Title: Requiem
Writer: Moirae
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst
Period: circa 2006
Pairings: None
Summary: Kingsley Shacklebolt apologises to a few friends.
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. The plot, however, is created by the writer and is not to be replicated by another.
Writer's Notes: Written in response to someone giving me Kinsley as a character to write about. This is an unbeta'ed version.
Requiem
a kinsley shacklebolt moment
The waxing moon hung ominously through the fractions of greying clouds, radiated its dirty waves of pale light over the cemetery of Wandering Souls. Thousands of tombstones rank the sacred grounds--fallen soldiers to some unworthy war they soon as never fought in. Their bodies rot six feet below the Earth's soil, lonely and forgotten to those who never thought about them while they lived.
Crimson and copper leaves drifted tediously onto the dying grasses, the harvest season's frosts nipped at the bent, peridot blades. Standing timbers lined the graveyard, their barren twigs interlocked into a towering barrier. A solitary bat flew overheard; her wings beat out the argentous moon as she entered a crypt of a prominent wizarding family.
Silence flowed through the cemetery as the obsidian fogs that clung to the headstones and sepulchres. Mortal footsteps penetrated the perimeter of the necropolis as a hooded wizard grasping four black roses approached a chain of weatherworn graves. Winds yowled around him, ruffled the skirts of his colourless robes and provoked the autumn leaves to dance around him in an elaborate invocation.
Kingsley Shacklebolt knelt before the tombstones of everyone he had ever loved.
"Would meaningful words of apology help you forgive me?" A soft sigh escaped his lips, the breath a pale wisp floating through the air. Kingsley bent forward and dropped a black flower over each of the compacted soil of the graves, his dark hands running along one of the marred and splintered and fainted stones.
"No, I think not.
"I have trouble forgiving myself at times. But I do not stand here to beg something I can never have. I wish the past could have been different, I wish that magic can bring people back from the dead. But we do not live in a perfect society, nor will we ever.
"We're going after You-Know-Who tonight. Five years of fighting the Death Eaters has been too long, too exhausting, and I've had to sacrifice so much. You all were my best friends; I would have done anything for you. But I could not bring myself to follow you to your deaths. Even if I knew I might have been that Auror who killed you. The friend who betrayed you.
"And for that, I will drink to your memories tonight, for that is all I have left."
Kingsley stayed a moment longer, staring at the names etched into the granite. Then slowly, he stood, turned away and strode towards the haunted gates. Tears flowed freely from his coffee-coloured eyes, never minding to hide them from immortal or decayed eyes.