A/N: I apologize so, so deeply to those readers who have stuck with this story for years, waiting for an update. I am happy to let you know that I have found my inspiration again and will be finishing it within the next several months. I will then tackle "The Ghost of You" (Hermione x Salazar Slytherin). Please read my profile page if you feel you need more in the way of an explanation as to why I stopped updating in the first place. Rest assured that while the rest of "Coward" is not written yet, I have substantial portions of future chapters ready as well as a layout of most of the rest.

Please also be sure to check out the new prequel to "Coward"—"Unsung Heroes," set sometime in August 1997, after the Battle of the Seven Potters. There is a reference to that one-shot in this chapter if you squint!

This chapter is dedicated to my wonderful new beta, lisbethsalandrr. Any remaining mistakes are my own. I also want to give thanks to provocative envy, with whom I am co-authoring a Hermione x Kingsley nonmagical AU drabble series on tumblr (follow me: gueneviere-fics). It features secret agent!Kingsley, skeptical grad student!Hermione, and it has been a delight to write. We might post it here or elsewhere when its done. I also want to thank cocoartist and justcourbeau for generally cheering me on.

And thank you all for reading. Please do send me a word of encouragement or feedback if you reach the end!

The fastest way to get a response from me these days is via tumblr! Ask away.

Disclaimer: I own nothing. J.K. Rowling is queen.

x

COWARD

By Gueneviere

XIII

AFTERMATH

For my part, I may speak it to my shame,

I have a truant been to chivalry;

And so I hear he doth account me too.

– Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

An Order meeting was scheduled at an indecently early hour the next morning.

Tonks dragged herself out of bed languidly, pouting at the fact that Remus had beat her to it. She half remembered the werewolf kissing her temple and whispering good morning. Tonks smiled through her entire shower, lengthening and shortening her bubblegum pink hair as she lathered it up.

She managed to get into civvies and make it halfway down the hall before the weight of last night's conversation with Hermione, and the rather less successful heart-to-heart with her best friend, dimmed her good mood.

Old Grimmauld was teeming with voices, but she found her boyfriend bent over the paper in the kitchen. Some tea and toast was waiting for her in the seat next to him, prepared, she knew, just the way she liked it. She looped her arms around his neck and sneaked a quick peck behind his ear.

"Morning, love," she greeted before dropping onto the chair. She could see that some non-resident Order members were already congregating in the hallway and outside the living room. "Is Kingsley here yet?"

"No, not yet," Remus replied, flipping a page.

Tonks sighed deeply. "I should go look for him. He might not wake up on his own. I'm afraid he must have drunk Tom's entire stock of firewhiskey yesterday."

Remus looked up with a smile. "That'd be quite an impressive feat indeed. I'm guessing he was celebrating his well-earned promotion?"

Tonks bit her lip, feeling the urge to shake her head. While Remus was an unusually perceptive man, Kingsley was an unusually guarded one, and it seemed the Marauder had failed to pick up on the Auror's mood.

She knew better though.

She decided not to illuminate her boyfriend on her best friend's love troubles. Especially considering who was on the receiving end of them.

"Right. I'll go get him now, shall I?" the Metamorphmagus said, making a move to get up.

Remus looked up at that. "No need. I sent Hermione a few minutes ago—Moody had his apartment key."

Tonks stopped on her tracks, her face frozen with ill-masked alarm. "H-Hermione?"

"Well, yes, they seem to be fast friends." Remus frowned, eyes narrowing a bit. "Why? What's wrong, Nymphadora?"

"Err—" Tonks quickly pulled herself together and decided that the best form to conceal the truth would be not to lie. Especially since she was not very good at it. "It's just that Kingsley might have some… company..."

A single raised eyebrow. "Company?"

"He, um, kind of picked up a girl yesterday."

"Oh," Remus blinked, surprised, then looked pensive for a second. "Well, Hermione's a mature young woman; I'm sure she'll be able to handle the situation appropriately."

Appropriately.

Right.

Tonks restrained herself from bolting from the room and out the front door.

Hermione had a head start on her already and there was no point in sealing her best friend's fate by making Remus suspicious of the nature of the Kingsley's relationship with the young Gryffindor.

It looked just like a regular Galleon, really: brass-colored, dull around the indentations, and as heavy as any Galleon that had ever passed through his hands. Lying on his couch still wearing last night's clothes, Kingsley rubbed his thumb over the coin as he had so often done since Hermione first gave it to him all those months ago. The knowledge that the tail of the Galleon was a direct line of communication with her and her alone still brought a smile to his face, despite the disastrous events of the past week.

Dropping the fake coin—the best he had ever seen in his entire Auror career, the girl was good—on his chest, Kingsley brought both hands to his face. He had drunk more last night than he had since his days in the Academy, and he didn't weather hangovers as well as he did in his early twenties.

He was genuinely worried about his behavior lately—drinking carelessly while in the middle of a war, so soon after his promotion, and on the eve of an important Order meeting… It wasn't like him.

Not before he had fallen hard for Hermione Granger, anyway.

At least he had come home alone. He had tried to drown his sorrows and, when that plan had failed, he'd attempted to push them away in the embrace of an age-appropriate woman in the back of the Leaky. That is, until said woman had asked him in a breathy voice if he was actually a Shacklebolt, of the Sacred Twenty-Eight Shacklebolts.

The girl hadn't been after Head Auror Shacklebolt, after all. It was much worse. She had been after Kingsley Shacklebolt, pureblood of impeccable lineage.

The reminder of his unsavory family history made him sick. As the British Ambassador to the International Confederation of Wizards, his father may have been a vocal moderate voice in favor of Muggleborn integration, but his hypocrisy was the reason Kingsley had become an Auror and ultimately joined a vigilante group to fight Voldemort.

Picking up the Galleon again, he swung his legs down to the floor, and sat up on the couch. He needed to shake off this self-pity and take a goddamned shower. He couldn't afford to be late to this Order meeting.

His train of thought was interrupted by a soft knock. He whipped out his wand in a smooth movement.

Who could it be? If they had passed through his outermost wards then they were carrying a key. Tonks? Or Moody?

"Kingsley? I am sorry to come unannounced, but the Order meeting is about to start and Remus—"

The Auror crossed the room in a few long strides and opened his front door as fast as he could. He stared into the girl's dark eyes incredulously. "Hermione?"

"Hello," she greeted in a muted tone. A hint of a shimmer on the corner of her right eye indicating a malfunctioning glamour—it must be a good one to withstand his wards at all—probably hiding the same worry and lack of sleep he was sure she could see in his face.

But her eyes were not on his face at all; they were trained on a point under his jaw. Dismay hit him like an Aguamenti to the back of the head.

There was a lurid crimson stain on the snowy collar of his shirt.

"You're up." Her voice was glacial. "I'll see you there then."

"No, wait." He stepped out into the hallway barefooted, hesitating to touch her. She stopped walking, but didn't turn around.

Their places—Hermione, about to leave, he, on the verge of confessing his feelings, or making excuses, or both—painted a familiar tableau.

"If you have something to say, Kingsley, please do so; otherwise I'll be going. My masochism has its limits."

Hermione hid her face from him when she spoke, but her voice was so full of pain and anger that he felt her glare anyway.

Enough, his brain screamed. He was a grown-ass man and he had a war to win, a tainted family history to make amends for, and friends to see through it alive.

And this—the unsaid things in between them, the palpable silence, and the sense of what could be - this was familiar too.

"I'll be there in a minute, Hermione," he said at last.

Hermione just shook her head and disapparated almost soundlessly before his eyes, without even making a move for her wand.

Kingsley stared at the empty spot she had just vacated. After a few seconds, the pain his chest forced him to breathe in again.

He turned and made his way to the shower.

x

A/N: I know, I know: I disappear for years only to serve you more angst? This needed to be done, but you'll be happy to know that there is a whole lot of action a chapter away and some smut soon after that! I've already written the bulk of their first "getting together" scene because I couldn't help myself.

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