lay your weary head to rest, don't you cry no more (sirius)

[Albus Severus Potter]

Albus was beside himself. He was worrying about things. He had to leave things in his brothers hand though that they would find Cato, but who would get hurt in the process. Various members of their family had been hurt or killed thanks to the asshole. How many more would get hurt? Would Cato go after his son again? He couldn’t ask Ethan to stay where Albus could see him until the threat ended. He would hate that and Albus had no idea when this was going to end.

Another owl came to his office. He looked at the letter and saw that it was indeed from Blackwell. Pictures of his children and wife were all in the letter just like the ones before that. Albus hands started to shake as he watched his children walk around Hogwarts in these photos. He needed more security there, he needed to warn the aurors and other people. He grabbed the other letters that had been sent to him before. He stopped at the most recent letter watching Keliy in their house. He had found the house. The room started spinning. The letters fell out of his hands as pain shot through his left arm and into his chest. His heart was beating too fast. He was on his knees his face white and then his heart just stopped. He crashed into the floor, the letters flying all around him.





Tagged: James Sirius Potter

[James Sirius Potter]

After his most recent hospital stay and the weeks at home recovering that followed, Sirius had been more than happy to find himself back in his office once again. Luckily, Claire had taken on his duties along with her own while he had been out of the office – as she had done for him on more than one occasion before – and that meant his return to work was relatively smooth. She had brought paperwork for him to sign, and anything that needed his approval home over the weeks he had been out of the office, so there really wasn’t much that he was behind when he came back, allowing him to jump into things, business as usual.

Now, a week into his stint stuck in the office, Sirius was becoming far more restless – but until today even if he had been cleared for field duty, there wouldn’t have been anything serious enough to take him out of the office. This morning however they had been greeted with an owl carrying news of another homicide scene, one that until further investigation may or may not be related to everything going on with Cato Blackwell. Of course, he had immediately handed the note off to Claire, knowing she would be overseeing things until they knew whether Blackwell was involved or not, and then limped off into the primary office in the aurors department and started calling off names of their best and most trusted aurors to accompany her.

Then he tried his luck at trying to slip his way in, casually, hoping it may for once slip Claire’s mind that he was restricted to the office, interrogations and anything but field work. Sirius went to their office and filled his flask as he always did before such a gruesome task as overseeing a homicide scene, and then started pulling on his coat as he felt Claire’s gaze on him. When he looked up he was met with a piercing look that simply said, “We’re not going to argue over this, are we?” and he merely shrugged with uncertainty. “It’s not really field work if we’re just walking around, is it?” he offered, but to no avail.

Before long Claire and the team he had called for had left the office, and he found himself sitting there drumming his fingers on his desk, taking a sip of whiskey from his flask rather annoyed. By eleven he had finished going through all the paperwork he had let pile up over the last couple days. He then wandered out to the rest of the department to assign tasks to the aurors who were available and checked in on the status of a few different cases – including hoping for a positive update on the whereabouts of Blaine Koon, the boy who had been raised by Cato Blackwell, who also happened to be the boy who was fathering his soon-to-be-born grandchildren. Unfortunately, nothing had turned up yet – something he was getting tired of hearing day after day.

At this point, Claire would still be gone for a few hours at least, and Sirius was running out of things to keep himself busy on an otherwise slow day. When he was finished ensuring that things were running smoothly in the office he decided he would go see if he could convince Albus to go get lunch and have a drink with him. It had been quite a while since they had been able to do that – since Ethan’s kidnapping last fall, Albus had been spending most of his free time trying to get his son to talk to him, spend more time with him, and understand a little better. Sirius being rather close with his nephew, tried to convince him to give his dad a chance – he was hoping Albus would be able to tell him that he has been.

Sirius almost regretted his decision about halfway through the walk across the Ministry of Magic from the aurors office to the Ministers office. It was a relief when he finally made it to the lift that would take him to Albus office, shifting his weight onto his left leg and leaning on the wall as it traveled up, and glad he had braced himself against the wall when it jerked to a halt – if he hadn’t he might have been knocked off balance. When Sirius reached his little brothers office however, he was confused at first as he saw the desk from a distance – but Albus wasn’t sitting at it pouring over paperwork as he usually was.

Knocking on the wall, Sirius called out, “Hey, I’m here to abduct you so I’m not drinking by myself at lunch. Get ready.” After taking a few steps into the office however, the scene he found had him in a panic. Albus was on the floor – scattered on the floor all around him were pictures eerily similar to the ones he had received of Juliette and Claire, and then he noticed the handwriting on the letters strewn between the photos and knew instantly they were from Blackwell. Sirius ran to his brother as soon as he saw him, ignoring the pain shooting through his knee as he did, though it gave out as he tried to crouch next to Albus – just as he realized his brother wasn’t breathing.

In a matter of seconds, Sirius had his wand out, using a spell to temporarily lift the restrictions on apparating, his free hand grabbing Albus around the wrist checking for a pulse and feeling his heart drop when he couldn’t find it. He touched his wand to Albus chest and used a spell that would shoot a small jolt of electricity through him in hopes that this would do the trick – and suddenly he felt a pulse, faint, but there. Before Albus could crash again, Sirius apparated him to St. Mungo’s hospital and started yelling for healers to get a move on helping and find out what happened to his little brother.

[Albus Severus Potter]

The whole world went black. The pain echoed throughout him but it came from his left arm and his chest. He had to get to the kids and his wife. He had to make sure they were okay but he could not move any closer to the door. His eyes rolled to the back of his head as he laid there on the ground. His wand was out of his reach. He could not get help. Everything turned black. He did not hear Sirius when he came in or see him rush to him. Years passed through his dream state as he laid there between death and living. Things he did in his past coming back to haunt him. His children telling him that he spends too much time at work, and not enough time at home. All he wanted was a better world for them.

Hours and hour’s healers spent working on him trying to get his heart to continue to beat. It stopped again and they immediately took him into surgery. Open-heart surgery was their best option to save Albus, but even that could go wrong. Hours more passed and they finally get his heart beating and fixed. They closed up his chest and bandaged where they opened him up. He was put onto a breathing machine, as they could not get his breathing to start again. They put him in a room and told Sirius everything that happened and what they had to do. They said he could recover or he could not. They told him that the next few hours is critical and that they are hoping he wakes up.

Days passed and Albus did not wake up. The beginning of the second week healers told Sirius that it may be a good idea to let Albus go and asked him to talk to Albus wife about the possibility. Kaley was asleep in a chair in Albus room for days before Harry and Ginny finally made her go home, shower, eat, and sleep in her bed. It was some odd hours after that when Albus finally opened his eyes.


Tagged: James Sirius Potter

[James Sirius Potter]

What had originally been plans to talk shit until he convinced his little brother to take an hour out of his day to have lunch together had quickly turned into a world of panic as he opened the door to the office only to find Albus not breathing on the floor. As quickly as he had been able to move he had managed to lift the spell restricting him from apparating from the office, managed to send a shock wave of electricity just strong enough through his brother to keep him alive long enough to get there, and apparate him to the hospital – where he immediately started yelling until someone noticed them. However, with Albus being the Minister of Magic there was a huge sense of urgency within the whole floor – every available healer that could help did their part and they got him into surgery quickly – leaving Sirius to pace around worried for far too long.

While Albus was in surgery there was nothing to do except wait – he went back to the Ministry when they told him it would take a while, hours even, only so he could return the proper restrictions on his brothers office and inform Claire that he wouldn’t be back in that afternoon. Of course, she understood and stayed behind in the office to keep things in a working order the way she always did – in the meantime Sirius did everything he knew he was supposed to do – inform the people just under Albus that he was in the hospital, and that someone else would have to take care of things until they knew what was going on; and that from the looks of things, he might be there a while, it hadn’t looked good and the healers hadn’t been willing to give him any idea of how well or quickly his brother might recover from this.

After taking care of all the things a department head so close to the Minister would need to take care of, he then did the more important, but harder for him thing to do – which was tell Albus wife what was going on. While perhaps they weren’t the closest, they were family and it was harder to handle anything personal than it was for him to take care of things related to work – but when he finally told her she broke down a little and he was there to hold her, much the way her and Albus had both done for him after he had lost Kayla and his girls – he hated to think it but he knew they both were (even if neither would say it out loud); there was a chance Albus wasn’t making it out of this one.

Together they went back to the hospital and waited for what felt like ages – really it was several hours and still far too long – before the healers finally came out and spoke to Sirius, who had been pacing around and limping badly in front of the doors waiting for them. They told him how his brother had a heart attack – a bad one – and they had to do open-heart surgery to save his life. However, as it stood right now, he wasn’t breathing on his own and things could truly go either way – they wouldn’t really know until he finally woke up. Fists clenched, attempting to control his own emotions, Sirius nodded and limped down the hall to fill in his sister-in-law before they both went in to see Albus.

Things only got harder from there – he got home very late that night, after being unable to convince Albus wife to go home too, but he didn’t get much in the way of sleep. Instead, he stayed up talking with Claire who was naturally an insomniac and always there to help him pick through his thoughts late at night in a way that didn’t happen with anyone else. Eventually, he had fallen asleep for a couple of hours, only to be woken by rolling onto his stomach which hurt and woke him up as the wounds on his torso were still healing and tender – from there he showered and went back to the hospital to check on things with Albus; but as he expected there was very little change.

It was time to make sure his children knew what was going on as well – so he paid a visit to Hogwarts to talk to each of the children individually, Ethan out at the Quidditch pitch where he knew he would find him – Aria and the others he pulled from class and told there – all of them told that they were welcome to stop attending classes for the time being, and are allowed to go see their father for as long as they want. The younger children all went to their mother and fathers side, but Ethan – the boy just didn’t seem to know how to handle anything these days, not that Sirius could blame him after everything he had been through – he must have decided to stay at the school and deal with his emotions in his own way. The worst part of all of this was the fact that there was nothing they could do but wait – and they had no choice but to wait – how long could they keep it up?

It had been a couple of weeks now and Sirius had gone back to work after a couple days, stopping by the hospital every evening to find out if there had been any change in his brothers’ condition. It was the only time he had ever really voluntarily walked into that building so frequently in his life – but he wanted desperately to find out that Albus had woken up; he had lost enough people, he didn’t want to lose his brother as well, he just couldn’t deal with that right now. At one point, he had punched a hole through a wall at what was now Claire’s and his house (repairing it with magic before Claire could get home and see it), he was definitely back to drinking and smoking a bit more than he had been (and the smoking was hurting more than he cared to admit because of the slowly healing wounds on his chest).

It was just more than he was prepared to handle – and then the healers approached him with the one thing he didn’t want to hear – that perhaps it was time to talk to his wife about letting go. If it had been days, there was still a good chance he would wake up, but weeks had now passed with no changes – things weren’t looking very good. His parents had convinced his sister-in-law to go home and get some rest, a shower and sleep somewhere other than an uncomfortable chair at Albus bedside – he was glad she wasn’t there when the healers had finally brought up the subject, they had all been avoiding. Sirius was pacing around Albus room – from one end to the other, around the bed one way then the other, his leg protesting more, causing the limp to get worse with every step the longer he kept it up.

One hand was wrapped tightly around his flask, the other balled into a fist that he was trying so hard to not put through another wall – as he took a sip from the flask, letting the burning liquid slide down his throat in excess yet again, he felt his knee start to give and he caught himself on the wall to his right. Leaning against the wall he groaned loudly in a combination of frustration and anger – then he slid down to sit on the floor, looking up at his brother laying in the bed, looking just as lifeless as he had the day he found him on his office floor. “This is bullshit,” he muttered in anger, assuming himself to be alone. “You can’t fucking do this Albus… You can’t fucking die on me now… You made me stick around… so damn it you need to, too…” he said somewhat softly, head in one hand as the other tipped the flask back to his lips, completely unaware of the fact that his brother had just woken up.