Benefit of the Doubt by ficexchange

Merry Christmas, Narcissa!

Benefit of the Doubt

It's a good morning, Sirius decides as he runs down the staircase of the shabby little house he lives in these days. He's missing his shirt, and Peter and Remus both claim that they have nothing to do with its disappearance. His head is aching, which might have something to do with the bottles of Firewhisky on the table. The carpet on the first floor feels sticky; he wonders briefly if he wants to know what kind of fluids it got drenched in last night. He makes a tally in his head. No shirt. Headache. No booze left. Carpet ruined. Oh, and the war.

Sounds really bad. Still, he's whistling, even though it makes his head hurt even more. The sun is shining, the smell of Remus brewing coffee in the kitchen wafts over and drowns the sickly sweet odours rising from the sticky carpet, Peter promised scrambled eggs for breakfast and they'll go and see Lily, James and Harry later. He inserts a few higher notes into his theme and continues to scan the room for his shirt.

The sudden crack is loud and familiar enough to alarm not only him but his two friends, as well. They come storming from the kitchen, wands out and directed at the pile of laundry in the corner of the living room. Sirius' heart is racing; his mind reels. If they are able to find them and Apparate in here, then this is going to end badly.

"COME OUT, WAND DOWN AND HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD! YOU HAVE THREE WANDS POINTED AT YOU!"

He's gripping the wand so hard that the veins bulge out from his forearm. His eyes shift to Remus and Peter, checking position, and back to the pile of dirty clothes. Something is moving there. And then he sees a gnarled hand that appears on top of the pile, followed by the tips of two ears. Pointy ears. Filled with white hair.

It takes him about a second to grab Kreacher’s throat and pin him to the wall. The elf makes a choked sound, and that gives him a grim pleasure. Serves him right for ruining the day.

“You know you can’t lie to me. Is there anybody besides you who knows how to get here?”

Still choking, the elf shakes his head. The tension in Sirius’ shoulders lessens a little. He can see Remus lowering his wand ever so slightly. He takes a deep breath.

“Then tell me two things: How did you find me, and why shouldn’t I just kill you now that you’re here?”

Kreacher squeaks, he is obviously in pain. Sirius sets him down, but his wand stays firmly at the other’s throat. Now that he can breathe again, the elf sounds sullen more than anything else.

“Mistress told Kreacher to go an find her good-for-nothing son. Kreacher told her it would be no use, because he does not care that poor Mistress is miserable. He does not care that the family is ruined. He does not care about Master Regulus.”

The elf’s voice breaks.

“Master Sirius does not care that Master Regulus has disappeared and that Mistress will never know where he has gone and what happened!”

And with those words, Kreacher flings himself against the wall, wailing and banging his head against it.

If anybody had told him that he would ever return to his parents’ house, and for his brother, no less, Sirius would have given him a bitter laugh for a reply and ignored him for the rest of the day. He can feel the laugh building up inside him right now, and it has a maniac edge to it.

Apart from the desire to laugh that is slowly choking him, he feels strangely numbed. His mind refuses to accept both that he has returned, and the reasons for it. He does not care about mother, and he tries to tell himself that he does not care about Reg, either. But still, he has to know what happened to him. It’s just curiosity, he tries to tell himself. More, it’s important for the war. There were rumours that Regulus had risen into Voldemort’s Inner Circle, and the Order needs all the information they can get. Yes, that’s why he’s here. For the Order. He’s willing to endure the horrors of Grimmauld Place for a noble cause.

At least, that’s what he told Remus when he tried to stop him. Sirius suspects that Remus didn’t believe him – which is quite offending, really, because it’s the truth – but he let him go.

The house is eerily quiet. His footsteps are muffled by thick, rich carpets whose overwhelmingly familiar smell makes him want to sneeze. He follows Kreacher through the hallway and up the staircase. Long before Kreacher stops in front of the door, Sirius is certain that his mother will want to meet him in the tapestry room. There’s no better way to show him that the acknowledgement of his existence and the permit to return is temporary, at best. Sirius is both immensely glad at her choice and immensely disdainful of it. He pushes Kreacher out of the way and enters without a knock. Get this over with quickly.

She’s sitting on a high armchair in front of the tapestry, mounted on a throne before the map of her realm. Her posture impeccably rigid, her face betraying no emotion expect sour disdain at the world in general and Sirius in particular, she looks just like he remembered and expected. Until he notices her hands; clenched into the folds of her robes. He might be imagining it, but he thinks the fingers are twitching.

He wonders if he should greet her; and how. Mother? It sounds like a lie. Mrs. Black? Childish. Walburga? He knows it would offend her the most, but nevertheless, he doesn’t want to. She starts to talk before he can make a decision.

“So you have decided to come.” Her voice is cold, unrelenting.

He nods curtly and waits for her to continue. She doesn’t.

“What do you want, mother? The word is out before he can stop it. “I don’t have time for games. What happened to precious little Reggie that made you call me, of all people?”

He wants to make her angry at him, just to speed things up. Instead, she hesitates. The small, detached part of his brain notices how her whole façade crumbles. It has never happened before. Not like this. He’s seen her furious, proud, disdainful, but never betraying a weakness, a real emotion that broke through her thick veneer of protection.

But now there are three feelings very distinct in his mother's voice. Weakness. Anxiety. Insecurity. "I do not know. We don't know where he is."

And then she surprises him by rushing on; the words suddenly spill out of her mouth as if a dam has broken. Sirius needs a few seconds to realize that she is confiding in him, for the first time since – no, for the first time ever.

“He vanished two weeks ago, and we haven’t heard of him; no one in the family has,” – the Death Eaters don’t know, Sirius translates – “and none of them knew of a mission or anything. Kreacher has not been able to find him, I had to make him iron his feet, but he couldn’t bring him back. He has been able to find you, how could he fail in this? He believes Regulus is dead, but I cannot think that. What will happen to us if he’s gone? He's the last in the line…”

Under the strange truce they have forged for the moment, neither is bothered by her blunt rejection of her first-born. She rallies herself herself slightly.

“I wanted to know if your side had heard of anything.”

And if we had, you would probably curse me backwards out of the house, Sirius thinks. However, he answers truthfully.

“No. No, I’ve heard nothing before Kreacher found me this morning. And they would have told me if anything… had happened.” But even as he says it, he wonders if it’s true.

He can see her posture and expression change yet again, and he’s afraid of the emotional outburst that is to come, whatever its nature.

“I will ask around, okay? I’ll even send you an owl if I hear something.”

And then he runs from the house, the need to escape more prominent than his wonder at this strange conversation. He can hear her start to shriek when he reaches the downstairs corridor, but it’s just a few more steps and he can slam the door behind her voice.

The next days pass in a blur. He is tracking down Order members, visiting spots of recent Death eater activities and even trying to pry Ministry officials for information. On the seventh day, Dumbledore comes to talk to him. Sirius is consumed by guilt at the Headmaster’s appearance. He has neglected everything for a week, going on a personal quest for which he doesn’t even know the reason.

He starts to apologize, but Dumbledore doesn’t reprimand him.

“I hear your brother has gone missing?” Dumbledore’s tone is gentle, and the concern in his blue eyes sincere. Sirius nods mutely.

“And you have spent quite some time trying to locate him, or so I have heard. Did you find anything?”

With a sigh, Sirius shakes his head. “Nobody on our side knows anything, and Moody assures me that the Aurors didn’t run into him either. If my Death Eater cousins are any wiser, at least they didn’t tell my mother. He vanished three weeks ago, according to her, and there have been no major attacks or casualties at that time.”

“Do you think there is any other source that you have not consulted yet?”

“I can’t think of anything else. I guess unless I want to interview dear Bella in person, that’s it.”

They are silent for a moment before Dumbledore speaks again. “Can I ask you something, Sirius?”

Surprised, he nods.

“What do you wish to find?”

Silence, again. “I wish to… I expect that he’s dead; I don’t wish that, but I’m certain of it. If somebody goes missing for no apparent reason in the middle of a war, what are the odds? I wish… Sometimes I wish it was all straightforward – he ran into some of our people and was killed. It’s still possible; maybe I didn’t ask the right person, or he was just wounded and died after he fled, or his mask was never lifted. Something like that. All these years, I have been afraid of running into my own brother, under a mask. And a part of me is glad that it’s over, I’ll never have to be afraid of that again and it’s not my fault that he chose to die as one of Voldemort’s cronies.”

“And why should you be afraid that whatever happened to him might be your fault, Sirius?” Dumledore’s voice is still gentle, but there’s a stern tone hidden somewhere in the back and Sirius is compelled to tell the truth.

“There are two ways that you can die in this war, after you’ve chosen a side. Either you are killed by the other side or you offend your own and pay the consequences. And if Regulus was not killed by our side, he was killed by Voldemort. And if he didn’t make a very stupid mistake, it means that he turned sides, in the end. And then, that means that he had the potential to change his mind inside him all this time, and I misjudged him. And that makes it partly my fault, because in that case, maybe I could have helped him, could have been there for him. That’s what big brothers are for, aren’t they?” His laugh is a short bark. “A part of me wants him to be wrong rather than myself. I guess that makes me a terrible person.”

“Ah, but we are all curiously prone to misjudge others just as often as we misjudge ourselves. And one of the main reasons for this is that the potential to change is inside all of us, all the time. It is an essential part of our humanity. Being wrong does not make us bad persons, and neither does the desire to be right. What we must not allow ourselves is to become too blinded by our prejudices to change our perception and try to judge impartially. You tried to find out the truth, but sometimes the truth is a very elusive good. So, considering the evidence you have, what is most likely?”

“I don’t know. I can’t know.”

“Well, let us consider the probability that he was killed by Voldemort’s opponents. None of the Order know of a battle in which this could have happened, and neither do the Aurors. Of course, it is possible that he was killed by an individual who is not affiliated with either, or that he died from his wounds off the battlefield. But in this case, neither Voldemort nor his followers would have any reason to keep the news from his family. That means that they had not learned of his death either.”

“You mean that it sounds unlikely.” Sirius whispers the words, looking down at the table rather than into the piercing blue. “You mean that it’s far more likely that he offended Voldemort, or any other Death Eater. That they got rid of him quietly, because admitting that another Black deserted them would not make good publicity. That they didn’t tell mother because they don’t want to anger her. You mean it’s far more likely that I was wrong.”

Dumbledore shakes his head. “What I mean is that there is no way to know if we are wrong or right in some cases. There are myriads of possible scenarios. Would it hurt anybody to believe that Regulus made the right choice?”

“Give him the benefit of the doubt?” Sirius’ voice is more steady now. “I guess it wouldn’t. Although it might just ruin whatever afterlife he’s in now if he learns that his Gryffindor brother defames his Death Eater martyr status.”

Is he imagining it, or do Dumbledore’s lips really twitch? “I would have said something about this being the noble choice, but you found a way to avoid the compliment.”

He puts a hand on Sirius’ shoulder in a silent good-bye gesture before he Disapparates. When his hand lifts, Sirius feels immensely lighter. Benefit of the doubt.

Rest in peace, Reg.