Prologue
"Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession."
The words were muffled in the tiny confession booth of the cathedral she only visited in the middle of the night. The seat upon which she sat was flatly cushioned, but she was never in the booth long enough for the lack of comfort to become painful. Her hands were folded in her lap and her eyes were downcast, never looking through the grate at the priest who listened to her tell him the details about best and worst part of her life.
"My cousin died last night and I could have prevented it."
She never wasted her time or the priest's with her petty crimes against the God to which he'd devoted his life. She always cut right to the chase.
"If it was his time to return to the arms of God, there was nothing you could have done," the priest said in a quiet voice, and at those words her face scrunched up and she felt the beginnings of hot tears prickle in her eyes.
"Don't," she said in a voice so choked she surprised even herself. "Don't give me all of that it was his time bollocks. It wasn't his time, he was barely even thirty-six years old! Don't tell me it was his bloody time!"
The priest remained quiet for a moment, allowing the sobbing woman the time to collect herself before he spoke.
"How do you think you could have prevented it?"
She sighed heavily. "I'm trained to prevent that sort of thing for happening. I should have done a better job, I should have—I should have gotten the information. I don't know how I missed it, all those careful months of planning that bastard went through to lure them there—his followers had to have known. How could they have not? First the Azkaban thing and this—" She choked once more, angrily brushing the tears from her cheeks with the back of her trembling hand. "I should have been able to prevent it. I should have known it was going to happen. He shouldn't be dead."
There was another long pause as she cried, and when it seemed as if her tears were finally abating, priest spoke once more.
"Without the information, there was nothing you could have done. You did your job exactly the way you were supposed to. No blames you."
"I blame myself," she snapped. "I should have done a better job. After everything—after everything I've gone through and done for this bloody cause…after all that, the only decent bloody relative I have still dies. I feel like I've done all of that for nothing, like it didn't help anything."
"You know very well that it wasn't all for nothing," the priest said calmly, looking at his subject, whose head was still bent low as if in prayer. But they both knew she didn't pray, and he was certain she didn't even believe in his god.
She swallowed tightly, closed her eyes, and attempted to regain control of her emotions. If she blocked out the pain, compartmentalized like she'd been taught…
There. No more tears, at least for now.
"I also killed a man two nights ago. If I didn't, he was going to kill me."
This confession was by far the lesser of the two, as far as how she felt about it. She'd killed before—never in cold-blood, always in self-defense. It was her job.
"God forgives you," the priest murmured quietly, and for the first time that night, she turned her head to meet the priest's eyes.
"Will your god understand if I don't forgive myself?"
The amount of pain that went into those words settled heavily in the priest's mind, and her eyes—a shade of indigo he'd never before seen in an iris—bore into his for a moment in time that could have easily lasted forever.
Finally she stood and left the booth, leaving the priest behind to think about the confession he'd just heard. For Nymphadora Tonks, it was never about religion; all she'd ever wanted was for someone to care.
