night in the barracks rather than have his parents' faces fresh in his mind the morning of his initiation; so had Quintus and Elspeth, the only other two of their group to be taken on as Junior Elite. It hadn't helped. His new holster, a gift sent by owl last night from his family, brushed back and forth against his hip as he made his way down a narrow Roehampton street. It tapped against his leg with every step, netting him squarely between thoughts of home and what lay ahead.

No. 213 Lackadaisy Lane stood at the very end of a tall row of anonymous terrace housing, faded red and looming, indistinguishable from any of its neighbours save for the dark curtains drawn against the mid-morning light in all the windows. He checked his pocket watch--five minutes to nine--satisfied that he'd made it with just enough time to spare.

The stupid, civilian part of him almost made a beeline for the front door, but the Auror's voice that had been knocked into him with plenty of bumps and bruises to show for it over the past half-year reined him in. Think, idiot. Stop. Survey the scene.

He rolled his shoulders, relaxing, letting the feeling of the place wash over him. Door, windows, front step, dustbins, all were coloured with a faint patina of magic. He glanced up and down the empty street, and then slipped his wand up his sleeve and cast an unobtrusive minesweeping spell. Not quite subtle enough--the wards still gave him a sharp electric shock--but a moment's glimpse was enough to give him a good idea of what he was dealing with.

The dustbins were on a trigger, tied to something inside the house, most likely a Foe-Glass. He paused in his scrutiny, leaning against a nearby lamppost as an old woman walking an equally elderly terrier passed, the woman pursing her lips in a suspicious frown despite his best attempt to appear unthreatening.

He waited until both were out of sight before cutting the tether from the dustbins to the side door with a careful Separo, sawing through the twisted spell carefully, thread by thread. Then, very nearly as much time was spent just trying to counteract the ice charm on the steps, a tricky bugger that had him nearly melting the concrete along with the ice his first two attempts.

The door next. A sense about the knocker sent a sharp spike of headache through him. A simple bother-me-not charm coated the surface, but something far nastier lay underneath. He eyed the lion's head in brass warily, suspecting it hid teeth.

Finally, he shrugged on a shallow obscuring spell to keep the tiny periscope under the porch light from turning his way as he ventured up to the front door, knocking smartly. There were no approaching footsteps, only seven seconds of silence before the click of a lock. Kingsley's chest was puffed out proudly when the door swung open.

"You're late," Alastor Moody declared.

Kingsley deflated.

He had spent nearly half an hour in front of the mirror that morning before setting out, itching in his new robes and trying to convince himself that he didn't look quite so young, quite so green that Auror Moody wouldn't take one look at him and toss him back like an undersized fish. Up until that moment, he'd nearly had himself believing it.

Moody looked him up and down, and Kingsley rallied, meeting the appraising stare as boldly as he could manage. No surprises. He had spent the last three days since he got his assignment replaying every single memory he had of the man: newspaper photographs, passing him in the department corridors, having him oversee their duelling classes and even lecturing to his group once, with Kingsley hanging spellbound with the rest of the class on his every word.

Oddly, Moody wasn't quite as tall close up as he remembered, maybe a hair under six-foot even. But then, Kingsley's perception was still playing catch-up after he'd shot up half a foot over a single summer; not that a few inches' difference took away the air that made you want to give the man all the elbowroom he wanted. It certainly didn't stop Kingsley from feeling as though he were being peeled like an onion and evaluated for the very first time by a pair of intense dark eyes that left little doubt as to why they called Moody 'Mad-Eye.'

He was finally invited in with a grunt, chided to take his boots off the moment he set foot over the threshold. He kept his wand as close to hand as politeness allowed. The inside of the house surprised him with its ordinariness, though the magic that met him wasn't the familiar welcome of the hearth, but something a touch more aware, bristling in defence. The decor was spare but warm, with fussy paint and paper that Kingsley would guess were left over from the previous tenants. He made a quick catalogue of the first floor: sitting room, staircase, a shut door to a water closet, a kitchen still smelling of eggs and Worcestershire sauce.

"Might as well get it over with," Moody muttered.

Kingsley was herded up the stairs. Somehow he managed to hit each creaky step while his host walked silently behind him. He wasn't certain if it was a comfort that Moody seemed to be looking forward to this just as little as he was. He supposed it had to be worse for the other man. These days, it wasn't anybody's choice whether they got stuck with an apprentice, and everybody who'd ever come up in the barracks knew that Alastor Moody had always worked alone.

There was only one room upstairs. Two beds, or rather, one bed in the middle of the room and a cot shoved into the corner that looked as though it had been filched from Supply; closer inspection revealed that it had, a stamp on one side declaring it "Property of the Ministry of Magic." There was a wardrobe, a trunk, a shelf, and not much else.

He didn't know what he'd been expecting. All right, not the pomp and grandeur that smothered any formal occasion at Hogwarts, nor even the stout candles that were taken out and dusted off for ritual at his parent's house. But there was something undeniably...disappointing about the muted sunlight filtering through the curtains into a room that might have been any other, even if he did pause uncomfortably when he approached the bed to find it neatly made, the bedclothes smelling freshly of laundry soap.

Moody pulled a bottle of spirits from one of his voluminous pockets and set it on the nightstand. A sharp-looking kitchen knife joined it, and Moody looked up at Kingsley's faint fidget. Then, with an unknowable expression on his face, he crossed the room and closed the door behind them.

It's the little things that keep him from going numb. The indignity in the practical side of hospital care. The apathy of staff who've dealt with far worse things in their day. The tubes and needles and endless intrusive spells, all these things endlessly pinch at him, keeping him sharp.

The healers won't allow a shaving charm, not when the rest of the spellwork is trying to push every cell into regeneration, and Moody looks like a stranger with his salt and pepper scruff. No one could ever call the man a dandy, but he has standards that never get broken. His clothes might be older than Kingsley himself, but they're always impeccably mended, and the first thing he ever does upon coming home from the field is sink into a hot bath, even if he's falling-down tired. He probably hadn't had his hair cut in years before the healers had to shave his head, but Kingsley suspects he'd rather walk out the door stark-naked than with stubble on his face.

So he makes a pest of himself, and one of the porters brings him a folding razor, and a bowl, and some lather. His father taught him how to shave by hand when he was fourteen--said it was something every man should know how to do. It's awkward, but not very much more difficult to shave someone else, though he sloshes the water a little, and gets lather on the corner of Moody's lips.

He brushes it away with his thumb, and pauses. If he were being truly honest, he might admit that it's nothing more than an excuse to touch him. The bowl of warm water is perched just as precariously in his lap as he is between all the medical equipment, sitting close enough for their hips to touch, lingering with one hand on a newly clean-shaven cheek.

Kingsley isn't the handholding sort. Even if he were, Moody's hand is freezing and limp, but this way, he gets to fill up some of the awful ache gnawing a hole in his chest. His body calms a little, missing something he didn't even know he'd grown accustomed to. And he can pretend, as he feels the soft, even whisper of breath against his fingers, that Moody will open his eyes at any moment and give him hell for dripping water on the pillow.

They sat down awkwardly on the bed together. Moody picked at the label of the Dervish's Old Fire before opening it up and taking the first swig, and Kingsley nearly asked for a glass as his lips touched the warm, wet mouth of the bottle afterwards, before realising it would make him look like an utter twit. The clock on the far wall ticked with distracting volume, rivalled only by their breathing. Moody asked him no questions, and he offered nothing in return, supposing that the man would have already found out everything he needed to, and there was no use bothering him with more until the deal was done.

He kept an eye on the level of the whisky and realised Moody was matching his swallows with mere sips. Taking his cue, he barely tasted the stuff with the next tip of the bottle, only to be rebuffed when he tried to hand it back. A shrewd look from Moody held him until he downed a quarter of it with his next gulp.

His head spun. He usually stuck to ale when he drank, which wasn't often given the regimen at the academy, and the hot flush that spread over him was something wholly new. It advised against drinking, the pamphlet. That's what they'd given him: a pamphlet. No one would talk about this, except everyone else from his group who hadn't been chosen, who suddenly acted as though the initiation was a fate worse than death, as though being taken on for an apprenticeship on the front lines wasn't everything they'd been dreaming of when they'd signed on. Quintus Quigley, always something of a swot, had found a pair of drawers splattered with red paint hung from his door that morning.

Kingsley tried to remember what else the pamphlet had said. Nothing useful. Nothing he could actually use, only a lot of dusty rambling about Sparta and Thebes and a handful of technical terms in Greek and Latin that all seemed to boil down to bonding magic. On the back in tiny print had been a very short list of things that his new master, by law, was not allowed to ask him to do. The breadth of everything that wasn't on that list scared him half to death.

He wasn't...like that, not in the least, not even the sort to lend a hand in the showers and then pretend it never happened. And this wasn't supposed to be like that either, what he'd read had been keen on making that much clear. This was tradition, and it was necessary--but he was of the opinion that it was a lot easier to call something "symbolic" when it wasn't your own arse on the line.

What steeled him was the thought that it couldn't possibly be worse than what he'd gone through in training. Getting by on the least amount of food and sleep a body could take. Imperio. Crucio. He had survived the worst they could throw at him in the space of six months; next to that, a couple of minutes or hours was nothing. In fact, as the heat of the spirits spread out from his belly, he actually began to feel rather nice.

It was short-lived. He sank back against the headboard, his eyes slipping half-shut, glancing over to the other side of the bed when he heard a muffled sound.

He sobered abruptly.

Moody had his hand in his lap, making a familiar kneading motion. There was a hint of a bulge in his robes. He wasn't looking at Kingsley, his brow creased as though he were trying to picture something else, and it was obviously working.

It made him twitch. He blamed it on the drink, and suddenly wished he could go back in time and somehow make the right moment and the right girl come together for his younger self, because his body was increasingly aware that this was really going to happen, and he had no idea what he was doing.

He hesitated, and then set down the bottle, beginning to open up his robes without being asked, just to get it over and done with. His eyes never left his hands as they carefully moved from button to button, ears pricked to the sound of skin against cloth next to him. He thought very deliberately about Miranda Mims, who he'd been sort of going with right before he left Hogwarts, the last girl he'd kissed and touched and done nearly everything-but with. He warmed to remember slipping his hand into her robes, stiffened up a little to recall the wet heat between her thighs.

He took a deep breath. He could do this.

Moody's gruff voice cut through his haze. "You want it quick, or do you want it good?"

Kingsley paused, needing a moment to sort the words out. His face went hot, and then he had to clear his throat before muttering, "Your call, sir." It didn't seem polite to point out that the second was unlikely.

A decisive nod was the only reply he got, and then a flash of red as Moody placed the blade of the knife in his closed fist and pulled it swiftly out. Kingsley opened his mouth, but whatever he'd meant to ask was lost as Moody seized his wrist, the knife slashing across his palm in turn so fast that he didn't even have time to flinch.

It stung, but at the first murmured syllable of gibberish from Moody's lips, the pain faded around the edges and turned into a hard pull, like something had hooked deep down under his flesh. His breath caught in his chest as his hand, drawn by the roughly lilting spell, clasped Moody's tightly.

He shuddered. Didn't protest as he was pushed back on the bed, his arm tingling right up to the shoulder now, hand burning where their blood mingled. A rush of magic washed over him like an unstoppable wave, the hardest spell short of an Unforgivable he'd ever been hit with--subtle, and as unrelenting as the rusty words Moody breathed in his ear. Part of him tried to fight, the stubborn part that could almost put up a brick wall to Imperio, but Moody pinned him with his eyes, burning him right down to his bones, crumbling his resolve to ashes.

The knife cut a subtler shape over his heart, one that pulsed hard and hot with every breath he drew, and then--as he held himself deathly still--the slightest nick in the last place he wanted a knife to touch ever again. The pain flared brightly behind his eyes, the last he felt before something tight and needful possessed him.

Later, with the taste still lingering in his mouth, he would remember the hand pressing to his lips, the sudden ache in him, a half-finished feeling that had him lapping at the hot copper tang of it.

A rough sound from Moody, like it hurt him. "Turn over."

His skin felt thin as tissue paper as his drawers were taken down, and he had to force himself not to push that hand away when it reached for him. Touching him...oh, touching him there. Thinking of Miranda, of Cynthia before her, of Auror Switch in her tight-fitting robes. Anything but the hot hands that moved him, stroked him, wrapped around him with a grip that was far too broad to be a girl's, rougher than even his own.

He braced himself, but all that came was...between his thighs...his face flushing hot as he realised that he was hard, really hard, but the worst of the confusion was kept at bay because every inch of his skin seemed just as frighteningly sensitive. The oddness of crisp hair against his back, a callused touch, the puff of breath with each low grunt that now punctuated the rolling chant.

The whole room tilted as the rhythm of it quickened to desperate speed, the steady rub between his thighs leaving him gasping. Something seemed to reach right down into the bottom of his belly, pulling hard and turning him inside out, every part of him exposed to the open air and the heat on top of him. He was suddenly looking down on himself from above, his blood rushing in his ears: Mine, Mine, Mine.

Moody's breathing hitched for a long, silent moment, and then--

"...lambano se..."

--Kingsley crashed back down to himself, his body already half-twisted in the hardest spending he'd ever had in his life, breathing relief like breaking the surface of the water and pulling in a lungful of precious air. He trembled for a long, worrisome moment, poised on the edge of something vast. Then he toppled over, nearly smothering himself in the pillow as his body went limp.

A moment later, he was turned firmly onto his side, warmth surrounding him. Wet fingertips met his lips, and this time it was more than blood he swallowed, pride and embarrassment warring within him.

Vaguely, it occurred to him that he must be getting blood on the sheets. He struggled to get his eyes open, but when his gaze fell hazily on the palm of his hand, he found that the cut had already closed to a thin, pink line. He opened and closed his fist in experiment. No pain.

They lay in silence for several minutes, just long enough for the realisation to truly sink in that there was another man naked against his back, and that he was stretched out in a cooling wet spot that wasn't entirely his. He had spent, something he had never imagined he'd end up doing, not here. And he wondered, briefly, which that had been: quick or good.

A faint groan of protest broke from him a moment later when Moody tried to draw away, leaving him feeling as though a million little threads were pulling at his skin. He rolled helplessly along with him, instinctively trying to follow.

Moody patted him on the shoulder, and the feeling eased a little. When he spoke, his voice was a touch apologetic and surprisingly kind. "Sh. It's over."

They dressed, Kingsley with as much haste as he could, but Moody took his time, as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had occurred. Kingsley fumbled for his wand, managing a sobriety spell with no more than a flash of a headache. He stole a guilty glance over at Moody with a slightly clearer eye; he had never seen any older man naked before, save for his father, who...well, who wasn't nearly as fit.

His skin was slow to forget what he had just done, and he tried to cram down the most vivid of the memories, the thought lingering that he hoped he was in such good shape when he was Moody's age. Secretly wishing he would be just as unflappable too.

Straightening up, Moody charmed the sheets clean, remaking the bed when Kingsley had legs to stand on again. He pocketed the bottle of brandy and then the knife, making an odd shiver go down Kingsley's back when he gently stroked the blade.

They went downstairs abreast, in silence, though a rather different one than that which they'd come up in. Kingsley couldn't put his finger on the cause, only that they both seemed to be breathing more quietly. It wasn't until they reached the kitchen that he realised the wards of the house were nearly purring for him now.

Moody put the kettle on and Kingsley slipped into the kitchen chair that looked like no one else ever sat in it. He watched Moody move with a preoccupation that he couldn't even explain to himself. They sat and took their tea, sitting in comfortable quiet, and then Moody began sorting through the stack of file folders that teetered on the table.

They got down to business.

The hospital puts up its Christmas decorations, and he still hasn't gone in to the office, so two admin agents are sent to loom awkwardly in the doorway, looking anywhere but at him or Moody as he finishes writing up his report. He asks them how you spell "haemorrhage." They're only too eager to leave when he's done, and he's only too happy to be left alone.

His knees make a creaking sound when he gets up to wash in the private bathroom, his clothes wearing thin with too many cleaning charms. He splashes some cold water on his face when he's done, and looks at himself in the mirror, finding red cracks criss-crossing the whites of his eyes. He decides to take a walk before a healer comes around for the eleven o'clock bed check.

The corridors are bright and empty, the entire hospital a far different place than it was just a few months ago when he'd come in with his leg turned to dog food after an arrest and found the waiting room packed full, patients on stretchers lying right out by the front desk, beds full of casualties of not only Death Eaters, but paranoid neighbours and amateur attempts at self-defence misfired.

Most of the staff know him on sight. A few offer tight smiles and the rest ignore him, having relegated him to part of the scenery. He passes a row of rooms, half occupied, and an old man wheeling a sandwich cart up to the dumbwaiter. Somebody groans behind a curtain.

The stairwell leading down is draughty and smells of wet concrete. He jogs up and down the five flights, his legs eager to stretch. His heart is pounding hard on his third trip down, shamefully out of shape. He pauses at the bottom, opening the door and breathing in the smell of fresh snow. He leans against the jamb for several moments, letting the frigid air cool down his flushed skin as he retrieves his breath. The sounds outside startle him, noticeably crisp after a week of everything heard muffled through windows and walls.

He nearly takes a step out, the cold intoxicating. Just a half-hour away from this place. A long walk, a cup of decent coffee, anything. But he barely has one foot out the door when his conscience halts him, a shiver of mute panic rushing down his spine. He turns, and walks quickly back up the stairs.

It's only when he reaches the landing of the fourth floor that it hits him: it isn't leaving Moody to wake up with strangers that worries him anymore. It's leaving Moody to die alone.

If Kingsley had been expecting great battles against hoards of marauding werewolves and covens of dark wizards on his first mission out, he would have been sorely disappointed. As it was, he found himself with his hands full enough when Moody decided that the perk of having an apprentice was never having to do paperwork ever again.

One month in the field with Moody made the previous six at the academy seem like a single day. His training and the stories had prepared him for midnight duels, for rooftop chases across Muggle London, exhaustion, pain, and keeping his head clear while hexes were flying all around it. They had not, however, prepared him for the waiting.

Moody called it hunting. They set out the first day after his arrival, tracing back a line of banned Dark items along the black market from Death Eater possession to a craftsman working out of a small village on the Irish coast. They spent nearly a week in long lulls between movements as they waited for hours, or even days, sheltered in their inn room facing the main street, or camped invisibly in the thicket outside their quarry's home, in the narrow gap between two buildings at the corner where he met his buyers, in the rain.

Even Kingsley, who had always been the quiet sort, found the silent watch nearly unbearable. He might have gone mad in those first days if it weren't for the hushed presence inside his head, the never-breaking rhythm of Moody's breathing that taught him not to jump, but to turn his eyes to the sound quicker than he'd ever thought himself capable of. He learned to breathe in time with him, to the sound of the steady waves just under his thoughts. He learned stillness. Invisibility.

He hoped he would also eventually learn how to stop going warm in the face every time Moody spoke. The man was just...brilliant.

The arrest, when it came, was by the book. Only two shots fired: one clean blast through the wards from Kingsley, and the quickest Body-Bind he'd ever seen from Moody. The bastard didn't even know what hit him until they were dragging him back to the Ministry, and even if he was a weedy little fellow who didn't look anything like a proper Death Eater sympathiser, it was as satisfying to throw him into the holding cells as if he'd been You-Know-Who himself.

Moody took him down to the Leaky Cauldron after and bought him a drink. Dervish's Old Fire. Kingsley was in a fine enough mood, thrumming with lingering adrenaline, that he actually found that a little bit as funny as Moody seemed to.

"And just what is that smile about, young man?"

He went home for Sunday dinner a month into his apprenticeship.

If you could make a howler with just quill and ink, his mother had the knack of it, and he'd almost begged off until he realised just how long it was since he'd been by the house--and he'd suspected that if he didn't show up, his mother would hunt him down and drag him out by his ear. Moody would probably let her too.

"Nothing, Mum--" he began to say, but she cut him off.

"Nothing you can you can tell us about, you mean."

Her voice was sharp enough to sting. She hadn't taken kindly to the notion of classified information. Kingsley managed not to roll his eyes as he dug back into his potatoes, a moment's awkward silence passing over the table before his father and Marie went back to commiserating over the latest Quidditch match, and Tennyson and his wife resumed squabbling over whether or not the baby could eat French beans.

His mother hadn't spoken to him for weeks after he'd decided to enlist, and his father had been little better, plotting to practically crate him up and mail him off to Trinidad to work at his uncle's conjure shop. There was no making them understand. They wanted him to keep his head down just like they did, to be like his brother and sister and go on as if nothing were happening. To get a nine-to-five job, and meet a nice witch who would give them more grandchildren, and stubbornly believe that coming home to a Dark Mark blazing above your door was something that only happened to other people.

Of them all, only Marie had seemed the least bit proud of him, if worried--giving him a consoling glance across the table now. He suspected the holster had been her idea.

He half tuned his mother out as she began quietly bemoaning what she'd ever done to raise such a foolhardy boy. He found himself itching to go back to Roehampton, an urge that surprised him, considering he'd spent nearly 24 hours a day in Moody's company for weeks on end.

It was an arrangement that had taken some getting used to. Kingsley was accustomed to living with company; even when his brother and sister had gone off to Hogwarts ahead of him, the house had always been crammed full of guests and relations, and then it had been the dormitory at school, and then the barracks. But living with one man alone, he'd discovered, was something entirely different.

They were...close, for all that they were still relative strangers. He thought about his friends from school, whom he'd promised to keep in touch with, already scattered and gone. His family, who couldn't know about half the things he saw and did. The group he'd come up with in the barracks. You didn't make friends in Auror training, not when a third dropped out or failed, and less than half of those left over made it into the top tiers. Sometimes it was as though Moody was the only one who really knew him anymore, and effortlessly, it seemed.

In the field, he slept while Moody kept watch, and guarded his sleep in turn. He bedded down in Moody's room when they were home, on the cot in the corner, listening to the man's soft snoring. There was little room for modesty between them, no more than there had been in the dorms at Hogwarts, but it was different when it was two grown men instead of a dozen boys sharing space.

Kingsley had stopped going into the closet to change his clothes, and Moody--to both his relief and embarrassment--stopped hammering on the bathroom door to tell him to quit wasting water once he figured out what Kingsley was running the faucet to cover in the first place. He in turn discovered that Moody had a tattoo of a badger on his arse, the origins of which he refused to speak about, turning red and gruffly ordering Kingsley to go make breakfast when he had asked after it.

It wasn't a bad-looking badger, really. If you liked that sort of thing.

"...some mad old buzzard gallivanting around, using my boy as a human shield..."

That brought his head up.

"Mum."

"...seen him in the paper, looking all full of the badness..."

"Mum."

She paused in her tirade, regarding him archly, but he didn't shy away.

He met her gaze squarely. "He's a good man, Mum."

She opened her mouth again, but he stayed her with a firm look. He held it, aware of the table falling quiet again. Both his brother and sister talked back worse with every second breath, but it was something new for Kingsley not to simply hold his tongue and abide.

His mother fell silent, and eventually the conversation drifted back to her second favourite topic: Why isn't Marie married yet, and the ice in the air slowly thawed. After dinner, she took him aside and pressed a plate of leftovers on him.

"For your Mr. Moody. God help me if he knows what good food is, by the look of your ribs."

He smiled, and kissed her cheek. "Thanks, Mum."

It was a start.

They come with more papers. He's Moody's proxy as of six weeks ago, something he didn't discover until the start of this whole mess. It's him--not the sister in Portsmouth who's never come to visit and who Moody never even told him about--who has to sign a hundred papers, and keep the reporters out, and tell the healers to keep on working long after Moody probably counted on him to let him die.

He has access to all of the medical records. He reads them over to himself to while away the time, memorising each fact to heart. It feels like cheating. It took him a fortnight of covert operations to find out Moody's birthday by himself, too many long, quiet nights on a stakeout to discover that he was born here in London too. He earned these things, and now they and more are laid out in dull black type for anyone to see.

He discovers that Moody asked for him. It's in his declassified work file. A bit more than one year ago today, not long after he gave his last lecture to Kingsley's group, he filled out the requisition form asking for him as his apprentice. Maybe the higher-ups made him put in the request and maybe they didn't, but it's there nonetheless, signed by Moody, with Kingsley's name the only choice written on a line with room for three.

Kingsley fills in the blanks to sign off on a new course of spells they want to try. Mother's name, father's name, blood type, phase of the moon at birth. So many little details Kingsley now knows about him, and so many more that he wishes he'd had time to ask about.

He doesn't know who Moody apprenticed under, nor who he came up with through the ranks. He's never seen a picture of Moody as a boy. Never asked what he'd be doing if he weren't an Auror, or if he'd ever been abroad, or who the first girl he went with was. Or if he'd gone with girls at all.

He signs the last paper and pushes them aside, then looks at Moody, who's motionless and grey. With his eyes closed, his hair shorn and his hands so still, he looks like a stranger.

A rap at the window startles him, his gaze flying up to find a big eagle owl fluttering on the other side of the glass. He recognises the bird, rising with a quiet sigh to let her in. She lands on the ledge, and he lets her nibble at a leftover roll as he removes the message tied about her leg. He unrolls it to find Dumbledore's familiar looping handwriting, reading it carefully and committing it to memory before giving it a twist and letting it burn to ash.

He hunts about for parchment to write back on, penning two words: No change.

He liked working in London the best. It was his city, familiar beneath his feet, keeping few secrets--or so he'd thought until he began his hunting here. Then, it was as though Moody had stopped him in his tracks, turned his head just slightly, and a huge glistening spider web he'd been about to collide with had come into view.

Still, working in town meant operating out of the house that was starting to feel like home, and by the time spring began to tentatively assert itself, he felt the green wearing off him. Moody began sending him out on his own to shadow persons of interest, consulting him as to their plans instead of simply debriefing him. They brought in three suspects with three convictions in his first two months on the job.

A Monday evening in early March saw him hurrying home from the office to catch supper while it was still hot, ready for the hundredth time to convince Moody he was entirely too paranoid about the Floo. He practiced running unnoticed over the front gardens, breezing past a pair of mothers with their prams who never so much as looked up at his passing. He slipped into the house by the alleyway door just in time to find Moody taking a pot of stew off the stove.

Kingsley greeted him with a grin, still panting softly, and shrugged off his coat as the heat of the indoors caught up with him. Moody poured him a glass of water, and he knocked it back without a thought.

"God, what a day--" he began, then fell abruptly silent as the taste hit him. A subtle wrongness. One look at Moody's face had him cursing himself, his hand going for his wand as his knees gave out.

Everything went black.

Grey.

White.

He awoke squinting up at the kitchen lights. He tried to move, but couldn't. A swimming glance down found rope wound across his chest, binding his hands behind him to the chair.

Moody sat calmly across the table from him, looking like a curious cat batting a mouse about.

He tried to speak, his first thought to charm a cut through the ropes, but all he could manage was a garbled groan, his tongue like lead. Silence reigned dangerously as he sorted out his wits and speech.

"What--"

Moody gave an impatient wave of his hand. "What's your name?"

There was no biting his tongue, no clenching his jaw. With frightening insistence, his body would not allow it. "Kingsley...Edmund...Shacklebolt."

He closed his eyes. Shit. Veritaserum.

Moody smiled humourlessly, an unpleasant shadow of his usual grin. "Are you now or have you ever been affiliated with the Death Eaters?"

Through his dizziness, Kingsley's eyes nearly popped out of his head. "No."

That didn't seem to satisfy Moody, and the betrayal cut him so deep it stole his breath away. What had he done--said--how could Moody even think it?

"Are you sympathetic to Voldemort's cause?"

Kingsley hid his grasp on the ropes with a feigned flinch at the name, prodding at the knots with nimble fingertips spurned on by a touch of desperate magic. "No."

"Have you ever fraternised with Death Eaters?"

He began to deny it, but found his tongue twisted into a knot. "I--I--" He winced, carefully sorting out his words before he could bite clean through his lip. "I was at school with Alphaeus Archer."

There was no need to explain further. Moody himself had arrested him on arson charges while Kingsley was still at the academy.

Moody's eyes narrowed. "Close to him, were you?"

He didn't have to even try to lie, his heart skipping as the knots unwound. "Couldn't stand the little git."

"Anyone else?"

Kingsley quickly eyed the situation and decided to bide his time, holding the ropes tight as he tried to gage just what was going on here. "I'm beginning to have my doubts about you."

Moody snorted, and this time there was a hopeful glimmer of his familiar smile. "Clever boy." His voice held a proud warmth that made Kingsley hesitate as he eyed the place settings, wondering how sharp the fork was.

He stiffened as Moody suddenly leaned across the table, so close that he could smell him, strong coffee and hard soap. Something thundered in the back of his mind, making him shiver, and his thoughts went unbidden to the morning he kept trying to forget.

Their eyes met, Moody's unnervingly keen, and Kingsley swore he saw his pupils widen the closer he came.

"And just what are you hiding, then?" Moody asked, his voice low and rough, and only the merciful vagueness of the question kept Kingsley from blurting out something unfortunate.

He fought not to answer, a hundred secrets and doubts all warring on the tip of his tongue. His heart began to pound with the strain of it, and Moody leaned in closer and closer until Kingsley could feel his breath against his skin. He broke out in a hot sweat all over.

Now.

In a flash he let the ropes drop--surged--snatched the heavy platter up from the tabletop and smashed it over Moody's head.

The mad bastard went down laughing.

Some time after, when the blood flow had been staunched and wands returned, Moody sent a still-wary Kingsley upstairs to let the Veritaserum wear off. He brought him up his dinner not long after, reheated stew and a heel of bread, and a bottle of proper ginger beer, which Kingsley was certain he'd run out of several days ago. He lingered in the doorway a moment, looking Kingsley over in a way that made him first squirm, and then warm. Then he left.

An hour later, he came knocking again. "What's your name?"

Kingsley replied with something his mother would have broken out the tar soap to hear.

Moody only laughed, and threw his cloak at him. "Get up. We're going visiting."

He frowned with lingering resentment as he followed Moody downstairs, digging in his heels by the time he reached his boots. "You owe me an explanation." An apology would be reaching, but an explanation was the least he deserved.

Moody paused, looking thoughtful and a little taken aback. Kingsley had long since come to understand that he wasn't used to explaining himself to anybody.

"I'm taking you to meet some people. Had to make sure they could trust you, didn't I."

Kingsley was silent a moment, considering that carefully. If nothing else, Moody always said exactly what he meant. "They", not "I". That had to count for something, and the way Moody was looking at him seemed a subtle plea that Kingsley trust him in return.

He couldn't help but. He slowly nodded, thinking of the look in Moody's eyes as he'd come up close to him at the table. Approval, and maybe something hungrier, and an amusement that seemed to be turned more inwards than out.

What he did next, he'd never be able to reason to himself for the rest of his days--but he blocked the door as Moody moved to open it. Backed him up against the wall. And kissed him.

Curiosity. Revenge. The tables were turned as Moody stiffened in surprise, and Kingsley was struck by a sudden sense of satisfaction to finish what had teasingly been started. Inexperienced he might be, but he was no stranger to kissing, under mistletoe and outside shops on Hogsmeade weekends, in the common room over a spun bottle, in a cramped and dusty supply closet, listening for Filch's footsteps. He was a good kisser, and it occurred to him at first that Moody wasn't--but then the man rallied with a vengeance and Kingsley was left nearly crowing in triumph instead at having caught him off his guard.

Nothing was said when they both finally pulled back, breathing just a little too hard. Moody took him firmly by the elbow and Apparated with him out of the suddenly over-warm house to the chilly outskirts of a rambling property in what looked like it might be Wales.

At first Kingsley would have sworn that the lot was uninhabited, but Moody marched him up closer and then, like a mirage turning solid, a small house came into sight, non-descript save for the carving of what looked to be a phoenix above the door. The bearded figure who unfolded himself from a bench in the front garden to greet them needed no introduction.

"There," Moody said smugly, finally removing his hand from Kingsley's arm and giving him a little push towards Professor Dumbledore instead. "Don't say I never take you anywhere nice."

Mrs. Willikins in room 4F dies in the early hours of the morning. Kingsley bolts awake to the sound of a ringing bell and hurried footsteps coming up the hall, and immediately dives for the light before he registers that the healers are running right past.

He creeps out into the corridor to see what the commotion is about, only to be shooed back into the room by a mediwitch with pursed lips. There's a brief flurry of voices, then nothing but the alarm bell ringing, and finally silence.

He watches as they wheel a shrouded body past several minutes later. The woman's hand can be glimpsed under a fold in the sheet, and he quietly realises that no one ever came to visit her in all the time he's been here. Someone once told him she came in months ago. Her entire family was killed under the Dark Mark, and she had survived only to spend her last days locked in a hospital room, half-conscious inside a sterile bubble that kept even the fresh air out.

The lights in the corridor dim again to the nighttime settings, and Kingsley wonders if he should do something. Go talk to the staff on the nightshift, or say a prayer at least.

He rubs his eyes as he settles back down into his chair. Moody sleeps on peacefully, if sleep or peace are really words you could put to him. He lies still and quiet, breathing shallowly. Every passing day leeches more colour from him, lips pale and skin grey, his hair growing back in with far less black than there once was. He was a handsome man before, something that Kingsley has no compunction against admitting now. Handsome and alive, always in motion if only in his eyes, always thrumming with so much energy and life that it woke you up just to be around him.

Kingsley sighs. It's only in these moments here, in the small hours of the morning, that he stops to wonder just what the hell he's doing. They've probably fired him from the Ministry and just haven't got around to telling him. His parents likely have no idea where he is. The Order is meeting without him as the last cooling days of the war wind down and the trials heat up, and Moody is counting on him to be there on his behalf.

But he can't leave. Not until Moody leaves this room, one way or the other. He knows deep down to the heart of him, where the waters lie still and clear, that Moody would do the very same for him.

That summer, he murdered a man.

Of course, they didn't call it murder when you were an Auror. It was a "casualty while resisting arrest." Involuntary manslaughter. Understandable.

The man's name was Evan Rosier, and they had spent nearly a month tracking his movements by way of Dumbledore's connections. Their case was airtight, and Rosier was big--even closer to You-Know-Who than Karkaroff, whose arrest they'd been drinking to for a fortnight.

It should have gone by the numbers. He and Moody had cornered him to an old abandoned cottage in Cornwall on the edge of what were once Rosier lands. He was alone. They had been carefully disabling the wards and replacing them with their own for over a week. Rosier's owl had been stunned in the shed, following a long silent argument in which Kingsley had finally persuaded Moody not to kill the poor creature.

They slipped silently together towards the house, Moody to the front door and Kingsley to the back, waiting by unspoken accord until Rosier could be glimpsed coming out of the corridor.

Then they charged. And it all went to hell.

Kingsley had a half-dozen arrests under his belt by then, and if you'd asked him what was the first thing anyone did when you shouted 'freeze', he'd have answered without hesitation that it was to run like hell.

Only Rosier didn't run. He attacked.

The curses were flying in an instant, half the house going up in flames before he or Moody could even get near him. Moody was playing lure, drawing out the worst of the hexes towards himself, trying to pull Rosier out of the corner so Kingsley could get a clear shot.

He'd almost had it. Hacking on smoke from the burning couch, he'd leapt out, a Body-Bind poised at the tip of his wand just as he saw a lightning-bolt of a hex shoot straight for Moody, and a spray of blood, and then his wand nearly shattered with the force of the spell he pushed through it, one he knew no words for, pulled deep from inside him.

Rosier went flying like a rag doll into the wall--nearly right through it--and a sickening crack was all he heard before the man slumped down to the floor.

Kingsley froze for an instant, and then his training kicked in. He went to Rosier first, meaning to make certain he was incapacitated, nearly slipping in the blood as he approached.

"...he's not going anywhere."

Kingsley spun, flush with relief to find Moody picking himself up off the floor. He hurried over to his side, wincing at the blood that was seeping steadily from the hand pressed to his nose.

Of course the stubborn old fool wouldn't even leave Kingsley to guard the scene while he went to hospital. They had to put out the fires first, and search the area for prying eyes until their backup came to take their statements and the body.

It wasn't until several hours later, sitting in the waiting room at St. Mungo's while Moody got patched up, that it truly hit him. When it did, he lurched to his feet, barely making it to the nearest loo before sicking up everything in his stomach. He rose cold and trembling, shutting his eyes and leaning against the wall as he remembered that awful cracking sound. The mess of meat and bone.

Rosier had been at school with him, though a couple years ahead in James and Lily Potter's year. Kingsley vaguely recalled that he'd been a prefect. Not the meanest of the Slytherins. Some of the girls in his year couldn't shut up about how handsome he was.

'Not anymore,' he thought, his hands clutching hard at the edge of the basin to steady themselves.

He said nothing to Moody when he was finally discharged and they made for home. It wasn't quite as bad as the blood had led him to think. Moody was missing a noticeable chunk from his nose, but when Kingsley thought of how bad it might have been if he hadn't turned his head quick enough...

It could have been Moody's brain splattered across the hearth.

They picked up fish and chips, but Kingsley had no appetite. Moody stole his chips and put the rest in the icebox, prodding him upstairs to make an early night of it. He lay on his cot with the lights on low as Moody sat in bed reading the paper.

His bones were jangling, a nervous skeleton dance that had him restlessly tossing and turning, the springs of the cot quietly groaning every time he took a breath. He was aching to ask Moody if he'd ever killed anyone; he had a reputation of "bringing 'em in breathing," something Kingsley had never really stopped to think about before. But he stayed silent, certain that if Moody had ever taken a life, it hadn't upset him like this.

He lay awake as Moody made his way through the news, the ads, the Quidditch section and obituaries, then heard him skim over the society page and the horoscopes with a snort. His eyes were still open when the light was turned out, and then opened even wider when he heard:

"Get over here." The thump of Moody patting the bed.

Kingsley got to his feet uncertainly, exhausted and edgy, but not trained to have to be asked twice. Pausing at the bedside, he heard Moody sit up.

"Not going to get any sleep, are you?"

Kingsley shook his head, his voice tired and tight. "No."

"Well, I'm not either until you stop your sighing," Moody grumbled, and before Kingsley could snap that he'd just take the couch then, he found himself grasped by the arm and pulled down on the bed.

Moody's hands settled on his shoulders.

Kingsley stiffened, then relaxed at the touch. "Er...what are you doing?" He really didn't think it was a stupid question, given the circumstances.

"Putting you to sleep," Moody muttered absently, and then his hands dug in, working at a knot between his shoulder blades that Kingsley hadn't even realised was there.

Oh...

His head lolled forward, and he moaned. He'd always been just a little prickly about being touched unexpectedly, even as a small boy, but Moody's hands were inarguable as his whole body sagged in relief.

"There we go..."

No one else would ever suspect that Moody could make his voice like that. When he wasn't barking or biting, the sharp edges wore away, leaving only a low, soothing roughness.

He was lulled far enough off his guard that it took a moment for him to be shocked when one hand dropped right into his lap.

"Wha--" This time he was fairly certain it was a stupid question, something that Moody seemed to echo as he hushed him impatiently.

"S'good for what ails you."

Kingsley could do nothing but breathe out in a soft rush as his body made a liar out of any protest he could have put up. A hand was a hand, he knew that--didn't mean he was bent, didn't even mean he wanted it. But he did. Or he thought he did. The rest of him stayed warm and limp as Moody's insistent hand worked him stiff through his drawers, and when his fingers slipped down inside...

He fell back against the pillow with a soft gasp.

It was strange. But good. Really good. Memory twined up with the present as he was caught between the oddness of a rough hand the size of his own stroking his prick, and the embarrassing knowledge that it had done well by him before.

The darkness made it easier. He saw nothing but shadows as he stared through half-lidded eyes up at the ceiling, and Moody's scent and breathing and closeness were nothing new at all. Only the pleasure was, with none of the drunken haziness to it as the last time he'd been in this bed. It built sharply as Moody's hand moved relentlessly, just a little less careful than he was used to with anyone else, rough like his own, knowing just how to make him lose it.

He was aware of Moody's breathing coming harder and harder, and he swallowed past a lump in his throat as he felt something equally hard press against his hip.

"Shh..." Moody's strokes sped up, and Kingsley groaned deep in his chest as all the tension in him curled into one tight knot that was pushed up out of him as he came, feeling like he was drowning, pulled under the waves and sent floating head over heels.

After, still weak and half drifting off, Kingsley reached for him. Fair was fair. And it wasn't really so bizarre after all to touch another man there, even when Moody moved half on top of him and kissed him hard, over and over again until they were both panting.

Kingsley fell asleep while Moody was still murmuring the cleaning charms, and when they woke together in the morning, there was only a little lingering discomfort. They spoke quietly for a time when Kingsley found the nerve to ask his question. Yes, Moody had killed someone, and yes, it hit him just as hard. And it got a little easier, apparently, though he shouldn't want it to.

In the face of all that had happened the day before, he decided as he dressed, sleeping with Moody was probably the least he had to worry about.

He begins reading the paper nightly, hunting up the scattered sections of the evening edition from the waiting room. It tells him nothing of use. Already the list of court proceedings and Ministry reshufflings are moving to the back pages, the society section plumping up to twice its usual size as a rush of weddings and births are announced.

The only talk of the search for You-Know-Who comes from his correspondence with Dumbledore. As far as the world is concerned, out of sight means out of mind, and gone is as good as dead.

He reads it all out loud to Moody anyway, to convince himself that he hasn't lost his voice, and sometimes he swears he sees a flicker under Moody's eyelids, come and gone so quickly that he never quite works up the nerve to mention it to the healers. They would only call it "involuntary muscle movements" or something of the sort, but he sees it happen every time he tells Moody about incompetent Ministry workers or botching prosecutors.

Hope is a terrible thing.

He folds up the paper and lays his head on the bed beside Moody's.

"Wake up already, you stubborn git."

Autumn came, and with it, victory enough.

James and Lily Potter, God rest their souls, died. Their little boy lived. Sirius Black showed his true colours.

The fortnight immediately after was a rush of arrests as a dozen or more chickens with their heads cut off led them blindly to one bolt-hole and safehouse aftern another, a handful more caught selling all they owned, some making it to the international Apparation points before they were captured.

Then an unnerving lull.

They were given time off, both of them, with little to do save catch up on paperwork and stay out of the department's way as the bureaucrats took over. He hadn't thought Moody came with an off setting, but apparently even he had the sense to know when things were out of their hands. Not that their guard was let down. "The calm between storms," Moody called it, urging constant vigilance.

But Kingsley was aware of a mellowing of him. A deliberate relaxation, like he had trained himself to sink from manic to utter calm on command. The sea barely rippled, smooth and fathomless, reflecting a deep blue sky. He had never lived with calm before. His parents were loud people, the house always bursting at the seams with his mother's constant chatter, his father's booming voice, singing and rows and happy exaltations, his brother and sister tornadoes of arguments and scuffles.

Moody was like him, seeing no awkwardness in silence. He sent Kingsley out on a few errands, but otherwise made no demands on him. They played cards and checkers, and talked about their days back in Hufflepuff, and Kingsley had a few lessons about drinking and not getting drunk.

One Saturday, he took some coin to the Leaky Cauldron, and let a pretty girl who called herself Maddy (lying, the Moody-like voice in his head told him) lead him upstairs. He didn't tell her it was his first time, and he didn't think she could tell. He made her come, or at least fake it pretty damned well, and he himself didn't have to feign his pleasure.

Oh...he definitely liked women.

Her face, her hair, her soft mouth, her breasts, and the hot, wet place between her legs, the smell and taste and welcoming slickness of it.

He lay done and gasping with her afterwards, his heart racing and his skin prickling with gooseflesh. He waited for the peaceful rest to come over him, but it wouldn't. His body, even spent, was tense and strung taut as a harp-string. The sheets made him itch, and the clink of her counting the coins drove him to quiet distraction. He dressed and paid her, and she laughed when he kissed her goodbye, but not meanly, and she invited him back to visit anytime.

Then he Apparated home with his body still tight and wakeful, and met Moody at the door--found himself sniffed with a knowing grin--and was then taken to bed. What followed was nearly as good as the eight hours of solid sleep that followed.

He gave up and demanded an encore the next morning, then again while lunch was in the oven, and a third time after dinner, which earned him a boxed ear and Moody grumbling that he wasn't a bloody machine, but complaints or no, the old fellow didn't stop. It was little like the things he'd always heard about, just kissing and hands and tangling up together. It was convenient, and satisfying, and...

...and he really liked Moody. Liked him so much it worried him.

On Monday night he burnt dinner, and while they were waiting for the takeaway to come through the Floo, he found himself pushed up against the wall, a hand in his robes. Then, if that weren't surprise enough, it was followed by the sight of the great Alastor Moody dropping to his knees before him, no more submissive a pose than a wolf crouching down over a kill. No hesitation. Just a hot mouth sinking down on him, rough hands on the rest of him, and he figured out quick why they'd sniggered over this in whispers when he'd been at school, because if the pleasure of it had his knees trembling now, it would have killed him at fifteen.

His eyes squeezed shut, leaving the rest of his senses flayed open. The smell of burnt bangers on the stove, and the thick scent of his own arousal. Moody's breathing, a little fast, and the wet swallow-smack-swallow of his mouth. The rasp of stubble against him and the goodwetdon'tstop feeling...

This time it wasn't like drowning, nothing quite so helpless or fearsome as that. This time it was like stretching out in the sand and letting the surf lap up over him as he spent with a low, grateful moan, Moody's smug mouth urging him through every shiver, catching every drop.

Maybe he shouldn't have been surprised when Moody rose smoothly to his feet with a definite tent in the front of his robes, but he was. And maybe a little flattered even if he shouldn't have been. He hesitated, though, before awkwardly slipping down to his knees, because it was one thing to lend a hand to something like a mate, but another thing entirely to suck a man's prick.

He could have put it off to being a Hufflepuff as he carefully opened Moody's buttons to a faint caught breath of surprise. Fair play ruled the day, after all. But that didn't explain the hot feeling that went through him as Moody's hand tentatively cupped the back of his neck, nor the thrill that darted down to the pit of his stomach when he steeled himself to move from touching to tasting. The sea in the back of his mind was the best kind of stormy, smelling of lightning and rolling fiercely.

Moody's hand squeezed tight as he mimicked his approach, clumsily at first, and then with growing ease. A low moan followed--he'd always been a quick study. His heart was pounding a hole in his chest the entire time, turning him hot from head to toe with the impossibility of what he was doing.

He glanced up at Moody as he caught the rhythm of it, growing in boldness when he saw how it had taken him. Flushed cheeks, hair falling forward into his face, and his eyes burning desperately into Kingsley's, as if he meant to urge him on by thought alone. It changed nearly everything, the thought of being not with another man, but with Moody. It was enough to stop him from caring as he fell into the act with hungry enthusiasm, not even pausing when Moody growled a warning, when his grip turned nearly bruising, when his hips bucked and Kingsley choked down the hot, salty spill.

In hindsight, it might have been the best day of his life, had the letter not come ten minutes later, informing them that Frank and Alice Longbottom had been attacked.

He finds himself awake at 5 a.m., and supposes that since the cafeteria will be opening, he might as well pretend it's morning and get himself some breakfast. He slept fitfully the night before, waking several times with the newspaper crumpled in his hand, turned to the back page where the smallest blurb on the day's coming trials have been holding his attention hostage.

The night shift is just leaving as goes upstairs, the cafeteria too cold and bright and lonely to hold anything appetising at this hour. To his surprise, Frank Longbottom's mother is there with the baby, bawling out a startled server because they don't have any porridge. Little Neville stares wide-eyed at him over her shoulder. As he watches, she finally settles for soft-boiled eggs and sits down at a far table, leaving Kingsley caught between approaching her and letting her be.

The healers say she comes in every day so that the baby can see his parents--and while one part of him understands that, another can't help but think that if he ever had a child, he'd sooner die than have it see him like that. Despite the fact that they're both here more often than some of the staff, he and she meet only rarely in the corridors. She never asks after Moody, and only narrows her eyes and complains about the healers when he mentions Frank and Alice.

He gets himself a plate of rubbery scrambled eggs and rashers, and a cup of hospital tea, and goes to join her. She glares up at him, a dried-up old woman with fire in her eyes. He sketches a shallow bow, chucking the solemn-looking infant under the chin and making him smile. He watched him once or twice, the few times Frank and Alice had to take him with them to the Order headquarters. That's Alice's smile being turned on him.

Mrs. Longbottom sniffs. "I don't suppose you'll be coming to the Ministry this afternoon."

It isn't a question, and it gives him a moment's pause. He tries to answer as mildly as he can. "They don't need me to testify, actually."

The Lestranges, upon their arrest, were immediately convicted without a trial on attempted murder of an Auror while resisting arrest. The barristers of the tribunal have made it clear that Kingsley isn't needed until--unless--the charge is raised to murder.

Mrs. Longbottom says nothing, but looks at him sourly when he pulls a face at the baby to make him laugh. "I could watch him for you, if you'd like," he offers, as Neville grabs his finger. "While you're at the Ministry, I mean."

It would be a nice diversion, and he doesn't imagine there'll be anyone to look after him at the trial. She can't be thinking of letting him in the same room as the Lestranges.

She looks at him like he's suggested throwing the baby to a pack of wolves. "He'd be a poor son," she says archly, "if he didn't go and see justice done."

Right. Kingsley suddenly feels every bit as tired as he should be, conceding victory and giving the infant a pat before bidding them both good day. He takes his cooling breakfast to Moody's room and watches the clock, and holds his breath waiting to hear the results.

They met Dumbledore at St. Mungo's, outside a small room at the very back of the fourth floor, one that had stood empty since just after All Hallows--the torture ward. The baby was sleeping in some sort of hastily transfigured bassinette out in the corridor. Terrible sounds were coming from inside the room.

Moody charged straight in with Kingsley on his heels, and then the two of them nearly collided as they both stopped dead in their tracks. What they saw, Kingsley swore he'd take with him to his grave. Frank and Alice--God, it took him a moment to even realise that it was Frank and Alice, their faces twisted and hysterical--were strapped down to their beds, but even that didn't stop them from thrashing hard enough to rattle the metal frames, making noises that sounded more like wounded animals than human beings.

Alice looked wildly at him, shrieking that he'd killed her baby, calling him a name he would have sworn would never leave her lips in all her life. He had to turn away, sick with embarrassment at seeing them this way, but he was aware of Moody facing them still as stone for what seemed a short eternity. Then he too silently turned, leaving Kingsley to follow behind him, the sounds stalking them out back into the corridor.

Dumbledore was waiting mutely for them, a list of names in hand, and in a chest at his feet Kingsley spied the silver shimmer of the old man's Pensieve, often glimpsed around the Order's headquarters. For a moment he wondered how anything of sense could have come from Frank and Alice's minds, and then his eyes fell on the baby, sleeping with unnerving soundness through his parents' wailing and the hurried healers, and his mouth tightened.

He knew the first three on the list well. Rodolphus, Bellatrix, and Rabastan Lestrange. The department had files on them thick as tomes, and theirs were always the first names to slip from the lips of those captured from the inner circle, but together they had a fortune to keep themselves hidden and each had two others to cover their movements. They had eluded capture all through the war, and the department had already presumed them fled to the continent, with agents stationed there in search of them.

The last, though...

Kingsley's eyes widened, never having heard of the young man in question, but knowing the name well.

Moody tapped the parchment firmly. "You'll take him."

He looked up sharply. "And leave you to take on the Lestranges?" His voice was every bit as incredulous as he felt. "I don't think so."

"You'll take Crouch," Moody repeated, his voice brooking no argument, "before Daddy smuggles him out of the country." He skewered Kingsley with a hard look when he made to protest again. "I'm better off without you slowing me down."

He had to have known it was the one thing he could say to make Kingsley pause long enough to let him go. Dimly, he could hear Dumbledore saying something about the baby's grandmother being on the way, and a healer Flooing in from Cardiff who was the foremost specialist on the Cruciatus. He listened with one ear only, watching as Moody disappeared down the corridor, his body protesting with everything it had.

He almost ran after him. Something pulled hard at him, like there was a hook sunk deep into his chest, urging him to follow. Only the sensible voice in his mind stopped him. Moody had been bringing in dark wizards since before Kingsley was born and, with only a few weeks left before his apprenticeship would reach its year's end, he would be doing it long after Kingsley left.

And so he held his ground until the awful feeling in his stomach could be pushed aside. Then he drew his wand and went hunting.

Sometimes he wonders how much of it is even real. What he thinks, what he feels. The longer this goes on, the more certain he is that he's in the right place. The healers puzzle over the bond. "Surprisingly resilient." It should have already been fading over the last few months, and with the state Moody's in, there should be nothing left. Most days it seems more like an infection than magic, hot and stubborn in his blood, taking over his body. Would it hurt so much now if he didn't have something anchored inside him, tethering him to Moody?

It's a petty thing to think. Sometimes he can't believe he'd ever want to be with another man without the magic interfering, but the rest of it...he's not such a sad person that he can't imagine caring for someone like this out of his own heart and nothing else.

He's thought Moody was wonderful from the first time he met him, before that even, from the articles in the Prophet when he was still in school, the stories and rumours traded around the barracks. All that admiration hadn't started with the bond. Maybe it only sped things up a little.

It makes him think of the handful of proper dates he's had, his mates nudging him towards one girl or another at Madam Puddifoot's; he even went with two of them something like seriously for a while, and he remembers a thousand conversations. Where are you from, and what do your parents do, and do you like chocolate frogs or jelly djinns better? A million little details you bandy back and forth in the hopes that the other person will somehow put it all together like puzzle pieces and know what the inside of your head looks like.

He knows Moody's. The crash of the grey-green sea on a rocky shore.

It's all he dreams about anymore, when he sleeps, and sometimes he's sick to his stomach when he wakes to nothing but still grey water and darkening clouds. Outside, the weather is just as bleak, all the more so for the holly in the corridors and carollers in the street. He counts the days off on his fingers. It's the day before Christmas Eve, and he's so tired it hurts.

Sometimes it feels like he's been here for years, not for barely even two weeks. Other times he's certain it's only been one long night full of anxious dreams, every minute he's spent here smudging into the fog of the past.

He just wants it to be over.

It's another terrible thought, and every time it surfaces, he buries it under anything else he can possibly bring to mind. But it's always there. He's aching and empty all over, and every breath Moody takes sounds like it hurts, rasping and croaking. This can't be the way that Moody wants to die--but he can't imagine it's the way he'd want to live either, and he's haunted by the feeling that there's something he should be doing, something he should know how to do.

He's no healer, though, and the best in the country have washed their hands of anything but time. All he can do is stay here and hold vigil, refusing to snap the threads that seem to be unravelling between them with each hour that passes. Closing his eyes and wishing one more time that, one way or another, the awful near-death rattle would stop.

"I'm here," he mutters under his breath, and in his tired mind he gathers up all those fraying ties and wraps them tight around himself. When he speaks next, his voice is firm, more like Moody's than his own, stubbornly shaping the world around itself.

"I'm not leaving."

He might as well have been tracking a dragon through the woods. From the riot of magical fingerprints scattered across the Longbottom's ruined cottage, through the near-empty night-time streets of Diagon Alley, west on the trail of lingering Apparation leaps in what was probably meant to be a cleverly elusive path to a tall, lonely manor house on the edge of Dartmouth.

The twisted bastard had run home.

The sheer stupidity of this nearly left Kingsley speechless, uncertain for a moment of how to proceed when he saw the elder Bartemius Crouch himself pass in front of a first-floor window. He could sense his quarry like a flickering shadow up in the attic, a third unknown, likely the wife, in the back of the house. This was no place to go in with wand blazing, and so he found himself attempting something he had never done before in his entire year in the field.

He walked up to the front door and knocked.

There was little triumph it what came after: the mute incomprehension, and then the pompous threat to see him sacked. A pale, freckled face peeking down from the top of the stairs. The horror that passed over Crouch Senior's face when the boy bolted. If Kingsley hadn't been the first to bring him down, he'd swear that Junior wasn't the one he'd be taking in to the cells.

Barty Crouch snivelled like a child, protesting his innocence every step of the way with a fervour that boiled Kingsley's blood as he remembered Alice's screams. He didn't bother to catch him when the boy tripped going down the stairs.

He was out of there as quickly as he could manage, leaving a row in the making behind him. Crouch Senior knew what would be done from here, and he himself was eager to make certain that Moody had checked in with his progress at the department, to wash his hands of the sick little fuck screaming now behind his gag. Something was niggling in the back of his mind, something insistent, accompanied by a hard twist in his stomach that came when Barty Crouch was thrown into the holding cells, bound for Azkaban by morning.

Something was wrong. He began to ask about, unaccountably infuriated when all seemed to think nothing of the fact that Moody hadn't sent word. Of course he hadn't, he rarely did. But Kingsley couldn't shake the sudden crop of gooseflesh the sprung up on him. His heart began to pound, hammering in his ears until he could only distantly hear someone right next to him offer congratulations on the arrest--then ask if he was all right.

Then somebody screamed, and he only realised it was himself a second before he hit the floor. Pain seized him, skinning him alive as he gasped for breath, a dozen feet crowding around him.

Moody.

That was the only clear thought in his head as he gritted his teeth past the searing pain and pushed himself to his feet. He shoved away the hands that tried to steady him, able to mutter only that he had to go, he had to...

He was off before anyone could follow, down the stairs and out into the street, Apparating blind in mid-step. He didn't know where he was going, appearing first in a field, then on the coast, then in the backyard of a startled Muggle, nearly splinching himself as he pushed on. He fell somewhere in a grassy meadow, his left leg going out from under him. His head was throbbing, his right eye watering copiously as he groaned in agony.

Get up.

He staggered back upright and Apparated again, and again, and again, until he hardly seemed to be pausing between leaps, following the familiar trace of Moody's magic. His last jump stopped him dead in his tracks as though he'd hit a brick wall. He blinked, his eyesight the last thing to rejoin him as his body landed. He couldn't say what town he was in, nor even what country, only that a heavy snowfall had already come to the deserted old farm. A crooked fence surrounded a pasture of dead grass, and a little farmhouse stood not a stone's throw away, the windows haunted eyes of flickering light.

He trembled with the effort of stopping himself from running straight in, prowling the perimeter restlessly until he found the tear in the wards where Moody had squeezed through. There was no sign of fresh damage on the exterior. The back door was barred with a weak charm, easily broken, and he stepped silently into a half-lit kitchen.

The heavy square table was just a touch off-centre, a large bowl on the counter still faintly tingling with the after-effects of a mending spell, broken glass in the dustbin. There had been a struggle, and somebody had been left standing afterwards to clean up.

He paused, his ears pricked. There was the faintest sound coming from below him--some sort of cellar? He crept into the sitting room to find a hatch in the floor still propped open, a rug pushed hastily aside. There was no light coming up. His feet found the stairs leading down into the dark, stepping silently until broken glass crunched beneath his boots. His wand was lit in an instant.

Breathing--he nearly jumped back as three faces leapt out at him from the shadows, ravaged in fury. The Lestranges hung from the ceiling like a trio of vampire bats, twisting and hissing, and a shielding spell was on his lips a second before he realised they were all bound, strung up from the rafters and gagged. Three wands lay broken on the hard-packed floor.

Then something moved in the corner, and he started forward before a ghost of a hand gave him a smack in the back of his mind. Think. He carefully eased the faltering bonds holding the Lestranges to his own power, and heard the figure in the darkness sag in relief.

He hurried to Moody, feeling the clank of irons, and flaring an even brighter Lumos.

Then he froze.

Moody's breathing sounded like he had rocks in his lungs, and Kingsley watched in horror as the next breath brought up a trickle of blood. The dirt floor was soaked with it, and Moody's leg...God, his face...

"...'bout time..."

He felt something warm settle briefly over his panic, like an insubstantial caress. He swallowed hard, crouching down helplessly beside him, afraid to touch. "Don't worry. Everything's going to be all right."

Moody turned weakly toward him, one eye sharp. "...boll'cks."

Kingsley tried to unlock the shackles and found them spell-proof--settling for yanking them right out of the wall, muttering under his breath that he was taking him to hospital, that everything was going to be fine, just hold on.

He felt more than saw Moody motion to the Lestranges, ordering him to deal with them first, and didn't hesitate to disobey him for the first time in his life. Already he was counting the wasted seconds as he Apparated them straight to St. Mungo's, the first sight of Moody under the garish hospital lights leaving him just as horrified as the healers.

He never lied in his official report, but no one ever asked about the missing ten minutes between the time he left Moody at the hospital and when he finally brought the Lestranges in.

And in the small hours of Christmas morning, the hospital staffed to the bones and silent, Moody finally wakes.

Later, when Kingsley thinks on it, he supposes there should be more to the story than that. It's a good night for miracles, after all. Maybe he should have broken down and clutched Moody's hand, and proclaimed his love like a heartsick schoolgirl. Or maybe he should have shouted at him, punched the wall and goaded the old mule back into consciousness. Maybe he should have left, poised right at the door when a parched voice suddenly stopped him.

But it's none of those.

Instead, Kingsley falls asleep just after midnight, having sent off a letter to his mother declining her invitation to Christmas dinner. A note to his superiors lies half-finished by the bedside. He is waiting. No matter what's to come, he's going to be here.

He falls asleep with his head on the edge of the bed, not waking when the wind squalls outside with a late-night blizzard, nor even when the lights come on as the mediwitch on duty makes her rounds. His eyes open when Moody's breathing changes.

He's upright in an instant, fumbling for the light.

Moody makes a rough sound of protest, wincing at the sudden brightness, and Kingsley lets out a breath he's been holding for two weeks straight. They stare at each other in silence for a moment, and then Moody slowly takes in his surroundings. His hand weakly comes up to touch where his left eye is bandaged over. Then he seems to hesitate for an awful minute before looking down to where not even the blankets can hide the empty space below his right knee. His face crumples for a moment before setting itself in stone, his mouth a grim gash.

Awake, alive, he's never looked better to Kingsley's eyes.

Moody mouths something, his voice a bare whisper.

"They're in Azkaban. Life sentence."

The slightest movement of lips. Kingsley hesitates. "They're still...here. The baby's living with Frank's mother."

Moody sinks back down against the pillow, but his good eye stays open, regarding Kingsley steadily. He feels something tug deep inside him, and he holds onto it stubbornly. Only a noise from the corridor reminds him that he should be bringing the healers down in droves.

"Happy Christmas," he finally manages to say, laughing under his breath in mad relief. He stands, then pauses, and brushes a kiss across Moody's cheek. "I'll be right back."

It was mid-January before Moody was let out of the hospital, and only then because he was driving the healers as mad as they were driving him. They Apparated to the end of their street in the early afternoon, and Kingsley threatened to take him straight back if he didn't at least allow himself to be wheeled to the front door. Moody in turn threatened to put him in the hospital instead, and so it was a long but triumphant walk to the house, Moody limping heavily with his staff and Kingsley falling easily into slow steps beside him.

Home was waiting warm and quiet for them. He had stopped by earlier in the month, shortly after Moody had grown sick of his hovering, and took out the garbage and emptied the icebox of everything that had spoilt in their absence. He'd left the dusting for later, supposing that Moody would need something to complain about.

Once inside, Moody collapsed at the kitchen table with a triumphant groan, and Kingsley put the kettle on. He leaned against the counter, openly staring. Moody only ever accused him of doing it when he wasn't. The eye was taking some getting used to--for Kingsley, rather. Moody seemed to have fallen in love with the thing the moment Mundungus Fletcher snuck it round to the hospital. Of course it broke more Enchanted Object laws than he could count on his fingers, but if it had Moody saying things like it was an even trade for a leg, then Kingsley was intent on making certain he kept it.

"Can you see through my clothes with that?" he asked, only half teasing.

Moody didn't smile back. He was still different, and Kingsley was coming to realise that he might always be. A bit jumpier. Quieter. Quicker to anger, and frustrated nearly all the time with all that had been lost. He wasn't going back to work; Kingsley, by some miracle, was.

"Haven't moved out yet?" Moody's new eye was fixed on the windowsill, where the vase Kingsley's mother had given him to brighten up the place still stood. "I'll be charging you rent soon--I'm not running a bloody charity."

Kingsley had been expecting that. He reached into his pocket and tossed a small purse onto the table, leaving Moody to examine it as the kettle whistled. "Congratulations, you're a landlord."

He had spent the last week thinking hard on the matter. There were the practical considerations: he'd be constantly afield and abroad now that he was an independent agent, and boarding made more sense than finding a place of his own. And while Moody was getting a generous pension on account of being wounded in the line of duty, he suspected a few extra galleons a month wouldn't go amiss. Whether he'd admit or not, Moody needed someone to look after him--and so did Kingsley.

A small smile played at his lips as he poured two cups and sat down at his side of the table, the cold rush in the back of his mind mellowing into the gentle lap of waves. Besides, where else was he going to get an ocean view for twenty galleons a month?

"Hmph," Moody snorted, picking up the purse and turning it over in consideration before pocketing it. "Wouldn't kill you to dust the place now and again if you're staying, would it?"

Kingsley grinned. He slouched down in his chair, his foot brushing Moody's under the table, and if it earned him a scowl where once it would have brought at least the twitch of a smile, it was better than nothing. He still didn't know quite what he was doing here, what he was looking to find, but he thought the knowledge might just be worth waiting for. If it took another two weeks, or two months, or even two years to figure it out, he would be here.

A moment later, he felt the distinct gaze of the magical eye wandering down his body.

They both knew who could outwait who.