Title: The Unspoken Ally
Author: bridgetlynn
Fandom/Genre: Harry Potter/NCIS Fusion
Relationship(s): pre-slash Tony DiNozzo/Sirius Black
Content Rating: R
Warnings: canon-level violence, language, fanon accepted conspiracy theories
Friday August 27th 1993
Paddington Estate
Hartland-Bideford
Devon, United Kingdom
“A Month! A whole month back in England and you didn’t even think to come and see me…or at least just tell me you’re back home. But I mean, why would you think to do that? Afterall, I’m only your mother!”
Tony, sitting on an armchair in the sitting room, kept his face blank as his mother, pacing the room, continued the rant that she had started almost a full twenty minutes earlier; a rant that had begun as happy surprise that Tony had come from Rome for a visit and quickly devolved when he let it slip that he had actually been staying in the family’s Hogsmeade cottage, the home he had been using as his own since he graduated Hogwarts, since the first week of August.
“Mum!” he finally interrupted her, sending a glare at his younger brother who was on the other couch barely covering his own amusement. “I had research to do and I couldn’t have it getting out that I was back in England,” he added, not for the first time since she had started in on him.
“And I make it a habit of going around and advertising family business then do I? I don’t know what it’s like to be married to someone who has access to severely confidential information?”
“No,” Tony admitted. “It was just easier if you didn’t have to lie about it,” he continued verbally. Privately, he had decided it would be easier if she didn’t know that he back since she wouldn’t have reacted well when he told her he couldn’t spend any time with the family since he was too busy splitting his time between spying on a 13 year old girl and a 112 year old man. She already hated that he was always putting himself in danger working in law enforcement; he didn’t need her worried he was going to get arrested for potentially being considered a pervert or for whatever Dumbledore could cook up.
“Well now that I know you’re back does this mean I’ll get to see my son more often?”
“Probably,” Tony admitted; with the school year active both of his targets would be mostly stationary at the potential scene of the crime. “I’ll try and make it to monthly dinners at the very least. But hey, if I was in Rome you wouldn’t ever see me. So there’s that.”
“But you aren’t in Rome Anthony. You’re home.”
“Yes Mother,” Tony finally agreed, shooting Crispian a two-fingered salute when Lyra had turned her back on the two.
“I saw that Anthony,” she snapped. “Now then, go unpack. Dinner is in a two hours and your father will be home soon.”
Tony barely refrained from rolling his eyes as he got up off the couch, taking the escape that was offered despite knowing that Kip would have already unpacked the small bag he had brought for the weekend, taking note of his younger brother following him out of the room.
“You’re an asshole,” he hissed at the sixteen year old once he was certain they were far enough away from their mother so as not to be overheard.
“Yes I am,” Crispian agreed with a smirk. “But she’s not wrong you know. It would have been nice to see you this summer now that I know you were around.”
Tony sighed, entering his bedroom with his brother following behind him, “I know Cris. I really did have things to do that were time sensitive.”
Tony removed the suit jacket he was wearing, not daring to arrive to the expected verbal execution without looking properly dressed, and laid it on the bed before dropping down next to his brother on the small couch near the bedroom’s fireplace. He reached over and hauled the younger boy into his side and ruffled his hair, holding on for a moment before asking, “So…how’s life?”
Crispian scowled, pushing himself away and simultaneously attempting to straighten his light brown hair, “Berk. But since you asked so nicely; life’s fine. Dad’s been busy this summer; especially now that Sirius Black escaped. I think he’s trying to use that as an excuse to ask some hard questions without, maybe, getting a run around this time.”
Tony nodded in agreement; not letting his brother know that he had actually spoken to their father about that very subject two weeks ago. He figured it would probably be a good idea not to let their mother know that Clive had known of their son’s return to the U.K. the day after he arrived.
“Ready for sixth year?” Tony continued his questioning, trying to think of a subtle way to get the information he wanted to know without being obvious about it. The problem was that even in Rome he hadn’t lost touch with his younger sibling – the relationship was too used to being relegated to letters while Tony, and then Crispian, was away at school. They wrote at minimum every two weeks so it wasn’t as though he didn’t know what was going on with the younger male.
“Yes,” Crispian replied, nodding and looking at Tony with a strange expression. “What’s up Tony? If you want to know something just ask.”
“Why do you think I’m looking to ask something. Maybe I just want to know what my little brother is ready for the beginning of his NEWTs program?”
Crispian visibly rolled his eyes at that and straightened up further on the couch before speaking in a near monotone, “Let’s see – I got full O’s on my OWLs. I’m taking NEWTs in everything except Divination and Muggle Studies. I took my GCSEs last month and am fairly certain I did well. Mum will continue to send me my correspondence work for my A-level’s. Yes, I’m still leaning towards medicine over business for after Hogwarts. Slytherin lost the cup again last year. Oh wait! You know all this.”
“Stop being a twit,” Tony shot back. “So you really are thinking of doing that medical program in the States after graduation?”
Crispian nodded and replied, smiling more brightly than a pureblood Slytherin would normally dare, “Yes. Thank you for finding it for me. I was having a bitch of a time doing it while at school. A third of my house would curse me in the back if I openly asked about muggle schooling; it’s hard enough keeping my correspondence work from them as it is.”
“Yea; I remember that stupidity from when I was in school. I still have no idea how you wound up in Slytherin anyway.”
“You don’t think it’s ambitious to want to become both a muggle doctor and a magical healer?”
“I think it’s very ambitious,” Tony responded. “I just remember what that house was like when I was in Hogwarts and, unfortunately, at the time they only cared about how pure your blood is and how big your Gringott’s vault is.”
“Oh, well, that’s still what most of them care about. But there’s a few people who aren’t complete wastes of space,” Crispian replied, shrugging. “Not many mind you, but enough where I’m not completely friendless inside my own house.”
“And you’re sure you want to put yourself through this kind of work during your NEWT years? Even I stopped after my GCSEs. A-levels on top of NEWTs will be a bitch.”
“I’m certain,” the younger boy insisted. “I need to do this if I want to turn ‘Paddington Farms’ into what I think it can be,” he added, referring to the system of Farms through the U.K. (with a few in Western and Southern Europe), growing plants and raising animals for sale as potions ingredients, the family had owned for generations and the sole reason they had their fortune.
‘Paddington Farms’ had in all technicality started in the seventeen-hundreds on the very estate the family was currently occupying. However, the estate itself had belonged to the Paddington family, according to the histories, for hundreds upon hundreds of years before that. The oldest record anyone in the family was aware of dated to the 7th century, a record of land acquisition for 500 acres, when Devon was still considered part of the Kingdom of Dumnonia; long before it had ever become part of Great Britain. At that point their name had been recorded as Paddatun; which linguistic enthusiasts in the family had eventually traced the origins of to pre-7th century Olde English; specifically to large region between a triangle of modern Southampton, Surrey and Brighton.
In fact, as far as Tony knew, the Paddington family, was one of the few (if not only) pureblood family that purposefully traced their line back further than they had possessed magic. The first Paddington’s to even have magic had been a quintet of siblings – technically all muggleborn – and they hadn’t been born until the 10th century themselves. Judging by the timing of the family birth records, references to a Mistress Ravenclaw and the known dates of Hogwarts operation it was generally accepted among the family that the Paddatun children had probably been amongst the first Hogwarts students.
Tony knew the records his family kept galled the real hard-line blood-purists because they proved that in all probability every magical family had begun with a muggleborn witch or wizard. He knew it bothered them even more that a family line as “old” as the Paddington’s had zero problem marrying muggles or magical’s without a pure lineage – and yet, that very same age of their family line meant that the purists couldn’t call the Paddington’s anything other than pureblood.
He had very carefully not considered what family records that old meant in conjunction with what he had learned from Nimue about supposedly being descended from Galahad. As a Wizard he knew Camelot, Arthur and the Knights were more than just fables. That didn’t mean that even magicals knew where Camelot had actually been located; those records had been long since lost, destroyed or hidden. And he wasn’t about to be the person to show off his family’s origins and perhaps imply that he knew where his line had emigrated from a mere three hundred years after Arthur supposedly died. Other families knew the Paddington records existed; that didn’t mean they knew what they contained.
The estate had obviously evolved, and shrunk from 500 to 50 acres, over the years; but the location of the ‘family seat’ had remained the same. Hundreds of variations of homes had been built upon the land their sprawling three floor farmhouse now stood going back to the time a grand castle had stood upon the cliffs they overlooked. What hadn’t changed was the deep vault located under the home. Even back before the family had magic, they had built a large secure, reinforced (and always first to be repaired and maintained) room that held records, artwork and jewelry belonging to the family. Tony had always known it as a magical vault and assumed that upon the development of their Family Magic that a Patriarch had at some point chosen to rebuild the vault to preserve the items within the best way possible. Unfortunately, before it had been magically remodeled there was only so much protection it had been able to offer to the actual written documents. Tony really didn’t want to think about how that vault, and the idea that the family should need one, only reinforced the knowledge that Nimue had given him.
“Tony are you listening to me?” his younger brother’s voice broke through his slightly frazzled thoughts and Tony quickly looked up apologetically.
“Yes, I was. I promise,” he responded and thanked Merlin for a proficiency in occulmency that allowed him to ‘listen’ without fully paying attention. “You were telling me about how you wanted to study muggle medicine and become a healer so that you could turn ‘Paddington Farms’ into more then just a potions ingredient production. You want to branch out into actual potions development for retail sale and medical research for better magical pharmaceuticals.”
“Okay, so you were listening. I never know when you get that look.”
“What look?”
“The look that says you’ve bitten off more then you can chew and you would very much like the world to swallow you up whole. I’m really grateful to be the younger brother when you look like that.”
Tony winced at the comment and glanced at his brother, “Cris…you know.”
“Nope,” his brother interrupted before he could continue. “I know you’re adopted, on a technicality. Fuck that. You’re my older brother and the heir; and let’s be honest, I have zero interest in anything Dad does. I’m much happier in Mum’s lab brewing something then I am sitting around the dinner table talking policy.”
“But you’re good at it when you have to be,” Tony insisted, never wanting his brother to feel remotely diminished.
“Yes, when I have to be. You’re good at it all the time; even if you don’t particularly like it. I might be a Slytherin; but I have zero political ambitions. I’m going to drag magical medicine into the next century by driving myself crazy doing an insanely intensive eight year program through Johns Hopkins and then I’m going to come back here and make a big splash and piss off all the purebloods who think muggles are either dumb animals or adorable curiosities.”
“And you’re going to be awesome at it,” Tony agreed, smiling at the teenager. And while he had always been proud of his brother’s compassion and lack of guile – something that had surprisingly survived the House of Snakes fully intact – he was more than thrilled with his goals than ever before. Because if the rumors circulating around Hogwarts that he had heard about, and was currently busy trying to confirm, were true then he wanted his baby brother as far away from England as he could get as soon as possible. And if Tony was forced to knock him out, tie him up and ship him to Baltimore after graduation then that was what he would do.
His Crispian; the little boy that had followed him around since the day he could walk, the little boy who had told Tony at six years old “I wanna be you when I grow up”, the now teenager who even at sixteen only thought about others before himself was not going to know the kind of pain he had seen in the eyes of his peers during his first three years at Hogwarts.
Later that night, after an awkward dinner that saw his mother continue to snipe at Tony for not telling her of his return to England earlier, Tony found himself sitting in his Patriarch’s study with the older man and his younger brother.
“So, Mum’s pissed,” Tony stated blandly to the other two Paddington men.
“You know she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of you going to Rome in the first place Anthony,” his father answered.
“She didn’t have a problem with it at first,” Tony reminded his father and trade a glance with his younger brother, whom he knew had not informed their mother yet about his plans to go to the United States after graduation.
“She didn’t have a problem with it at first because she focused on the fact that you were going to get a ‘Defense & Law’ mastery. She initially assumed that meant your plans also involved leaving the field and moving into either prosecution or even just research in the Department. When she realized you weren’t only going to Rome to study; but were in fact going to be working with Interpol she grew concerned.”
“Father, you have an ability to understate like no one else I’ve ever met,” Crispian interjected with a raised eyebrow. “Mum didn’t grow concerned…she lost the damned plot.”
“Don’t harass your Mother on this issue; either of you. She’s a strong woman; but she’s still your Mother. She’s always going to worry. There were too many close calls during the War. The fact that our family escaped relatively unscathed is a miracle in and of itself.”
“Yes Father,” both of the younger men replied promptly upon hearing their Father’s stern tone.
“Now, Anthony; I don’t know all the details of why you are back. I haven’t been told and if you haven’t told me I’m sure you have a reason. That being said, have you thought of a logical reason to tell people that you’re back?”
“I haven’t quite gotten that far yet,” Tony admitted. “Until tonight only Madam Bones and Auror Scrimgeour, outside of the Department, knew I was back.”
“Luckily, I have. I spread it around the Wizengamot today that with Sirius Black’s escape I called you back as your Patriarch. That overrules everything else and no one would think to question it. It’s also gotten around to a few key people over the last two years that you wear the Black Heir ring. I’ll let the general citizenry make of those two facts and how they connect what they will.”
“So, you called me back because Sirius Black could potentially claim his Lordship. A Lordship that I was…what…waiting for the time to run out on him claiming it? So I could claim it myself?”
“Knowing the sheep that run the Wizengamot that’s exactly what they will think.”
“Well alright then. That works nicely. I’m a little annoyed I didn’t think of it myself,” Tony responded, frowning slightly.
“You’ve been a little busy,” his father pointed out with a straight faced expression but highly amused eyes. “I hope you made yourself scarce during more, private, moments son.”
“Oh yes, very funny Father,” Tony shot back, sounding disgusted. “I wasn’t anywhere near that close thank you very much.”
His father’s only response was to laugh at his put out expression and Crispian’s confused one.
“This is why I’m going into medicine. I don’t know what you two are talking about and I do not want to know either,” Tony’s younger brother interjected over their father’s chuckles.
“You really don’t,” Tony replied, shaking his head. “Oh! As annoying as that comment was; Dad inadvertently reminded me of something I meant to ask you earlier,” he continued in a more serious tone. “Do you know Hermione Granger? She’d be going into her third year at Hogwarts.”
Tony watched his brother carefully as he asked and found it both amusing and interesting when the young man blushed and averted his eyes but also seemed to be gathering his thoughts before speaking, “I don’t know her. But I know of her. She’s a Gryffindor and three class years behind me. Why?”
“Well, now I want to know for an entirely different reason Cris. You blushed!”
“I did not,” his brother snapped back, blushing darker and making Tony glad that his skin had maintained the more olive hued, easier to tan, Paddington skin while his brother had gotten their mother’s much paler ‘Black’ complexion to go with their father’s hair color.
“You absolutely did. Don’t tell me you have a crush on a thirteen year old.”
“She’s going to be fourteen soon,” Crispian immediately answered him and then groaned. “Merlin. You’re going to torture me aren’t you?”
Tony glanced their father’s way and saw that he had moved to his desk to do paperwork, but was still paying his son’s attention and throwing amused glances his youngest’s way.
“I’m not going to torture you. But if you could tell me whatever you know, without asking why I want to know, I’ll love you forever.”
The expression on Crispian’s face, and their father’s almost inaudible snort of laughter, told all Tony he needed to know about how that statement had gone over.
“That expression hasn’t worked on me since I was seven and you used it to convince me to go steal Christmas cookies from the kitchen elves since you were too big to sneak in anymore,” the youngest male responded, rolling his eyes as he spoke.
“I’m sorry?” Tony replied, smiling innocently and pushing down a smirk. “But seriously, what do you know about this girl?”
Crispian sighed, containing the blush and responded, “Not much actually. She’s cute and she’s really, crazily, smart. But she has just finished her second year, half of which she spent in the infirmary, so I don’t really know much more.”
“Infirmary?” Tony questioned and saw his own father’s head look up curiously at that.
“Yes, infirmary,” Crispian replied and then frowned. “Something happened? A few students were hurt…I don’t think it was that big of a deal.”
“Several students were hurt and you don’t think it was a big deal?” Tony asked his brother incredulously. This was his brother who had wanted to be a doctor since he was eight. “What happened to them?”
“I…don’t know? I mean, I do know. They were petrified,” Crispian answered and rubbed his forehead. “They were petrified and then they got better. But it took awhile. My head hurts.”
“That’s enough Anthony,” Clive Paddington interrupted Tony, who had been about to ask his brother another question, and moved swiftly across the room towards his younger son. Tony watched their father wave his wand a few times in the general direction of his brother and seconds later Crispian was sleeping on the couch.
“Dad?” Tony choked out, nervously glancing at the younger boy.
“He’s alright,” Clive responded, squeezing Tony’s shoulder. “There’s a minor block; more like a screen really. The memories are still there, but they’ve been dulled to the point where they have no importance. He wouldn’t feel the need to ever bring them up or talk about them.”
“The pain?”
“Your brother is powerful. Very powerful in fact,” Clive explained. “His magic was trying to give him what he wanted.”
“The complete memory,” Tony guessed and saw his father nod. “But the pain?”
“Whoever placed the screen was very powerful. It would take more then what essentially boiled down to accidental magic to break that.”
“Can it be broken?” Tony asked his father, leaving unsaid the only logical conclusion as to who could have done the magic itself. “Cause, what he just did fits at least two other students.”
“It can be. I’ll have to do it in ritual if I want to harvest the entire screen and still be able to identify the caster. If I want to just use blunt force to break it I could do that here and now.”
“Do it in ritual. Even if you have to wait until Christmas,” Tony instructed, making an executive decision as he thought about what he had heard about Susan Bones and Hannah Abott only being able to recall the barest of details of certain events of their first and second years at Hogwarts. “I don’t think he knows anything I really need to know. I was mostly just feeling him out about Granger.”
“Don’t tease your brother,” their father chided. “From everything I’ve heard Lucius bitch about the girl she’d make an excellent daughter-in-law.”
“I don’t know,” Tony replied quietly. “Fate might have other plans for her,” he added.
“Don’t tease him either way,” Clive continued, giving Tony a stern look. “Your brother hasn’t had the easiest time of it these last two years you’ve been gone. It’s hard for him; I honestly expected you to be the Slytherin and him the Ravenclaw…or even Hufflepuff. He’s softer…no that’s the wrong word…he’s kinder than most people I know. He cares about others before himself in a way that I have never seen before. His only goal is to heal people and make medicine, wizarding and muggle, more accessible. And as he’s gotten older and that’s been more obvious the other Slytherin’s have been bordering on eating him alive.”
Tony considered his father’s words as he eyed his younger brother and had to ask, “Is he a Potential? Did he get selected this summer?”
“Of course,” Clive replied looking at Tony as though he had two heads. “Why would you ask such a ridiculous question. You know that doesn’t mean you can discuss things with him of course.”
“I know the rules,” Tony responded but kept his gaze on his brother. “Are you sure he’s right for it. He’s strong and smart; but, he doesn’t do secrets well.”
“He’ll learn,” the boy’s father answered firmly. “Our family, with very few exceptions, have been Unspeakables for as long as there has been a Department of Mysteries. It is our honor to serve the Crown and England.”
Tony nodded, having had this argument with his father on more than one occasion since Crispian started Hogwarts and never having won it. At least he could be comforted by the fact that Crispian wouldn’t even be eligible to be fully sworn for at least a decade at minimum. He’d need to be finished with his medical training first. Hopefully, whatever was getting ready to rear it’s head would be well over and done by then.
“I’ll take him to bed,” Tony spoke to the now silent room, his father settling himself at the desk once more. “I’ll see you and Mum in the morning.”
“Goodnight Anthony,” was the only response he got as Tony levitated his brother and headed out of the office.
Where Fiction & Fandom Collide 