Kingsley "Too Soon" Shacklebolt (shackalack) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2008-09-14 23:03:00 |
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It was after nine-thirty when Kingsley finally arrived home, exhausted out of his mind. He'd nodded off a few times while doing his paperwork and finally just said "fuck it" and decided to finish tomorrow. It was mostly done, anyway, and he doubted (or at least he hoped) that no one would blame him. He'd been up all day Saturday before being called out to Hogsmeade and after three hours in the waiting room at St. Mungos, 10 minutes to get his arm fixed up, and maybe about 45 minutes at home getting some food and a change of clothes, he was right back out there "cleaning up." In some ways he thought the clean-up was worse than the actual battle. If anything, the battle was fast and he didn't have time to dwell in his thoughts, while afterwards he couldn't stop thinking about each splatter of blood he found and who it had once belonged to or how with each passing minute it was becoming less and less likely that Pathkendle and Hitchens would be found alive. He had trouble keeping away the entire time, but he didn't complain. Others had it much worse, and he didn't mind sacrificing some of his own sleep if it meant his co-workers who were much worse off could get a bit more time to rest. But he was finally home, hungry and tired. He flicked his wand toward the lights, too tired to even say the spell out loud. All he wanted was a nice big omlette with onions and pepper and maybe some garlic powder and then the pull-out couch he hadn't even been able to sleep on yet. Well, if he could sleep, which he wasn't sure about yet. He made his way into "his" room, the one with all his stuff except for the bed-couch, changed into an old tshirt and sweatpants then went into the kitchen and made himself an omelette, probably being a bit louder than he should have been as he searched Hestia's cupboards for the right pans, his own still being in a box. After about ten minutes he emerged from the kitchen plate in hand, the frying pan still in the sink (since he decided to cast the washing spell the next day). He had assumed that Hestia wasn't home yet since it seemed a bit early still and the lights were off, but when he went to sit down on his couch, he realised it was already occupied. "Shiiiit," he whispered to himself, realising how silly it was for him to not expect her to fall asleep early after the night they had the day before. "Erm, sorry fer wakin' you up." By that point, Hestia had no idea how long it had been since she last slept. She know she'd woken fairly early on Saturday morning to help Kingsley move in, and hadn't really intended to go to bed until very late Saturday night or early Sunday morning (preferably having to take anti-hangover potions beforehand) anyway, but then, well, things exploded. The delightful drinking session she'd planned with her new roommate had been interrupted by what could only be described as complete and utter chaos, and the net result was an entirely sleepless night and day for Hestia...probably close to eighteen hours of healing and surgery in significantly less than ideal conditions. Weeks ago, before things had gotten this bad, before Tinworth and that mess, it would've been enough to make Hestia curl into a little ball and cry for hours on end, and justifiably so. Somehow, though, she was a little bit more able to deal with the entire situation now. Once the adrenaline from the night and day before had worn off, the only thing Hestia felt was pure, sheer exhaustion. She'd apparated home, found her tiny flat above the Leaky void of any roommate and, not wanting to deal with cleaning her sheets of Marlene's blood or do anything of the sort for at least another twenty-four hours, promptly collapsed on the couch and fell asleep, almost before her head rested on the pillows that lay there. She didn't even notice Kingsley coming in, flicking on the light or cooking his dinner. She wouldn't have noticed and just would've kept on sleeping, had she not been sat upon, and even then, it barely registered with her enough to wake her up. Kingsley's apology prompted a very groggy response. " 'Salright. 'M on your bed anyway," she muttered, trying and failing to pull herself into a sitting position. "Don't think I can move quite yet, though." Kingsley nodded, as he already had a big bite of omelette in his mouth, and sat down instead on the arm of the couch. He eyed her suspiciously while she was working on waking up a bit, worried. When he'd come home earlier that morning (shiiiit it seemed like ages ago), he'd seen the large blood stains on her bed, and he was about positive they weren't from some... womanly accident. He'd had to make himself forget about the stains in order to concentrate on his work, but now that he was back at Hestia's (home, he reminded himself) he wanted to know. "Didja get hurt last night?" he asked her looking over at the bed deliberately. It looked pretty bad, judging from the amount of blood. "What?" Hestia was confused, still waking, though she understood after a moment, also glancing back at the bed. "No, no. That's not mine. That...God..." She put her hand weakly to her forehead. How to explain this? She didn't know why Marlene had been there, or why Sirius had been there, or why Remus Lupin had been there...the very idea of explaining it to Kingsley made her want to go back to sleep. "I came across an old school friend while I was there. She didn't want to go to the Hospital, so I brought her back here to get her stabilized, and then finished at home. Her boyfriend was there, too, so I took care of him as well." It was a pretty shitty explanation, when she thought of it, but she was too tired to concoct something more elaborate, though her mind briefly and belatedly flitted to the idea of a wounded owl crashing through the window. Kingsley said nothing, leaning back on the couch. He groaned quietly a bit of pain shot through his back. If this was how sore he was without sleeping, he didn't want to imagine what it would be like tomorrow. At least the big scratches on his arms and face had scabbed up pretty well. They'd be gone in about a week if he made sure not to pick the scabs. "Hm," he finally said before putting another bite of omlette into his mouth. He had been there too and there weren't any townspeople about, which left the only un-masked people to be either vigilantes, vampires, or werewolves. 'School friends,' she'd said, and since Kingsley hoped that none of her school friends were now dark creatures, these friends were most likely vigilantes. Or an un-masked death eater. "Hestia," he said slowly, "I'm only askin' this cause I hafta... these school friends weren't death eaters, were they?" Hestia shook her head, closing her eyes again, though she truly didn't know how to explain herself without implicating Marlene and Remus and Sirius and...well, all of them. They were about the farthest things from Death Eaters out there, but Hestia didn't have a better reason why they were at the battle, and didn't want to put Kingsley in the position of having to choose between keeping her confidence and risking his job. That she was already doing something like that to Elle was bad enough. "No, they weren't," was the only answer she could give, and it sounded weak, but she was too tired. She was not, however, too tired to notice the scratches on Kingsley's arms and the way he'd groaned as he leaned back. "What about you? I thought you were alright," she pointed out, sitting up a bit straighter. "Are those your bandages that I found? I thought they might have been mine, but I didn't remember using so many." Nodding slowly, Kingsley decided not to answer her latest question right away but instead go back to the other topic, the one they had to be really careful about. "I jus' want you to know that I gotta put anything I hear 'bout vigilantes in my report. So if someone tells me, I've gotta put it in. An' if I don't hear anyfing, I don't gotta put it." He gave her a look, knowing she'd get it but still wanting her to know that he was starting to get it. Or, things. Something, at least. But no more of that kind of talk for now. "An' yeeeeeah, 'bout this..." He'd lied to her about not being injured, but mostly because his injuries weren't that bad (especially compared to some of the others) and he didn't want her to worry. "I am all right - this is nothin' compared to some o' the others. Worst of it was a broken arm from the vampire," he pointed to the spot on his arm, "but I was in the waitin' room at Mungos longer than it took to fix it. Didn't want em to fix the rest though." Hestia shrugged in response to Kingsley's warning, though she normally would've been quicker to dismiss his concerns, even if they were warranted. She hated this...this being in the middle of everything, of not being able to trust friends and having the people who were supposed to help and rescue her turn into enemies. Not that she thought of Kingsley as an enemy, but he could very easily become one if she let her guard down and told him the wrong thing at the wrong time. So she focused on his injuries instead. "Your arm was broken by a vampire?!" Hestia repeated, her eyes widening a bit more. "Why didn't you have them fix the cuts on your arms and whatever made you make that sound when you sat down?" The Healer in her was already grabbing for a wand and mending the cuts, but Hestia was still feeling too tired to actually want to do anything. "Dunno," he shrugged. "Didn't really want to? I've got bandages here." He took another bite and thought for a moment, his mouth twisting oddly as he did. "Guess it didn't seem fair," he finally said, " that some of 'em got so badly 'urt and the worst I got it was a broken arm that took five seconds for them to set and me to drink some Skele-grow." Did that make sense to her? It definitely did to him. "Even the soreness - it's just a little worse than if I spent a day liftin' 'eavy boxes." He shrugged again and shoved the last bit of omelette into his mouth. "Y'know?" "Still..." Hestia frowned and fumbled about in her pocket for her wand. It'd been such a long twenty-four (or was it more? She'd lost track) hours of healing that it was almost second nature by this point to whip out her wand at the first sign of an injury. "There's no reason to go around with gashed up arms if you don't have to. I can take care of those...you know, since I'm not doing anything else at the moment." Though she'd been doing any and everything else for almost the past two days and though she could hardly remember the incantation anymore, but neither was important. Hestia held out her hand to hold Kingsley's arm steady. "If that's alright with you, that is." No, she didn't entirely get it. It probably didn't even make sense, but nothing really did at the moment. This seemed to though. Three Hitwizards had lost their lives (they'd concluded) and he'd come out relatively unharmed. He'd spent the entire day at the site, trying to find anything that would lead them to Hitchens and Pathkendle or at least to where the Death Eaters all escaped to, but there was nothing and for all he knew the two Hitwizards could still be alive, captured or being tortured or slowly dying, and it made him sick to his stomach to think about it. He knew Pepper and Kate and Elladora were at Mungos, hurt pretty badly, when he, with much less experience then they had, was completely fine except for a few annoying scratches. Maybe it was some odd way of making himself feel better by punishing himself for getting off easy, but it did make him feel better. Plus big wounds were just a little badass. "Y'can look at my shoulder - that's where the vampire bit, but leave the rest alone, all right?" Best make sure there wouldn't be any complications from that, though he'd looked at it himself and figured it looked all right. It stung a lot, but that was normal until it scabbed over. "Alright." On a normal night, Hestia would've argued and insisted on fixing Kingsley up entirely: shoulder, arms, anything. Tonight, though, she was emotionally and physically worn out. The only thing that really appealed to her was a very long sleep, maybe for a couple of days, though she knew she couldn't afford that. St. Mungo's was probably filled with people who'd been at the battle, and there was no telling what kinds of work she'd be doing once she got back there. And then there was everyone at the Potters' house... "Lovely night for it, anyway," she finally commented off-handedly as she pulled herself into a kneeling position to get a closer look at Kingsley's injured shoulder. "At least it wasn't raining." "Yeah, that'd've been well bad," he murmured, sliding down sideways from the arm of the chair so that he was sitting next to her and taking off his shirt so she could get at the wound. He didn't say anything else for a few moments as she began to work on his shoulder a bit except to groan slightly when it stung. The vampire seemed to have done more damage to Kingsley than he had done to it despite Kingsley having dealt most of the blows. Damn thing. Sitting on the couch, Kingsley suddenly realised how incredibly tired he was. The exhaustion had been weighing on him for the past few hours, but it suddenly hit him like a sack of bricks and he felt like he couldn't keep his eyes open for another second. He looked at Hestia out of the corner of his eye (as he was trying not to move too much) and after noticing how the top of her head only came up to about his ear, he leaned his head down to rest on the top of hers. "Thanks, Hes," he said with his eyes closed. "Glad you're all right." It was a very awkward position to fall asleep in, so Hestia carefully extricated her head from between Kingsley's head and shoulder and rearranged herself so that the two of them would be more comfortable. There were blankets elsewhere, maybe, and pillows, but it seemed that as soon as Kingsley drifted off, Hestia couldn't keep her eyes open a second longer. "You too," she murmured before closing her eyes for a night of, thankfully, dreamless sleep. |