A Stranger's Life:
1. What They Don't Know.
2. In Children's Eyes.
b 3. Nothing To Tell. /b
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He can hear the whisper of snores on the back of his neck.
It chills him when Kingsley sleeps curled around him… there is something he finds rather disturbing about the forced contact. The contact that has him wishing it was possible that he were a lonely old man once more.
But at the same time he knows that he would never really want such a thing.
He lies awake at stares at the ceiling, wondering when the morning sun is going to come up. Perhaps when it does the itch from where his left leg used to be will finally go away.
Kingsley shifts closer to him. His muscular body becoming tight around Alastor.
He thinks that this is wrong of him. To be so old with no future with Kingsley, after all he once had a I future /I but it has become the present.
His gnarled face is barely warm on the side facing out. His neck is growing warmer as the breaths stay just as shallow. He can feel the naked skin on his back…
He remembers something he once said when he asked himself about why he was with Shacklebolt,
"He may not be my First Love, nor the True Love but he is still my love."
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The first person he could honestly say captured his heart with the essence of their soul was a girl of rather unfortunate looks. She could not honestly be described as beautiful in the conventional sense. Or even pretty with her pudgier stature and acne scarred skin…
But she was the personification of elegance and intellect. Charming in the way she spoke and her dark brown eyes took in everything that was around her.
She entranced Alastor when he was sixteen with the sly movement of her tongue across words that he knew but had to think before replying.
"I wanted to ask you Alastor, where do you go to school?" A smile with naturally straight teeth, the one saving feature. "Our paths never cross without it being summer."
Alastor laughs loudly,
"It's a school for the idiots."
She smiles with questions unasked in her eyes.
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"Old Man… get over here." Kingsley's growl is ridiculous to him. He sometimes thinks of it as the boy's growl of I arousal /I , though he has yet to understand what the boy is aroused about.
He turns and looks at Kingsley's dark face with his big eyes that are nearly black. Alastor can imagine how much of an idiot he looks with his own flush and slightly bright eyes.
He can't say he's not a little flattered that Kingsley wants this more than he's able to actually give the younger man.
But he says nothing but the soft words that are forced out of his mouth as they continue on in a carnal embrace.
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It was her voice that first had him on his knees wondering at such a creature's existence.
How could it not?
The soft feminine cultured sound of it. Coming from such a face whose jaw was too strong and meant to be a man's. The way that the soft accents of some letters seemed different, yet not foreign.
Her name was Marissa Sankey and she was obviously an intellect of her own devise.
"I would love to be a writer. But Alastor, a writer is a dreamer who never really surfaces in the real world. They write stories that no one will read."
"People read!" He's shot out a bit of the apple he was chewing; she flicks it off her vest with an irritated look.
"No they don't. People are after TVs and whatever media will come out in the future. No one reads the classics of the Greek philosophers or the artists of the Renaissance periods. They don't even read Freud for chrissakes and the man spoke mainly of sex!
Instead they read this drabble on aliens who are gods, or whatnot. Do they bother even forming their own ideas on how to apply religion into their lives anymore? No, instead they make even more clubs for self mutilation or pagan worship in order to create some hobby in their life—"
"Oh come on. The way you're going on you'd think that the end of the world is upon us. People are not getting more ignorant. If anything they are changing into a world of more promis—"
She throws her head back as she laughs.
"You don't actually believe that do you? Because if you do then I dearly underestimated your knowledge of the world today,
What of the wars going on in the south? Or the ones going on in the west? East? Or the war that goes on still hmmm? What of that?"
She stirs the coffee in front of her.
"We are heading towards a destruction of our own. The extermination of the human species will be completely of our own fault. The reason? I believe that once we made that bomb, the one that fell on Japan along with the new diseases coming out of Africa everything bad is going to be the product of our own arrogance. To rule over each other without a thought to what is happening to the earth on which we stand.
We only have this earth to stand on. We are not space people who can walk on Mars and Jupiter. No, we breathe oxygen and eat animals who should be our predators."
Alastor placed his hand on hers. She looked up at him and smiled.
"On a brighter note, in a couple of years we will have a man stand on the moon, so perhaps we will walk on Mars and Jupiter yet."
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Alastor Moody remembers when he taught Kingsley, perhaps less than a decade ago. The boy being the only Ravenclaw.
There was nothing that really stood out about this dark skinned boy with his brilliant white teeth. He had great grades, but so did all the pupils who entered into the Auror training.
It is not an occupation that one enters without having a dozen or so brains to rub together.
Yet, as Alastor would find out, the boy was fast on his feet and could trick a dragon if he had to. With the seemingly soft demeanour of a nice shy boy.
Shy. He snorts about it now. His body aching in ways that it should have only done so in his youth.
"Hmm…" The kiss on his neck is wet.
The fingers twining themselves in his own.
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He never got the chance to do more than kiss her.
Though she never seemed comfortable with touch. She tensed when he would try to hold her.
He laughed about it.
"What don't you trust me?"
She had eyes that spoke thoughts that he could never hear.
"What happened to your father?"
He couldn't look her in the face.
"I don't like secrets Alastor." The softness of her voice grated on him.
"There's nothing to tell, Marissa. Leave it be."
He would find out later on in life that she actually became a politician. He voted for her without even looking at the other candidates' names.
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"Stop it Shacklebolt." His hip is acting up again and the moron has decided to start rubbing it.
It only serves to make it worse.
"Alastor, you should start taking those potions again." The concern in the voice is more than Alastor can abide with,
"Just be quiet about that already?"
He hates meddlesome people.
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He had affairs when he was younger.
None of them at all lasting. He found of all of them no one could stand up to the pointedly to the feeling of completeness he had felt with Marissa.
He did have a lover who could make his heart beat faster than a hummingbird flies with desire.
Thorton Cawthorne. A man of considerable reputation in the Wizarding World these days. He had the rare talent at making money.
Alastor found that the man could create goldmines out of a galleon investment. When they first were together it was when Alastor had been training for his Auror certificate and well into the fit handsome young man of his youth.
The sort of attractiveness that had the women at his feet begging for marriage and the men no strings attached intimacies.
That was what Cawthorne offered.
"But who is to say that this is wrong? Two men bedding down together, is it not something that has been happening for thousands of years?"
Cawthorne was a man who liked to think of himself as an intellect. The rich tend to do that.
It was an affair that would end with Alastor butted aside for a trophy wife as the fortune grew and the thought of such scandal became grotesque.
They remained good friends. Alastor being the one with whom Cawthorne would bleed out his secrets to.
In fact Cawthorne would be the one who bought Alastor his fake eye and private hospital bills in the later years.
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He supposes that the only good thing about this relationship is that it is an Auror who eats beside him for breakfast is that he doesn't have to be so paranoid.
He finds himself too tired as of late to be worried whether or not when he goes to take the rubbish out he's going to be Stupefied and thrown into a box for nearly ten months.
The tiring thing is that he's expected to help out with this new war with his knowledge and experience.
He remembers the things that Marissa once said to him.
"There will always be war. No one ever learns."
Ironic that he would have Cawthorne who found profit off of wars, and Kingsley who will find solace.
Ironic that those two lovers would follow throughout his life, either as a friend or pupil.
Yet he would have married a woman who was both a Muggle and cynic on humanity. He would have married a woman who walked out of his life after only a two summers of knowing each other.
Ironic that he would fight for everything in his life.
But he would never fight for her.