2nd Song (HermionexTonks) - 1/3
2nd Song - HermionexTonks - pg-r - 1/3
complete, full length fic starting in the summer pre OotP, continuing until the eventual end of the war. There are some rape references, for the record, and the fic is image heavy. You'll see.
(I own nothing, except for Sirius' leather jacket. That's mine).
dedicated to my M - tireless beta, appalling speller, part-time muse. With love.
(1: out-wait)
At night, the house stops moving (the only sound the portraits whispering through the walls). The house seems lonely in the middle of the night. She's only young, but that, she understands: how possible it is to be lonely in a crowd of people, to be inhabited but lonesome all the same. She feels empty, sometimes. She tries so hard, but she's a clanging bell, and you can learn to ignore any noise in the end. She's scared that they'll learn to ignore her, one of these days.
She's fallen into making lists.
She has pages and pages on the way that Tonks' colours filter and change. She'd been summer in the hallway, talking to Sirius (blue blue sky blue hair, laughing at something he said and leaning up to kiss his cheek, favourite cousin, loved)...she was spring in the kitchen, trying to help with dinner (Molly makes her nervous, giggling, hair like daffodils)...She's winter when she's lonely, gnawing on a fingernail, forgotten in a corner of the stairs.
I would never forget you.
She feels like such a little girl, sometimes. In snatched moments in front of the mirror (black spots under glass, clawed feet), she smoothes her sweater over the front of her body, critical, longing. She's budding, but she wants to bloom. Tonks is easily a woman (she recalls, with a pang, a glimpse of Tonks caught through an open door at midnight, perched on the kitchen table talking to Remus, a glass of milk forgotten, dressed in a t-shirt that skimmed the top of long legs kicking). She laughs a lot (it's such a good sound, open). Hermione loves that sound like nothing else (her body rises, two fingers for support, levitating, slipping her skin). Remus had looked her in the eyes, that way he had (looking down and at you at the same time), but Hermione's eyes had been dragged (not against her will, but she hadn't had a choice) to the place where skin met countertop, where Tonks figeted (glimpse of elastic trimmed with pink ribbon). It's an uphill struggle (the air is thin, here) - she bucks and struggles, biting down, tasting cotton (Ginny sleeping quietly steps away).
Tonks smells like clean sheets and violets and leather, but singed (still young, still learning, still pushing).
The way she takes stairs two at a time in her boots, laces trailing...
The way she pulls and twists at the curls at the nape of her neck when she's nervous and watched.
When she leant on her elbows on the bench in the kitchen, head tilted on one side...the way her breasts spilt forward in her t-shirt, the way she ran her teeth over her bottom lip.
Hermione comes with a whimper, her feet scrabbling on the sheets, slipping and failing to find purchase. It feels like falling (if you fall in a dream, you wake up. If you fall in a dream and don't wake up, you die). She lies still for a second (still alive, world spinning); orgasm is still a new enough sensation to make the world look like it's shining in the corners of her eyes. She lies very still, nightdress shoved up (cotton on bare skin, nipples so tender it almost hurts), legs still apart, not moving (can't move), warm and wet to her knuckles.
Eventually, she curls in around herself like a secret.
What would Tonks think of her?
x
Her legs are still trembling when she goes down to the kitchen (counting steps, obsessive-compulsive, list maker), desperate for water, for something. In the hallway, she pauses...There's music coming from the sitting room. She creeps down the hall, feeling guilty dressed in sex scent and a nightgown rucked up at the thighs (if it's Sirius and Remus in there, she'll die).
It isn't. Remus and Sirius must be long to one bed or another.
Tonks is curled into the corner of the long velvet settee (does everything in this house have clawed feet?). Her long legs are drawn up under her, under patchwork, her hair (red) stands up in sleep-peaks. She's autumn, watching the night through a window just recently washed.
"Tonks?" She looks up, startled (for a moment, there's nothing in her eyes but summer stars).
"Hermione...bit late, isn't it?"
She hesitates, on the edge of something (fingers snarling and twisting in pink cotton), and Tonks must see something (glass forehead), because she shifts, sits up. She looks concerned.
"Alright, Hermione?"
She'll never know why, but she shakes her head. By the time she does it, there's no taking it back. She almost expects Tonks to laugh at her (she'd laugh herself), but Tonks is lifting the corner of the blanket.
"Come sit."
She curls in against Tonks' body, her legs folded against the length of the back of her thigh. She can't help it, she goes liquid (Tonks is magnetic north). Tonks' arm fits around her shoulders like it was meant to be there. With her head against Tonk's breast, her own hair under her cheek, she feels mountain-breathless again.
"What are you waiting for?" She says (it seems like the thing to ask).
"Sunrise." says Tonks, her cheek against the top of Hermione's head.
A sunrise isn't going to save them now.
(2: stumble)
If she'd known anything about poetry, she might have seen it coming, might have known that summers exist so that, in the depth of winter, the world remembers.
Yes. Yes. Once, I was adored.
It has to do with remembering and with being reborn.
She didn't know anything about poetry (there's nothing about poetry which you can touch with your hands). Remus liked to read poetry, slim muggle paperbacks carried in suit pockets (sex and fear of sex and death and wanting to live on pages so thick that they crackled). All those books looked like they'd been dropped in baths, the pages yellowed and crinkled. Remus always said that they looked like that because there are things so beautiful they'll make you weep (when she was older, she'd understand).
She found Tonks in the garden, lying on the patch of grass which Sirius had so valiantly cleared (life, he'd explained grimly, finds a way, his arms laced with indigo Azkaban ink). Summer lingered in London that year (down by the river, the muggles were selling ice cream and taking boat rides, sighing in relief in the cool places under the bridges). Tonk's feet were bare, moving through the air in loose circles. Her t-shirt had ridden up, leaving the smooth slope of the small of her back bare and uninterrupted. Her hair (longish, more pink than red) was spangled with daisies and half finished braids. She seemed out of place in the garden, sprawled on that scrap of green reclaimed from the brambles.
Maybe it was like Sirius had said...
Quietly, not wanting to speak and shatter summer (which seemed fragile and always under threat of rain), she arranged herself on the rug, just to the side of Tonks' slowly kicking feet. It was uncomfortably hot in the garden. With both hands, she reached up to twist the weight of her hair away from the nape of her neck.
"You've got such a lot," said Tonks, peering over the rims of pink-lensed sunglasses, her book lolling in her hands.
"What?" She sounded sharper than she'd meant to.
"Of hair. Such a lot." Tonks pushed her hand through her trailing fringe; damp hair clung together, leaving her forehead bare, beaded in sweat.
"Yes...Sometimes, I think I'll get it all cut off, it's such a pain, but..." She realised that Tonks wasn't looking at her at all. She traced the line of the other girl's sight to the big windows, so recently liberated. Remus was sitting at the desk in the bay (Sirius had wanted to burn that desk, a relic of his father, but, then again, Sirius had been in favour of burning down the entire house).
"What are you..?"
"Shhhh..."
From the way Remus had his fingers snarled in greying hair, his other hand curled around the back of his neck under the open collar of his shirt (mint green) he was concentrating. By his frown, he was suffering for it in the heat (the house should have been full of cool corners. Should have been, but still, even with all the windows open, it baked like an oven, oppressive and vindictive). Sirius was standing behind Remus reading over his shoulder. The fingers of one hand were curled around the neck of a beer bottle on the desk, but the other rested on Remus' shoulder, palm against cotton. As they watched, Remus' head rolled back on his neck against Sirius' stomach, the frown going internal, leaving his face relaxed. He looked much younger, suddenly.
"Love," said Tonks, folding over the page of her book and rolling onto her back (breasts a neat spill in a vest sparkling with printed flowers), "Is a key which unlocks."
(Where did she get these things from?)
Hermione wanted to reach out and correct the strand of hair that had fallen across Tonks' forehead. She hesitated, once, twice (a stutter) and then she reached out, and brushed it away. Tonks' eyes were bright and pale at the same time, grey green, sea water, full of trapped and refracted light. Silver fish darted in the other girl's eyes. As she took her hand away, Tonks caught hold of her fingers. She brushed her lips across Hermione's knuckles. The younger girl felt herself blush (young, stupid). She didn't think that things like this happened, not really.
She felt like something that somebody made up, sitting on the grass at Grimmauld place, Tonks' fingers still laced with her own.
She felt like something that had never happened before, anywhere else in the world.
"Back to school tomorrow," said Tonks. Hermione nodded.
"Looking forward to it?"
"Yes." Immediately, she felt guilty (too quick to answer). "I mean...no...I mean..." Tonks laughed, a sudden, loud sound in the quiet garden. A bird took off from a distant tree.
"You're cute, you know that?"
She hadn't.
Love is a key which unlocks.
--
She sat between Tonks' knees on the unmade bed, her head tipped back slightly as Tonks brushed out her long hair.
"So much bloody hair, Hermione," said Tonks, her mouth full of grips, words coming out distorted. "You were born with the hair of two people..."
Hermione blushed.
"I can't help it."
"I know, sweetheart, I know. Sit still." She held Hermione's hair in her first, so that the roots didn't pull. "It's a very beautiful lot of hair."
(She was burning up with pleasure).
"There..." said Tonks, smoothing Hermione's hair over her shoulder. "It's as good as it's going to get..."
There was a moment when Tonks' mouth was almost against the skin of her shoulder, and she knew that she need to get up and go somewhere else (her hands spasming against the sheet), and her eyes closed (right eye first) and she felt Tonks' breath against her lips, they were that close.
Either you do or you don't. It's a choice. You have a choice.
For how long will you regret it if you don't?
Tonks tasted of summer: grass and pollen and blue sky and a book with the pages folded over. The kiss, at first hesitant, blossomed and bore fruit. They leant their foreheads together, breathless (like running up hill).
"Oh, Hermione," said Tonks, her eyes brimming with light.
"I'm sorry," said Hermione, feeling unlocked. "I didn't...I wasn't..."
"Shhhh," said Tonks, bending her head for the second time, one girl kissing another on the mouth on an unmade bed in summer.
(3: my eager eyes)
"You look beautiful."
"Why are you sitting on the stairs?"
"There's nowhere else to sit."
"There's plenty of other places to sit."
"Don't want to sit on my own."
"You're much less handsome when you pout, you know."
"You're looking less and less beautiful, Nymphadora."
"Cheers, Sirius."
She felt beautiful (some shimmering, glimmering thing in her bones) and she felt like she was bursting out of her skin (tattoos and silver and glitter on her collarbone and the place between her breasts). She was going dancing, and Remus was going with her. She'd seen them dancing in the kitchen, the two of them and it was the only time she'd ever seen Sirius look less than comfortable in his own skin (head down, feet shuffling, arm clinging around Remus' neck for dear life), but Remus, while dancing, had shone. As she'd watched, he'd bent his head (so much taller) and whispered,
"Relax, Sirius. I'm not letting you go."
His hand had rested in the place between the small of Sirius' back and the tight curve of him under denim.
She gone back to bed without water.
Remus came down the stairs behind Sirius, nudging him in the back with the toe of his boot.
"Are you still sulking?"
"Mmph."
"We can't take you with us. Some of us are fugitives. Fugitives can't go dancing, Sirius. Not even fugitives who can dance. I'm not sure that there's precedent for those that can't and still want to."
"Fuck you, Remus."
"You don't mean that." He slid past Sirius (skinny, taking up so little room, hunched on the step). "You look lovely, Nymphadora..." A glitter-stained giggle spilt out of her. Remus frowned (self concious, blush stained).
"What?" He self-conciously adjusted his shirt (black, button down).
"Nothing...we've just been here before, haven't we, Sirius." Sirius was sullenly silent (the fact that his face through the banister looked like a face behind bars stuck in her throat). Remus straightened his tie (loosely knotted), pushing his blushes internal with the backs of his long fingered hands.
"Are you ready to go, Nympahdora?" She nodded, pulling on her jacket (scarred brown leather, a gift from her mother, who had told her that it had been Sirius' once, in his youth). She bent from the waist and pressed a kiss to Sirius' mouth, her hand finding bare skin under the sleeve of his t-shirt (black cotton, palm against ink).
"We'll be back." She said.
"Be good," said Sirius, risking a smile, wiping glitter off his lower lip on the back of his hand.
Nobody has to be alone forever.
x
Out of her skin, out of her head, she loved to dance, she loved it. Loved dancing in her heavy boots, her arms up over her head, now in her hair, on her breasts over her hips. She held out her hands to Remus, not caring if he came or not, just wanting to dance, dance, dance. Just wanting to be free for a while, free of all of it...Just wanting to be a girl again, a young girl, not a care in the world. She couldn't see straight (sweat in her hair, hair in her eyes), and she wanted a cigarette and a beer and a fuck (yes, she wanted a fuck). She wanted to scream, all of those things. More than anything, she just wanted to dance.
Fuck it, for a night.
The world can save itself.
A pretty girl, a blond girl, holding out a cigarette, and she wanted one she wanted one she wanted one and she took it. Blue eyes and blond hair, and Remus was somewhere else, and this girl was a little bit taller. She was drunker than she thought she was (the world span when she took a drag), and she was tired of dancing, and she wanted to sit down, and where-the-fuck-was-Remus?
(Why is no-one ever there to catch you when you trip?).
Sitting on the couch, not seeing straight, seeing stars. They were talking, faces turned together, backs of their necks against the couch (The girl's name was Sarah...a muggle...oh gods, a muggle), and her cigarette was in her hand forgotten against her jeans, and she thought that Sarah might have been leaning in for a kiss, and she told herself not to be stupid (who'd kiss her? You know who).
And then their lips touched.
When she didn't pull away (blindsided), a hand came up, tracing along her jawline (calculated tentative, light but strong. Some women are steel). The kiss deepened, tongue in her mouth, fingers curled around the back of her neck. She moaned (couldn't help it, hardwired for it), wanted it wanted it wanted it (its not this you want). Hand under the collar of her shirt, knee between her legs, turning her body, pushing forward, getting wet, breathing quicker, pushing forward.
Hermione.
"I..." Steadying herself with two fistfuls of shirt (bigger breasts than hers, pale skin, no marks). "We have to stop."
"Why? Don't you wanna..?"
"Yes. No. I have to go."
"You have to GO?"
"Yes. I have to...there's somebody..."
And she got up and reeled away and suddenly she was happy because she'd realised and she saw Remus by the bar and she just wanted to kiss him, and tell someone, and then never ever kiss anybody else, ever again.
Bursting out of her skin, she suddenly felt full of light.
x
Molly Weasley was waiting for them at the door, her red hair wild with irritation, her dressing gown clutched around her.
"Molly?" said Remus, suddenly all business, his shoulders tight with anticipation. "Molly, what's wrong?"
"You," said Molly, stabbing Remus in the chest with an outstretched finger, "Need to talk to him. Now. He's keeping the whole house up."
"Who? What?"
"Sirius."
"What's he done now?" A screech erupted from the bowels of the house, followed by Sirius' deeper voice raised in a roar.
"Not only has he woken his bloody mother, as if that wasn't enough, but they've now been screeching at each other for half an hour..." She rubbed her forehead with her hand (she was looking her age around her fingers now, knuckles gnarled by children and kitchens and time). "Talk some sense into him, Remus, would you? I know it's difficult for him but is there any reason to make the rest of us suffer with him?"
"I'll sort it out, Molly," said Remus (comforting hand for her terry-cloth shoulder), "You go on back to bed."
In the hallway, Mrs Black was in full flight, full flow, denouncing her son as a traitor, a coward, a sodomite, a fool. Sirius' hair was thrown around his face, his shoulders pushed back, cheeks flooded red. The boards at his feet were littered with cigarette butts and the broken green glass of a beer bottle.
"Yes, mother, yes. Yes, I did those things. Yes, I loved them. You fucking bitch...I'm everything you fucking hate, and I love it, y'hear? I fucking LOVE it."
"Sirius?" His head whipped around (something drowning in his eyes). He was breathing heavily, like he'd been running. "Sirius, what are you doing?"
"'M talking to my mother, Remus."
"Sirius, come away..."
"I don't need to come away, Remus..." It was hard to hear them over Mrs Black's shrieking and spitting. Remus closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "S'my fucking house now..."
"Nymphadora?"
"Yes?"
"Take Sirius outside, would you?"
Sirius allowed himself to be turned (towed) by a hand on his own. He turned back, a mouth full of spit for Mrs Black (it oozed over canvas, leaving pale tracks in the dirt on the frame).
"Cunt," snarled Sirius, last living son of the house of Black.
"Come on, Sirius," said Tonks, leading him. "It's a beautiful night."
x
"I..." She ran the tip of her tongue along the edge of the thin paper, smoothing it with the pad of her thumb, "Was saving this for a special occasion, but I guess I'll just have to waste it on you."
"What is it?"
"What is it? What IS it? This, I'll have you know, good cousin, is the best gillyweed I've got my hands on in three years. And we? Are going to smoke the lot." She lit the joint, closing her eyes, taking a long drag, before she offered it to him. He was lying on his back on the grass. As he took a smoke, grey eyes narrowing to slits (like the dim light from the house was suddenly too bright), she lay down too, her body making a junction with his, her head rest on his chest, under the place where his arm folded up under his head. He passed the joint back to her, his arm staying folded across his body, the side of his against her cheek, the tips of his fingers brushing her neck.
"When I was a little girl, I used to love you." She said, softly. "When I was a teenager, I used to dream about you touching me, just like this, just casually."
"Hmmm?"
"A crush, Sirius. I had a crush."
"That's nice."
"No, it wasn't. It was bloody horrible. You'd gone to Azkaban and I still loved you, and all I had were these pictures that mum had kept, and I was never going to see you again."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah. I am too." There was a long pause, just the sound of him breathing (no birds, no traffic noise...even the lights of the muggle world didn't touch the garden at Grimmauld place. The stars were brighter, there). He stroked the side of her neck. She reached up over her head blindly for the joint between his lips (trusting him not to let her burn herself).
"Do you still..?"
She took a long drag.
"Don't, Sirius. Not just because you're mad at him. He doesn't deserve it, and you're not that much of an arsehole. And, anyway...No, since you ask. No. There's somebody else. I think. I think that there's somebody else." He moved his body slightly (his arm not long enough), the tips of his fingers finding her exposed collarbone. There wasn't any sex in a touch like that, just comfort.
She knew that he was there.
"Who?" She took another deep drag (false courage), a little stuttering cough forcing it's way out of her.
"Hermione."
"Oh," he said, holding out his fingers for the spliff (fingers of his free hand, head flat against the grass now). "Ohhhh."
"What?" she said, a challenge, chin jutting, high enough to be brave.
"Nothing..." He said, stroking her skin carefully. "Does she know about this." She nodded, her head still against his body (feeling her through his ribs).
"I think so."
"Then every happiness to you, little cousin." He said, and she could hear him smiling. "How the fuck did you know about me and Remus, anyway?"
"It's written all over you," she said. "Every time you see each other."
(True love needs no decoding).
"Shall we go inside," he said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. She shook her head.
"Let's stay a while." She turned her face into his shirt, his arm slipping around her shoulders. She felt better for having told somebody.
She was never going to kiss anybody else ever again.
(4: looking back on sunsets)
When she was little, she'd clung to him whenever he was in the house (Remus had been there too, but she'd only ever let Sirius lift her). Looking back they'd been so young, those two boys; Remus in his shabby cords, his hair brushed straight back from his forehead, and Sirius, rockstar teenager, with his longer hair and his leather and his quick smile.
He didn't smile so easily anymore.
Of course, when she was only eight years old when he went to Azkaban (so very young), but he had been her mother's favourite cousin (Andromeda's only dowery from the house of Black: a leather jacket, scuffed and scared and a chest of photographs of a beautiful boy, lost). Nymphadora Tonks had spent her early teens studying those photographs, learning every flicker of his face. She'd started wearing his jacket as soon as it had fitted her.
She'd never forgotten him (though feelings change over time, and she wasn't fifteen anymore).
Sirius Black stalked. He prowled. He drank his beer, and he lit one cigarette from the end of another. He tied his hair back, and then he yanked it out of the elastic, ruffled it to one side of his face. He'd spent all those years behind bars (this was a house; spread rooms under the ground and into the air like cancer). He spent a lot of time out in the garden (at least there was the illusion of freedom there - at least he could find the dogstar and pretend that he still burnt as well).
'God, he was my favourite,' her mother had said, tracing the line of his jaw and the fall of his hair with the tip of her finger. 'You remember him, right, Nym'? Sirius? He was so handsome...he shone too brightly to be one of us...' (You weren't one of them, mother. You were never one of them.)
He looked up as she walked into the kitchen, cigarette in his mouth (dull). The house was silent. She must have been the first one back.
"Wotcha, Sirius..." He didn't so much smile as flash all of his teeth, shreading the corner of the beer bottle label with his nail. "Not in bed yet, huh?"
"Not tired." He nipped at the edge of his nail. "I'm...dying here, Tonks. I'm fucking dying. All they,' (the portraits, the Blacks through the walls), "All they ever do is whisper about me, and I think I'm going mad."
"You didn't go mad in Azkaban, you won't go mad here."
"Maybe this is the last thing that I can take."
She sat down opposite him, her bag on the table between them.
"I brought you something." He arched an eyebrow (now that was a Black look, to the bone).
"Oh?" She unzipped her rucksack and produced a bottle, holding it out to Sirius by it's neck. He gave a low whistle under his breath.
"This is good stuff, Nymphadora...very good."
"I thought you'd say that," she said, as he got up to retrieve glasses. "And Merlin knows, you could do with cheering up." She took Remus' camera out of her bag, squinting at him through the view-finger, taking a snapshot.
"Let's go out," said Sirius, pouring them each a measure of the firewhiskey. "Let's go for a walk somewhere or something."
Now it was her turn to quirk an eyebrow.
"Are you kidding me? Kingsley finds out I let you go out, he'll KILL me...and that's if Remus leaves enough of me for Kingsley to take adequate action. No fucking way."
"Please?"
She'd never known him to say please before. "Please, Tonks, I'm dying here." She glanced at her watch. The others probably wouldn't even make it back for hours. She knocked back the shot that he'd poured for her, shuddering.
"Okay...but just for a little while."
On the train he was nervous (rattle and hum, ratta tatta rhythm dreaming down towards the river) - he had no love for the muggle Undergroud, Sirius Black (too long spent in dark, confined spaces. He'd been away from the sky for too long). She tried to distracted him; nips from the firewhiskey in the silver flask (muggles drinking out of plastic bottles and cans, the air rank). She talked and talked, and even offered him Remus' camera, talked him through the process, ended up with a shaky shot from way too close (you can see souls in pictures like that, burst of light around the head).
Finally, she got up, one hang swinging her bag over her shoulder, the other finding his and tugging.
"Come on,"
"Where?"
"We're here."
"Where are we going?"
"Down to the river," she told him over her shoulder, dragging him through the doors just as they were closing, the rubber soles of his sneakers squeaking on metal, concrete, stairs.
"How do you know if you're in love?" she said to him, perched on the wall, her feet dangling down towards the water, eating chips out of greasy paper. He looked at her, popping a chip into his own mouth, his hair falling around the side of his face.
"I don't think there's a guidebook, Tonks. I think that you just...know..."
"What if it's never happened before?" She could feel herself going red (not so very long ago that she still thought that she was in love with him, fugitive, family, trapped in a gone time when she was very young). Her fingers traced the edges of a letter folded into her pocket for six months (handwriting still childishly rounded - you get your real handwriting later - but nothing childish in the sentiment...I hope to become very good at it). "I mean...what if you're not expecting it?"
He looked down at the lights on the river, nodding slowly.
"That's the best kind...when you're not expecting it. Like...you're going about your life, right? And maybe they've always been there...maybe that's how they are, quiet and always there...and one day you like them and you realise..."
"Realise what?" He turned to look at her, smiling. She hadn't seen him smile like that since she was a little girl...she could barely remember him ever smiling like that (there was a reason that they named him after the brightest star, heart of the sky).
"That they're the only thing. And, from the moment that you realise that, you'll never see anybody else again..."
"And then what?"
"And then love arrives..." said Sirius Black, softly, dreamily, grey eyes reflecting the lights in the water... "And it's good, sweetheart. It's very, very good."
"Think that'll happen for me?"
Sirius shrugged.
"She's very young, Tonks. You both are."
"You were very young when you met Remus." He smiled, and nodded, leaving his head down.
"I was."
"And you knew?"
"Not at first. He found me. Took me by surprise."
Hermione's lips catching hers, unexpected, on her bed, unmade, in summer. Just a kiss, just that one kiss, barely a touch after that (lying on the bed after that, Hermione's ear over her heart, Hermione's hair like a puzzle to be unravelled).
"He saved you..." It was a romantic notion: a little girl's notion.
"You save yourself, love. Maybe...maybe he just made me want to be saved. Maybe love makes all things possible."
She traced the corners of the letter folded in her pocket (proof with four corners). Somebody (her mother, maybe, or Remus Lupin) had told her that every letter from a friend, from someone you treasured, was a love letter, written between the lines.
"Shall we go back now?" She said (London stained pink along the river). Without warning, he leant over and caught the corner of her mouth with a kiss.
(He shone with an a fragile, spun light. Azkaban hadn't killed him, but it had broken him, broken his heart being away from Love for so young. He'd survived, but, sometimes, when the light caught him, he seemed paper thin).
"I suppose that we better had, hadn't we?"
She could have stayed in sugar-spun London, down by the river forever.
Before morning came.
"We have enough teenagers coming and going in this place..." said a voice behind them in the hallway, "without you two acting as you like..." Sirius froze mid step, dropped his head (guilty, grinning like a teenaged boy).
"Surely, you've got better things to do than lurking behind hat-stands, Remus?"
"What if you'd be caught, Sirius? What if you'd been seen..?" Sirius turned, closed the gap between them.
"We weren't, Remus. We weren't." He held out a hand. "Come here." Remus' eyes flicked to Tonks. She knows?
(Of course she knows. It's written all over both of you).
"Come...here." said Sirius, softly.
"Why?"
"I want to dance with you."
"We'll wake your mother..."
"Remus, I don't give a fuck about my mother."
Tonks crept up the stairs, blushing quietly for them, for everything, for love. She sat down in the middle of her bed (unmade, as usual...Molly had tried for a few weeks, but given up, contenting herself with the fact that the very thought of an unmade bed gave Remus Lupin migranes). She balanced a roll of parchment along her thigh (was tempted to write I wish that you were as close to me as this letter is. I was you were as close to me as that, always).
She didn't, but she wanted to.
(5: staring at the loss)
She rose, she fought (she wanted to come back). It was difficult, dark (she couldn't see her hand in front of her face). She could hear someone shouting, as though from very far away.
She pushed with both hands.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Moody above her (she'd never even imagined that his hands could be so gentle). She saw angels dancing in the shadows of an empty socket. Everything had gone very quiet.
She slipped.
It's trying to rain in the world tonight (a heavy sky, no moon, nothing to navigate by). The wind bites through her coat (Sirius'), thrown on over her favourite shirt - the clouds pull at her hair with chill fingers. Ahead of her, she can make out Remus' dark shape against the cloud (wolves don't believe in constellations). Below her, Moody keeps a constant line.
Sirius is her shadow.
On the ground, he touches her arm, the curve of her shoulder (It'll be alright, I promise.). He used to say things that like when he'd babysit her and she'd have nightmares: smooth her hair with the flat of his hand (delicate hands, long and slender fingers, a silver ring on a fourth digit), and tell her that everything was going to be okay.
She's seen the way that they're looking at each other. It's giving her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Oh, baby, don't make promises that you can't keep.
She's been here before (of course she has, trained here, based here), but these corridors are new and strange. Moody seems to know where he's going (he and Remus setting a pace that's almost running), and they follow him like a light. Sirius is at her side, silent and grim. Maybe he has a sinking feeling too.
Vaulted doors, and they slow to a stop (she can see the glow of Mad Eye's revolving gaze in the dark). As they wait for the word, for the call, for the moment, barely daring to breath (even walls have ears), she feels a touch, a brush against her wrist. Sirius threads his fingers through hers, just for a moment, a split second, squeezing her hand. She can feel his silver ring making an imprint in her skin (later, she'll search for that mark, wanted it to scar, to never heal, to be there forever). He winks at her (left eye flicker), and then Moody gives the signal, and that's it, really. That's all there is.
The doors fly open, and this might as well be it. She's never been in a battle before.
This is the moment of your life.
It's all shards then (it's all time that she'll never get back). One step at a time, they descend (Kingsley shouting to her, to them, Remus and Sirius with their language of looks, Moody silent and grim), and it's because she hesititates that she sees Malfoy (beaten silver, black on the inside) raise his wand. Her Stunning Spell goes wide, but it buys them time. That's all she wants: to buy them time. From her vantage point, she sees Hermione spilt across the floor: her hair knotted, and tossed across her face. Sirius sees at the same time as she does. He throws her a look over his shoulder (almost down the stairs).
"Don't!" he shouts, gone into the mix, and it's the last time he'll ever look at her and later she'll wish that it had lasted longer. She took a deep breath. Concentrate. Concentrate.
Don't.
"You should be glad," calls an familar voice from down below, "That you look nothing like your mother, Nymphadora."
Not her. Anybody but her.
Her aunt resembles her mother closely; dark eyes and a tumble of hair. Bellatrix's mouth is a dark red slash. Bellatrix's eyes have no love. Like Andromeda, she resembles her cousin, Sirius (the Black arch to their brows, bow to their lips). Bellatrix is smiling. "Ready, Nymphadora? Ready to die like so many worthless mudbloods before you?"
The world narrows. Tonks draws herself up to her full height.
"I'm not afraid of you," she says (for a moment, in that moment, it's true).
The world narrows.
Bellatrix snarls and spits, foul, filthy things about Andromeda and Ted, about Sirius, about Tonks herself. She turns and ducks, a spell zinging over her head (too close for comfort). As she stands, she catches sight of Sirius and Harry talking. He's not watching. She feels her eyes widen as she watches someone take aim.
"Sirius!" He jerks, the spell gone wide, and she feels herself starting to smile, and then there's this short, sharp shock (like a fist to the breast bone...more than that, like a punch to the heart).
The last thing she sees is Bellatrix's slash of a smile, Bellatrix's back, and she turns, not even waiting to watch her niece fall.
She slips.
She opened her eyes and he was sitting next to her bed, head down, hands folded in his lap. She thought that he was sleeping, but, when she tried to push herself up (found that she couldn't, no strength in her arms), he looked straight at her. Remus Lupin, face pale and tight, hair pushed straight back from his forehead.
She could feel the impression of Bellatrix's knuckles on her heart.
"Haven't you slept?" She said, forcing a smile, feeling like dirt.
"Tonks..." He said, softly. "I've...you need it..."
She looked at him.
"Don't, Remus. Please don't."
"You don't know what I'm going to say yet."
That look. That look that was, at once, broken and iron fisted. It had to be one of them; her first love or the love newly discovered. It had to be. He'd called her Tonks.
"Don't. Don't. I can't bear it, Remus, don't." He reached out to touch her, but she recoiled from the reach of his hand.
"He...didn't suffer. Dumbledore is sure of it."
It was more than a sigh, not a scream, the sound she made. A suffering sound; a sound wrenched out of her body. A undulating wail, a keen.
There is no love which does not scar.
They ended up on the bed together: long legs in fraying tweed, and her lumpy under blankets, borrowed nightgown and the blue hospital wristband. Every inch of her body ached and cried. She let him hold her anyway (he needed it as much as she did). Remus fumbled in his pockets, pooling a little collection of things in his lap. She watched, her head against his shoulder (she didn't feel like she was ever going to have the energy to move herself again).
I'll move myself tomorrow.
"Someone once told me," said Remus, his voice low, not moving up and down much (a straight line to follow), "that you are the sum of everyone who you allow to touch you." He smiled, just a brief touch, a flutter (a October butterfly, dulled by the promise of winter coming). "Sirius woud have been the sum of everybody. You won't remember, Nymph-...you won't remember, but, when he was younger, he sparkled and he shone, and everybody wanted to touch him. Even me. Especially me."
She remembered.
With two fingers scissored, he picked up a note that had been torn up and then mended, folded.
"James and Lily," He said. "I thought that he did it. I thought..." He swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing, and set the note down on the sheet, on the far side of his thigh. "Enough of that, now. People die." He picked up a photograph of Sirius, bare chested, smiling, very young. "God, he was handsome. He can't ever have been that handsome..."
(He used to be that handsome. Azkaban took a lot of it away from him, but, once, he'd shone the brightest and the best, dogstar, heart of the sky).
One handed, he turned over the photograph, the back filled with cramped, spidery scrawl. He held it out to her. She frowned, puzzling over it like glyphs.
"I...can't read it." Remus' smile lifted one corner of his mouth.
"He always had appalling handwriting. Born for a job at the Ministry." He cleared his throat. "Thought you might enjoy that, dear old..." He blushed. "Dear old perverted Moony. You're...you're out at the moment and I find myself terribly bored and wishing you were here. Look..." He stopped, for a moment, his breath shuddering. Tonks had closed her eyes. "Look, I've been reading: Come live with me, and be my love...and we shall all the pleasures prove. Whatever that means..." He stopped. "There's not much else."
She kept her eyes squeezed shut.
She'd heard every word in Sirius' voice.
"This one..." He held up the other photograph, folded from being kept, faded from being looked at (you take a colour every time you blink), "Was taken two days before...before everything happened. Things were never really the same after that, thought we tried." He was fretting with the ring on his fourth finger. "Too much lost time, perhaps. Too little joy for the both of us. We had to relearn each other, you see. I think that we were both too old for that, by then. Too old and too tired."
She thought about it after he'd gone: love and loss of love and grabbing what you have with both hands while you're young: while there's nothing to relearn. She studied the two photographs of Sirius ('I'll come back for them tomorrow', and a kiss for her forehead). She thought about Hermione (she thought about Hermione, her hair spilling across the floor of the Department of Mysteries). She rubbed her breast-bone, feeling tender, and she felt smashed to pieces. She curled in on herself, her body a wall around her sorrow that bloomed like an orgasm, like cancer. The tears came slowly, painfully, each one costing something dear. What if she hadn't slipped? What if she'd still be awake...could she have saved him? Would she have seen what was coming before he did (she'd done it once before?). Gods, she was useless and pathetic (falling so early). She heard Moody's gruff voice ('Not yourself, girl...you did the best you could...you did brilliantly). She'd been too broken hearted to even blush at the highest of praise. All that she could think of was Sirius (beautiful, lost boy, never grow old now), and Hermione (who was never going to want her, fuck-up, faller, used up and broken).
She didn't weep. They weren't tears. She didn't cry (little girls cry). She was grown up now.
In the private room, in St Mungo's, nightgown and blue wristband, Tonks screamed and it tore her.
"These are beautiful flowers, but they'll die without water," said Dumbledore, folded into the chair at her bedside. She hadn't even heard him come in.
"They don't matter," she said, turning her face to him.
"I doubt that the person who sent them would think that, Nymphadora." He gestured to the cards sitting on the bedside table (Discarded now, but handled). "Sirius Black knew what he was doing when he left Grimmauld place, Nymphadora. He accepted the risk...as did you all."
"We didn't all die though, sir." (Though we may wish that we had).
"No. No, you did not." He sipped his coffee. "Abysmal," he said, wistfully. His eyes, when he looked at her, were the colour of the shallow sea. "You may miss him forever, Nymphadora, but it need not break you and what you have."
"Might? It's like..." She looked at her hands, clenched and useless. "It's like there's been this horrible accident, this terrible thing and...I don't remember it, it might as well have happened to someone else entirely, but I have to learn to walk again. He's gone, and I will miss him forever."
"And yet? Life continues, Nymphadora. It's one of the great mysteries of it; that such things do not end the world."
It was said that Dumbledore remembered every name of every witch or wizard in every first year at Hogwarts. Looking at him sitting in the hospital chair, Tonks could believe it. There is love of a kind which knows no bounds. He got up to leave, fussing with the folds of his robes.
"There will be hands to carry you, Nymphadora." said the old wizard, with a bow of his head. "Remember: nobody living is ever truely alone."
Lonely and alone are two completely different things.
(6: a feel for the song)
"It's not much," he'd said, all angles in a chair without padding. "Not a very important thing." He'd been isolating himself for so long that he had no idea of what he had left to give. She was still sitting in the bed, swathed in blankets, her hair unbrushed. For days, she'd been taking what they gave her to take, talking to whoever showed up, but she felt broken, somehow; no strength in her bones. She'd felt broken and without light. "Just a little thing."
He was holding out the box to her. She made herself take it.
"He...might have wanted you to have them." He said, smiling (or trying to). "And, god knows, I don't know what to do with them."
She opened the box. What was inside it was magical or stupid or vital, depending on who you were.
Magical, wrapped in their own laces, etched with drawings in white and silver. Stupid, somebody else's shoes. Vital.
They had been Sirius'.
She stared at them for a long time, not wanting to touch them (not wanting to get burnt that way - through the tips of her trembling fingers and what she remembered so dearly).
"What am I supposed to do with these?"
"...I thought, since you already wear his jacket..."
"Remus, I haven't stood up since the Ministry."
Suddenly, there was iron in Remus' eyes. Suddenly, she could see how he'd had the strength to be in love with Sirius for so long.
"So they'll be there for you to wear when you do."
"What if I never do?"
"You think that that's an option?" She stretched her legs out on the sheet in front of her (it was too hot, so hot, the hospital sweltering). She sat on top of the sheets, the t-shirt she wore brushing the tops of her thighs. Remus studied her bare legs. If it had been anybody else (if it had have been Sirius), she'd have blushed, wanted to cover herself, but there wasn't any sex in the way that Remus Lupin was looking at her.
Tonks felt deconstructed.
"Get up."
"What?"
"Get...up. If you don't...if you don't do it now, when I'm here with you, maybe you won't..."
I'll move myself tomorrow...
But you won't. You maybe never will.
Remus, I don't...I mean...what if I can't?" He made a soft sound, disbelieving (tongue and teeth).
"If Sirius could do all the things that he did then you can certainly do this...If your mother could do what she did..."
"I'm not a Black, Remus."
"You're more like them than you realise...Give me your feet."
"What?"
"Give me your feet, Nymphadora. Let's begin as we mean to go on." Not knowing quite else what to do (quiet authority in a voice like his), she swung her feet towards him (bare, muscles going to waste, to dust). He guided her feet into his lap, rubbing the muscles of her calves (tired, aching, she felt strung through with barbed wire). His thumbs found sensitive points in the soles of her feet. With anybody else, it might have made her want him. It just felt like he was remaking her in somebody else's image (just make me better, please). He slipped her feet into Sirius' shoes, wrapping the laces around her ankles slowly, tying each bow with undue care (he was a craftsman).
They were making maps.
"You might need to make your feet a little bigger..."
"I don't even have the energy for that." He studied her face.
"So that's really you, is it?" She brushed back bubblegum hair self conciously, shaking her head (he could make her blush).
"This is hard-wired..."
She couldn't tell whether he was sad that it was hardwired, or glad that she wasn't nearly dead.
"Come on then, Nymphadora. Let's see what you're made of, shall we?"
Sitting on the edge of the bed, rubber capped toes just touching the floor, t-shirt rucked up (grey cotton underwear), she trembled.
"Remus, I..."
"Stop it," he said, standing up now, holding out his hands (she wanted to be believe in him), "Stop thinking so much. Trust me, Nymphadora. I'm not going to let you fall."
(What was it that Dumbledore had said? There will be hands to carry you...Nobody living is ever truely alone.
When she nearly fell (rubber soles on a tiled floor, her legs doing their best to forget that she had ever learnt to run), it was Remus' arm around her waist which caught her. Walls to her country, he held her, as she found her feet in Sirius' shoes, muscles in bare thighs trembling (a thin, wailing cry from every part of her). Her t-shirt was rucked up: his fingers rested against grey cotton and bare skin where he held her.
"Do you want to walk somewhere?"
"Just hold me here for a second..."
Above her, he nodded.
"I miss him," she whispered to the rumpled collar of his shirt.
"You probably always will," he said, no comfort, just truth, words getting lost in her hair as it faded.
The train station costs more than she'll ever let on. It costs a lot now to do these things without him. It doesn't matter that they'd been without him for years and years (at least, then, they'd known that, somewhere, he still lived and breathed). The world without him is cool, and close. The world without him...
She's supposed to be saying something, isn't she? She's supposed to...
"Anyway, that's not the point..." She says, pushing fingers through pink hair (even that leaves her exhausted). "The point is, if we ever find out you've been horrible to Harry-"
She drifts, after that, watching Hermione with her parents.
(When Hermione looks up, straight at her, catches her eye, Tonks blushes and looks away).
When it's time to go home, Remus offers her his arm, lets her lean on him without question (he takes a lot of the weight).
She doesn't want to go back to Grimmauld place.
She wants to go home for a while, a few weeks, and be lost.
x
So this was what war did. No scars (not the dignity of scars, of knowing that you had given your pound of flesh, no comfort in personal sacrifice). A lingering weakness in her legs which left her winded and breathless after missions...the imprint of Bellatrix's knuckles in her heart (soft and pliant)...the tiny mark that his ring had made when he'd grabbed her hand and squeezed too tight (it faded, red then pink then white, then as gone as he was, in the end). War had left her breathless and lonely, watching Hermione's letters pile up, unable to do anything about them. War had burnt her photographs, left her skittish and lonely. She read with the windows thrown open to the grey sky (it had rained in London incessantly that summer), and she fell asleep in her clothes (waking up sweaty and disorientated, like waking up somebody else entirely).
What war did.
She was curled on her side on the settee, staring, cold (too warm for a fire, but, oh, she wanted to set the world alight). The doorbell (muggle extravagance, memory of her father) made her jump. Suddenly, she was ashamed of herself (coffee cups and dirty plates, unmade bed, half the bedding dragged to the couch...she hadn't had the energy to move for days). She cast a quick tidying charm on the flat as she walked to the door (a wreck herself, holes in the seams of her t-shirts, ripped up jeans).
She did the only thing that she could do.
She opened the door.
Hermione stood in the hallway, her hair damp and curling, the shoulders of a green sweater spotted with wetness. Her bag dangled from her hand.
"I'm supposed to be at Ron's," she said. "I told mum and dad that I was going to Ron's. Remus brought me. You didn't answer my letters."
"I know. I'm sorry." (Her wet hair was hanging in her eyes. All that she wanted to do was move it).
"I'll go to Ron's tomorrow. I just...I had to come, and see you, and..."
"Come inside," She said, stepping aside, taking a chance.
x
Almost a year to the day, and it was difficult to touch, talk, anything, with the weight of what had happened seperating one summer from another. She tried desperately to remember the way that Tonks had looked, the way that she'd sounded, lying on her stomach telling stories about love and falling in love, watching Sirius and Remus through the big windows of the dark house.
And now Sirius is gone, and they have to start again.
She wanted to touch Tonks more than anything (she'd had a year to think about it). She watched the older girl slumped at one end of the settee, the sharp points of her breasts under her t-shirt, the dark shadows smudged under her eyes (You don't have to look like that, she thought, frozen at her own end of the seat. You could magic all that away).
Maybe that's the point after all.
"Do you miss him?" She said, finally (nothing else to say). Tonks nodded.
"It's like a hole in the heart."
"Will you be okay?" Tonks stared at her, blanky. When she looked away, a tear oversplit the corner of her eye, clinging to her cheekbone. It was enough (permission) for her to shuffle down the threadbare velvet, mould herself to Tonks' angles, one arm around her shoulders, the other around her waist (clinging, hipbone-anchor). Tonks shoved her face into the curve of Hermione's neck and shoulder, sharp nose buried in her hair. She trembled (her lips against the bare skin where Hermione's shirt had slipped). "What is it? Tonks?"
"I don't think anybody asked me that before..."
"Shhhh..." She smoothed the tousled hair at the nape of Tonks' neck as she cried, and looked out of the window, London in the rain.
complete, full length fic starting in the summer pre OotP, continuing until the eventual end of the war. There are some rape references, for the record, and the fic is image heavy. You'll see.
(I own nothing, except for Sirius' leather jacket. That's mine).
dedicated to my M - tireless beta, appalling speller, part-time muse. With love.
(1: out-wait)
At night, the house stops moving (the only sound the portraits whispering through the walls). The house seems lonely in the middle of the night. She's only young, but that, she understands: how possible it is to be lonely in a crowd of people, to be inhabited but lonesome all the same. She feels empty, sometimes. She tries so hard, but she's a clanging bell, and you can learn to ignore any noise in the end. She's scared that they'll learn to ignore her, one of these days.
She's fallen into making lists.
She has pages and pages on the way that Tonks' colours filter and change. She'd been summer in the hallway, talking to Sirius (blue blue sky blue hair, laughing at something he said and leaning up to kiss his cheek, favourite cousin, loved)...she was spring in the kitchen, trying to help with dinner (Molly makes her nervous, giggling, hair like daffodils)...She's winter when she's lonely, gnawing on a fingernail, forgotten in a corner of the stairs.
I would never forget you.
She feels like such a little girl, sometimes. In snatched moments in front of the mirror (black spots under glass, clawed feet), she smoothes her sweater over the front of her body, critical, longing. She's budding, but she wants to bloom. Tonks is easily a woman (she recalls, with a pang, a glimpse of Tonks caught through an open door at midnight, perched on the kitchen table talking to Remus, a glass of milk forgotten, dressed in a t-shirt that skimmed the top of long legs kicking). She laughs a lot (it's such a good sound, open). Hermione loves that sound like nothing else (her body rises, two fingers for support, levitating, slipping her skin). Remus had looked her in the eyes, that way he had (looking down and at you at the same time), but Hermione's eyes had been dragged (not against her will, but she hadn't had a choice) to the place where skin met countertop, where Tonks figeted (glimpse of elastic trimmed with pink ribbon). It's an uphill struggle (the air is thin, here) - she bucks and struggles, biting down, tasting cotton (Ginny sleeping quietly steps away).
Tonks smells like clean sheets and violets and leather, but singed (still young, still learning, still pushing).
The way she takes stairs two at a time in her boots, laces trailing...
The way she pulls and twists at the curls at the nape of her neck when she's nervous and watched.
When she leant on her elbows on the bench in the kitchen, head tilted on one side...the way her breasts spilt forward in her t-shirt, the way she ran her teeth over her bottom lip.
Hermione comes with a whimper, her feet scrabbling on the sheets, slipping and failing to find purchase. It feels like falling (if you fall in a dream, you wake up. If you fall in a dream and don't wake up, you die). She lies still for a second (still alive, world spinning); orgasm is still a new enough sensation to make the world look like it's shining in the corners of her eyes. She lies very still, nightdress shoved up (cotton on bare skin, nipples so tender it almost hurts), legs still apart, not moving (can't move), warm and wet to her knuckles.
Eventually, she curls in around herself like a secret.
What would Tonks think of her?
x
Her legs are still trembling when she goes down to the kitchen (counting steps, obsessive-compulsive, list maker), desperate for water, for something. In the hallway, she pauses...There's music coming from the sitting room. She creeps down the hall, feeling guilty dressed in sex scent and a nightgown rucked up at the thighs (if it's Sirius and Remus in there, she'll die).
It isn't. Remus and Sirius must be long to one bed or another.
Tonks is curled into the corner of the long velvet settee (does everything in this house have clawed feet?). Her long legs are drawn up under her, under patchwork, her hair (red) stands up in sleep-peaks. She's autumn, watching the night through a window just recently washed.
"Tonks?" She looks up, startled (for a moment, there's nothing in her eyes but summer stars).
"Hermione...bit late, isn't it?"
She hesitates, on the edge of something (fingers snarling and twisting in pink cotton), and Tonks must see something (glass forehead), because she shifts, sits up. She looks concerned.
"Alright, Hermione?"
She'll never know why, but she shakes her head. By the time she does it, there's no taking it back. She almost expects Tonks to laugh at her (she'd laugh herself), but Tonks is lifting the corner of the blanket.
"Come sit."
She curls in against Tonks' body, her legs folded against the length of the back of her thigh. She can't help it, she goes liquid (Tonks is magnetic north). Tonks' arm fits around her shoulders like it was meant to be there. With her head against Tonk's breast, her own hair under her cheek, she feels mountain-breathless again.
"What are you waiting for?" She says (it seems like the thing to ask).
"Sunrise." says Tonks, her cheek against the top of Hermione's head.
A sunrise isn't going to save them now.
(2: stumble)
If she'd known anything about poetry, she might have seen it coming, might have known that summers exist so that, in the depth of winter, the world remembers.
Yes. Yes. Once, I was adored.
It has to do with remembering and with being reborn.
She didn't know anything about poetry (there's nothing about poetry which you can touch with your hands). Remus liked to read poetry, slim muggle paperbacks carried in suit pockets (sex and fear of sex and death and wanting to live on pages so thick that they crackled). All those books looked like they'd been dropped in baths, the pages yellowed and crinkled. Remus always said that they looked like that because there are things so beautiful they'll make you weep (when she was older, she'd understand).
She found Tonks in the garden, lying on the patch of grass which Sirius had so valiantly cleared (life, he'd explained grimly, finds a way, his arms laced with indigo Azkaban ink). Summer lingered in London that year (down by the river, the muggles were selling ice cream and taking boat rides, sighing in relief in the cool places under the bridges). Tonk's feet were bare, moving through the air in loose circles. Her t-shirt had ridden up, leaving the smooth slope of the small of her back bare and uninterrupted. Her hair (longish, more pink than red) was spangled with daisies and half finished braids. She seemed out of place in the garden, sprawled on that scrap of green reclaimed from the brambles.
Maybe it was like Sirius had said...
Quietly, not wanting to speak and shatter summer (which seemed fragile and always under threat of rain), she arranged herself on the rug, just to the side of Tonks' slowly kicking feet. It was uncomfortably hot in the garden. With both hands, she reached up to twist the weight of her hair away from the nape of her neck.
"You've got such a lot," said Tonks, peering over the rims of pink-lensed sunglasses, her book lolling in her hands.
"What?" She sounded sharper than she'd meant to.
"Of hair. Such a lot." Tonks pushed her hand through her trailing fringe; damp hair clung together, leaving her forehead bare, beaded in sweat.
"Yes...Sometimes, I think I'll get it all cut off, it's such a pain, but..." She realised that Tonks wasn't looking at her at all. She traced the line of the other girl's sight to the big windows, so recently liberated. Remus was sitting at the desk in the bay (Sirius had wanted to burn that desk, a relic of his father, but, then again, Sirius had been in favour of burning down the entire house).
"What are you..?"
"Shhhh..."
From the way Remus had his fingers snarled in greying hair, his other hand curled around the back of his neck under the open collar of his shirt (mint green) he was concentrating. By his frown, he was suffering for it in the heat (the house should have been full of cool corners. Should have been, but still, even with all the windows open, it baked like an oven, oppressive and vindictive). Sirius was standing behind Remus reading over his shoulder. The fingers of one hand were curled around the neck of a beer bottle on the desk, but the other rested on Remus' shoulder, palm against cotton. As they watched, Remus' head rolled back on his neck against Sirius' stomach, the frown going internal, leaving his face relaxed. He looked much younger, suddenly.
"Love," said Tonks, folding over the page of her book and rolling onto her back (breasts a neat spill in a vest sparkling with printed flowers), "Is a key which unlocks."
(Where did she get these things from?)
Hermione wanted to reach out and correct the strand of hair that had fallen across Tonks' forehead. She hesitated, once, twice (a stutter) and then she reached out, and brushed it away. Tonks' eyes were bright and pale at the same time, grey green, sea water, full of trapped and refracted light. Silver fish darted in the other girl's eyes. As she took her hand away, Tonks caught hold of her fingers. She brushed her lips across Hermione's knuckles. The younger girl felt herself blush (young, stupid). She didn't think that things like this happened, not really.
She felt like something that somebody made up, sitting on the grass at Grimmauld place, Tonks' fingers still laced with her own.
She felt like something that had never happened before, anywhere else in the world.
"Back to school tomorrow," said Tonks. Hermione nodded.
"Looking forward to it?"
"Yes." Immediately, she felt guilty (too quick to answer). "I mean...no...I mean..." Tonks laughed, a sudden, loud sound in the quiet garden. A bird took off from a distant tree.
"You're cute, you know that?"
She hadn't.
Love is a key which unlocks.
--
She sat between Tonks' knees on the unmade bed, her head tipped back slightly as Tonks brushed out her long hair.
"So much bloody hair, Hermione," said Tonks, her mouth full of grips, words coming out distorted. "You were born with the hair of two people..."
Hermione blushed.
"I can't help it."
"I know, sweetheart, I know. Sit still." She held Hermione's hair in her first, so that the roots didn't pull. "It's a very beautiful lot of hair."
(She was burning up with pleasure).
"There..." said Tonks, smoothing Hermione's hair over her shoulder. "It's as good as it's going to get..."
There was a moment when Tonks' mouth was almost against the skin of her shoulder, and she knew that she need to get up and go somewhere else (her hands spasming against the sheet), and her eyes closed (right eye first) and she felt Tonks' breath against her lips, they were that close.
Either you do or you don't. It's a choice. You have a choice.
For how long will you regret it if you don't?
Tonks tasted of summer: grass and pollen and blue sky and a book with the pages folded over. The kiss, at first hesitant, blossomed and bore fruit. They leant their foreheads together, breathless (like running up hill).
"Oh, Hermione," said Tonks, her eyes brimming with light.
"I'm sorry," said Hermione, feeling unlocked. "I didn't...I wasn't..."
"Shhhh," said Tonks, bending her head for the second time, one girl kissing another on the mouth on an unmade bed in summer.
(3: my eager eyes)
"You look beautiful."
"Why are you sitting on the stairs?"
"There's nowhere else to sit."
"There's plenty of other places to sit."
"Don't want to sit on my own."
"You're much less handsome when you pout, you know."
"You're looking less and less beautiful, Nymphadora."
"Cheers, Sirius."
She felt beautiful (some shimmering, glimmering thing in her bones) and she felt like she was bursting out of her skin (tattoos and silver and glitter on her collarbone and the place between her breasts). She was going dancing, and Remus was going with her. She'd seen them dancing in the kitchen, the two of them and it was the only time she'd ever seen Sirius look less than comfortable in his own skin (head down, feet shuffling, arm clinging around Remus' neck for dear life), but Remus, while dancing, had shone. As she'd watched, he'd bent his head (so much taller) and whispered,
"Relax, Sirius. I'm not letting you go."
His hand had rested in the place between the small of Sirius' back and the tight curve of him under denim.
She gone back to bed without water.
Remus came down the stairs behind Sirius, nudging him in the back with the toe of his boot.
"Are you still sulking?"
"Mmph."
"We can't take you with us. Some of us are fugitives. Fugitives can't go dancing, Sirius. Not even fugitives who can dance. I'm not sure that there's precedent for those that can't and still want to."
"Fuck you, Remus."
"You don't mean that." He slid past Sirius (skinny, taking up so little room, hunched on the step). "You look lovely, Nymphadora..." A glitter-stained giggle spilt out of her. Remus frowned (self concious, blush stained).
"What?" He self-conciously adjusted his shirt (black, button down).
"Nothing...we've just been here before, haven't we, Sirius." Sirius was sullenly silent (the fact that his face through the banister looked like a face behind bars stuck in her throat). Remus straightened his tie (loosely knotted), pushing his blushes internal with the backs of his long fingered hands.
"Are you ready to go, Nympahdora?" She nodded, pulling on her jacket (scarred brown leather, a gift from her mother, who had told her that it had been Sirius' once, in his youth). She bent from the waist and pressed a kiss to Sirius' mouth, her hand finding bare skin under the sleeve of his t-shirt (black cotton, palm against ink).
"We'll be back." She said.
"Be good," said Sirius, risking a smile, wiping glitter off his lower lip on the back of his hand.
Nobody has to be alone forever.
x
Out of her skin, out of her head, she loved to dance, she loved it. Loved dancing in her heavy boots, her arms up over her head, now in her hair, on her breasts over her hips. She held out her hands to Remus, not caring if he came or not, just wanting to dance, dance, dance. Just wanting to be free for a while, free of all of it...Just wanting to be a girl again, a young girl, not a care in the world. She couldn't see straight (sweat in her hair, hair in her eyes), and she wanted a cigarette and a beer and a fuck (yes, she wanted a fuck). She wanted to scream, all of those things. More than anything, she just wanted to dance.
Fuck it, for a night.
The world can save itself.
A pretty girl, a blond girl, holding out a cigarette, and she wanted one she wanted one she wanted one and she took it. Blue eyes and blond hair, and Remus was somewhere else, and this girl was a little bit taller. She was drunker than she thought she was (the world span when she took a drag), and she was tired of dancing, and she wanted to sit down, and where-the-fuck-was-Remus?
(Why is no-one ever there to catch you when you trip?).
Sitting on the couch, not seeing straight, seeing stars. They were talking, faces turned together, backs of their necks against the couch (The girl's name was Sarah...a muggle...oh gods, a muggle), and her cigarette was in her hand forgotten against her jeans, and she thought that Sarah might have been leaning in for a kiss, and she told herself not to be stupid (who'd kiss her? You know who).
And then their lips touched.
When she didn't pull away (blindsided), a hand came up, tracing along her jawline (calculated tentative, light but strong. Some women are steel). The kiss deepened, tongue in her mouth, fingers curled around the back of her neck. She moaned (couldn't help it, hardwired for it), wanted it wanted it wanted it (its not this you want). Hand under the collar of her shirt, knee between her legs, turning her body, pushing forward, getting wet, breathing quicker, pushing forward.
Hermione.
"I..." Steadying herself with two fistfuls of shirt (bigger breasts than hers, pale skin, no marks). "We have to stop."
"Why? Don't you wanna..?"
"Yes. No. I have to go."
"You have to GO?"
"Yes. I have to...there's somebody..."
And she got up and reeled away and suddenly she was happy because she'd realised and she saw Remus by the bar and she just wanted to kiss him, and tell someone, and then never ever kiss anybody else, ever again.
Bursting out of her skin, she suddenly felt full of light.
x
Molly Weasley was waiting for them at the door, her red hair wild with irritation, her dressing gown clutched around her.
"Molly?" said Remus, suddenly all business, his shoulders tight with anticipation. "Molly, what's wrong?"
"You," said Molly, stabbing Remus in the chest with an outstretched finger, "Need to talk to him. Now. He's keeping the whole house up."
"Who? What?"
"Sirius."
"What's he done now?" A screech erupted from the bowels of the house, followed by Sirius' deeper voice raised in a roar.
"Not only has he woken his bloody mother, as if that wasn't enough, but they've now been screeching at each other for half an hour..." She rubbed her forehead with her hand (she was looking her age around her fingers now, knuckles gnarled by children and kitchens and time). "Talk some sense into him, Remus, would you? I know it's difficult for him but is there any reason to make the rest of us suffer with him?"
"I'll sort it out, Molly," said Remus (comforting hand for her terry-cloth shoulder), "You go on back to bed."
In the hallway, Mrs Black was in full flight, full flow, denouncing her son as a traitor, a coward, a sodomite, a fool. Sirius' hair was thrown around his face, his shoulders pushed back, cheeks flooded red. The boards at his feet were littered with cigarette butts and the broken green glass of a beer bottle.
"Yes, mother, yes. Yes, I did those things. Yes, I loved them. You fucking bitch...I'm everything you fucking hate, and I love it, y'hear? I fucking LOVE it."
"Sirius?" His head whipped around (something drowning in his eyes). He was breathing heavily, like he'd been running. "Sirius, what are you doing?"
"'M talking to my mother, Remus."
"Sirius, come away..."
"I don't need to come away, Remus..." It was hard to hear them over Mrs Black's shrieking and spitting. Remus closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "S'my fucking house now..."
"Nymphadora?"
"Yes?"
"Take Sirius outside, would you?"
Sirius allowed himself to be turned (towed) by a hand on his own. He turned back, a mouth full of spit for Mrs Black (it oozed over canvas, leaving pale tracks in the dirt on the frame).
"Cunt," snarled Sirius, last living son of the house of Black.
"Come on, Sirius," said Tonks, leading him. "It's a beautiful night."
x
"I..." She ran the tip of her tongue along the edge of the thin paper, smoothing it with the pad of her thumb, "Was saving this for a special occasion, but I guess I'll just have to waste it on you."
"What is it?"
"What is it? What IS it? This, I'll have you know, good cousin, is the best gillyweed I've got my hands on in three years. And we? Are going to smoke the lot." She lit the joint, closing her eyes, taking a long drag, before she offered it to him. He was lying on his back on the grass. As he took a smoke, grey eyes narrowing to slits (like the dim light from the house was suddenly too bright), she lay down too, her body making a junction with his, her head rest on his chest, under the place where his arm folded up under his head. He passed the joint back to her, his arm staying folded across his body, the side of his against her cheek, the tips of his fingers brushing her neck.
"When I was a little girl, I used to love you." She said, softly. "When I was a teenager, I used to dream about you touching me, just like this, just casually."
"Hmmm?"
"A crush, Sirius. I had a crush."
"That's nice."
"No, it wasn't. It was bloody horrible. You'd gone to Azkaban and I still loved you, and all I had were these pictures that mum had kept, and I was never going to see you again."
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah. I am too." There was a long pause, just the sound of him breathing (no birds, no traffic noise...even the lights of the muggle world didn't touch the garden at Grimmauld place. The stars were brighter, there). He stroked the side of her neck. She reached up over her head blindly for the joint between his lips (trusting him not to let her burn herself).
"Do you still..?"
She took a long drag.
"Don't, Sirius. Not just because you're mad at him. He doesn't deserve it, and you're not that much of an arsehole. And, anyway...No, since you ask. No. There's somebody else. I think. I think that there's somebody else." He moved his body slightly (his arm not long enough), the tips of his fingers finding her exposed collarbone. There wasn't any sex in a touch like that, just comfort.
She knew that he was there.
"Who?" She took another deep drag (false courage), a little stuttering cough forcing it's way out of her.
"Hermione."
"Oh," he said, holding out his fingers for the spliff (fingers of his free hand, head flat against the grass now). "Ohhhh."
"What?" she said, a challenge, chin jutting, high enough to be brave.
"Nothing..." He said, stroking her skin carefully. "Does she know about this." She nodded, her head still against his body (feeling her through his ribs).
"I think so."
"Then every happiness to you, little cousin." He said, and she could hear him smiling. "How the fuck did you know about me and Remus, anyway?"
"It's written all over you," she said. "Every time you see each other."
(True love needs no decoding).
"Shall we go inside," he said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. She shook her head.
"Let's stay a while." She turned her face into his shirt, his arm slipping around her shoulders. She felt better for having told somebody.
She was never going to kiss anybody else ever again.
(4: looking back on sunsets)
When she was little, she'd clung to him whenever he was in the house (Remus had been there too, but she'd only ever let Sirius lift her). Looking back they'd been so young, those two boys; Remus in his shabby cords, his hair brushed straight back from his forehead, and Sirius, rockstar teenager, with his longer hair and his leather and his quick smile.
He didn't smile so easily anymore.
Of course, when she was only eight years old when he went to Azkaban (so very young), but he had been her mother's favourite cousin (Andromeda's only dowery from the house of Black: a leather jacket, scuffed and scared and a chest of photographs of a beautiful boy, lost). Nymphadora Tonks had spent her early teens studying those photographs, learning every flicker of his face. She'd started wearing his jacket as soon as it had fitted her.
She'd never forgotten him (though feelings change over time, and she wasn't fifteen anymore).
Sirius Black stalked. He prowled. He drank his beer, and he lit one cigarette from the end of another. He tied his hair back, and then he yanked it out of the elastic, ruffled it to one side of his face. He'd spent all those years behind bars (this was a house; spread rooms under the ground and into the air like cancer). He spent a lot of time out in the garden (at least there was the illusion of freedom there - at least he could find the dogstar and pretend that he still burnt as well).
'God, he was my favourite,' her mother had said, tracing the line of his jaw and the fall of his hair with the tip of her finger. 'You remember him, right, Nym'? Sirius? He was so handsome...he shone too brightly to be one of us...' (You weren't one of them, mother. You were never one of them.)
He looked up as she walked into the kitchen, cigarette in his mouth (dull). The house was silent. She must have been the first one back.
"Wotcha, Sirius..." He didn't so much smile as flash all of his teeth, shreading the corner of the beer bottle label with his nail. "Not in bed yet, huh?"
"Not tired." He nipped at the edge of his nail. "I'm...dying here, Tonks. I'm fucking dying. All they,' (the portraits, the Blacks through the walls), "All they ever do is whisper about me, and I think I'm going mad."
"You didn't go mad in Azkaban, you won't go mad here."
"Maybe this is the last thing that I can take."
She sat down opposite him, her bag on the table between them.
"I brought you something." He arched an eyebrow (now that was a Black look, to the bone).
"Oh?" She unzipped her rucksack and produced a bottle, holding it out to Sirius by it's neck. He gave a low whistle under his breath.
"This is good stuff, Nymphadora...very good."
"I thought you'd say that," she said, as he got up to retrieve glasses. "And Merlin knows, you could do with cheering up." She took Remus' camera out of her bag, squinting at him through the view-finger, taking a snapshot.
"Let's go out," said Sirius, pouring them each a measure of the firewhiskey. "Let's go for a walk somewhere or something."
Now it was her turn to quirk an eyebrow.
"Are you kidding me? Kingsley finds out I let you go out, he'll KILL me...and that's if Remus leaves enough of me for Kingsley to take adequate action. No fucking way."
"Please?"
She'd never known him to say please before. "Please, Tonks, I'm dying here." She glanced at her watch. The others probably wouldn't even make it back for hours. She knocked back the shot that he'd poured for her, shuddering.
"Okay...but just for a little while."
On the train he was nervous (rattle and hum, ratta tatta rhythm dreaming down towards the river) - he had no love for the muggle Undergroud, Sirius Black (too long spent in dark, confined spaces. He'd been away from the sky for too long). She tried to distracted him; nips from the firewhiskey in the silver flask (muggles drinking out of plastic bottles and cans, the air rank). She talked and talked, and even offered him Remus' camera, talked him through the process, ended up with a shaky shot from way too close (you can see souls in pictures like that, burst of light around the head).
Finally, she got up, one hang swinging her bag over her shoulder, the other finding his and tugging.
"Come on,"
"Where?"
"We're here."
"Where are we going?"
"Down to the river," she told him over her shoulder, dragging him through the doors just as they were closing, the rubber soles of his sneakers squeaking on metal, concrete, stairs.
"How do you know if you're in love?" she said to him, perched on the wall, her feet dangling down towards the water, eating chips out of greasy paper. He looked at her, popping a chip into his own mouth, his hair falling around the side of his face.
"I don't think there's a guidebook, Tonks. I think that you just...know..."
"What if it's never happened before?" She could feel herself going red (not so very long ago that she still thought that she was in love with him, fugitive, family, trapped in a gone time when she was very young). Her fingers traced the edges of a letter folded into her pocket for six months (handwriting still childishly rounded - you get your real handwriting later - but nothing childish in the sentiment...I hope to become very good at it). "I mean...what if you're not expecting it?"
He looked down at the lights on the river, nodding slowly.
"That's the best kind...when you're not expecting it. Like...you're going about your life, right? And maybe they've always been there...maybe that's how they are, quiet and always there...and one day you like them and you realise..."
"Realise what?" He turned to look at her, smiling. She hadn't seen him smile like that since she was a little girl...she could barely remember him ever smiling like that (there was a reason that they named him after the brightest star, heart of the sky).
"That they're the only thing. And, from the moment that you realise that, you'll never see anybody else again..."
"And then what?"
"And then love arrives..." said Sirius Black, softly, dreamily, grey eyes reflecting the lights in the water... "And it's good, sweetheart. It's very, very good."
"Think that'll happen for me?"
Sirius shrugged.
"She's very young, Tonks. You both are."
"You were very young when you met Remus." He smiled, and nodded, leaving his head down.
"I was."
"And you knew?"
"Not at first. He found me. Took me by surprise."
Hermione's lips catching hers, unexpected, on her bed, unmade, in summer. Just a kiss, just that one kiss, barely a touch after that (lying on the bed after that, Hermione's ear over her heart, Hermione's hair like a puzzle to be unravelled).
"He saved you..." It was a romantic notion: a little girl's notion.
"You save yourself, love. Maybe...maybe he just made me want to be saved. Maybe love makes all things possible."
She traced the corners of the letter folded in her pocket (proof with four corners). Somebody (her mother, maybe, or Remus Lupin) had told her that every letter from a friend, from someone you treasured, was a love letter, written between the lines.
"Shall we go back now?" She said (London stained pink along the river). Without warning, he leant over and caught the corner of her mouth with a kiss.
(He shone with an a fragile, spun light. Azkaban hadn't killed him, but it had broken him, broken his heart being away from Love for so young. He'd survived, but, sometimes, when the light caught him, he seemed paper thin).
"I suppose that we better had, hadn't we?"
She could have stayed in sugar-spun London, down by the river forever.
Before morning came.
"We have enough teenagers coming and going in this place..." said a voice behind them in the hallway, "without you two acting as you like..." Sirius froze mid step, dropped his head (guilty, grinning like a teenaged boy).
"Surely, you've got better things to do than lurking behind hat-stands, Remus?"
"What if you'd be caught, Sirius? What if you'd been seen..?" Sirius turned, closed the gap between them.
"We weren't, Remus. We weren't." He held out a hand. "Come here." Remus' eyes flicked to Tonks. She knows?
(Of course she knows. It's written all over both of you).
"Come...here." said Sirius, softly.
"Why?"
"I want to dance with you."
"We'll wake your mother..."
"Remus, I don't give a fuck about my mother."
Tonks crept up the stairs, blushing quietly for them, for everything, for love. She sat down in the middle of her bed (unmade, as usual...Molly had tried for a few weeks, but given up, contenting herself with the fact that the very thought of an unmade bed gave Remus Lupin migranes). She balanced a roll of parchment along her thigh (was tempted to write I wish that you were as close to me as this letter is. I was you were as close to me as that, always).
She didn't, but she wanted to.
(5: staring at the loss)
She rose, she fought (she wanted to come back). It was difficult, dark (she couldn't see her hand in front of her face). She could hear someone shouting, as though from very far away.
She pushed with both hands.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Moody above her (she'd never even imagined that his hands could be so gentle). She saw angels dancing in the shadows of an empty socket. Everything had gone very quiet.
She slipped.
It's trying to rain in the world tonight (a heavy sky, no moon, nothing to navigate by). The wind bites through her coat (Sirius'), thrown on over her favourite shirt - the clouds pull at her hair with chill fingers. Ahead of her, she can make out Remus' dark shape against the cloud (wolves don't believe in constellations). Below her, Moody keeps a constant line.
Sirius is her shadow.
On the ground, he touches her arm, the curve of her shoulder (It'll be alright, I promise.). He used to say things that like when he'd babysit her and she'd have nightmares: smooth her hair with the flat of his hand (delicate hands, long and slender fingers, a silver ring on a fourth digit), and tell her that everything was going to be okay.
She's seen the way that they're looking at each other. It's giving her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Oh, baby, don't make promises that you can't keep.
She's been here before (of course she has, trained here, based here), but these corridors are new and strange. Moody seems to know where he's going (he and Remus setting a pace that's almost running), and they follow him like a light. Sirius is at her side, silent and grim. Maybe he has a sinking feeling too.
Vaulted doors, and they slow to a stop (she can see the glow of Mad Eye's revolving gaze in the dark). As they wait for the word, for the call, for the moment, barely daring to breath (even walls have ears), she feels a touch, a brush against her wrist. Sirius threads his fingers through hers, just for a moment, a split second, squeezing her hand. She can feel his silver ring making an imprint in her skin (later, she'll search for that mark, wanted it to scar, to never heal, to be there forever). He winks at her (left eye flicker), and then Moody gives the signal, and that's it, really. That's all there is.
The doors fly open, and this might as well be it. She's never been in a battle before.
This is the moment of your life.
It's all shards then (it's all time that she'll never get back). One step at a time, they descend (Kingsley shouting to her, to them, Remus and Sirius with their language of looks, Moody silent and grim), and it's because she hesititates that she sees Malfoy (beaten silver, black on the inside) raise his wand. Her Stunning Spell goes wide, but it buys them time. That's all she wants: to buy them time. From her vantage point, she sees Hermione spilt across the floor: her hair knotted, and tossed across her face. Sirius sees at the same time as she does. He throws her a look over his shoulder (almost down the stairs).
"Don't!" he shouts, gone into the mix, and it's the last time he'll ever look at her and later she'll wish that it had lasted longer. She took a deep breath. Concentrate. Concentrate.
Don't.
"You should be glad," calls an familar voice from down below, "That you look nothing like your mother, Nymphadora."
Not her. Anybody but her.
Her aunt resembles her mother closely; dark eyes and a tumble of hair. Bellatrix's mouth is a dark red slash. Bellatrix's eyes have no love. Like Andromeda, she resembles her cousin, Sirius (the Black arch to their brows, bow to their lips). Bellatrix is smiling. "Ready, Nymphadora? Ready to die like so many worthless mudbloods before you?"
The world narrows. Tonks draws herself up to her full height.
"I'm not afraid of you," she says (for a moment, in that moment, it's true).
The world narrows.
Bellatrix snarls and spits, foul, filthy things about Andromeda and Ted, about Sirius, about Tonks herself. She turns and ducks, a spell zinging over her head (too close for comfort). As she stands, she catches sight of Sirius and Harry talking. He's not watching. She feels her eyes widen as she watches someone take aim.
"Sirius!" He jerks, the spell gone wide, and she feels herself starting to smile, and then there's this short, sharp shock (like a fist to the breast bone...more than that, like a punch to the heart).
The last thing she sees is Bellatrix's slash of a smile, Bellatrix's back, and she turns, not even waiting to watch her niece fall.
She slips.
She opened her eyes and he was sitting next to her bed, head down, hands folded in his lap. She thought that he was sleeping, but, when she tried to push herself up (found that she couldn't, no strength in her arms), he looked straight at her. Remus Lupin, face pale and tight, hair pushed straight back from his forehead.
She could feel the impression of Bellatrix's knuckles on her heart.
"Haven't you slept?" She said, forcing a smile, feeling like dirt.
"Tonks..." He said, softly. "I've...you need it..."
She looked at him.
"Don't, Remus. Please don't."
"You don't know what I'm going to say yet."
That look. That look that was, at once, broken and iron fisted. It had to be one of them; her first love or the love newly discovered. It had to be. He'd called her Tonks.
"Don't. Don't. I can't bear it, Remus, don't." He reached out to touch her, but she recoiled from the reach of his hand.
"He...didn't suffer. Dumbledore is sure of it."
It was more than a sigh, not a scream, the sound she made. A suffering sound; a sound wrenched out of her body. A undulating wail, a keen.
There is no love which does not scar.
They ended up on the bed together: long legs in fraying tweed, and her lumpy under blankets, borrowed nightgown and the blue hospital wristband. Every inch of her body ached and cried. She let him hold her anyway (he needed it as much as she did). Remus fumbled in his pockets, pooling a little collection of things in his lap. She watched, her head against his shoulder (she didn't feel like she was ever going to have the energy to move herself again).
I'll move myself tomorrow.
"Someone once told me," said Remus, his voice low, not moving up and down much (a straight line to follow), "that you are the sum of everyone who you allow to touch you." He smiled, just a brief touch, a flutter (a October butterfly, dulled by the promise of winter coming). "Sirius woud have been the sum of everybody. You won't remember, Nymph-...you won't remember, but, when he was younger, he sparkled and he shone, and everybody wanted to touch him. Even me. Especially me."
She remembered.
With two fingers scissored, he picked up a note that had been torn up and then mended, folded.
"James and Lily," He said. "I thought that he did it. I thought..." He swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing, and set the note down on the sheet, on the far side of his thigh. "Enough of that, now. People die." He picked up a photograph of Sirius, bare chested, smiling, very young. "God, he was handsome. He can't ever have been that handsome..."
(He used to be that handsome. Azkaban took a lot of it away from him, but, once, he'd shone the brightest and the best, dogstar, heart of the sky).
One handed, he turned over the photograph, the back filled with cramped, spidery scrawl. He held it out to her. She frowned, puzzling over it like glyphs.
"I...can't read it." Remus' smile lifted one corner of his mouth.
"He always had appalling handwriting. Born for a job at the Ministry." He cleared his throat. "Thought you might enjoy that, dear old..." He blushed. "Dear old perverted Moony. You're...you're out at the moment and I find myself terribly bored and wishing you were here. Look..." He stopped, for a moment, his breath shuddering. Tonks had closed her eyes. "Look, I've been reading: Come live with me, and be my love...and we shall all the pleasures prove. Whatever that means..." He stopped. "There's not much else."
She kept her eyes squeezed shut.
She'd heard every word in Sirius' voice.
"This one..." He held up the other photograph, folded from being kept, faded from being looked at (you take a colour every time you blink), "Was taken two days before...before everything happened. Things were never really the same after that, thought we tried." He was fretting with the ring on his fourth finger. "Too much lost time, perhaps. Too little joy for the both of us. We had to relearn each other, you see. I think that we were both too old for that, by then. Too old and too tired."
She thought about it after he'd gone: love and loss of love and grabbing what you have with both hands while you're young: while there's nothing to relearn. She studied the two photographs of Sirius ('I'll come back for them tomorrow', and a kiss for her forehead). She thought about Hermione (she thought about Hermione, her hair spilling across the floor of the Department of Mysteries). She rubbed her breast-bone, feeling tender, and she felt smashed to pieces. She curled in on herself, her body a wall around her sorrow that bloomed like an orgasm, like cancer. The tears came slowly, painfully, each one costing something dear. What if she hadn't slipped? What if she'd still be awake...could she have saved him? Would she have seen what was coming before he did (she'd done it once before?). Gods, she was useless and pathetic (falling so early). She heard Moody's gruff voice ('Not yourself, girl...you did the best you could...you did brilliantly). She'd been too broken hearted to even blush at the highest of praise. All that she could think of was Sirius (beautiful, lost boy, never grow old now), and Hermione (who was never going to want her, fuck-up, faller, used up and broken).
She didn't weep. They weren't tears. She didn't cry (little girls cry). She was grown up now.
In the private room, in St Mungo's, nightgown and blue wristband, Tonks screamed and it tore her.
"These are beautiful flowers, but they'll die without water," said Dumbledore, folded into the chair at her bedside. She hadn't even heard him come in.
"They don't matter," she said, turning her face to him.
"I doubt that the person who sent them would think that, Nymphadora." He gestured to the cards sitting on the bedside table (Discarded now, but handled). "Sirius Black knew what he was doing when he left Grimmauld place, Nymphadora. He accepted the risk...as did you all."
"We didn't all die though, sir." (Though we may wish that we had).
"No. No, you did not." He sipped his coffee. "Abysmal," he said, wistfully. His eyes, when he looked at her, were the colour of the shallow sea. "You may miss him forever, Nymphadora, but it need not break you and what you have."
"Might? It's like..." She looked at her hands, clenched and useless. "It's like there's been this horrible accident, this terrible thing and...I don't remember it, it might as well have happened to someone else entirely, but I have to learn to walk again. He's gone, and I will miss him forever."
"And yet? Life continues, Nymphadora. It's one of the great mysteries of it; that such things do not end the world."
It was said that Dumbledore remembered every name of every witch or wizard in every first year at Hogwarts. Looking at him sitting in the hospital chair, Tonks could believe it. There is love of a kind which knows no bounds. He got up to leave, fussing with the folds of his robes.
"There will be hands to carry you, Nymphadora." said the old wizard, with a bow of his head. "Remember: nobody living is ever truely alone."
Lonely and alone are two completely different things.
(6: a feel for the song)
"It's not much," he'd said, all angles in a chair without padding. "Not a very important thing." He'd been isolating himself for so long that he had no idea of what he had left to give. She was still sitting in the bed, swathed in blankets, her hair unbrushed. For days, she'd been taking what they gave her to take, talking to whoever showed up, but she felt broken, somehow; no strength in her bones. She'd felt broken and without light. "Just a little thing."
He was holding out the box to her. She made herself take it.
"He...might have wanted you to have them." He said, smiling (or trying to). "And, god knows, I don't know what to do with them."
She opened the box. What was inside it was magical or stupid or vital, depending on who you were.
Magical, wrapped in their own laces, etched with drawings in white and silver. Stupid, somebody else's shoes. Vital.
They had been Sirius'.
She stared at them for a long time, not wanting to touch them (not wanting to get burnt that way - through the tips of her trembling fingers and what she remembered so dearly).
"What am I supposed to do with these?"
"...I thought, since you already wear his jacket..."
"Remus, I haven't stood up since the Ministry."
Suddenly, there was iron in Remus' eyes. Suddenly, she could see how he'd had the strength to be in love with Sirius for so long.
"So they'll be there for you to wear when you do."
"What if I never do?"
"You think that that's an option?" She stretched her legs out on the sheet in front of her (it was too hot, so hot, the hospital sweltering). She sat on top of the sheets, the t-shirt she wore brushing the tops of her thighs. Remus studied her bare legs. If it had been anybody else (if it had have been Sirius), she'd have blushed, wanted to cover herself, but there wasn't any sex in the way that Remus Lupin was looking at her.
Tonks felt deconstructed.
"Get up."
"What?"
"Get...up. If you don't...if you don't do it now, when I'm here with you, maybe you won't..."
I'll move myself tomorrow...
But you won't. You maybe never will.
Remus, I don't...I mean...what if I can't?" He made a soft sound, disbelieving (tongue and teeth).
"If Sirius could do all the things that he did then you can certainly do this...If your mother could do what she did..."
"I'm not a Black, Remus."
"You're more like them than you realise...Give me your feet."
"What?"
"Give me your feet, Nymphadora. Let's begin as we mean to go on." Not knowing quite else what to do (quiet authority in a voice like his), she swung her feet towards him (bare, muscles going to waste, to dust). He guided her feet into his lap, rubbing the muscles of her calves (tired, aching, she felt strung through with barbed wire). His thumbs found sensitive points in the soles of her feet. With anybody else, it might have made her want him. It just felt like he was remaking her in somebody else's image (just make me better, please). He slipped her feet into Sirius' shoes, wrapping the laces around her ankles slowly, tying each bow with undue care (he was a craftsman).
They were making maps.
"You might need to make your feet a little bigger..."
"I don't even have the energy for that." He studied her face.
"So that's really you, is it?" She brushed back bubblegum hair self conciously, shaking her head (he could make her blush).
"This is hard-wired..."
She couldn't tell whether he was sad that it was hardwired, or glad that she wasn't nearly dead.
"Come on then, Nymphadora. Let's see what you're made of, shall we?"
Sitting on the edge of the bed, rubber capped toes just touching the floor, t-shirt rucked up (grey cotton underwear), she trembled.
"Remus, I..."
"Stop it," he said, standing up now, holding out his hands (she wanted to be believe in him), "Stop thinking so much. Trust me, Nymphadora. I'm not going to let you fall."
(What was it that Dumbledore had said? There will be hands to carry you...Nobody living is ever truely alone.
When she nearly fell (rubber soles on a tiled floor, her legs doing their best to forget that she had ever learnt to run), it was Remus' arm around her waist which caught her. Walls to her country, he held her, as she found her feet in Sirius' shoes, muscles in bare thighs trembling (a thin, wailing cry from every part of her). Her t-shirt was rucked up: his fingers rested against grey cotton and bare skin where he held her.
"Do you want to walk somewhere?"
"Just hold me here for a second..."
Above her, he nodded.
"I miss him," she whispered to the rumpled collar of his shirt.
"You probably always will," he said, no comfort, just truth, words getting lost in her hair as it faded.
The train station costs more than she'll ever let on. It costs a lot now to do these things without him. It doesn't matter that they'd been without him for years and years (at least, then, they'd known that, somewhere, he still lived and breathed). The world without him is cool, and close. The world without him...
She's supposed to be saying something, isn't she? She's supposed to...
"Anyway, that's not the point..." She says, pushing fingers through pink hair (even that leaves her exhausted). "The point is, if we ever find out you've been horrible to Harry-"
She drifts, after that, watching Hermione with her parents.
(When Hermione looks up, straight at her, catches her eye, Tonks blushes and looks away).
When it's time to go home, Remus offers her his arm, lets her lean on him without question (he takes a lot of the weight).
She doesn't want to go back to Grimmauld place.
She wants to go home for a while, a few weeks, and be lost.
x
So this was what war did. No scars (not the dignity of scars, of knowing that you had given your pound of flesh, no comfort in personal sacrifice). A lingering weakness in her legs which left her winded and breathless after missions...the imprint of Bellatrix's knuckles in her heart (soft and pliant)...the tiny mark that his ring had made when he'd grabbed her hand and squeezed too tight (it faded, red then pink then white, then as gone as he was, in the end). War had left her breathless and lonely, watching Hermione's letters pile up, unable to do anything about them. War had burnt her photographs, left her skittish and lonely. She read with the windows thrown open to the grey sky (it had rained in London incessantly that summer), and she fell asleep in her clothes (waking up sweaty and disorientated, like waking up somebody else entirely).
What war did.
She was curled on her side on the settee, staring, cold (too warm for a fire, but, oh, she wanted to set the world alight). The doorbell (muggle extravagance, memory of her father) made her jump. Suddenly, she was ashamed of herself (coffee cups and dirty plates, unmade bed, half the bedding dragged to the couch...she hadn't had the energy to move for days). She cast a quick tidying charm on the flat as she walked to the door (a wreck herself, holes in the seams of her t-shirts, ripped up jeans).
She did the only thing that she could do.
She opened the door.
Hermione stood in the hallway, her hair damp and curling, the shoulders of a green sweater spotted with wetness. Her bag dangled from her hand.
"I'm supposed to be at Ron's," she said. "I told mum and dad that I was going to Ron's. Remus brought me. You didn't answer my letters."
"I know. I'm sorry." (Her wet hair was hanging in her eyes. All that she wanted to do was move it).
"I'll go to Ron's tomorrow. I just...I had to come, and see you, and..."
"Come inside," She said, stepping aside, taking a chance.
x
Almost a year to the day, and it was difficult to touch, talk, anything, with the weight of what had happened seperating one summer from another. She tried desperately to remember the way that Tonks had looked, the way that she'd sounded, lying on her stomach telling stories about love and falling in love, watching Sirius and Remus through the big windows of the dark house.
And now Sirius is gone, and they have to start again.
She wanted to touch Tonks more than anything (she'd had a year to think about it). She watched the older girl slumped at one end of the settee, the sharp points of her breasts under her t-shirt, the dark shadows smudged under her eyes (You don't have to look like that, she thought, frozen at her own end of the seat. You could magic all that away).
Maybe that's the point after all.
"Do you miss him?" She said, finally (nothing else to say). Tonks nodded.
"It's like a hole in the heart."
"Will you be okay?" Tonks stared at her, blanky. When she looked away, a tear oversplit the corner of her eye, clinging to her cheekbone. It was enough (permission) for her to shuffle down the threadbare velvet, mould herself to Tonks' angles, one arm around her shoulders, the other around her waist (clinging, hipbone-anchor). Tonks shoved her face into the curve of Hermione's neck and shoulder, sharp nose buried in her hair. She trembled (her lips against the bare skin where Hermione's shirt had slipped). "What is it? Tonks?"
"I don't think anybody asked me that before..."
"Shhhh..." She smoothed the tousled hair at the nape of Tonks' neck as she cried, and looked out of the window, London in the rain.