Fic:: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (1/2)
Apr. 25th, 2006 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenThis is it, kids. This is the big long silly epic of a Remus/Tonks story. I've been working on this since the beginning of April, and sixteen thousand words later, here we are. It's not been an easy story to write, certainly. I'm hoping Remus/Tonks shippers won't hate me for pairing Remus with Sirius and similarly with the Sirius/Remus shippers for pairing him with Tonks. Just pretend it's gen, which it very nearly is.
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amchau and gamesiplay did absolutely stellar beta jobs. I am very, very grateful to you both for your comments. (And in the case of amchau, for suggesting hysterically funny plot developments when I was trying to cook dinner without dropping things.)
LJ won't let me post the whole thing in one go, so this is part one and the link to part two is at the bottom.
Fic:: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
by Raven
R, Harry Potter, slash, het. Sirius/Remus, Remus/Tonks. A story about how Tonks grows up.
Something special happened when Nymphadora Tonks was five. It wasn’t Sirius coming to visit, although that was something special that didn’t happen often, because he was away at Hogwarts most of the time and could only come when he was on holiday. Now it was summer, and he had come to babysit. Nymphadora was very excited.
But it wasn’t like it usually was when he babysat. First of all, her mummy and daddy hadn’t actually gone anywhere. They’d just said they were having an important chat with Professor Dumbledore in the living room and she wasn’t to come in and disturb them, but to stay in the kitchen and be good for Sirius. She was a little bit disappointed, because she liked Professor Dumbledore almost as much as she liked Sirius. Professor Dumbledore always gave her Muggle sweeties (and her dad would eat them and tell her, “Ah, that takes me back!”), and said nice things about her hair, and she was sorry she wasn’t allowed to go in and see him; but then the doorbell rang and she knew it would be Sirius and she forgot all about it.
Sirius bounced in through the door and picked her up. “Nymphadora! How are you, baby?”
Nymphadora didn’t mind being called a baby by Sirius. “I’m fine,” she said politely, like she’d been taught, but then she forgot and asked: “Can we make cookies by magic pretty please?”
“Of course we can! And Moony here will dye them pink to match your hair!”
Nymphadora squealed. Her hair wasn’t always pink, but it changed colour when she got excited, and now Sirius was here, it was the colour of Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum. He put her down gently and said, “Nymphadora, this is Moony.”
She turned round and realised he hadn’t come by himself, which was the second reason it wasn’t like when he usually babysat. There was another boy with him, who had long brown hair and brown eyes that had light-coloured flecks in them. (She asked about the word “flecks” later, so she knew it was the right one.)
“Sirius?”
Nymphadora turned round. Her mum had opened the living-room door and stuck her head out. “I thought it was you,” she said, and she was smiling. “And you must be Remus Lupin. Sirius has told me a lot about you.”
The boy with the brown hair smiled back at Nymphadora’s mum and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Tonks.”
“Andromeda, please.” She was still smiling. “Well, Sirius, you enjoy babysitting Dora, and Remus, you enjoy babysitting Sirius.” She laughed, and so did the boy with the brown hair, but Sirius looked grumpy. “Be good, Nymphadora.”
She went back inside, and Sirius picked Nymphadora up again. “What was that about making cookies by magic?”
“Sirius...” said the other boy warningly. Nymphadora squirmed in Sirius’s grasp to turn to look at him.
“Is your name really Moony? Mum called you something else.”
“Moony,” he said, looking down at her, “is what my friends call me. I’d be honoured if you did the same.”
Nymphadora didn’t say anything, but something inside her stomach went pop.
In the kitchen, Sirius sat her down on the edge of a counter and started taking things out of cupboards – things like flour and sugar and bicarbonate of soda. (Nymphadora was very proud of being able to say bicarbonate of soda.) “You see, little cousin,” he said as he did it, “we have a slight problem. Your mum can make cookies by magic. But Moony and I, sadly, are not of age. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“You can’t do magic or bad things happen,” she said, and suddenly felt disappointed. “Does that mean no cookies?”
“Certainly not!” He looked like she’d said something awful. “There will be cookies... the Muggle way! Do you know how Muggles make cookies, Nymphadora?”
Nymphadora thought about it. “My nana is a Muggle. I know how she makes them.”
Sirius laughed. “If my family heard you say the word “nana”, Nymphadora, I don’t know what they’d....”
Moony interrupted. “Mine is too,” he said, and he smiled at her. “And she taught me to make cookies as well.”
Making cookies the Muggle way was fun. Lots of flour got on the floor, for one thing, and Sirius didn’t seem to know what to do with a rolling-pin. He threatened to hit her on the head with it, and she screamed and ran away, but she knew he wouldn’t really.
When the cookies were ready, the kitchen smelled wonderful. Sirius took the tray out, wearing oven gloves – he would have forgotten if Moony hadn’t reminded him – and put them on the counter. And Nymphadora opened her eyes wide, because they were pink! “You said you couldn’t do magic!” she told Sirius.
“He can’t.” Moony put a finger on his lips. “Can you keep a secret, Nymphadora?”
She nodded her head.
“Look at this.” He held out his hand, shook it, and something dropped out of his sleeve. It was a small glass bottle, and it was labelled – Nymphadora was good at reading – food colouring. “Muggle magic,” he said, and grinned. “Now would you like a cookie, my lady with the kaleidoscope eyes?”
She nodded again. Through a mouth full of crumbs, she asked, “What’s it mean, kaleidoscope eyes?”
“It comes from a song by the Beatles. Has Sirius told you who the Beatles are?”
Sirius snorted. “She’s Andromeda’s daughter, she’s been well educated already.”
Moony ignored him. “Well, they sing a song about it. A kaleidoscope is a Muggle toy that you look through, and it changes colours while you look. And it’s a good name for you, because your eyes change colour whenever you want. Do you understand?”
“I’m like a girl in a song?”
He nodded. “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly...” he sang, hoarsely. “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes...”
Sirius clapped his hands over his ears. But Nymphadora, sitting on the counter and listening, knew something very special had just happened.
Late that night, when Professor Dumbledore had gone and so had her babysitters, Nymphadora sat up in bed when her mummy came to say goodnight.
“Dora, I thought you were asleep.”
“Mummy,” said Nymphadora, “something very important happened today.”
“What’s that, darling?”
Nymphadora took a deep breath and worried she might laugh. “I fell in love.”
But her mummy didn’t laugh. She smiled, though, and said, “I’m delighted to hear it.” And she kissed Nymphadora goodnight, and switched off the light.
*
When Nymphadora Tonks was eleven, she burst into tears in the middle of one of Professor McGonagall’s Transfiguration classes.
For a minute, nothing happened. The class were changing needles into matchsticks, in a room filled with total silence, and Nymphadora’s sudden, violent sobs cut into it like a blunt blade. Once they’d been alerted to the noise, the people around her exchanged confused, surreptitious glances. From the other side of the room, some of the Slytherins began to snigger. Nymphadora ignored them all, cried solidly for two more minutes, and stood up, her chair scraping. She stalked out of the room, her hair straightening out of corkscrew curls, and slammed the door behind her.
The corridor outside was deserted. There were rolling clouds visible through the large, dingy window, with a flash of sun. There was a little warmth in it, and she moved to stand by the glass, looking down at the bleak, autumnal grounds rolling away beneath. She took a deep breath, and then another.
“Now, Tonks,” said someone quietly, “suppose you tell me what’s the matter.”
She turned around, slowly. Professor McGonagall had just closed the door behind her, and Nymphadora heard the latch click closed. “Can’t,” she said.
“No one inside can hear a word,” McGonagall continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “They’re busy with their needles, and anyone who has not produced a matchstick by the end of this class will have detention for the next four weeks of term.” She smiled grimly. “I do not make idle threats, as you know. Now, Tonks...” – and her voice had a gentleness beneath the brogue – “I want to know why you were crying in there.”
Nymphadora turned away again, back to looking at the sunlight spilling over Hogwarts’ grounds. Far, far below, she thought she saw the giant squid break the surface of the lake, making a shadowy wake in the flawless blue, then disappearing. “I got the Daily Prophet this morning,” she said after a minute. “My mum sends it on to me when I’m at school.”
McGonagall nodded. “Go on.”
“It was in the gossip column,” Nymphadora said flatly. “It was just a paragraph. It said someone thought they’d seen Harry Potter in a Muggle shop.”
“Oh, I see. Harry went to live with Muggles, dear.” McGonagall had stepped closer, but Nymphadora was grateful she hadn’t been asked to turn round, at least not yet. “It was the best place for him. I’m not saying what they publish in that rag is always true, mind you, but it could be.”
“I saw him once when I was little,” Nymphadora said. “He was Sirius’s godson. He was so proud.”
McGonagall had tensed at the name, and there was a long pause before Nymphadora spoke again.
“And I thought: they’re not coming back. Any of them. And just because I was so little somehow I’m not allowed. I mean I’m not allowed to miss them. Miss him.”
McGonagall didn’t say anything.
“And it’s not like I’m not happy too,” Nymphadora told the window. “He, I mean You Know Who, he’s gone. It’s all over. Mum doesn’t cry at night any more.” She paused, catching her breath, feeling she’d said too much and that to McGonagall, of all people.
But a soft, almost motherly hand settled on her shoulder, and all at once Nymphadora felt like crying again. “But it’s not the same” – and she knew she was wailing – “for me as it is for everyone else, because they’re all gone, and, and” – a sniff – “my parents won’t let me even say his name!”
“Tonks,” said Professor McGonagall, “I think that perhaps you shouldn’t return to my lesson. Just sit down” – she indicated the windowsill – “and listen to me for a moment.”
This time, Nymphadora had to turn around to face her. Rubbing at her eyes, she sat down. To her surprise, McGonagall heaved a sigh and came to sit beside her. “We were all, and perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s true – we were all surprised. Shocked, even. No one expected it, no one even considered it. He was the last person anyone would ever have thought... in any case, it was hard for us all, but there were a few people it was particularly hard on. Your mother was one of them.”
Nymphadora nodded. “I hate it, that everyone always talks about how wonderful things are now it’s over, and they forget the bad stuff.”
It was strange, but McGonagall looked somehow more kind than Nymphadora had ever seen her. “I don’t like saying it to a mite of a girl,” she said, slowly, “but time is a great healer. You might not know it now, but things will get better.” Off Nymphadora’s look, “They will. You’ll see. Now go and wash your face, dear, and then go and have a cup of tea with Hagrid. It’ll do you good.”
Nymphadora gave a final sniff. “Thanks, Professor.”
“You’re very welcome. Off you go now.”
Nymphadora got unsteadily to her feet, her footsteps the only sounds in the quiet morning.
“Tonks?”
She turned.
“I nearly forgot,” McGonagall called. “Two scrolls of parchment on the mechanics of inanimate Transfiguration, by Monday, please.”
“Thanks, Professor,” Nymphadora said, and almost smiled.
*
“Tell me,” he said earnestly, “what’s it that makes you tick? Why do you do what you do, say what you say? Why use that perfume or wear that dress? What makes you laugh, makes you cry? Who is Nymphadora Tonks?”
She burst into laughter. “Charlie Weasley,” she got out, through the threatening hysterics, “you quoted that word for word from this month’s Cosmo!”
He looked affronted. “I am hurt. You impugn me.”
“Charlie, you’ve never been pugned in your life.”
He grinned. “But I didn’t quote it word-for-word, as it happens. It actually said ‘who is Insert Name Here’, but I improvised. Thought it might work this time.”
She burst into laughter again. “For the last time, Charlie – I’m not going out with you. Your deathless prose notwithstanding,” she added. “Look, we’re mates, aren’t we?”
To his credit, he didn’t look too disappointed. “Yeah,” he agreed. “We are.”
Only good mates, Nymphadora thought, would be sitting out here at eleven o’clock at night, up on the top of the tower with a picnic blanket in Gryffindor colours. It wasn’t dark yet; there were still streaks of blue in the west, and although it was chilly, she had absolutely no need to draw close to him for warmth or anything else he might have been fantasising about.
Although, to be fair, he’d asked her out at least once a month for six years, and much as she’d hate to admit it, she didn’t want him to stop.
“It’s a nice night,” he said after a while, throwing a cherry stone off the top of the tower and watching it disappear into the dark at the base. “Nearly the longest day.”
“Nearly the end of term, that means,” she replied, smiling at the thought. “And then we’ve only got one more year left! Doesn’t that scare you?”
“To death,” he agreed. “Mum keeps sending me frantic owls wanting to know what I’ve done about my Future. With a capital F. Future. Scary all by itself, that is.” He shuddered.
“My mum’s the same.” She smiled wryly. “It’s in the job description, I think. She’s been at it since we had that careers advice in fifth year. ‘What are you doing with your life, Nymphadora? Are you taking your studies seriously, Nymphadora? Are you sure you’re not a lesbian, Nymphadora?’”
He put one hand to his mouth. “You’re making that up!”
“Oh, if only!” She stuck her tongue out at him. “She thinks because I won’t go out with you, I must be, you know. And anyway, Mum never quite got off the free-love bandwagon. Apparently the Slytherin common room was the place to be, back in the sixties.”
“I can imagine.” He paused. “Your mum was a Slytherin?”
“Yeah.” She drew her knees up to her chest, willing her hair longer to make a shield against the breeze. It was getting colder. “We don’t all have noble Gryffindor pedigree, you know.”
Charlie smiled wryly. “So, Miss Nymphadora Tonks, Gryffindor without pedigree, what are you going to do with your life? Something bold and brave, no doubt?”
She shifted a little, pulling the blanket to her. “Can you keep a secret?”
“To the death!” he said dramatically, but his face softened when he saw she was serious. “Of course I can. What is it?”
Nymphadora took a moment before answering. “It’s embarrassing,” she said quickly, “’specially when I can’t get across a room without tripping over something, you know me, and I’m not mega clever and yeah, I’m dead clumsy all the time and I’m probably never going to get in, and....”
“Nymphadora! What is it?”
She blushed. “I want to be an Auror.”
It was his turn for the laughter, and she buried her head in her hands. “Oh, fuck, it’s stupid, it’s a stupid idea....”
“No, no!” Charlie lifted her head, softly, one hand on each side, making her sit up. “It’s not stupid at all. It’s perfect for you.”
“You really think so?” She looked up at him, blinking.
“Course I do. You’re great at Defence, and you’re a meta... meta... you know I can’t pronounce it.”
“Metamorphmagus. Yeah. Yeah, I am. Won’t have to worry about disguise and stuff like that.” She concentrated for a moment. “What do you think?”
Charlie laughed, and she drew out a small hand mirror to check her handiwork. “Oh, yes, I like it,” he said. “Red hair with yellow stripe, very Gryffindor.”
“I’d do it proper gold, but I can’t be bothered.” She leaned back against one of the battlements. “I can do bold and brave, though. Out there battling the forces of evil.”
“You will be,” he said, and he wasn’t being flippant. “I remember when we were kids. Aurors all over the place. Of course, there was lots of evil to be battled.”
“That’s what gave me the idea,” she confessed. “I looked up to them so much, as a kid. They were always making jokes about what they did, you know, and some of the things they had to do.... it was horrible. They’d go out every night and come back in the morning covered in gore, and they were only a couple of years older than we are now, but they seemed so wonderful, so grown-up. I remember thinking I’d give anything to be like them.”
“Not exactly like them,” said Charlie, thoughtfully, and she knew what he meant. “Some mornings, they didn’t come back.”
“I will. I’ll always come back.”
They looked at each other, exchanged awkward smiles. An owl hooted, swooping off up into the highland, a shadow in a sky that was now dark.
After a pause, she said, “I’m cold.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She was shivering under the blanket, and rather than draw her close, Charlie helped her to her feet and they began gathering up the picnic things. “Time to go,” she said wistfully. “I don’t really want to go to bed.”
As they walked towards the spiral staircase, Charlie paused. “Nymphadora?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
She laughed. “Would it help if I was?”
Charlie seemed to consider. “No.”
“Didn’t think so,” she said, and put an arm round his shoulder, steadying him all the way down the stairs.
*
She was late. She was always late, it seemed; this morning had involved a headlong rush out of the door, a rolled-up newspaper on the step and an unscheduled flight into a flowerbed, which had necessitated trudging back inside to mop up the spilled blood and free-flowing embarrassment.
But if she hadn’t been late, she wouldn’t have been running with a Muggle plastic cup of coffee in her hands, and she wouldn’t have knocked it all over a total stranger on the Underground.
But in the stark flickering light of the train, she looked into the dark eyes of the man and realised he wasn’t a stranger at all. She hung off the hooks of the rattling train, swaying with it, her body brushing against his with each jerk of the carriage. He stared down at her from beneath his hood, his face rendered ghost-white and familiar with each passing window flash. “I know you,” she said, the words at once a whisper and a shout above the roar.
There was a pause whilst he registered the fact she was talking to him. “I don’t know you.”
The palpable disapproval surprised her. “Where have you been all this time? We’ve been trying – I mean Dumbledore and everyone else, they’ve been trying desperately to find you, make sure you’re okay....”
“Look,” and there was something harsh and acidic in his voice that she’d never heard in it before, “I don’t know where you’re getting all this, but I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Remus!” she snapped, making him jerk to look at her. In the dimness, she focused. In the next brief flash of a passing tunnel light, her hair shifted pink, then green, then back to its current black. “It’s me.”
“Oh, it’s you.” His voice hadn’t changed. “It’s you. Good, I’m glad we’ve had that sufficiently clarified. Now will you please leave me alone?”
“Remus...” – but he had already gone, making his way handhold by handhold down the carriage and away from her. Annoyed, she followed, but she didn’t have his grace and stumbled into baggage, windows, seated and irritated people. She got tangled up with one man’s spread broadsheet, and by the time she had extricated herself, the train had come to a noisy, confused stop at Embankment. “Remus!” she yelled, but her voice was lost in the clamour of commuters and announcements, and she launched herself through the train doors just as they were closing only to see his shaggy head disappear into the crowd.
“Fuck,” she muttered, quietly, and struck out after him. The rush of the people towards the exits guided her; she hurried down long winding passageways, past buskers, up escalators, through the ticket hall – it wasn’t her station stop; seek assistance, the barriers told her, and she vaulted over them – and into the rush of wind, freezing cold after the muted warmth of the tunnels, and outside.
It was surprisingly easy to find him, leaning over one of the railings and looking out across the river. The Thames was murky grey water below a murky grey sky. She said: “Remus.”
He turned, tiredly. “Didn’t I tell you to leave me alone?”
“No.” She joined him in staring out at the river. “You asked me. There’s a difference.”
“Well, now I’m telling you. Leave me alone.”
“Sorry.” She shifted closer to him; he inched away. “No can do. Remus, the whole of the wizarding world, more or less, is looking for you. Where have you been?”
He turned back to face her, and in the daylight, she saw the depth of his pallor, the absence of flesh on his sharp bones. He was gaunt, ghost-like. “I’ve been here.”
“By the Thames.”
“By myself. I don’t see how it’s your business, or anyone else’s for that matter, what I do with my life.”
“It’s our business,” she said, “because we care about you. We’re worried about you. The last time anyone heard anything from you was years ago!”
“Not enough years.” He was looking straight down at the water again, and Tonks noticed his knuckles were dead white.
There was silence. In the murk of the morning, it was beginning to rain, small, irritating droplets that made a condensation mist out of Tonks’s hair. She shifted it out of the way and stretched out. She was beyond late, now; Moody would mark her down as a no-show, and away would go another precious attendance, and she was pretty sure she’d be thrown out of the programme some day soon, anyway.
“Why were you on the Underground?”
It was the first thing he had said without her prompting him, and Tonks decided to take it as a good sign. “I usually Apparate,” she said. “But I had a rough night last night, and I’m too tired for it. Last time I tried it I nearly got splinched.”
He looked up at her, seemingly for the first time, taking in all of her – her changed face and hair, her frayed Weird Sisters T-shirt, the spiked cuff on her wrist, her favourite boots. He smiled, humourlessly. “Sirius’s little Dora, hungover. Wouldn’t he have been proud?”
“Fuck you.” The words came out quickly, sharp as a whip crack. “How dare you say that?”
“Nymphadora....”
For a minute he was sounding like himself, the man she’d known coming through in the liquid vowels, but she was too angry to care. “It’s Tonks now. Just Tonks. And you would know that if you hadn’t fucked off into the wide blue yonder!”
He flinched. “All right, Tonks: tell me what I had to stay for. To live for. To carry on for.”
“For what’s left behind!” she yelled. “For who’s left behind! For what they died for!”
“The people left behind don’t need me. The whole world can forget me, and I’d be happy to be forgotten.”
She didn’t say anything. The fury was leaving as quickly as it had come, fading into insubstantial grey alongside the clouds on the horizon. “I guess you’re not coming back with me.”
“No, I’m not.”
She tried to think about it without her head hurting. “Sirius was more than just my cousin, you know that. He was my friend, my big brother, mine. And I’m still here. I’m training to be an Auror. That’s what I’ve learned. I’ll never be fooled again.”
“I will be.”
Tonks looked up at him.
“I knew him better than you did.” It was a statement of fact, not an accusation. “He was my friend, and my lover, mine, and I will always be fooled again. Goodbye, Nymphadora.”
Standing there, he was framed for a shifting sequence of moments by the sun emerging from a cloud and then retreating again. There were changes in him that were more subtle, Tonks realised. The drawn, white hollows in his face made his eyes look even larger and more lustrous; the sparseness of his frame emphasised the animal grace. For a long moment more, they looked at each other.
“Goodbye, Moony,” she said, at last, and he was gone into the bleakness, as if he had never existed at all.
*
Tonks was in the bath when she got the summons.
Before she did anything else, she took a moment to resent being disturbed. It was a twilight bath, the sort of bath you had when it was three am and you couldn’t, realistically, be said to be hogging the bathroom, sitting in the dimmed tub taking long, slow breaths of steam. The water had poured scorching hot from the pipes, and she was keeping a warming charm on it, but even that was fading with time. Cooled to blood-heat, it was only apparent to her senses as soft, slopping movement, lulling her to sleep.
The interrupting owl, therefore, received a muffled curse – it went wild and hit one of the light fittings, reducing the room to further dimness – and swooped huffily out of the window. The letter was left on the edge of the bath, already curling open from the steam. It was addressed in telltale green ink, with the precision of address that betrayed the hand that had written it: Ms. N. Tonks, The Bath, the First Floor Flat...
She liked the Ms., she decided. She wasn’t pretty, prissy, Miss Nymphadora, with the blood of a pure and ancient house and a talent for behaving herself; she didn’t think such a person had ever existed. Whereas the girl the letter was for was the sort of girl, woman, who could have spent the night drinking and dancing until her clothes were perfumed with sweat and scent, got home in the wee small hours, thrown up pure zinfandel into a flowerpot, fallen into an ancient claw-feet bathtub and watched, amusedly, as her hair and face and body shifted through a spectrum of colours and curves back to feminine.
Now that – she paused before reaching for the letter – that had been an afterthought. She’d been out with Charlie, nominally (off back to Romania in the morning, and he’d dropped a few hints of the farewell-fuck variety, though Tonks had demurred), but the club had been thick with magic and smoke and she’d ended up on her own, for a minute. And then a girl had come up to her, taken in the pink hair, given her a muted smirk of a smile, and asked, sultrily, “Does the carpet match the curtains?”
She got asked the question a lot – it was a natural hazard of constantly mutating hair colour – but usually, it was by men. And she’d spent four years in one of the most elite training programmes known to woman, and she knew how to deal with them.
This time had been different. Something had gone pop inside her head, and she’d known, right then and there, that it did.
In the starker light of the ladies’ loos, she’d given it a bit of thought. And although it was fading, here in the bath where her magic was going squiffy round the edges, there was enough left to admire her handiwork.
Firstly, the hair. Short punky pink had become shorter and punkier, with a tinge of bleach-white for the sake of the detail. Then her eyes, larger, but with finer lashes. Her hands, roughened, with short, trimmed nails. Then, the difficult bit. It was a straightening and a hardening, less softness to her curves, more subtlety to the hourglass. And when she stepped out, the change was almost invisible, but against a wall, it was palpable.
And there had been a few women and a few walls, and another word for wall was dyke, which was the sort of thing that was very funny after four glasses of pink wine and all of Charlie’s Ogden’s Old. He’d forgiven her. She thought so, anyway, and if he hadn’t he was going to Romania in the morning.
Giggling a little bit at the thought – not all the zinfandel was in the flowerpot – she reached for her letter with one hand and for a towel with the other, getting rid of the water and bubbles before touching the parchment.
It was in Dumbledore’s narrow, elegant hand, and it was polite and serene and laconic. After a few words Tonks stopped smiling.
She read it once quickly, and then again, taking in every detail. While she was reading, her body shifted back to sensible femininity, her hair became dull black, her toenails taking on a chipped coat of purple polish. The water was growing colder with each descriptive paragraph, chilling her bones with each word she’d thought she’d never read again. And, finally, at the end of the letter, a sparse line drawing of a bird with bright eyes, and a request.
Tonks thought about it for a while. There was another piece of parchment attached, which she didn’t have to unfold and read; she could drop it over the side and go to sleep in the water and in the morning she’d forget. She’d go on training. She’d wait for Charlie to come back, and maybe they’d go out again. Her mum would be pleased, if something happened between them, and even so she’d work on the baby-dyke thing. It might come in useful.
But she didn’t think about it for long. She unfolded the parchment.
The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix are at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.
After a while, the note dropped into the bath and disintegrated, ink swirling green and fading, vanishing, gone.
*
She remembered the house.
She remembered winter. She remembered the chill wind, the shaking chandeliers, the headless house-elves. She remembered her mother. She remembered the shouts and screams as the last daughter of the house of Black walked out, dragging her own little one behind her – hush, Dora, don’t cry, don’t cry, we’re never going back – and the sonorous, hollow sound of the door closing behind them both.
“I wanted to show you to them,” Andromeda said years later, and Tonks felt the strange, rising bubble she’d recognise later as pride. “I wanted them to see my little girl was growing up just fine without them. It was stupid.”
“No,” said Tonks. “No, it wasn’t.”
Sirius had done the same thing, when he was sixteen and she was three; he’d walked through this very hallway, his eyes bright, his aristocratic Black features hidden by a toss of glam rock hair, and he’d left forever.
And now – and now, when everything had come full circle and the door opened, swung back with the same crash of finality – they were back.
“Hello!” Tonks called, through the silence and the dust. Her voice lifted up, blurred into background creaks and then nothingness. “Is anyone there?”
There was no reply. Sunlight was coming down into the mausoleum, filtering through layers of gloom until it emerged, sepia and faded, into a pool at Tonks’s feet. She stepped through it, forwards and back, wondering whether she should go for the stairs and search the house. Something scampered behind her, and she turned, but saw nothing.
Far, far above, a voice stated: “Incendio.”
And through the silence came a shriek, someone shouting, “Sirius, NO!” and then running footsteps, a strong smell of burning, and then something came hurtling down the stairs, all flapping brown fabric, thick, acrid smoke and crackling flames, and lots of yelling, and then a final, sickening thump of flesh hitting the ground.
Tonks shut her eyes, held her wand above her head and howled, “Aguamenti!”
There was a millisecond’s pause, a sound like onions hitting a frying pan, then of water, and then everything faded back into silence.
The steam cleared, and Tonks opened her eyes. Remus looked up at her from floor level. “Hello, Nymphadora,” he said serenely.
“Tonks,” she corrected, on autopilot.
“Tonks, then. Do you mind my asking why you just dumped about four buckets’ worth of water on me?”
“Um,” Tonks said, “you were on fire?”
“That was what the rolling was for. Down the stairs. To put out the fire.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Still, you probably helped.” He stood up and started wringing out his hair and clothes, which were covered in sodden cobwebs and black with dust. “Thank you. Excuse me a minute.”
He disappeared, dripping, presumably in search of wand and towel. After a minute, Sirius walked down the stairs, slowly, and sat on the bottom step. “Remus,” he called plaintively.
“Bugger off, I’m not talking to you,” came the distant, petulant reply, and Tonks realised she was smiling, and so was he.
“Wotcher, Sirius,” she said quietly, and sat down beside him. “What did you do to him?”
“Not to him, exactly.” Sirius shrugged, waving his hands. “I was trying to set fire to a curtain, and he was in the way.”
“He’s quite tall,” she offered. “Quite noticeable. I mean, you’d think you’d have spotted he was there.”
“I think that’s what he said. Only with more swearing.”
“And why were you trying to set fire to a curtain?” she went on. “Was there any reason or did you just randomly feel like it?”
“I think possibly he said that too. Obviously you take after him.” He smiled at her, a little nervously, and she swallowed, feeling the tension flow out and settle in the air between them.
“That’s strange,” she said, as lightly as she could muster, “considering it’s you and me who’re related.”
“It is that.” He smiled again, still with that tinge of nervousness the old Sirius would never have betrayed. “But looking at you now, I’d never be able to tell.”
It was painful, almost, to think that when he’d seen her last, she’d been a tomboy eight-year-old; to think of him as he was then, with long lashes and the beauty of youth; to think of the things left behind, lost and found broken. “It’s good to see you,” she said at last. She’d never been as clumsy with feelings.
She wondered if he even remembered the house in London, the Muggle cookies, or if that memory had been another thing lost. But he spoke eventually, and he wasn’t a stranger to her. “You too, Dora.”
She didn’t correct him.
After a moment Remus stamped back in, shaking his head in a very canine way. The drying charms hadn’t quite worked, apparently, as drips of water were flying in all directions. “Sirius,” he said, and he was wagging a finger, “if you do that again, I will still be hexing you at Christmas, peace and goodwill or not.”
“Sorry, Moony.” Sirius bowed his head, but he winked at Tonks, and they both laughed, a little bit, the sound stifled but sparkling in the dimness of the old house.
They were supposed to be cleaning, Tonks knew, ready for using the house as headquarters, but it was a separate war they were fighting – against the dust and the dirt and the murky, shadowed past. To reinterpret, to rewrite, to fill colour in the fading line drawings: that wasn’t the hardest part, but only almost; it was easier to remember than forget. She wished for a minute that she could see the memories like ghosts, to exorcise and cast out, say begone and they would be gone, and then the men on the floor could come back, be themselves like she’d loved them before, and it might all be all right.
Sirius was still laughing, quietly, and Remus put a hand on his shoulder, looked up; she caught his eye and grinned. It was somewhere to begin.
*
“You’re up early, dear.” Molly Weasley rubbed at her eyes as Tonks opened the kitchen door. “I looked in on the boys and Ginny and they were fast asleep.”
Tonks yawned, stepping in to join her by the stove. “I have to be at the Ministry in an hour. Thought I’d save time for breakfast.”
Molly aimed her wand at a bowl of porridge, which poured a delicate stream of honey onto it. “Eat this, it’ll fill you up. Tea?”
“Please.” Tonks warmed her hands on the mug – the kitchen was the only really cosy room at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, and at this time of the morning even it was chilly – and took a sip. It was weak, as Molly’s tea always was, but welcoming, and she sat down at the table with it clutched tightly. Whilst she drank it, Molly busied herself with brewing one for herself.
Tonks lapsed into silence, eating her porridge almost mechanically, but a glimpse of her reflection in the Black silver coffee-pot prompted a grimace. “Best spend a minute in front of the mirror before I go into work,” she said, pushing back her chair.
“Could you give this to Remus?” Molly handed her a fresh, steaming mug of coffee. “He’ll be needing it, poor dear.”
Tonks nodded and started up the stairs. She found Remus asleep on a sofa in one of the upstairs sitting-rooms, eyelids flickering, buried under a pile of sheets and blankets. Curled up at his feet was a large black dog with a thick winter coat. Tonks stepped in, left the mug on the floor by his trailing hands, and she had just moved to go when a soft voice called, “Nymphadora.”
She turned. “Remus, go back to sleep.”
“I don’t want to.” He sounded almost childish, and there was a shift in the dog’s slow, steady breathing.
“Remus.” Tonks found herself wagging a finger, and she went to sit on the edge of the sofa, with him rolling back to allow her room. She leaned down and picked up the mug. “Here, drink this. Actually, no, wait.”
She had to think about it for a minute – it wasn’t a spell she used often – before producing her wand and tapping the mug. “Exanthinus.”
Nothing appeared to happen, but Remus’s eyes had darkened. “Did you just decaffeinate my coffee?” he demanded, and Tonks wanted to laugh.
She was unrepentant, laying a hand on his forehead before handing over the mug. “Remus, you’re horribly dehydrated and you know you need to sleep.”
He took a sip anyway, hissing from the heat of it. “Tell Molly thank you for me, and make it Irish next time.”
She didn’t take the bait, her hand moving to stroke his hair. “How was it?”
“Sirius was here.” He gave her a quick, twisted smile. “But I think I hurt him... quite badly.”
“Nothing a little healing won’t fix.” She carefully didn’t look at the dried blood on Sirius’s muzzle; she knew it would be taken care of, in time, and now Remus needed to be soothed back into sleep. “Doesn’t the potion help with that?”
“It would, if Severus could be persuaded to make it with any regularity. This month he has pleaded other pressing engagements.”
“Too pressing to keep you from tearing yourself apart?” Her voice was rising, and Padfoot snuffled himself awake. Bright canine eyes regarded her for a moment, and Tonks was certain he agreed with her.
“Yes,” said Remus simply, and laid his head back down. Tonks took the mug from him before he dropped it, and laid it back on the floor. His breathing was slowing, lengthening, and she realised he was drifting back into sleep. As she watched, he pushed the hair from his eyes, twitching fretfully, and rolled over so he was face down. There was something stiff and painful about his movements.
“He always did fall asleep in the middle of conversations.,” said Sirius, quietly, and she jumped. He was tapping his left ear in a very doglike way, but the transformation seemed to have been conducted silently in the minute Tonks had been staring down at Remus. “I learned not to take it personally. Still, I always worried that maybe I was just that boring a conversationalist.”
Tonks smiled wryly. “He’s exhausted. I don’t think he’ll even remember this when he wakes up again.”
Sirius nodded at her, getting up to pace across the room. “He won’t. He won’t remember.” He paused, turned on his heel and walked a few steps in the other direction. “There’s something in your head, you know, that means you can’t remember pain. It means it comes as a shock every time you feel it.”
Tonks had nothing to say to that. Sirius seemed aware of it; his movements lost something of their tightness, and he came to sit on the floor beside her. One of Remus’s feet, bare and curiously delicate, dangled near his head, and he pushed it back beneath the covers.
“I wish I knew where he’s been,” he said, after a while. “Fuck knows how he’s managed for himself all this time.”
Tonks shrugged. “No one had seen him for years before Dumbledore persuaded him to come back to Hogwarts. Wish he’d been my Defence teacher.”
“He needs looking after,” Sirius went on thoughtfully. “And there was no one he’d let close enough to do it. I despair of him, sometimes.”
“So do I.”
He glanced at her, flashing her a smile that lit his eyes. “I forget you’re all grown up, now. Old enough to worry about my Moony.”
“You worried about him when you were twelve.”
He looked at her again, with that quick, intelligent interest, and Tonks realised that she’d never talked, really talked, to Sirius; before, she’d been a child, and now, afterwards, they were labouring underneath the weight of the past, shown in Remus’s drawn face and dark eyes. Sirius was regarding her with an air of revelation about him. “You’re a credit to the Noble and Ancient House of Black.” He grinned. “Toujours pur.”
She flinched. “I’m not a Black.”
“You are.” He wasn’t looking at her any more. “So am I, and so is your mother. It’s not always a bad thing. You’re just like Andromeda – you’ve got a mind of your own. Moony said we always thought you would do.”
“He was right.” She looked up at him, white-faced and dreaming. “He usually is. Sirius,” – and she touched his shoulder, grabbed at him in a way she hadn’t done in years, “look after him. And look after yourself. He said he hurt you....”
Sirius frowned, running his fingers over the lines of his face and through his hair. “He did at that. Scalp wound, nothing to worry about.” His tone was nothing but affectionate, and Tonks wondered if he’d even thought to check himself over. “Molly will fix it. Not you, you’re late.”
“Shit!” Tonks’s eyes went straight to the wall clock. “Sirius, I’ve got to go, but please....”
He laughed, softly. “Don’t hide the kitchen knives, Nymphadora. Remus and I will be all right.”
Tonks nodded, and turned away. As she moved to the door, Sirius leaned down and kissed Remus’s head, and for a moment they were boys covered in flour, looking at her through time, and she had to run.
*
It wasn’t like eavesdropping, Tonks thought. It wasn’t anything at all like eavesdropping. The kitchen door was wide open and they could be heard all over the house. It was the two of them, shouting, and the portrait in the hallway screeching like a banshee, and the front door banging open and then closed as people entered, disappeared, tried not to linger in the vortex of sound.
Except her, of course; she wasn’t scared of either of them, and as she thought it she hoped it was true.
“Greyback,” Sirius was growling, “you, you ... are going underground with Fenrir Greyback.”
It wasn’t the only argument they had had on the subject. Tonks had looked up the name in the Ministry records, the first time, and been amazed that Sirius was taking it even as calmly as this.
Then Remus, tiredly as always: “I’ve told you before, it’s something I can do, and do well. And if I’m not worried about it, neither should you be.”
“Stop it with that fucking, fucking self-sacrificing shit!” Sirius yelled, and Tonks was sure the last word had been heard everywhere in the house, and probably by the neighbours, were it not for the fact numbers eleven and thirteen thought they were neighbours. And that, she decided, was the problem; in a dark old house which no one could see, things got bottled up and twisted and started, belatedly, to hurt.
“I’m telling you the truth. Trust me,” Remus said, and even though he never raised his voice, it rang painful clearly in her ears. “Trust me! Is that so hard? Do you have to make it all so hard?”
Tonks wondered if she should step inside, let them know she was there. But they must know, they couldn’t not know that they were shocking most of the Order, and somehow that was worse than their usual fights behind closed doors.
The front door banged open even as she thought of it, and a quiet, oily voice drifted in.
“Ah. Not only are they cleaning and cooking like a pair of gossipy housewives, they’re putting the dispute back into domestic. How terribly fitting.”
“Fuck off, Snape,” Tonks murmured without turning round, and though it didn’t feel as good as she’d thought it would when she was at school, it was almost. And to her amazement, he took her advice, turning on his heel in a sweep of rustling fabric. Looking over her shoulder, she saw she was alone again.
Alone, bar the shouting.
“It’s nothing to do with trust!” Sirius, this time, and the growls were becoming less human. “It’s to do with you getting yourself killed!”
“And I’m telling you I won’t be! I’m telling you every single bloody day, Sirius, so why, why do you have to do this?”
“Because I’m stuck here, doing nothing, and you’re going out there to die, and forgive me for not being able to bear it! Don’t you dare stand there and tell me to just trust and it’ll work out right, it’ll all go away! I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re acting like one.”
“Fuck you, Remus! It’s not idiotic to want more to life than this! More than this fucking house! I hate it here. I hate every minute of the day when I’m here. All I’ve got, all I’ve got is memories, and you telling me to trust and I can’t take it. Trust in what? What I have got left to trust in? Tell me that!”
Remus said: “If you’d trusted me fourteen years ago, they wouldn’t be dead.”
Tonks felt the words settle, like feathers falling in silence, and then there was Sirius, battering past her, a whirlwind of fear and anger heading for the door.
“Sirius!” Remus was running out after him, robes flapping, bare feet slapping on the stone. “I didn’t mean... you know I didn’t...”
He stopped and turned straight to look at Tonks. He couldn’t keep still, and in his jerking movements, flexing fingers, wringing hands, she saw savagery. “It’s my fault,” he said, helplessly, and went outside.
And that, she thought, two summer days later, would be another thing she couldn’t bear to remember; along with audio fading as the red streaks of light hit her and Remus clinging desperately to Harry and the pause, stretched out, as it took her eyes a long time to close and Sirius a long, long time to die; another thing to do with falling together, falling apart, falling into the dark.
on to part two
amchau and gamesiplay did absolutely stellar beta jobs. I am very, very grateful to you both for your comments. (And in the case of amchau, for suggesting hysterically funny plot developments when I was trying to cook dinner without dropping things.)LJ won't let me post the whole thing in one go, so this is part one and the link to part two is at the bottom.
Fic:: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
by Raven
R, Harry Potter, slash, het. Sirius/Remus, Remus/Tonks. A story about how Tonks grows up.
Something special happened when Nymphadora Tonks was five. It wasn’t Sirius coming to visit, although that was something special that didn’t happen often, because he was away at Hogwarts most of the time and could only come when he was on holiday. Now it was summer, and he had come to babysit. Nymphadora was very excited.
But it wasn’t like it usually was when he babysat. First of all, her mummy and daddy hadn’t actually gone anywhere. They’d just said they were having an important chat with Professor Dumbledore in the living room and she wasn’t to come in and disturb them, but to stay in the kitchen and be good for Sirius. She was a little bit disappointed, because she liked Professor Dumbledore almost as much as she liked Sirius. Professor Dumbledore always gave her Muggle sweeties (and her dad would eat them and tell her, “Ah, that takes me back!”), and said nice things about her hair, and she was sorry she wasn’t allowed to go in and see him; but then the doorbell rang and she knew it would be Sirius and she forgot all about it.
Sirius bounced in through the door and picked her up. “Nymphadora! How are you, baby?”
Nymphadora didn’t mind being called a baby by Sirius. “I’m fine,” she said politely, like she’d been taught, but then she forgot and asked: “Can we make cookies by magic pretty please?”
“Of course we can! And Moony here will dye them pink to match your hair!”
Nymphadora squealed. Her hair wasn’t always pink, but it changed colour when she got excited, and now Sirius was here, it was the colour of Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum. He put her down gently and said, “Nymphadora, this is Moony.”
She turned round and realised he hadn’t come by himself, which was the second reason it wasn’t like when he usually babysat. There was another boy with him, who had long brown hair and brown eyes that had light-coloured flecks in them. (She asked about the word “flecks” later, so she knew it was the right one.)
“Sirius?”
Nymphadora turned round. Her mum had opened the living-room door and stuck her head out. “I thought it was you,” she said, and she was smiling. “And you must be Remus Lupin. Sirius has told me a lot about you.”
The boy with the brown hair smiled back at Nymphadora’s mum and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Tonks.”
“Andromeda, please.” She was still smiling. “Well, Sirius, you enjoy babysitting Dora, and Remus, you enjoy babysitting Sirius.” She laughed, and so did the boy with the brown hair, but Sirius looked grumpy. “Be good, Nymphadora.”
She went back inside, and Sirius picked Nymphadora up again. “What was that about making cookies by magic?”
“Sirius...” said the other boy warningly. Nymphadora squirmed in Sirius’s grasp to turn to look at him.
“Is your name really Moony? Mum called you something else.”
“Moony,” he said, looking down at her, “is what my friends call me. I’d be honoured if you did the same.”
Nymphadora didn’t say anything, but something inside her stomach went pop.
In the kitchen, Sirius sat her down on the edge of a counter and started taking things out of cupboards – things like flour and sugar and bicarbonate of soda. (Nymphadora was very proud of being able to say bicarbonate of soda.) “You see, little cousin,” he said as he did it, “we have a slight problem. Your mum can make cookies by magic. But Moony and I, sadly, are not of age. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“You can’t do magic or bad things happen,” she said, and suddenly felt disappointed. “Does that mean no cookies?”
“Certainly not!” He looked like she’d said something awful. “There will be cookies... the Muggle way! Do you know how Muggles make cookies, Nymphadora?”
Nymphadora thought about it. “My nana is a Muggle. I know how she makes them.”
Sirius laughed. “If my family heard you say the word “nana”, Nymphadora, I don’t know what they’d....”
Moony interrupted. “Mine is too,” he said, and he smiled at her. “And she taught me to make cookies as well.”
Making cookies the Muggle way was fun. Lots of flour got on the floor, for one thing, and Sirius didn’t seem to know what to do with a rolling-pin. He threatened to hit her on the head with it, and she screamed and ran away, but she knew he wouldn’t really.
When the cookies were ready, the kitchen smelled wonderful. Sirius took the tray out, wearing oven gloves – he would have forgotten if Moony hadn’t reminded him – and put them on the counter. And Nymphadora opened her eyes wide, because they were pink! “You said you couldn’t do magic!” she told Sirius.
“He can’t.” Moony put a finger on his lips. “Can you keep a secret, Nymphadora?”
She nodded her head.
“Look at this.” He held out his hand, shook it, and something dropped out of his sleeve. It was a small glass bottle, and it was labelled – Nymphadora was good at reading – food colouring. “Muggle magic,” he said, and grinned. “Now would you like a cookie, my lady with the kaleidoscope eyes?”
She nodded again. Through a mouth full of crumbs, she asked, “What’s it mean, kaleidoscope eyes?”
“It comes from a song by the Beatles. Has Sirius told you who the Beatles are?”
Sirius snorted. “She’s Andromeda’s daughter, she’s been well educated already.”
Moony ignored him. “Well, they sing a song about it. A kaleidoscope is a Muggle toy that you look through, and it changes colours while you look. And it’s a good name for you, because your eyes change colour whenever you want. Do you understand?”
“I’m like a girl in a song?”
He nodded. “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly...” he sang, hoarsely. “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes...”
Sirius clapped his hands over his ears. But Nymphadora, sitting on the counter and listening, knew something very special had just happened.
Late that night, when Professor Dumbledore had gone and so had her babysitters, Nymphadora sat up in bed when her mummy came to say goodnight.
“Dora, I thought you were asleep.”
“Mummy,” said Nymphadora, “something very important happened today.”
“What’s that, darling?”
Nymphadora took a deep breath and worried she might laugh. “I fell in love.”
But her mummy didn’t laugh. She smiled, though, and said, “I’m delighted to hear it.” And she kissed Nymphadora goodnight, and switched off the light.
When Nymphadora Tonks was eleven, she burst into tears in the middle of one of Professor McGonagall’s Transfiguration classes.
For a minute, nothing happened. The class were changing needles into matchsticks, in a room filled with total silence, and Nymphadora’s sudden, violent sobs cut into it like a blunt blade. Once they’d been alerted to the noise, the people around her exchanged confused, surreptitious glances. From the other side of the room, some of the Slytherins began to snigger. Nymphadora ignored them all, cried solidly for two more minutes, and stood up, her chair scraping. She stalked out of the room, her hair straightening out of corkscrew curls, and slammed the door behind her.
The corridor outside was deserted. There were rolling clouds visible through the large, dingy window, with a flash of sun. There was a little warmth in it, and she moved to stand by the glass, looking down at the bleak, autumnal grounds rolling away beneath. She took a deep breath, and then another.
“Now, Tonks,” said someone quietly, “suppose you tell me what’s the matter.”
She turned around, slowly. Professor McGonagall had just closed the door behind her, and Nymphadora heard the latch click closed. “Can’t,” she said.
“No one inside can hear a word,” McGonagall continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “They’re busy with their needles, and anyone who has not produced a matchstick by the end of this class will have detention for the next four weeks of term.” She smiled grimly. “I do not make idle threats, as you know. Now, Tonks...” – and her voice had a gentleness beneath the brogue – “I want to know why you were crying in there.”
Nymphadora turned away again, back to looking at the sunlight spilling over Hogwarts’ grounds. Far, far below, she thought she saw the giant squid break the surface of the lake, making a shadowy wake in the flawless blue, then disappearing. “I got the Daily Prophet this morning,” she said after a minute. “My mum sends it on to me when I’m at school.”
McGonagall nodded. “Go on.”
“It was in the gossip column,” Nymphadora said flatly. “It was just a paragraph. It said someone thought they’d seen Harry Potter in a Muggle shop.”
“Oh, I see. Harry went to live with Muggles, dear.” McGonagall had stepped closer, but Nymphadora was grateful she hadn’t been asked to turn round, at least not yet. “It was the best place for him. I’m not saying what they publish in that rag is always true, mind you, but it could be.”
“I saw him once when I was little,” Nymphadora said. “He was Sirius’s godson. He was so proud.”
McGonagall had tensed at the name, and there was a long pause before Nymphadora spoke again.
“And I thought: they’re not coming back. Any of them. And just because I was so little somehow I’m not allowed. I mean I’m not allowed to miss them. Miss him.”
McGonagall didn’t say anything.
“And it’s not like I’m not happy too,” Nymphadora told the window. “He, I mean You Know Who, he’s gone. It’s all over. Mum doesn’t cry at night any more.” She paused, catching her breath, feeling she’d said too much and that to McGonagall, of all people.
But a soft, almost motherly hand settled on her shoulder, and all at once Nymphadora felt like crying again. “But it’s not the same” – and she knew she was wailing – “for me as it is for everyone else, because they’re all gone, and, and” – a sniff – “my parents won’t let me even say his name!”
“Tonks,” said Professor McGonagall, “I think that perhaps you shouldn’t return to my lesson. Just sit down” – she indicated the windowsill – “and listen to me for a moment.”
This time, Nymphadora had to turn around to face her. Rubbing at her eyes, she sat down. To her surprise, McGonagall heaved a sigh and came to sit beside her. “We were all, and perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s true – we were all surprised. Shocked, even. No one expected it, no one even considered it. He was the last person anyone would ever have thought... in any case, it was hard for us all, but there were a few people it was particularly hard on. Your mother was one of them.”
Nymphadora nodded. “I hate it, that everyone always talks about how wonderful things are now it’s over, and they forget the bad stuff.”
It was strange, but McGonagall looked somehow more kind than Nymphadora had ever seen her. “I don’t like saying it to a mite of a girl,” she said, slowly, “but time is a great healer. You might not know it now, but things will get better.” Off Nymphadora’s look, “They will. You’ll see. Now go and wash your face, dear, and then go and have a cup of tea with Hagrid. It’ll do you good.”
Nymphadora gave a final sniff. “Thanks, Professor.”
“You’re very welcome. Off you go now.”
Nymphadora got unsteadily to her feet, her footsteps the only sounds in the quiet morning.
“Tonks?”
She turned.
“I nearly forgot,” McGonagall called. “Two scrolls of parchment on the mechanics of inanimate Transfiguration, by Monday, please.”
“Thanks, Professor,” Nymphadora said, and almost smiled.
“Tell me,” he said earnestly, “what’s it that makes you tick? Why do you do what you do, say what you say? Why use that perfume or wear that dress? What makes you laugh, makes you cry? Who is Nymphadora Tonks?”
She burst into laughter. “Charlie Weasley,” she got out, through the threatening hysterics, “you quoted that word for word from this month’s Cosmo!”
He looked affronted. “I am hurt. You impugn me.”
“Charlie, you’ve never been pugned in your life.”
He grinned. “But I didn’t quote it word-for-word, as it happens. It actually said ‘who is Insert Name Here’, but I improvised. Thought it might work this time.”
She burst into laughter again. “For the last time, Charlie – I’m not going out with you. Your deathless prose notwithstanding,” she added. “Look, we’re mates, aren’t we?”
To his credit, he didn’t look too disappointed. “Yeah,” he agreed. “We are.”
Only good mates, Nymphadora thought, would be sitting out here at eleven o’clock at night, up on the top of the tower with a picnic blanket in Gryffindor colours. It wasn’t dark yet; there were still streaks of blue in the west, and although it was chilly, she had absolutely no need to draw close to him for warmth or anything else he might have been fantasising about.
Although, to be fair, he’d asked her out at least once a month for six years, and much as she’d hate to admit it, she didn’t want him to stop.
“It’s a nice night,” he said after a while, throwing a cherry stone off the top of the tower and watching it disappear into the dark at the base. “Nearly the longest day.”
“Nearly the end of term, that means,” she replied, smiling at the thought. “And then we’ve only got one more year left! Doesn’t that scare you?”
“To death,” he agreed. “Mum keeps sending me frantic owls wanting to know what I’ve done about my Future. With a capital F. Future. Scary all by itself, that is.” He shuddered.
“My mum’s the same.” She smiled wryly. “It’s in the job description, I think. She’s been at it since we had that careers advice in fifth year. ‘What are you doing with your life, Nymphadora? Are you taking your studies seriously, Nymphadora? Are you sure you’re not a lesbian, Nymphadora?’”
He put one hand to his mouth. “You’re making that up!”
“Oh, if only!” She stuck her tongue out at him. “She thinks because I won’t go out with you, I must be, you know. And anyway, Mum never quite got off the free-love bandwagon. Apparently the Slytherin common room was the place to be, back in the sixties.”
“I can imagine.” He paused. “Your mum was a Slytherin?”
“Yeah.” She drew her knees up to her chest, willing her hair longer to make a shield against the breeze. It was getting colder. “We don’t all have noble Gryffindor pedigree, you know.”
Charlie smiled wryly. “So, Miss Nymphadora Tonks, Gryffindor without pedigree, what are you going to do with your life? Something bold and brave, no doubt?”
She shifted a little, pulling the blanket to her. “Can you keep a secret?”
“To the death!” he said dramatically, but his face softened when he saw she was serious. “Of course I can. What is it?”
Nymphadora took a moment before answering. “It’s embarrassing,” she said quickly, “’specially when I can’t get across a room without tripping over something, you know me, and I’m not mega clever and yeah, I’m dead clumsy all the time and I’m probably never going to get in, and....”
“Nymphadora! What is it?”
She blushed. “I want to be an Auror.”
It was his turn for the laughter, and she buried her head in her hands. “Oh, fuck, it’s stupid, it’s a stupid idea....”
“No, no!” Charlie lifted her head, softly, one hand on each side, making her sit up. “It’s not stupid at all. It’s perfect for you.”
“You really think so?” She looked up at him, blinking.
“Course I do. You’re great at Defence, and you’re a meta... meta... you know I can’t pronounce it.”
“Metamorphmagus. Yeah. Yeah, I am. Won’t have to worry about disguise and stuff like that.” She concentrated for a moment. “What do you think?”
Charlie laughed, and she drew out a small hand mirror to check her handiwork. “Oh, yes, I like it,” he said. “Red hair with yellow stripe, very Gryffindor.”
“I’d do it proper gold, but I can’t be bothered.” She leaned back against one of the battlements. “I can do bold and brave, though. Out there battling the forces of evil.”
“You will be,” he said, and he wasn’t being flippant. “I remember when we were kids. Aurors all over the place. Of course, there was lots of evil to be battled.”
“That’s what gave me the idea,” she confessed. “I looked up to them so much, as a kid. They were always making jokes about what they did, you know, and some of the things they had to do.... it was horrible. They’d go out every night and come back in the morning covered in gore, and they were only a couple of years older than we are now, but they seemed so wonderful, so grown-up. I remember thinking I’d give anything to be like them.”
“Not exactly like them,” said Charlie, thoughtfully, and she knew what he meant. “Some mornings, they didn’t come back.”
“I will. I’ll always come back.”
They looked at each other, exchanged awkward smiles. An owl hooted, swooping off up into the highland, a shadow in a sky that was now dark.
After a pause, she said, “I’m cold.”
“Yeah, me too.”
She was shivering under the blanket, and rather than draw her close, Charlie helped her to her feet and they began gathering up the picnic things. “Time to go,” she said wistfully. “I don’t really want to go to bed.”
As they walked towards the spiral staircase, Charlie paused. “Nymphadora?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
She laughed. “Would it help if I was?”
Charlie seemed to consider. “No.”
“Didn’t think so,” she said, and put an arm round his shoulder, steadying him all the way down the stairs.
She was late. She was always late, it seemed; this morning had involved a headlong rush out of the door, a rolled-up newspaper on the step and an unscheduled flight into a flowerbed, which had necessitated trudging back inside to mop up the spilled blood and free-flowing embarrassment.
But if she hadn’t been late, she wouldn’t have been running with a Muggle plastic cup of coffee in her hands, and she wouldn’t have knocked it all over a total stranger on the Underground.
But in the stark flickering light of the train, she looked into the dark eyes of the man and realised he wasn’t a stranger at all. She hung off the hooks of the rattling train, swaying with it, her body brushing against his with each jerk of the carriage. He stared down at her from beneath his hood, his face rendered ghost-white and familiar with each passing window flash. “I know you,” she said, the words at once a whisper and a shout above the roar.
There was a pause whilst he registered the fact she was talking to him. “I don’t know you.”
The palpable disapproval surprised her. “Where have you been all this time? We’ve been trying – I mean Dumbledore and everyone else, they’ve been trying desperately to find you, make sure you’re okay....”
“Look,” and there was something harsh and acidic in his voice that she’d never heard in it before, “I don’t know where you’re getting all this, but I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Remus!” she snapped, making him jerk to look at her. In the dimness, she focused. In the next brief flash of a passing tunnel light, her hair shifted pink, then green, then back to its current black. “It’s me.”
“Oh, it’s you.” His voice hadn’t changed. “It’s you. Good, I’m glad we’ve had that sufficiently clarified. Now will you please leave me alone?”
“Remus...” – but he had already gone, making his way handhold by handhold down the carriage and away from her. Annoyed, she followed, but she didn’t have his grace and stumbled into baggage, windows, seated and irritated people. She got tangled up with one man’s spread broadsheet, and by the time she had extricated herself, the train had come to a noisy, confused stop at Embankment. “Remus!” she yelled, but her voice was lost in the clamour of commuters and announcements, and she launched herself through the train doors just as they were closing only to see his shaggy head disappear into the crowd.
“Fuck,” she muttered, quietly, and struck out after him. The rush of the people towards the exits guided her; she hurried down long winding passageways, past buskers, up escalators, through the ticket hall – it wasn’t her station stop; seek assistance, the barriers told her, and she vaulted over them – and into the rush of wind, freezing cold after the muted warmth of the tunnels, and outside.
It was surprisingly easy to find him, leaning over one of the railings and looking out across the river. The Thames was murky grey water below a murky grey sky. She said: “Remus.”
He turned, tiredly. “Didn’t I tell you to leave me alone?”
“No.” She joined him in staring out at the river. “You asked me. There’s a difference.”
“Well, now I’m telling you. Leave me alone.”
“Sorry.” She shifted closer to him; he inched away. “No can do. Remus, the whole of the wizarding world, more or less, is looking for you. Where have you been?”
He turned back to face her, and in the daylight, she saw the depth of his pallor, the absence of flesh on his sharp bones. He was gaunt, ghost-like. “I’ve been here.”
“By the Thames.”
“By myself. I don’t see how it’s your business, or anyone else’s for that matter, what I do with my life.”
“It’s our business,” she said, “because we care about you. We’re worried about you. The last time anyone heard anything from you was years ago!”
“Not enough years.” He was looking straight down at the water again, and Tonks noticed his knuckles were dead white.
There was silence. In the murk of the morning, it was beginning to rain, small, irritating droplets that made a condensation mist out of Tonks’s hair. She shifted it out of the way and stretched out. She was beyond late, now; Moody would mark her down as a no-show, and away would go another precious attendance, and she was pretty sure she’d be thrown out of the programme some day soon, anyway.
“Why were you on the Underground?”
It was the first thing he had said without her prompting him, and Tonks decided to take it as a good sign. “I usually Apparate,” she said. “But I had a rough night last night, and I’m too tired for it. Last time I tried it I nearly got splinched.”
He looked up at her, seemingly for the first time, taking in all of her – her changed face and hair, her frayed Weird Sisters T-shirt, the spiked cuff on her wrist, her favourite boots. He smiled, humourlessly. “Sirius’s little Dora, hungover. Wouldn’t he have been proud?”
“Fuck you.” The words came out quickly, sharp as a whip crack. “How dare you say that?”
“Nymphadora....”
For a minute he was sounding like himself, the man she’d known coming through in the liquid vowels, but she was too angry to care. “It’s Tonks now. Just Tonks. And you would know that if you hadn’t fucked off into the wide blue yonder!”
He flinched. “All right, Tonks: tell me what I had to stay for. To live for. To carry on for.”
“For what’s left behind!” she yelled. “For who’s left behind! For what they died for!”
“The people left behind don’t need me. The whole world can forget me, and I’d be happy to be forgotten.”
She didn’t say anything. The fury was leaving as quickly as it had come, fading into insubstantial grey alongside the clouds on the horizon. “I guess you’re not coming back with me.”
“No, I’m not.”
She tried to think about it without her head hurting. “Sirius was more than just my cousin, you know that. He was my friend, my big brother, mine. And I’m still here. I’m training to be an Auror. That’s what I’ve learned. I’ll never be fooled again.”
“I will be.”
Tonks looked up at him.
“I knew him better than you did.” It was a statement of fact, not an accusation. “He was my friend, and my lover, mine, and I will always be fooled again. Goodbye, Nymphadora.”
Standing there, he was framed for a shifting sequence of moments by the sun emerging from a cloud and then retreating again. There were changes in him that were more subtle, Tonks realised. The drawn, white hollows in his face made his eyes look even larger and more lustrous; the sparseness of his frame emphasised the animal grace. For a long moment more, they looked at each other.
“Goodbye, Moony,” she said, at last, and he was gone into the bleakness, as if he had never existed at all.
Tonks was in the bath when she got the summons.
Before she did anything else, she took a moment to resent being disturbed. It was a twilight bath, the sort of bath you had when it was three am and you couldn’t, realistically, be said to be hogging the bathroom, sitting in the dimmed tub taking long, slow breaths of steam. The water had poured scorching hot from the pipes, and she was keeping a warming charm on it, but even that was fading with time. Cooled to blood-heat, it was only apparent to her senses as soft, slopping movement, lulling her to sleep.
The interrupting owl, therefore, received a muffled curse – it went wild and hit one of the light fittings, reducing the room to further dimness – and swooped huffily out of the window. The letter was left on the edge of the bath, already curling open from the steam. It was addressed in telltale green ink, with the precision of address that betrayed the hand that had written it: Ms. N. Tonks, The Bath, the First Floor Flat...
She liked the Ms., she decided. She wasn’t pretty, prissy, Miss Nymphadora, with the blood of a pure and ancient house and a talent for behaving herself; she didn’t think such a person had ever existed. Whereas the girl the letter was for was the sort of girl, woman, who could have spent the night drinking and dancing until her clothes were perfumed with sweat and scent, got home in the wee small hours, thrown up pure zinfandel into a flowerpot, fallen into an ancient claw-feet bathtub and watched, amusedly, as her hair and face and body shifted through a spectrum of colours and curves back to feminine.
Now that – she paused before reaching for the letter – that had been an afterthought. She’d been out with Charlie, nominally (off back to Romania in the morning, and he’d dropped a few hints of the farewell-fuck variety, though Tonks had demurred), but the club had been thick with magic and smoke and she’d ended up on her own, for a minute. And then a girl had come up to her, taken in the pink hair, given her a muted smirk of a smile, and asked, sultrily, “Does the carpet match the curtains?”
She got asked the question a lot – it was a natural hazard of constantly mutating hair colour – but usually, it was by men. And she’d spent four years in one of the most elite training programmes known to woman, and she knew how to deal with them.
This time had been different. Something had gone pop inside her head, and she’d known, right then and there, that it did.
In the starker light of the ladies’ loos, she’d given it a bit of thought. And although it was fading, here in the bath where her magic was going squiffy round the edges, there was enough left to admire her handiwork.
Firstly, the hair. Short punky pink had become shorter and punkier, with a tinge of bleach-white for the sake of the detail. Then her eyes, larger, but with finer lashes. Her hands, roughened, with short, trimmed nails. Then, the difficult bit. It was a straightening and a hardening, less softness to her curves, more subtlety to the hourglass. And when she stepped out, the change was almost invisible, but against a wall, it was palpable.
And there had been a few women and a few walls, and another word for wall was dyke, which was the sort of thing that was very funny after four glasses of pink wine and all of Charlie’s Ogden’s Old. He’d forgiven her. She thought so, anyway, and if he hadn’t he was going to Romania in the morning.
Giggling a little bit at the thought – not all the zinfandel was in the flowerpot – she reached for her letter with one hand and for a towel with the other, getting rid of the water and bubbles before touching the parchment.
It was in Dumbledore’s narrow, elegant hand, and it was polite and serene and laconic. After a few words Tonks stopped smiling.
She read it once quickly, and then again, taking in every detail. While she was reading, her body shifted back to sensible femininity, her hair became dull black, her toenails taking on a chipped coat of purple polish. The water was growing colder with each descriptive paragraph, chilling her bones with each word she’d thought she’d never read again. And, finally, at the end of the letter, a sparse line drawing of a bird with bright eyes, and a request.
Tonks thought about it for a while. There was another piece of parchment attached, which she didn’t have to unfold and read; she could drop it over the side and go to sleep in the water and in the morning she’d forget. She’d go on training. She’d wait for Charlie to come back, and maybe they’d go out again. Her mum would be pleased, if something happened between them, and even so she’d work on the baby-dyke thing. It might come in useful.
But she didn’t think about it for long. She unfolded the parchment.
The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix are at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.
After a while, the note dropped into the bath and disintegrated, ink swirling green and fading, vanishing, gone.
She remembered the house.
She remembered winter. She remembered the chill wind, the shaking chandeliers, the headless house-elves. She remembered her mother. She remembered the shouts and screams as the last daughter of the house of Black walked out, dragging her own little one behind her – hush, Dora, don’t cry, don’t cry, we’re never going back – and the sonorous, hollow sound of the door closing behind them both.
“I wanted to show you to them,” Andromeda said years later, and Tonks felt the strange, rising bubble she’d recognise later as pride. “I wanted them to see my little girl was growing up just fine without them. It was stupid.”
“No,” said Tonks. “No, it wasn’t.”
Sirius had done the same thing, when he was sixteen and she was three; he’d walked through this very hallway, his eyes bright, his aristocratic Black features hidden by a toss of glam rock hair, and he’d left forever.
And now – and now, when everything had come full circle and the door opened, swung back with the same crash of finality – they were back.
“Hello!” Tonks called, through the silence and the dust. Her voice lifted up, blurred into background creaks and then nothingness. “Is anyone there?”
There was no reply. Sunlight was coming down into the mausoleum, filtering through layers of gloom until it emerged, sepia and faded, into a pool at Tonks’s feet. She stepped through it, forwards and back, wondering whether she should go for the stairs and search the house. Something scampered behind her, and she turned, but saw nothing.
Far, far above, a voice stated: “Incendio.”
And through the silence came a shriek, someone shouting, “Sirius, NO!” and then running footsteps, a strong smell of burning, and then something came hurtling down the stairs, all flapping brown fabric, thick, acrid smoke and crackling flames, and lots of yelling, and then a final, sickening thump of flesh hitting the ground.
Tonks shut her eyes, held her wand above her head and howled, “Aguamenti!”
There was a millisecond’s pause, a sound like onions hitting a frying pan, then of water, and then everything faded back into silence.
The steam cleared, and Tonks opened her eyes. Remus looked up at her from floor level. “Hello, Nymphadora,” he said serenely.
“Tonks,” she corrected, on autopilot.
“Tonks, then. Do you mind my asking why you just dumped about four buckets’ worth of water on me?”
“Um,” Tonks said, “you were on fire?”
“That was what the rolling was for. Down the stairs. To put out the fire.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Still, you probably helped.” He stood up and started wringing out his hair and clothes, which were covered in sodden cobwebs and black with dust. “Thank you. Excuse me a minute.”
He disappeared, dripping, presumably in search of wand and towel. After a minute, Sirius walked down the stairs, slowly, and sat on the bottom step. “Remus,” he called plaintively.
“Bugger off, I’m not talking to you,” came the distant, petulant reply, and Tonks realised she was smiling, and so was he.
“Wotcher, Sirius,” she said quietly, and sat down beside him. “What did you do to him?”
“Not to him, exactly.” Sirius shrugged, waving his hands. “I was trying to set fire to a curtain, and he was in the way.”
“He’s quite tall,” she offered. “Quite noticeable. I mean, you’d think you’d have spotted he was there.”
“I think that’s what he said. Only with more swearing.”
“And why were you trying to set fire to a curtain?” she went on. “Was there any reason or did you just randomly feel like it?”
“I think possibly he said that too. Obviously you take after him.” He smiled at her, a little nervously, and she swallowed, feeling the tension flow out and settle in the air between them.
“That’s strange,” she said, as lightly as she could muster, “considering it’s you and me who’re related.”
“It is that.” He smiled again, still with that tinge of nervousness the old Sirius would never have betrayed. “But looking at you now, I’d never be able to tell.”
It was painful, almost, to think that when he’d seen her last, she’d been a tomboy eight-year-old; to think of him as he was then, with long lashes and the beauty of youth; to think of the things left behind, lost and found broken. “It’s good to see you,” she said at last. She’d never been as clumsy with feelings.
She wondered if he even remembered the house in London, the Muggle cookies, or if that memory had been another thing lost. But he spoke eventually, and he wasn’t a stranger to her. “You too, Dora.”
She didn’t correct him.
After a moment Remus stamped back in, shaking his head in a very canine way. The drying charms hadn’t quite worked, apparently, as drips of water were flying in all directions. “Sirius,” he said, and he was wagging a finger, “if you do that again, I will still be hexing you at Christmas, peace and goodwill or not.”
“Sorry, Moony.” Sirius bowed his head, but he winked at Tonks, and they both laughed, a little bit, the sound stifled but sparkling in the dimness of the old house.
They were supposed to be cleaning, Tonks knew, ready for using the house as headquarters, but it was a separate war they were fighting – against the dust and the dirt and the murky, shadowed past. To reinterpret, to rewrite, to fill colour in the fading line drawings: that wasn’t the hardest part, but only almost; it was easier to remember than forget. She wished for a minute that she could see the memories like ghosts, to exorcise and cast out, say begone and they would be gone, and then the men on the floor could come back, be themselves like she’d loved them before, and it might all be all right.
Sirius was still laughing, quietly, and Remus put a hand on his shoulder, looked up; she caught his eye and grinned. It was somewhere to begin.
“You’re up early, dear.” Molly Weasley rubbed at her eyes as Tonks opened the kitchen door. “I looked in on the boys and Ginny and they were fast asleep.”
Tonks yawned, stepping in to join her by the stove. “I have to be at the Ministry in an hour. Thought I’d save time for breakfast.”
Molly aimed her wand at a bowl of porridge, which poured a delicate stream of honey onto it. “Eat this, it’ll fill you up. Tea?”
“Please.” Tonks warmed her hands on the mug – the kitchen was the only really cosy room at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, and at this time of the morning even it was chilly – and took a sip. It was weak, as Molly’s tea always was, but welcoming, and she sat down at the table with it clutched tightly. Whilst she drank it, Molly busied herself with brewing one for herself.
Tonks lapsed into silence, eating her porridge almost mechanically, but a glimpse of her reflection in the Black silver coffee-pot prompted a grimace. “Best spend a minute in front of the mirror before I go into work,” she said, pushing back her chair.
“Could you give this to Remus?” Molly handed her a fresh, steaming mug of coffee. “He’ll be needing it, poor dear.”
Tonks nodded and started up the stairs. She found Remus asleep on a sofa in one of the upstairs sitting-rooms, eyelids flickering, buried under a pile of sheets and blankets. Curled up at his feet was a large black dog with a thick winter coat. Tonks stepped in, left the mug on the floor by his trailing hands, and she had just moved to go when a soft voice called, “Nymphadora.”
She turned. “Remus, go back to sleep.”
“I don’t want to.” He sounded almost childish, and there was a shift in the dog’s slow, steady breathing.
“Remus.” Tonks found herself wagging a finger, and she went to sit on the edge of the sofa, with him rolling back to allow her room. She leaned down and picked up the mug. “Here, drink this. Actually, no, wait.”
She had to think about it for a minute – it wasn’t a spell she used often – before producing her wand and tapping the mug. “Exanthinus.”
Nothing appeared to happen, but Remus’s eyes had darkened. “Did you just decaffeinate my coffee?” he demanded, and Tonks wanted to laugh.
She was unrepentant, laying a hand on his forehead before handing over the mug. “Remus, you’re horribly dehydrated and you know you need to sleep.”
He took a sip anyway, hissing from the heat of it. “Tell Molly thank you for me, and make it Irish next time.”
She didn’t take the bait, her hand moving to stroke his hair. “How was it?”
“Sirius was here.” He gave her a quick, twisted smile. “But I think I hurt him... quite badly.”
“Nothing a little healing won’t fix.” She carefully didn’t look at the dried blood on Sirius’s muzzle; she knew it would be taken care of, in time, and now Remus needed to be soothed back into sleep. “Doesn’t the potion help with that?”
“It would, if Severus could be persuaded to make it with any regularity. This month he has pleaded other pressing engagements.”
“Too pressing to keep you from tearing yourself apart?” Her voice was rising, and Padfoot snuffled himself awake. Bright canine eyes regarded her for a moment, and Tonks was certain he agreed with her.
“Yes,” said Remus simply, and laid his head back down. Tonks took the mug from him before he dropped it, and laid it back on the floor. His breathing was slowing, lengthening, and she realised he was drifting back into sleep. As she watched, he pushed the hair from his eyes, twitching fretfully, and rolled over so he was face down. There was something stiff and painful about his movements.
“He always did fall asleep in the middle of conversations.,” said Sirius, quietly, and she jumped. He was tapping his left ear in a very doglike way, but the transformation seemed to have been conducted silently in the minute Tonks had been staring down at Remus. “I learned not to take it personally. Still, I always worried that maybe I was just that boring a conversationalist.”
Tonks smiled wryly. “He’s exhausted. I don’t think he’ll even remember this when he wakes up again.”
Sirius nodded at her, getting up to pace across the room. “He won’t. He won’t remember.” He paused, turned on his heel and walked a few steps in the other direction. “There’s something in your head, you know, that means you can’t remember pain. It means it comes as a shock every time you feel it.”
Tonks had nothing to say to that. Sirius seemed aware of it; his movements lost something of their tightness, and he came to sit on the floor beside her. One of Remus’s feet, bare and curiously delicate, dangled near his head, and he pushed it back beneath the covers.
“I wish I knew where he’s been,” he said, after a while. “Fuck knows how he’s managed for himself all this time.”
Tonks shrugged. “No one had seen him for years before Dumbledore persuaded him to come back to Hogwarts. Wish he’d been my Defence teacher.”
“He needs looking after,” Sirius went on thoughtfully. “And there was no one he’d let close enough to do it. I despair of him, sometimes.”
“So do I.”
He glanced at her, flashing her a smile that lit his eyes. “I forget you’re all grown up, now. Old enough to worry about my Moony.”
“You worried about him when you were twelve.”
He looked at her again, with that quick, intelligent interest, and Tonks realised that she’d never talked, really talked, to Sirius; before, she’d been a child, and now, afterwards, they were labouring underneath the weight of the past, shown in Remus’s drawn face and dark eyes. Sirius was regarding her with an air of revelation about him. “You’re a credit to the Noble and Ancient House of Black.” He grinned. “Toujours pur.”
She flinched. “I’m not a Black.”
“You are.” He wasn’t looking at her any more. “So am I, and so is your mother. It’s not always a bad thing. You’re just like Andromeda – you’ve got a mind of your own. Moony said we always thought you would do.”
“He was right.” She looked up at him, white-faced and dreaming. “He usually is. Sirius,” – and she touched his shoulder, grabbed at him in a way she hadn’t done in years, “look after him. And look after yourself. He said he hurt you....”
Sirius frowned, running his fingers over the lines of his face and through his hair. “He did at that. Scalp wound, nothing to worry about.” His tone was nothing but affectionate, and Tonks wondered if he’d even thought to check himself over. “Molly will fix it. Not you, you’re late.”
“Shit!” Tonks’s eyes went straight to the wall clock. “Sirius, I’ve got to go, but please....”
He laughed, softly. “Don’t hide the kitchen knives, Nymphadora. Remus and I will be all right.”
Tonks nodded, and turned away. As she moved to the door, Sirius leaned down and kissed Remus’s head, and for a moment they were boys covered in flour, looking at her through time, and she had to run.
It wasn’t like eavesdropping, Tonks thought. It wasn’t anything at all like eavesdropping. The kitchen door was wide open and they could be heard all over the house. It was the two of them, shouting, and the portrait in the hallway screeching like a banshee, and the front door banging open and then closed as people entered, disappeared, tried not to linger in the vortex of sound.
Except her, of course; she wasn’t scared of either of them, and as she thought it she hoped it was true.
“Greyback,” Sirius was growling, “you, you ... are going underground with Fenrir Greyback.”
It wasn’t the only argument they had had on the subject. Tonks had looked up the name in the Ministry records, the first time, and been amazed that Sirius was taking it even as calmly as this.
Then Remus, tiredly as always: “I’ve told you before, it’s something I can do, and do well. And if I’m not worried about it, neither should you be.”
“Stop it with that fucking, fucking self-sacrificing shit!” Sirius yelled, and Tonks was sure the last word had been heard everywhere in the house, and probably by the neighbours, were it not for the fact numbers eleven and thirteen thought they were neighbours. And that, she decided, was the problem; in a dark old house which no one could see, things got bottled up and twisted and started, belatedly, to hurt.
“I’m telling you the truth. Trust me,” Remus said, and even though he never raised his voice, it rang painful clearly in her ears. “Trust me! Is that so hard? Do you have to make it all so hard?”
Tonks wondered if she should step inside, let them know she was there. But they must know, they couldn’t not know that they were shocking most of the Order, and somehow that was worse than their usual fights behind closed doors.
The front door banged open even as she thought of it, and a quiet, oily voice drifted in.
“Ah. Not only are they cleaning and cooking like a pair of gossipy housewives, they’re putting the dispute back into domestic. How terribly fitting.”
“Fuck off, Snape,” Tonks murmured without turning round, and though it didn’t feel as good as she’d thought it would when she was at school, it was almost. And to her amazement, he took her advice, turning on his heel in a sweep of rustling fabric. Looking over her shoulder, she saw she was alone again.
Alone, bar the shouting.
“It’s nothing to do with trust!” Sirius, this time, and the growls were becoming less human. “It’s to do with you getting yourself killed!”
“And I’m telling you I won’t be! I’m telling you every single bloody day, Sirius, so why, why do you have to do this?”
“Because I’m stuck here, doing nothing, and you’re going out there to die, and forgive me for not being able to bear it! Don’t you dare stand there and tell me to just trust and it’ll work out right, it’ll all go away! I’m not an idiot.”
“You’re acting like one.”
“Fuck you, Remus! It’s not idiotic to want more to life than this! More than this fucking house! I hate it here. I hate every minute of the day when I’m here. All I’ve got, all I’ve got is memories, and you telling me to trust and I can’t take it. Trust in what? What I have got left to trust in? Tell me that!”
Remus said: “If you’d trusted me fourteen years ago, they wouldn’t be dead.”
Tonks felt the words settle, like feathers falling in silence, and then there was Sirius, battering past her, a whirlwind of fear and anger heading for the door.
“Sirius!” Remus was running out after him, robes flapping, bare feet slapping on the stone. “I didn’t mean... you know I didn’t...”
He stopped and turned straight to look at Tonks. He couldn’t keep still, and in his jerking movements, flexing fingers, wringing hands, she saw savagery. “It’s my fault,” he said, helplessly, and went outside.
And that, she thought, two summer days later, would be another thing she couldn’t bear to remember; along with audio fading as the red streaks of light hit her and Remus clinging desperately to Harry and the pause, stretched out, as it took her eyes a long time to close and Sirius a long, long time to die; another thing to do with falling together, falling apart, falling into the dark.
on to part two
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2006-04-25 08:18 pm (UTC)Especially:
"He nodded. “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly...” he sang, hoarsely. “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes...”
Sirius clapped his hands over his ears. But Nymphadora, sitting on the counter and listening, knew something very special had just happened."
And this: "She tried to think about it without her head hurting. “Sirius was more than just my cousin, you know that. He was my friend, my big brother, mine. And I’m still here. I’m training to be an Auror. That’s what I’ve learned. I’ll never be fooled again.”
“I will be.”
Tonks looked up at him.
“I knew him better than you did.” It was a statement of fact, not an accusation. “He was my friend, and my lover, mine, and I will always be fooled again. Goodbye, Nymphadora.”- This had me in tears. *loves*
no subject
on 2006-04-25 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-04-25 08:43 pm (UTC)*giggles*
*weeps some more*
you write like a dream, babe.
no subject
on 2006-04-25 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-04-25 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-04-25 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-04-26 05:15 am (UTC)meep I could fall for that too.
‘What are you doing with your life, Nymphadora? Are you taking your studies seriously, Nymphadora? Are you sure you’re not a lesbian, Nymphadora?’”
Sounds like my mom. ;)
off back to Romania in the morning, and he’d dropped a few hints of the farewell-fuck variety
Such a Weasley.
And that, she thought, two summer days later, would be another thing she couldn’t bear to remember; along with audio fading as the red streaks of light hit her and Remus clinging desperately to Harry and the pause, stretched out, as it took her eyes a long time to close and Sirius a long, long time to die; another thing to do with falling together, falling apart, falling into the dark.
Gorgeous.
no subject
on 2006-04-26 07:36 pm (UTC)“Mummy,” said Nymphadora, “something very important happened today.”
“What’s that, darling?”
Nymphadora took a deep breath and worried she might laugh. “I fell in love.”
On to part two... *g*
no subject
on 2010-10-29 10:40 am (UTC)“If you’d trusted me fourteen years ago, they wouldn’t be dead.” - made me gasp out loud. ;~;
Now on to part twoooo :D