Story Dump
A selection of stand-alone bits of old stories which were on my computer and which I liked but wasn't going to do anything more with.
1. Cho (drabble, though not 100 words)
You don’t fall in love at sixteen, she thinks. You don’t fall in love at sixteen. It’s impossible. It wasn’t love. It was a warm hand and a nice smile and some happy kisses.
It was her first gown and feeling beautiful and a waltz and a kind, handsome, laughing boy’s arms.
It wasn’t love.
It’s tears. It was pain and shock, but now it’s just an ache. Tears and more tears because she can’t stop crying.
She wasn’t in love with him. She loved the times, and she cries for being carefree.
When she remembers, their faces are like the ones in old photographs. Young faces whose flesh will wither. Bright expressions which will turn grim. And one young man who will age no more.
And so she cries again. Even though she didn’t love him.
2. Lily (I suppose this might be a ficlet? 600 odd words, anyway)
Love.
Lily blinked back the tears and leant forward, pressing her elbows into her knees. Her mouth quivered and she pressed her lips together, trying to force back the rising gorge of emotion. She had to be quiet. She didn’t want James to find out yet.
Love. It came with suffering and sacrifice and tears. Lily was only just learning this.
She’d always known her parents loved her. She had always been slightly aware, on some level, that her sister didn’t. It had always been like that, even before the letter which had torn Lily away from her childhood world, and introduced her to Hogwarts, magic and, ultimately, the greatest loves of her life.
Lily had always known she loved her parents. Even as she felt herself separating from the society she’d been a child in, she had felt her love, like an unshakable bridge, linking her fiercely and tenaciously to her mother and father. She knew, just as surely, that she didn’t love Petunia as she ought to. She had tried. She could only feel a detached mixture of affection and exasperation when it came to her sister. Lily hated this ambivalence: she hated not feeling strongly about anything.
Lily often thought that her love for her parents - even now they were gone - was one of the best parts of herself. And her inability to extend the same love to Petunia was one of the worst.
Love.
She clenched her toes against the linoleum of the bathroom floor. She clenched her hands, fisting them tightly in her hair, ignoring the pain from tugging on the roots. She sat, tense and hunched, and listened to the steady thrum of her heart beating, pulsing blood through her body.
Her love for James was like that. It had grown, beat upon beat, pulse upon pulse, so that she’d been in love almost before she’d noticed. She had been powerless against that kind of love. It was everywhere, encompassing, and she rediscovered its existence and its strength every day. That love was like time, Lily thought. It was steady as seconds, and just as surprising. It formed the very fabric of her being.
Love changed you. Lily wouldn’t be the same if she didn’t love her parents, her friends, James. She would have been different had she loved her sister.
Lily pushed away the thought of this more loving, better self. For she had been changed again. It was different from her parents’ always love, and James’s growing love. This was a love that bore straight into her heart and coiled there, rousing emotions Lily had never known she had until they were awakened, fully-formed.
Love was agony.
She remembered the pain of leaving her parents (and was jolted by another kind of love as she remembered Alice stroking her hair as she sobbed for her them as a homesick school girl, and James holding her as she shook with the grief of a bereaved daughter). There was pain in loving James, as well. A curious pain, in knowing that her hope, her happiness, her life was inextricably tied to his, and the cold, gnawing fear that the tie night one day be severed.
She had not chosen to love then.
She did not choose now; the decision was made. A baby amidst all this war? It was too dangerous. It was too cruel. It was irresponsible.
And yet, Lily realised, as she curved her hands over her stomach, she was now responsible for another life. At that, she let herself cry - noisy, rattling sobs of relief and guilt and fear and love.
James would hear her and he would come. Right now she needed her husband.
3. Back for Christmas (originally meant to be the start of something but I only ever liked this bit)
So much for sneaking out.
Harry, Hermione and Ron had been about to tiptoe out of the back door, when Mrs Weasley spoke, making them all wheel round. Harry’s heart flew to his lungs and lodged there.
“So you’re going, then?”
None of them had seen her in the kitchen. Maybe because she’d been sitting so still, or perhaps just because each of them were so used to seeing her in there that she was as much a part of the kitchen as the sink or stove or table. She was sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, wrapped in a dressing gown. It didn’t look as though she’d been to bed.
“Mum! Bloody hell, Ginny swore she wouldn’t tell.” Ron hissed.
“She didn’t.” Mrs Weasley said.
“Then how did you …”
“Don’t think I don’t know my own children, Ron.” Mrs Weasley whispered. She seemed unwilling to break the early-morning silence of the house, yet Harry thought that her whisper sounded just as terrible as the worst of her shouting.
“Mrs Weasley, you don’t understand. We have to go.”
Mrs Weasley got up from the table and moved towards them. “I do understand, Hermione, at least more than you think.” Harry felt her looking him right in the eye. “I know that what you have to do is important,” she said. “I just wish you could have told us.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Weasley.” Harry said, and his voice sounded strangled in his ears.
“It’s all right, dear. I know you have your reasons.” She sounded defeated and tired.
“So you’re letting us go?”
She smiled then, the worn-down smile of a mother who has raised her children. “Yes, Ron, of course I’m letting you go. I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to, could I?”
“No,” Harry said, and he answered for all of them.
“Well then,” and her voice became brisker. “You’ll need to be away soon, but I’ve packed you some food …”
“Mum, we did think to pack our own …”
“I’ve packed you some food,” she repeated, in a slightly louder voice, pulling three bags from a cupboard and thrusting them into their hands, “and I want you to promise that you’ll come home for Christmas.”
“What?” Ron asked, looking at his mother as though she were barmy. “We’re not going to be able to keep to a schedule.”
“I know,” his mother said, placing her hands on her hips, “but you’ll be back here on the 25th December.”
“Yeah, we’ll try,” Harry said, wishing that it were Christmas now, and that he was sitting in the sitting room of The Burrow with all the Weasleys. “We can try.”
She gave each of them a hard look, and nodded. “That’s settled, then. Come here, Ron.” Ron stepped forwards, his face grim. “Now you …” she hugged Ron very tightly, “make sure you …” she did the same to Hermione, “look after yourselves.” Harry let her hug him, and then with a whispered, “goodbye,” followed Ron and Hermione out the door.
Glancing back into the house as he turned to Disapparate, he saw Mrs Weasley sit back down at the table and place her head in her hands. He looked up and saw a flash of red at a window, and knew that it was Ginny.
“Come on, Harry!”
The Burrow disappeared from sight, and he vowed he’d make it back for Christmas if ever he could.
4. Nymphadora Anne Tonks (again, the beginning might not be bad but whatever tried to follow certainly was. This could sort of work on its own, as how Tonks joins the order, although I'm meant to be working on a different version. This is longish - 7000 words.)
Her full name was Nymphadora Anne Tonks, although she never used it and grimaced when she had to fill it in on official forms and documents. Her father, Ted, had wanted to name her Anne for his grandmother, and her mother, Andromeda, had wanted to call her Nymphadora for reasons known only to herself. Apparently they’d tossed a Sickle to decide which name came first, and Mum had won. Nymphadora Anne Tonks thought that this might have been because her mother had been a Slytherin at school and would have cheated, whereas her father had been a Hufflepuff and wouldn’t have. She had the Sickle framed on the wall of her bedroom at her parents’ house. She’d frequently tried to curse it as a child. At school she had cursed her fellow students until they’d taken her requests to be called only by her last name seriously. Of her names, she felt it was the one that suited her most. The word Tonks had a quirky sort of graceless charm, and she felt that this was the best she could aspire to.
Her name was Nymphadora Anne Tonks, and when she was twenty two years old, her world changed.
It was a warm summer’s day and she’d been having lunch with her parents. She’d just passed her final exams in Auror training, and had celebrated the fact that she was now Auror Nymphadora Anne Tonks by moving out of Mum and Dad’s house and into her very own flat. She felt, however, that it would be unfair to deprive her parents of her company and herself of her mother’s cooking for too long. Thankfully, the world changed after lunch: Tonks was lounging at the kitchen table, feeling pleasantly full, eying the piled-up plates, dirty cutlery and leftovers, and wondering idly if she ought to offer to clear them, when the doorbell rang.
Tonks was out of her chair and had drawn her wand before she even realised it.
“I wish you’d move that fast when it’s time to do the dishes,” Dad said with a chuckle as he got up to answer the door.
Tonks sat back down in her chair and folded her arms. “Bloody Alastor Moody,” she said. “He got me all worked up in Speed and Vigilance and I still haven’t recovered. No wonder they had to make him retire.”
“Yes, dear,” her mother said vaguely. Tonks realised that Mum had stopped listening. She looked up. Dad had let whoever had rung the bell in, and was standing beside the man, looking nervous.
The man was, as far as Tonks knew, a stranger, but there was something familiar about him that made her think that he was an old friend whom she had forgotten. She knew this couldn’t be the case. She didn’t have any old friends like him. The man was tall and very thin; his fine hair brown and flecked with grey. Though he was quite a young man his face was slightly lined and very pale, but there was something about it - something about his eyes, perhaps, that made her like it. His robes were shabby and, Tonks noticed with a professional eye - she was trained to pick up identifying marks - there was a red welt disappearing down the neck of his robes.
Mum stood up and placed her hands flat upon the table, leaning forwards, but she did not speak and neither did Dad. They all sort of stared at each other for a moment.
“I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you,” the stranger said in a hoarse voice.
“We’d finished eating,” Tonks said, as neither of her parents was talking.
He looked at her and smiled slightly. “I don’t suppose you know who I am, Nymphadora,” he said, “but we met when you were a child. I’m Remus Lupin.” He said his name as though he were apologising for it, and Tonks immediately knew why. Remus Lupin had been a friend of her cousin, Sirius. And Sirius, whom she vaguely remembered pulling her hair, Transfiguring his nose to match her morphing, and giving her a large box of sweets for her birthday, was a mass murderer who had escaped from Azkaban almost a year ago to the day.
She had barely known her cousin, really. There had been a war on, and Mum and Dad had been trying to keep as safe as possible. Her father was Muggle-born, her mother the disowned sister of one of You Know Who’s greatest supporters. Sirius and his friends had been well-known opposers of You Know Who (at least, Sirius had been until he even more publicly murdered thirteen people in broad daylight) and it would have put her family in greater danger to have had close ties with him. All this Tonks knew from her own research, guesses and from scant conversations on the subject with her parents. The subject of Sirius himself had been banned in the house for thirteen years.
And now the only one of his former best friends he hadn’t killed was in their kitchen. She made herself smile back at Remus Lupin.
“It’s Tonks,” she said.
This seemed to bring her mother back to life. She sighed loudly. “Nymphadora refuses to use the perfectly lovely name we gave her,” she said to Remus. Next to him, Dad unfroze too and grinned.
“She doesn’t much like Nymphadora, either,” he said.
“Ted!” Mum said, trying to look stern, but the family teasing about Tonks’s name was too familiar for her to really mind. Even Remus Lupin seemed to sense this and he smiled as well.
“I hope you are all well,” he said.
“Very well,” said Dad.
“Yes, and how are you, Remus?” Mum lowered her voice. “I heard - about Hogwarts - last term.”
In a flash, Tonks remembered the other reason why she should have known Remus Lupin’s name: he had witnessed Sirius Black’s capture and escape from Hogwarts only a few weeks ago. She was conscientiously kept off Sirius Black’s case because of the family connection, which meant that while everybody else in the Auror Department was out tracking him, she was stuck in the office the filing reports on petty theft and lost Crups which had been shunted over from Magical Law Enforcement. Still, she had picked up the rumours, and had heard Dawlish muttering something about ‘the testimony of the werewolf, Lupin,’ before going quiet when he’d seen her. So this man was a werewolf, then. Her stomach clenched slightly, but she pushed the feeling away. She knew what it was to change one’s form, and she had had to work hard for the control she now had over her morphing. She had always felt that werewolves were unfairly treated, and she hoped that what she felt about werewolves in general and what she felt about a werewolf standing in her mum and dad’s kitchen were the same thing.
“I am well, thank you,” Remus Lupin was saying. “Out of work again, I’m afraid, but I was foolish to think that I would ever be able to teach at Hogwarts, and of course that was out of the question once I forgot to take the Wolfsbane potion.”
Dad frowned. “That’s not like you, Remus.” Tonks registered that this sounded like Mum and Dad had known Remus Lupin quite well at some point. “What possessed you to miss the potion?”
A flicker of an emotion Tonks couldn’t identify passed across Remus Lupin’s face. “The reappearance of an old school friend.” His voice was hard. But then he mastered himself. Tonks could practically see him pushing back the emotion, and when he spoke again it was in a calm, precise manner.
It did not make the words he said any better.
“Andromeda, I want to talk to you about Sirius Black.”
Tonks looked to her mother, and wanted to hex this Remus Lupin for coming into their house and doing it to her. For her mother’s face had gone very white, and her lips were pursed tightly together.
“You will not speak to me about him,” Mum said. There was a small quaver in her voice.
Lupin took a step forward. “Andromeda, you must listen.”
Tonks moved in front of her mother, and Dad moved in front of her. It was a practised move. Tonks knew she and Dad got the same urge: to protect Mum from her past.
“I think you’d better go, Remus,” Dad said.
Remus Lupin did not look surprised. “I know that this is hard, Andromeda. But you would want to hear the truth about Sirius.”
Mum let out a hissing noise like an angry cat.
“Get out,” Dad said.
Lupin didn’t flinch. He carried on, looking calmly apologetic. “Sirius is innocent,” he said. “He did not perform the curse that killed those people, and he was never a Death Eater. He was framed by Peter Pettigrew. Do you remember him? He was our friend at school.”
Lupin’s voice cracked over the word ‘friend’, and Tonks got the overwhelming urge to try and offer the man some comfort. She stepped from behind her father, her hand outstretched. Her mother pulled her back.
“Don’t tell me this, Remus. It’s not true. You can’t tell me this!” Mum’s voice took on a wild screech, her hand grasping the back of Tonks’s robes tightly.
“It is true, Andromeda. Peter Pettigrew killed twelve Muggles and faked his own death.”
“All they found was a finger,” Tonks said, without meaning to.
Lupin caught her eyes. “That’s right,” he said. “He’s an Animagus. He cut off his finger and transformed.”
“Impossible,” Dad said, although he didn’t sound completely sure.
“Impossible,” Mum repeated, and she did sound sure. Tonks knew that she had spent years schooling herself to be sure that Cousin Sirius had done all the dreadful things that he had been put into Azkaban for. “Go to your room, Nymphadora.”
Tonks spun round, the sympathy she’d been feeling for her mother dissipating in a wash of anger. “Go to my room? I’m not a child! I don’t even live here.”
“Go to your room,” Mum said through gritted teeth.
She was using the tone of voice which Tonks knew meant that her mother was not going to be argued with. She turned her hair into the most violent shade of purple she could muster, and stalked out of the room. Even from her bedroom, where she sat fuming over being treated like a child (and panicking slightly that she had acted like one in front of Lupin), she could hear her mother’s raised voice, her dad’s angry one, and Lupin’s calm tone.
When the door shut, and her mother’s sobs reverberated through the house, she Apparated into an alleyway at the end of the street.
In the alley, she morphed into a light-haired middle-aged woman so that her parents wouldn’t spot her if they watched Lupin going up the road, and stepped out, just as he was walking past.
“Mr Lupin.” He stopped, his hand in his pocket, looking confused for a split second. Then his expression cleared.
“Hello, Miss Tonks.”
“We shouldn’t stop - in case my parents are watching,” she said. She walked off at a brisk pace and didn’t look back at him. He followed her to a small car park at the back of the local shop. There were a couple of cars parked there, but there was nobody about. Nevertheless she went to the very corner of the car park and stood between the wall and a bashed-up Volvo. Lupin came and stood beside her looking politely interested.
Why did you come here?” she asked him.
“I wanted your mother to know the truth about Sirius,” he said. “They were fond of each other as children.”
She rolled her eyes. “They were fond of each other as children, maybe, but she’s spent the last thirteen years trying to pretend that she never knew Sirius Black. It was awful for her, finding out what he’d done. She thought he was the only decent one in her family.”
Remus Lupin clenched his fists, although they remained by his side. When he spoke, he sounded tired. “Sirius is decent. He is an innocent man.”
“He was convicted of murdering - ”
“I know. Until June I believed it myself. But I saw him and I saw Peter. I knew which one of them was telling the truth. A terrible thing has been done to Sirius Black. My word carries very little weight with most people. I came here to try to convince your mother as she is one of the very few people I have a chance of convincing.”
There was something very impressive about the way he said this. Tonks felt a rising admiration for the man and tried to ignore it.
“You can’t want Mum to start trying to convince people. Not after all the time she’s forced herself into believing he did it.”
Remus Lupin shook his head. “No, I don’t expect that. I didn’t really expect your parents to believe me. Why should they? There are only five people who believe that Sirius is innocent. I merely thought that your mother’s knowing the truth would mean a lot to Sirius.”
Tonks knew that she should be asking whether he knew where Sirius was or, better still, arresting Lupin on the spot and taking him to Auror Headquarters where he would be forced to tell. Instead she said, “who are the five people?” Remus Lupin raised his eyebrows, and she had to morph her face a little to hide her blush. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Not at all,” he said. “The five are Harry Potter, who is Sirius’s godson, incidentally, Harry’s friends, Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger, myself and Albus Dumbledore.”
Tonks’s jaw dropped. “Professor Dumbledore believes you?” She supposed she shouldn’t feel surprised. It was well known that Dumbledore was mad.
“Will you come with me for a moment?” Lupin asked.
Tonks gaped at him. “Where?”
“Just somewhere I am sure we can’t be overheard,” Lupin said. “I can Apparate you there.”
It was probably a bad idea to go anywhere with a werewolf who was telling people that Sirius Black was innocent. Tonks could imagine what Mad Eye Moody’s reaction would be. But she felt ashamed that she’d used his being a werewolf as a reason not to trust him, even in her own mind, and she nodded. She did trust him.
He grabbed her arms and, with a swift feeling of pressure and a CRACK!, he Apparated them into a dark and dusty room. She barely had time to look around, though, because Remus Lupin hunched slightly and looked her in the eye. She relaxed into her usual face: it was a courtesy, she felt, to not hide behind a morph while he was talking to her in private.
“It was believed that Sirius was the Potters’ secret keeper when they went into hiding,” he said, very fast. “I believed it myself. But Sirius used himself as a decoy. The real secret keeper was Peter Pettigrew. Sirius and James didn’t think that anyone would think to go after Peter, but it turned out that Peter had been a Death Eater for over a year before that, and he betrayed James and Lily. After the attack, Sirius hunted Peter down. Peter accused Sirius of murdering the Potters, sliced off his finger, Cursed the Muggle witnesses and transformed into a rat - his Animagus form. He attached himself to the Weasley family, and Harry’s friend Ron kept him as a pet. The Weasley family got into the papers, and Sirius saw the photo of Peter whilst in Azkaban. The article said that the children went to Hogwarts. Sirius realised that Peter was at Hogwarts - ready to kill Harry at any sign of his master’s return. He escaped. He finally cornered Peter here, in this house. Harry and his friends were with him, and I followed them here. We forced Peter to reveal himself, but when we were bringing Peter back to the castle, I transformed, having forgotten my final dose of Wolfsbane potion. Sirius got me away from the children, and Peter escaped. That is what happened. That’s the truth.”
Tonks stared at him, feeling numb. Or, possibly, feeling so many things that her body had given up. “That’s one hell of a story,” she said at last.
Remus Lupin smiled. “Yes, it is.”
“Let me get this straight. Sirius is innocent. Instead, a long-dead school friend of his turns out to have been hiding out as a rat which just happens to belong to Harry Potter’s best friend. The rat just happens to get himself into a paper which Black just happens to see and … wait a minute, the family was the Weasleys you say?”
“Yes.”
“They were in the paper because Mr Weasley won the lottery last summer. The whole family went to Egypt. I know Charlie - I was at school with him. And his brother Percy used to have a rat. A fat grey thing called Scabby or Scrubbers or something.”
“Scabbers.”
“That’s the one.”
“That was Peter.”
Tonks looked at him, hard. He didn’t look away. “You couldn’t make it up, could you?” she said.
“I lack sufficient imagination,” Lupin said, with the hint of a smile.
Tonks swore. “I don’t, and I couldn’t have made all that up. And that’s what you were trying to tell Mum? She’d never believe that.”
Lupin rubbed his temple. “It was always a slim chance.”
Tonks let out a long breath. “I think I might, though.”
She wasn’t quite sure why she was so compelled to believe him. Part of it was because the story was so deliciously outlandish that it would be a shame for it not to be true. Another part was because of all the times she had seen that look - that special Sirius Black look - on her mother’s face. Part of it was because she couldn’t help believing the sincerity in Remus Lupin’s face: and she was good at reading people after all the Auror training. But she also wanted to be able to remember the laughing young man who had transfigured his nose without feeling guilty and ashamed that she had thought he was wonderful.
The next day, Kingsley Shacklebolt hauled her into his cubicle.
“Your parents had a visitor yesterday, Tonks,” he said without preamble.
Tonks felt a moment of surprise before realising that of course the Auror team on Sirius Black’s case would be tracking Remus Lupin’s movements in case he led them to him. She stared at a picture of Sirius with a girl whom she recognised as her mother in her early teens.
“Yes, Lupin came round. He wanted to talk to Mum about Black, but she chucked him out.”
Kingsley sat down at his desk and pulled out a quill and some parchment.
“What was he saying?” he asked, setting the quill to fill out the form.
“That Black was innocent. He didn’t get much further than that,” Tonks said. “Mum doesn’t like hearing about her cousin.” She wondered if Kingsley would tell her anything She looked away from Kingsley and watched the quill, which was writing out what she had said. “Lupin said something about Peter Pettigrew framing Black,” she added hopefully.
Kingsley narrowed his eyes. “That’s what Lupin’s story was when we spoke to him after Black’s escape,” he said.
“Why haven’t you arrested him?” Tonks asked. “If he helped Black escape.”
“He didn’t,” Kingsley said shortly. “We have Dumbledore’s testimony that Lupin had no contact with Black while he was at Hogwarts and was in fact trying to save the children’s lives that evening: and we’ve had a trace on Lupin since Black escaped, so we’ve checked that’s true. The only way in which Lupin aided Black’s escape was by not calling for back up immediately; and Snape captured Black after that, by which time Lupin was in no state to help anybody.”
Tonks thought this might have been the most she’d heard Kingsley Shacklebolt say: he was in charge of the hunt for Sirius Black and so she’d had very little to do with him during her training.
“Could Black be using the Imperius Curse on Lupin to get him to say he’s innocent?” As she asked the question, Tonks thought of the intensity in Remus Lupin’s eyes. She knew that people under the Imperius Curse could be very convincing, but somehow she couldn’t believe that Lupin’s certainty hadn’t been genuine.
Kingsley shrugged. “We’ve considered it as a possibility,” he said. “But I think it’s unlikely. Lupin’s powerful enough to fight against the curse, and he’s telling his story far too willingly. Besides, why would Black tell such an unbelievable story? And to a werewolf whom no one is going to believe?”
Tonks felt a stab of anger. “I don’t see what his being a werewolf has to do with his honesty,” she said.
Kingsley looked as though he were about to smile, but he didn’t. Instead he got up and directed the filled-out parchment into a corner of the cubicle, towards a stack of files. Tonks couldn’t see which one it went into, because Kingsley was blocking her view. But then he moved to the left, just enough so that Tonks could see perfectly, pointed his wand at the pile of folders, and said a complicated Sealing Spell in his clear, deep voice.
“That will be all, Miss Tonks,” he said, giving her a fleeting look before pulling out a new batch of parchments and leaning over them.
Tonks barely noticed that she fell over the dustbin on her way out. She was deep in thought. That night, she crept into the office in the guise of a cleaning witch. Abandoning her trolley of magimops and Mrs Skower’s Magical Mess Remover, she snuck into Kingsley’s cubicle. She muttered the counter-spell to the Sealing Spell Kingsley had locked his files with. It had been very lax of him to allow her to overhear the exact spell he used. Far too lax. Kingsley was an accomplished Auror.
She pulled out the reports and read some of Kingsley’s research, including interviews with Remus Lupin and Albus Dumbldore both before and after Sirius’s escape. She even found an interview with her mother, conducted a few days after Sirius’s arrest:
It must have been a mistake. Sirius couldn’t - he wouldn’t. I know he’s related to Bellatrix - and it’s pretty obvious she’s been involved for years - but he was disowned from the family when he was sixteen. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone. He loved James Potter like a brother. He couldn’t. It’s a mistake. He just couldn’t.
They’d questioned her again when he’d escaped. Tonks frowned. She’d never been told that. This time she recognised her mother’s carefully schooled hatred of Sirius:
We were as deceived by him as anybody. He hasn’t been anywhere near me or my family, but if he did come to us I would be ecstatic to turn the murdering traitor in.
Most chilling, though, was what Tonks read from Sirius himself.
Killed them? Oh Merlin, yes I killed them. It’s all my fault. I persuaded them to swap and now … James! He can’t be dead. You’re lying to me. James and Lily and oh it’s my fault. I’m going to kill Peter. Let me get him, the lying rat. He betrayed James and Lily oh shit how could I have I let them die, so stupid I thought it was Remus and they’re not dead are they, how can they be dead? James, James, James and Lily, they can’t be dead oh help me they’re dead what have I done, Peter you monster how could you have killed them …
She ran out of the cubicle and retched into the cleaning bucket.
The next morning she sent an owl to Remus Lupin. She was sure that Kingsley’s team would be intercepting his letters, and she frowned hard over how to word what she had to say. She’d been taught about encoding letters in Codes and Communication, but nothing sounded quite right. Even a letter which didn’t mean anything to the Aurors reading it would raise their suspicions if it obviously was a code.
Dear Professor Lupin,
She wrote at last. I am sad you won’t come back to teach us any more. I have been doing some extra work this holiday because your lessons interested me so much. You made a mistake, though, when you told us about the five ways to catch Kappas. There are actually six.
I believe you are the best teacher we’ve had.
She looked at her handiwork. It would have to do. But who to sign it from? She needed someone inconspicuous whose family weren’t connected to any of the Aurors who might read the letter. She went to have lunch with her friend Sandra, who worked in the Improper Use of Magic Office, and steered the conversation to the accidental magic that the office sometimes had to put straight.
Sandra ginned. “We get some really funny ones. Especially the ones the Muggle-borns do. They’re always more of a headache - we have to bring in the Obliviators and everything and that means more paperwork - but I wouldn’t have missed seeing Marjorie Dursley for the world. Actually, that was Harry Potter. She’s his aunt, and he blew her up.”
“I remember that,” Tonks said. “He ran away and I spent half the night trying to find him before Sirius Black did. So, did anyone top inflating their auntie?”
“Colin Creevey might have,” Sandra said. “His dad’s a milkman, and Colin went with him on his rounds every Saturday to help out. Apparently, Colin and his dad had an argument in the milkfloat.”
“Did he turn the milk sour?” Tonks asked.
Sandra took a bite of her sandwich and chewed slowly. “Into cheese,” she said. “There was bottled cheese on every doorstep for a mile.”
Tonks laughed, and remembered the name Colin Creevey. Then she sent off the letter.
She received the reply a few days later.
“Dear Mr Creevey", Remus Lupin’s writing was neat and small, but with loops on some of the letters which reminded Tonks a little of Dumbledore’s spindly writing.
I am glad that my lessons interested you and that you have pursued your own research because of them. Thank you for telling me about the Kappas: I shall definitely ask your advice if I ever wish to catch one.
With best wishes,
Remus Lupin
Tonks understood from the note that she was to wait for Lupin to get in touch with her if he needed her. She heard nothing until the following June, almost a year after she’d become qualified as an Auror, when the stories came that a boy had been killed at Hogwarts - and that Harry Potter was claiming that he’d been killed by You Know Who, who had returned to a body. She found it hard to believe the ministry line that Harry Potter was an attention-seeking nutcase who wanted to turn Cedric Diggory’s death into a publicity stunt. The Auror department was buzzing with it all, and they’d been told to uphold the ministry stance at all times. Some, like Dawlish, were doing this a bit too zealously and Tonks felt that she was going to lose her temper and hex him if she didn’t do something soon. She didn’t want to believe that You Know Who was back … but she couldn’t believe that Harry Potter had made the whole thing up. Not if Dumbledore believed him. And Dumbledore had also believed the story about Sirius … she decided to write to Remus Lupin.
As it happened, she didn’t need to. That evening she found him on her doorstep.
“Mad Eye gave me your address,” he said at once. He looked even skinnier than when she’d seen him last, and although he wasn’t as pale, he looked tired. Still, he smiled at her pleasantly enough. “I’m sorry to drop in unannounced.”
“Wotcher,” Tonks said cheerfully. “I was about to write to you anyway, so you’ve saved me a postage owl.”
Remus Lupin blinked at her. “I’m pleased to hear it,” he said. “May I come in?”
Tonks let him in, regretting that she hadn’t tidied up recently … there were a few mugs scattered around the sitting room and piles of papers teetering on the sofa. She waved her wand hopefully, and two of the piles straightened themselves neatly. The third fell over and scattered all over the floor.
“Bother,” she said. “I s’pose two out of three isn’t bad.” She knelt to gather up the stray papers.
“It’s an Exceeds Expectations,” Remus said. Then he looked rather embarrassed. “At OWL level, anyway. Sorry. I still don’t always remember I’m not a teacher.”
“You could be a teacher somewhere else, couldn’t you?” Tonks said.
Remus shrugged. “Only in Muggle schools, and with a great deal of forgery, but that isn’t why I came here. I wanted to ask about, er …”
“About Colin Creevey?” Tonks asked, chucking the armful of papers back on the sofa and pulling up a chair for Remus.
“Ah, yes. Thank you for that communication.”
“No problem,” Tonks said. “Yeah. I’ve kept tabs on it as much as I could, although I’m not allowed near the case. I even looked over some of Kingsley’s notes. Not completely officially.”
“And what did you think?”
“I think that it’s odd you left it a year to carry on this conversation.”
Remus Lupin nodded at her. “All right, Sirius isn’t directly why I came, although he’s part of it as well. I wanted to talk about Lord Voldemort.”
Tonks jumped at the name. She hadn’t heard it spoken before, and it gave her a shock. She looked at Lupin in admiration for being able to say You Know Who’s name in such a calm way. “You want to ask if I believe Harry Potter’s story about Cedric Diggory’s death, do you?”
“Do I need to?”
Tonks felt uncomfortable. Was he just assuming that she believed Harry, a boy she had never even met? But Dumbledore believed him, and Remus Lupin obviously did. Did she?
Lupin fingered the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re the first new person I’ve talked to. I didn’t think that you might not believe Harry’s version of events.”
“I don’t disbelieve him,” Tonks said. “I know the ministry’s telling lies, but the only account I’ve had of Harry’s version was pretty garbled.”
So Remus Lupin told her a second outlandish tale, and Tonks found herself believing it even more readily than she had Sirius’s.
Lupin gave the ghost of a smile. “I seem to be making a habit of asking you to believe unbelievable things.”
“Unbelievable things which I end up believing,” she said.
He smiled at her properly. It made his face look a lot younger, and Tonks suddenly felt rather warm. She fidgeted and changed her hair red.
“I don’t know what you know about the last war,” he said, “but last time Voldemort was powerful, Dumbledore founded an order of witches and wizards dedicated to fighting him.”
Tonks tried not to flinch at the name this time. “What if I want to join this order?” she asked.
“Then we need to see Dumbledore. We’re still regrouping, and trying to set up headquarters.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She nodded, feeling foolish. “Of course you can’t. Sorry. I got ahead of myself. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, no. I really can’t tell you. It’s protected by the Fidelius Charm.”
She felt even more foolish. “Oh. I. I mean … bother. I just want to help get rid of You Know Who, all right? And I don’t think that the ministry’s going to be doing it any time soon.”
Remus smiled, and Tonks felt better. “You’re right. I don’t believe the ministry is going to be making open-minded decisions at the moment.”
Tonks grinned at him. “When can I see Dumbledore?”
*
She hadn’t been on the Hogwarts grounds since she’d left four years ago, and it made her feel like a little girl.
“I can’t believe it’s four years since I was celebrating the end of NEWTs,” she said to Lupin, as they walked past the tree she’d passed out under after celebrating the end of her exams a little too hard.
Lupin sighed. “It was very strange coming back here to teach. It was hard to get used to being a member of staff rather than a student. I thought Minerva McGonagall was going to take points from Gryffindor every time I called her Minerva in the first week.”
Tonks grinned. “I don’t think you ever forget being a student at Hogwarts.”
“No,” Lupin said, and once more his face took on that very youthful expression which made Tonks feel rather confused and aware of her feet. Or unaware, as it turned out, as she took that opportunity to fall over them.
She felt even more like a naughty schoolgirl when they reached Dumbledore’s office (which she had visited in that capacity on a couple of occasions). Her former headmaster peered at her over his half-moon glasses.
“Miss, ahem, Auror Tonks, I must ask you to consider the fact that if you enter the Order of the Phoenix, and in particular enter our headquarters, then you would be required to conceal certain facts from your employers at the ministry.”
“Like a spy?” Tonks asked.
Dumbledore coughed. “I won’t deny it would be useful to have as many people from within the ministry as possible working with us,” he said, “but what I meant was, you will be asked to react differently to certain persons as a member of the Order of the Phoenix than you would do in your capacity as an Auror.”
“In other words, you’re not allowed to arrest Sirius,” Remus Lupin said with a faint smile.
“I think I’d just got that, thanks,” Tonks said weakly. Sirius would be there. Sirius was not a murderer and a Death Eater; he was a member of the Order of the Phoenix. And if she joined - which she had to, now, she realised, they’d told her so much - then she would meet her cousin for the first time in more than thirteen years.
“I’m in,” Tonks said. She added the word ‘trouble’ only in her head. Her mother would kill her if she ever found out about this.
She was inducted there and then. Dumbledore asked her to swear only that she was prepared to fight against Voldemort, but he got her to place her magical mark upon a phoenix feather, and registered her Patronus. Then he looked squarely at her and said, “The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.”
The location rang a bell.
“Well, I have an appointment to be voted out of the Wizengamot,” Dumbledore said happily, “but I daresay Remus will be available to escort you to Headquarters should you wish to go immediately.”
Head swimming, Tonks nodded. She and Remus Lupin walked through the deserted school together and across the grounds.
“It feels as though it’s all happening very quickly,” Tonks said.
Remus looked concerned. “You do not have to go to headquarters if you wish, Nymphadora.”
She groaned. “Tonks, please. And I want to go. I like things to happen fast.”
“Then you will be disappointed with the Order itself, I am afraid. I doubt we shall persuade the ministry very soon.”
Tonks felt as though she’d said something childish, but shrugged it off. “Oh well. It’s better than doing nothing.” They walked in silence for a minute, then she said, “er, Mr Lupin?”
He turned to her with a startled laugh. “For goodness sake, call me Remus.”
“What’s Sirius Black like? Will he be upset to see me because of Mum?”
Remus stopped walking and took a long breath. “Sirius will be very pleased to see you,” he said at last. “He was fond of your mother and of you.”
Tonks thought of the laughing young man in her memory.
“But Sirius has been … hurt by the last thirteen years,” Remus said carefully. “He is not mad, as most prisoners who have spent a prolonged amount of time in Azkaban are, but the experience has affected him.”
“How did he stay sane?” Tonks asked. The image of the laughing man had changed to one of a man sitting in a cell, in the same cell, for twelve years, with the dementors on the other side of the bars.
“Because he was innocent,” Remus Lupin said simply.
Number twelve, Grimmauld Place was not immediately visible, but its location was not prepossessing. It was a scrubby square fronted by houses which had fallen into disrepair. Tonks looked at number eleven, and then at number thirteen. She remembered Dumbledore’s words. The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.
A house appeared, shouldering its way between numbers eleven and thirteen. It looked no more assuming than its neighbours, and had it not just appeared out of thin air Tonks would never have guessed there was something different about it. That is, of course, until they went up to it.
“Do we knock?” Tonks asked, looking at the silver snake knocker.
“No,” Remus said. He tapped the door with his wand and Tonks heard the clicks of many locks and bolts being drawn back. He opened the door for her. “It’s best to be quiet in the hallway,” he said. “And watch out for the…”
CRASH!
Tonks found herself flat on her face. Screaming was echoing in her ears. She felt a hand at her elbow.
“Here.” Remus had to shout over the screams. She took his hand and let him help her up.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was that?” She peered, trying to see properly in the dim light of the hall. She had tripped over something that looked like a troll’s foot. It had been holding umbrellas: they were scattered over the floor.
Someone was still screaming in an awful, high-pitched voice which sounded familiar. Her mother’s voice sounded like that when she was at her most upset, although Mum never used the kind of language that this woman did. She turned to Remus. He was fighting with a pair of curtains. She lunged forward to help him.
“Thanks,” he grunted. “Can you try and pull … this one … over … her.”
Tonks caught a glimpse of a very ugly old woman in a portrait before the curtains finally met and the portrait silenced.
“Phew,” said Tonks. “This is an … unusual place.” She bent and tried to pick up one of the umbrellas that had fallen from the stand. It had a raven’s head on the handle which tried to bite her. She withdrew her hand. Remus waved his wand and the umbrellas flew back into place.
“That you, Moony?” came a gruff voice. “What did you wake the hag up for?”
Tonks went very still, her heart hammering. That must be …
A door opened at the end of the hall, and a shaggy-haired figure appeared. In the half-light of the house, Tonks looked at her cousin.
“Wotcher, Sirius,” she whispered.
“Let’s go into the kitchen to make the introductions,” Remus said in a firm voice. Tonks followed him towards the door where Sirius still stood.
“Who?”
“Kitchen,” Remus said again. “Your mother’s in fine voice today and I have no desire to hear it again.”
“Your mother?” Tonks said. “That’s Aunt Walburga?”
“Moony, who is this?” Sirius asked in a hard voice. Tonks opened her mouth to tell him, but Remus pushed both of them down the stairs into another dimly lit room. Remus waved his wand and torches on the walls flared brightly. By the new light, Tonks could see that it was a large kitchen, although only a small portion of it looked usable. She looked at Sirius.
Her cousin’s face was a little fuller than in the wanted posters, but not much. His hair was long, although no longer matted. He did not look like the man in her memories of her cousin. She could tell that he had once been very handsome, and even now he managed an air of tortured elegance.
Tortured elegance? She’d been reading too many romance novels.
She realised she’d been staring, but even after she’d looked away, Sirius Black continued to gawp at her.
“Sirius, this is Nymphadora T-”
“Tonks,” Tonks said firmly.
But a light had come into Sirius Black’s eyes. “You’re Andromeda’s Nymphadora?”
“Yes, but it’s Tonks. I don’t go by Nymphadora.”
Sirius Black grinned. “I’m not surprised. I remember being outraged that she’d gone and called you Nymphadora. I thought she was the sane one in the family.”
“We still bully her about it,” said Tonks. She couldn’t quite believe that she was having the conversation about her name with Sirius Black.
“Quite right,” Sirius said. “Remus, this is my cousin. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that this is little Nymphadora.” He frowned. “I saw you when you weren’t two months old. Andromeda brought you to see us in Hogsmeade.” He turned to Remus. “D’you remember?”
Remus nodded. “Yes. It’s making me feel very old.”
“Oh shut up, Moony.”
Tonks registered what it was that Sirius had been calling Remus. Moony. Because he was a werewolf (unless he had a penchant for flashing people, which she doubted somehow). How cruel, she thought. Reminding him of it every time Sirius talked to him. But then she saw the easy expression on Remus’s face. How kind, she realised. How incredibly kind. The name diminished it. It was affectionate, lighthearted, friendly. It showed that he accepted his condition to the extent that he could make fun of it.
Tonks thought that she could love her cousin.
The thought that she could love Remus Lupin came several weeks later.
1. Cho (drabble, though not 100 words)
You don’t fall in love at sixteen, she thinks. You don’t fall in love at sixteen. It’s impossible. It wasn’t love. It was a warm hand and a nice smile and some happy kisses.
It was her first gown and feeling beautiful and a waltz and a kind, handsome, laughing boy’s arms.
It wasn’t love.
It’s tears. It was pain and shock, but now it’s just an ache. Tears and more tears because she can’t stop crying.
She wasn’t in love with him. She loved the times, and she cries for being carefree.
When she remembers, their faces are like the ones in old photographs. Young faces whose flesh will wither. Bright expressions which will turn grim. And one young man who will age no more.
And so she cries again. Even though she didn’t love him.
2. Lily (I suppose this might be a ficlet? 600 odd words, anyway)
Love.
Lily blinked back the tears and leant forward, pressing her elbows into her knees. Her mouth quivered and she pressed her lips together, trying to force back the rising gorge of emotion. She had to be quiet. She didn’t want James to find out yet.
Love. It came with suffering and sacrifice and tears. Lily was only just learning this.
She’d always known her parents loved her. She had always been slightly aware, on some level, that her sister didn’t. It had always been like that, even before the letter which had torn Lily away from her childhood world, and introduced her to Hogwarts, magic and, ultimately, the greatest loves of her life.
Lily had always known she loved her parents. Even as she felt herself separating from the society she’d been a child in, she had felt her love, like an unshakable bridge, linking her fiercely and tenaciously to her mother and father. She knew, just as surely, that she didn’t love Petunia as she ought to. She had tried. She could only feel a detached mixture of affection and exasperation when it came to her sister. Lily hated this ambivalence: she hated not feeling strongly about anything.
Lily often thought that her love for her parents - even now they were gone - was one of the best parts of herself. And her inability to extend the same love to Petunia was one of the worst.
Love.
She clenched her toes against the linoleum of the bathroom floor. She clenched her hands, fisting them tightly in her hair, ignoring the pain from tugging on the roots. She sat, tense and hunched, and listened to the steady thrum of her heart beating, pulsing blood through her body.
Her love for James was like that. It had grown, beat upon beat, pulse upon pulse, so that she’d been in love almost before she’d noticed. She had been powerless against that kind of love. It was everywhere, encompassing, and she rediscovered its existence and its strength every day. That love was like time, Lily thought. It was steady as seconds, and just as surprising. It formed the very fabric of her being.
Love changed you. Lily wouldn’t be the same if she didn’t love her parents, her friends, James. She would have been different had she loved her sister.
Lily pushed away the thought of this more loving, better self. For she had been changed again. It was different from her parents’ always love, and James’s growing love. This was a love that bore straight into her heart and coiled there, rousing emotions Lily had never known she had until they were awakened, fully-formed.
Love was agony.
She remembered the pain of leaving her parents (and was jolted by another kind of love as she remembered Alice stroking her hair as she sobbed for her them as a homesick school girl, and James holding her as she shook with the grief of a bereaved daughter). There was pain in loving James, as well. A curious pain, in knowing that her hope, her happiness, her life was inextricably tied to his, and the cold, gnawing fear that the tie night one day be severed.
She had not chosen to love then.
She did not choose now; the decision was made. A baby amidst all this war? It was too dangerous. It was too cruel. It was irresponsible.
And yet, Lily realised, as she curved her hands over her stomach, she was now responsible for another life. At that, she let herself cry - noisy, rattling sobs of relief and guilt and fear and love.
James would hear her and he would come. Right now she needed her husband.
3. Back for Christmas (originally meant to be the start of something but I only ever liked this bit)
So much for sneaking out.
Harry, Hermione and Ron had been about to tiptoe out of the back door, when Mrs Weasley spoke, making them all wheel round. Harry’s heart flew to his lungs and lodged there.
“So you’re going, then?”
None of them had seen her in the kitchen. Maybe because she’d been sitting so still, or perhaps just because each of them were so used to seeing her in there that she was as much a part of the kitchen as the sink or stove or table. She was sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, wrapped in a dressing gown. It didn’t look as though she’d been to bed.
“Mum! Bloody hell, Ginny swore she wouldn’t tell.” Ron hissed.
“She didn’t.” Mrs Weasley said.
“Then how did you …”
“Don’t think I don’t know my own children, Ron.” Mrs Weasley whispered. She seemed unwilling to break the early-morning silence of the house, yet Harry thought that her whisper sounded just as terrible as the worst of her shouting.
“Mrs Weasley, you don’t understand. We have to go.”
Mrs Weasley got up from the table and moved towards them. “I do understand, Hermione, at least more than you think.” Harry felt her looking him right in the eye. “I know that what you have to do is important,” she said. “I just wish you could have told us.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Weasley.” Harry said, and his voice sounded strangled in his ears.
“It’s all right, dear. I know you have your reasons.” She sounded defeated and tired.
“So you’re letting us go?”
She smiled then, the worn-down smile of a mother who has raised her children. “Yes, Ron, of course I’m letting you go. I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to, could I?”
“No,” Harry said, and he answered for all of them.
“Well then,” and her voice became brisker. “You’ll need to be away soon, but I’ve packed you some food …”
“Mum, we did think to pack our own …”
“I’ve packed you some food,” she repeated, in a slightly louder voice, pulling three bags from a cupboard and thrusting them into their hands, “and I want you to promise that you’ll come home for Christmas.”
“What?” Ron asked, looking at his mother as though she were barmy. “We’re not going to be able to keep to a schedule.”
“I know,” his mother said, placing her hands on her hips, “but you’ll be back here on the 25th December.”
“Yeah, we’ll try,” Harry said, wishing that it were Christmas now, and that he was sitting in the sitting room of The Burrow with all the Weasleys. “We can try.”
She gave each of them a hard look, and nodded. “That’s settled, then. Come here, Ron.” Ron stepped forwards, his face grim. “Now you …” she hugged Ron very tightly, “make sure you …” she did the same to Hermione, “look after yourselves.” Harry let her hug him, and then with a whispered, “goodbye,” followed Ron and Hermione out the door.
Glancing back into the house as he turned to Disapparate, he saw Mrs Weasley sit back down at the table and place her head in her hands. He looked up and saw a flash of red at a window, and knew that it was Ginny.
“Come on, Harry!”
The Burrow disappeared from sight, and he vowed he’d make it back for Christmas if ever he could.
4. Nymphadora Anne Tonks (again, the beginning might not be bad but whatever tried to follow certainly was. This could sort of work on its own, as how Tonks joins the order, although I'm meant to be working on a different version. This is longish - 7000 words.)
Her full name was Nymphadora Anne Tonks, although she never used it and grimaced when she had to fill it in on official forms and documents. Her father, Ted, had wanted to name her Anne for his grandmother, and her mother, Andromeda, had wanted to call her Nymphadora for reasons known only to herself. Apparently they’d tossed a Sickle to decide which name came first, and Mum had won. Nymphadora Anne Tonks thought that this might have been because her mother had been a Slytherin at school and would have cheated, whereas her father had been a Hufflepuff and wouldn’t have. She had the Sickle framed on the wall of her bedroom at her parents’ house. She’d frequently tried to curse it as a child. At school she had cursed her fellow students until they’d taken her requests to be called only by her last name seriously. Of her names, she felt it was the one that suited her most. The word Tonks had a quirky sort of graceless charm, and she felt that this was the best she could aspire to.
Her name was Nymphadora Anne Tonks, and when she was twenty two years old, her world changed.
It was a warm summer’s day and she’d been having lunch with her parents. She’d just passed her final exams in Auror training, and had celebrated the fact that she was now Auror Nymphadora Anne Tonks by moving out of Mum and Dad’s house and into her very own flat. She felt, however, that it would be unfair to deprive her parents of her company and herself of her mother’s cooking for too long. Thankfully, the world changed after lunch: Tonks was lounging at the kitchen table, feeling pleasantly full, eying the piled-up plates, dirty cutlery and leftovers, and wondering idly if she ought to offer to clear them, when the doorbell rang.
Tonks was out of her chair and had drawn her wand before she even realised it.
“I wish you’d move that fast when it’s time to do the dishes,” Dad said with a chuckle as he got up to answer the door.
Tonks sat back down in her chair and folded her arms. “Bloody Alastor Moody,” she said. “He got me all worked up in Speed and Vigilance and I still haven’t recovered. No wonder they had to make him retire.”
“Yes, dear,” her mother said vaguely. Tonks realised that Mum had stopped listening. She looked up. Dad had let whoever had rung the bell in, and was standing beside the man, looking nervous.
The man was, as far as Tonks knew, a stranger, but there was something familiar about him that made her think that he was an old friend whom she had forgotten. She knew this couldn’t be the case. She didn’t have any old friends like him. The man was tall and very thin; his fine hair brown and flecked with grey. Though he was quite a young man his face was slightly lined and very pale, but there was something about it - something about his eyes, perhaps, that made her like it. His robes were shabby and, Tonks noticed with a professional eye - she was trained to pick up identifying marks - there was a red welt disappearing down the neck of his robes.
Mum stood up and placed her hands flat upon the table, leaning forwards, but she did not speak and neither did Dad. They all sort of stared at each other for a moment.
“I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you,” the stranger said in a hoarse voice.
“We’d finished eating,” Tonks said, as neither of her parents was talking.
He looked at her and smiled slightly. “I don’t suppose you know who I am, Nymphadora,” he said, “but we met when you were a child. I’m Remus Lupin.” He said his name as though he were apologising for it, and Tonks immediately knew why. Remus Lupin had been a friend of her cousin, Sirius. And Sirius, whom she vaguely remembered pulling her hair, Transfiguring his nose to match her morphing, and giving her a large box of sweets for her birthday, was a mass murderer who had escaped from Azkaban almost a year ago to the day.
She had barely known her cousin, really. There had been a war on, and Mum and Dad had been trying to keep as safe as possible. Her father was Muggle-born, her mother the disowned sister of one of You Know Who’s greatest supporters. Sirius and his friends had been well-known opposers of You Know Who (at least, Sirius had been until he even more publicly murdered thirteen people in broad daylight) and it would have put her family in greater danger to have had close ties with him. All this Tonks knew from her own research, guesses and from scant conversations on the subject with her parents. The subject of Sirius himself had been banned in the house for thirteen years.
And now the only one of his former best friends he hadn’t killed was in their kitchen. She made herself smile back at Remus Lupin.
“It’s Tonks,” she said.
This seemed to bring her mother back to life. She sighed loudly. “Nymphadora refuses to use the perfectly lovely name we gave her,” she said to Remus. Next to him, Dad unfroze too and grinned.
“She doesn’t much like Nymphadora, either,” he said.
“Ted!” Mum said, trying to look stern, but the family teasing about Tonks’s name was too familiar for her to really mind. Even Remus Lupin seemed to sense this and he smiled as well.
“I hope you are all well,” he said.
“Very well,” said Dad.
“Yes, and how are you, Remus?” Mum lowered her voice. “I heard - about Hogwarts - last term.”
In a flash, Tonks remembered the other reason why she should have known Remus Lupin’s name: he had witnessed Sirius Black’s capture and escape from Hogwarts only a few weeks ago. She was conscientiously kept off Sirius Black’s case because of the family connection, which meant that while everybody else in the Auror Department was out tracking him, she was stuck in the office the filing reports on petty theft and lost Crups which had been shunted over from Magical Law Enforcement. Still, she had picked up the rumours, and had heard Dawlish muttering something about ‘the testimony of the werewolf, Lupin,’ before going quiet when he’d seen her. So this man was a werewolf, then. Her stomach clenched slightly, but she pushed the feeling away. She knew what it was to change one’s form, and she had had to work hard for the control she now had over her morphing. She had always felt that werewolves were unfairly treated, and she hoped that what she felt about werewolves in general and what she felt about a werewolf standing in her mum and dad’s kitchen were the same thing.
“I am well, thank you,” Remus Lupin was saying. “Out of work again, I’m afraid, but I was foolish to think that I would ever be able to teach at Hogwarts, and of course that was out of the question once I forgot to take the Wolfsbane potion.”
Dad frowned. “That’s not like you, Remus.” Tonks registered that this sounded like Mum and Dad had known Remus Lupin quite well at some point. “What possessed you to miss the potion?”
A flicker of an emotion Tonks couldn’t identify passed across Remus Lupin’s face. “The reappearance of an old school friend.” His voice was hard. But then he mastered himself. Tonks could practically see him pushing back the emotion, and when he spoke again it was in a calm, precise manner.
It did not make the words he said any better.
“Andromeda, I want to talk to you about Sirius Black.”
Tonks looked to her mother, and wanted to hex this Remus Lupin for coming into their house and doing it to her. For her mother’s face had gone very white, and her lips were pursed tightly together.
“You will not speak to me about him,” Mum said. There was a small quaver in her voice.
Lupin took a step forward. “Andromeda, you must listen.”
Tonks moved in front of her mother, and Dad moved in front of her. It was a practised move. Tonks knew she and Dad got the same urge: to protect Mum from her past.
“I think you’d better go, Remus,” Dad said.
Remus Lupin did not look surprised. “I know that this is hard, Andromeda. But you would want to hear the truth about Sirius.”
Mum let out a hissing noise like an angry cat.
“Get out,” Dad said.
Lupin didn’t flinch. He carried on, looking calmly apologetic. “Sirius is innocent,” he said. “He did not perform the curse that killed those people, and he was never a Death Eater. He was framed by Peter Pettigrew. Do you remember him? He was our friend at school.”
Lupin’s voice cracked over the word ‘friend’, and Tonks got the overwhelming urge to try and offer the man some comfort. She stepped from behind her father, her hand outstretched. Her mother pulled her back.
“Don’t tell me this, Remus. It’s not true. You can’t tell me this!” Mum’s voice took on a wild screech, her hand grasping the back of Tonks’s robes tightly.
“It is true, Andromeda. Peter Pettigrew killed twelve Muggles and faked his own death.”
“All they found was a finger,” Tonks said, without meaning to.
Lupin caught her eyes. “That’s right,” he said. “He’s an Animagus. He cut off his finger and transformed.”
“Impossible,” Dad said, although he didn’t sound completely sure.
“Impossible,” Mum repeated, and she did sound sure. Tonks knew that she had spent years schooling herself to be sure that Cousin Sirius had done all the dreadful things that he had been put into Azkaban for. “Go to your room, Nymphadora.”
Tonks spun round, the sympathy she’d been feeling for her mother dissipating in a wash of anger. “Go to my room? I’m not a child! I don’t even live here.”
“Go to your room,” Mum said through gritted teeth.
She was using the tone of voice which Tonks knew meant that her mother was not going to be argued with. She turned her hair into the most violent shade of purple she could muster, and stalked out of the room. Even from her bedroom, where she sat fuming over being treated like a child (and panicking slightly that she had acted like one in front of Lupin), she could hear her mother’s raised voice, her dad’s angry one, and Lupin’s calm tone.
When the door shut, and her mother’s sobs reverberated through the house, she Apparated into an alleyway at the end of the street.
In the alley, she morphed into a light-haired middle-aged woman so that her parents wouldn’t spot her if they watched Lupin going up the road, and stepped out, just as he was walking past.
“Mr Lupin.” He stopped, his hand in his pocket, looking confused for a split second. Then his expression cleared.
“Hello, Miss Tonks.”
“We shouldn’t stop - in case my parents are watching,” she said. She walked off at a brisk pace and didn’t look back at him. He followed her to a small car park at the back of the local shop. There were a couple of cars parked there, but there was nobody about. Nevertheless she went to the very corner of the car park and stood between the wall and a bashed-up Volvo. Lupin came and stood beside her looking politely interested.
Why did you come here?” she asked him.
“I wanted your mother to know the truth about Sirius,” he said. “They were fond of each other as children.”
She rolled her eyes. “They were fond of each other as children, maybe, but she’s spent the last thirteen years trying to pretend that she never knew Sirius Black. It was awful for her, finding out what he’d done. She thought he was the only decent one in her family.”
Remus Lupin clenched his fists, although they remained by his side. When he spoke, he sounded tired. “Sirius is decent. He is an innocent man.”
“He was convicted of murdering - ”
“I know. Until June I believed it myself. But I saw him and I saw Peter. I knew which one of them was telling the truth. A terrible thing has been done to Sirius Black. My word carries very little weight with most people. I came here to try to convince your mother as she is one of the very few people I have a chance of convincing.”
There was something very impressive about the way he said this. Tonks felt a rising admiration for the man and tried to ignore it.
“You can’t want Mum to start trying to convince people. Not after all the time she’s forced herself into believing he did it.”
Remus Lupin shook his head. “No, I don’t expect that. I didn’t really expect your parents to believe me. Why should they? There are only five people who believe that Sirius is innocent. I merely thought that your mother’s knowing the truth would mean a lot to Sirius.”
Tonks knew that she should be asking whether he knew where Sirius was or, better still, arresting Lupin on the spot and taking him to Auror Headquarters where he would be forced to tell. Instead she said, “who are the five people?” Remus Lupin raised his eyebrows, and she had to morph her face a little to hide her blush. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Not at all,” he said. “The five are Harry Potter, who is Sirius’s godson, incidentally, Harry’s friends, Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger, myself and Albus Dumbledore.”
Tonks’s jaw dropped. “Professor Dumbledore believes you?” She supposed she shouldn’t feel surprised. It was well known that Dumbledore was mad.
“Will you come with me for a moment?” Lupin asked.
Tonks gaped at him. “Where?”
“Just somewhere I am sure we can’t be overheard,” Lupin said. “I can Apparate you there.”
It was probably a bad idea to go anywhere with a werewolf who was telling people that Sirius Black was innocent. Tonks could imagine what Mad Eye Moody’s reaction would be. But she felt ashamed that she’d used his being a werewolf as a reason not to trust him, even in her own mind, and she nodded. She did trust him.
He grabbed her arms and, with a swift feeling of pressure and a CRACK!, he Apparated them into a dark and dusty room. She barely had time to look around, though, because Remus Lupin hunched slightly and looked her in the eye. She relaxed into her usual face: it was a courtesy, she felt, to not hide behind a morph while he was talking to her in private.
“It was believed that Sirius was the Potters’ secret keeper when they went into hiding,” he said, very fast. “I believed it myself. But Sirius used himself as a decoy. The real secret keeper was Peter Pettigrew. Sirius and James didn’t think that anyone would think to go after Peter, but it turned out that Peter had been a Death Eater for over a year before that, and he betrayed James and Lily. After the attack, Sirius hunted Peter down. Peter accused Sirius of murdering the Potters, sliced off his finger, Cursed the Muggle witnesses and transformed into a rat - his Animagus form. He attached himself to the Weasley family, and Harry’s friend Ron kept him as a pet. The Weasley family got into the papers, and Sirius saw the photo of Peter whilst in Azkaban. The article said that the children went to Hogwarts. Sirius realised that Peter was at Hogwarts - ready to kill Harry at any sign of his master’s return. He escaped. He finally cornered Peter here, in this house. Harry and his friends were with him, and I followed them here. We forced Peter to reveal himself, but when we were bringing Peter back to the castle, I transformed, having forgotten my final dose of Wolfsbane potion. Sirius got me away from the children, and Peter escaped. That is what happened. That’s the truth.”
Tonks stared at him, feeling numb. Or, possibly, feeling so many things that her body had given up. “That’s one hell of a story,” she said at last.
Remus Lupin smiled. “Yes, it is.”
“Let me get this straight. Sirius is innocent. Instead, a long-dead school friend of his turns out to have been hiding out as a rat which just happens to belong to Harry Potter’s best friend. The rat just happens to get himself into a paper which Black just happens to see and … wait a minute, the family was the Weasleys you say?”
“Yes.”
“They were in the paper because Mr Weasley won the lottery last summer. The whole family went to Egypt. I know Charlie - I was at school with him. And his brother Percy used to have a rat. A fat grey thing called Scabby or Scrubbers or something.”
“Scabbers.”
“That’s the one.”
“That was Peter.”
Tonks looked at him, hard. He didn’t look away. “You couldn’t make it up, could you?” she said.
“I lack sufficient imagination,” Lupin said, with the hint of a smile.
Tonks swore. “I don’t, and I couldn’t have made all that up. And that’s what you were trying to tell Mum? She’d never believe that.”
Lupin rubbed his temple. “It was always a slim chance.”
Tonks let out a long breath. “I think I might, though.”
She wasn’t quite sure why she was so compelled to believe him. Part of it was because the story was so deliciously outlandish that it would be a shame for it not to be true. Another part was because of all the times she had seen that look - that special Sirius Black look - on her mother’s face. Part of it was because she couldn’t help believing the sincerity in Remus Lupin’s face: and she was good at reading people after all the Auror training. But she also wanted to be able to remember the laughing young man who had transfigured his nose without feeling guilty and ashamed that she had thought he was wonderful.
The next day, Kingsley Shacklebolt hauled her into his cubicle.
“Your parents had a visitor yesterday, Tonks,” he said without preamble.
Tonks felt a moment of surprise before realising that of course the Auror team on Sirius Black’s case would be tracking Remus Lupin’s movements in case he led them to him. She stared at a picture of Sirius with a girl whom she recognised as her mother in her early teens.
“Yes, Lupin came round. He wanted to talk to Mum about Black, but she chucked him out.”
Kingsley sat down at his desk and pulled out a quill and some parchment.
“What was he saying?” he asked, setting the quill to fill out the form.
“That Black was innocent. He didn’t get much further than that,” Tonks said. “Mum doesn’t like hearing about her cousin.” She wondered if Kingsley would tell her anything She looked away from Kingsley and watched the quill, which was writing out what she had said. “Lupin said something about Peter Pettigrew framing Black,” she added hopefully.
Kingsley narrowed his eyes. “That’s what Lupin’s story was when we spoke to him after Black’s escape,” he said.
“Why haven’t you arrested him?” Tonks asked. “If he helped Black escape.”
“He didn’t,” Kingsley said shortly. “We have Dumbledore’s testimony that Lupin had no contact with Black while he was at Hogwarts and was in fact trying to save the children’s lives that evening: and we’ve had a trace on Lupin since Black escaped, so we’ve checked that’s true. The only way in which Lupin aided Black’s escape was by not calling for back up immediately; and Snape captured Black after that, by which time Lupin was in no state to help anybody.”
Tonks thought this might have been the most she’d heard Kingsley Shacklebolt say: he was in charge of the hunt for Sirius Black and so she’d had very little to do with him during her training.
“Could Black be using the Imperius Curse on Lupin to get him to say he’s innocent?” As she asked the question, Tonks thought of the intensity in Remus Lupin’s eyes. She knew that people under the Imperius Curse could be very convincing, but somehow she couldn’t believe that Lupin’s certainty hadn’t been genuine.
Kingsley shrugged. “We’ve considered it as a possibility,” he said. “But I think it’s unlikely. Lupin’s powerful enough to fight against the curse, and he’s telling his story far too willingly. Besides, why would Black tell such an unbelievable story? And to a werewolf whom no one is going to believe?”
Tonks felt a stab of anger. “I don’t see what his being a werewolf has to do with his honesty,” she said.
Kingsley looked as though he were about to smile, but he didn’t. Instead he got up and directed the filled-out parchment into a corner of the cubicle, towards a stack of files. Tonks couldn’t see which one it went into, because Kingsley was blocking her view. But then he moved to the left, just enough so that Tonks could see perfectly, pointed his wand at the pile of folders, and said a complicated Sealing Spell in his clear, deep voice.
“That will be all, Miss Tonks,” he said, giving her a fleeting look before pulling out a new batch of parchments and leaning over them.
Tonks barely noticed that she fell over the dustbin on her way out. She was deep in thought. That night, she crept into the office in the guise of a cleaning witch. Abandoning her trolley of magimops and Mrs Skower’s Magical Mess Remover, she snuck into Kingsley’s cubicle. She muttered the counter-spell to the Sealing Spell Kingsley had locked his files with. It had been very lax of him to allow her to overhear the exact spell he used. Far too lax. Kingsley was an accomplished Auror.
She pulled out the reports and read some of Kingsley’s research, including interviews with Remus Lupin and Albus Dumbldore both before and after Sirius’s escape. She even found an interview with her mother, conducted a few days after Sirius’s arrest:
It must have been a mistake. Sirius couldn’t - he wouldn’t. I know he’s related to Bellatrix - and it’s pretty obvious she’s been involved for years - but he was disowned from the family when he was sixteen. He wouldn’t have hurt anyone. He loved James Potter like a brother. He couldn’t. It’s a mistake. He just couldn’t.
They’d questioned her again when he’d escaped. Tonks frowned. She’d never been told that. This time she recognised her mother’s carefully schooled hatred of Sirius:
We were as deceived by him as anybody. He hasn’t been anywhere near me or my family, but if he did come to us I would be ecstatic to turn the murdering traitor in.
Most chilling, though, was what Tonks read from Sirius himself.
Killed them? Oh Merlin, yes I killed them. It’s all my fault. I persuaded them to swap and now … James! He can’t be dead. You’re lying to me. James and Lily and oh it’s my fault. I’m going to kill Peter. Let me get him, the lying rat. He betrayed James and Lily oh shit how could I have I let them die, so stupid I thought it was Remus and they’re not dead are they, how can they be dead? James, James, James and Lily, they can’t be dead oh help me they’re dead what have I done, Peter you monster how could you have killed them …
She ran out of the cubicle and retched into the cleaning bucket.
The next morning she sent an owl to Remus Lupin. She was sure that Kingsley’s team would be intercepting his letters, and she frowned hard over how to word what she had to say. She’d been taught about encoding letters in Codes and Communication, but nothing sounded quite right. Even a letter which didn’t mean anything to the Aurors reading it would raise their suspicions if it obviously was a code.
Dear Professor Lupin,
She wrote at last. I am sad you won’t come back to teach us any more. I have been doing some extra work this holiday because your lessons interested me so much. You made a mistake, though, when you told us about the five ways to catch Kappas. There are actually six.
I believe you are the best teacher we’ve had.
She looked at her handiwork. It would have to do. But who to sign it from? She needed someone inconspicuous whose family weren’t connected to any of the Aurors who might read the letter. She went to have lunch with her friend Sandra, who worked in the Improper Use of Magic Office, and steered the conversation to the accidental magic that the office sometimes had to put straight.
Sandra ginned. “We get some really funny ones. Especially the ones the Muggle-borns do. They’re always more of a headache - we have to bring in the Obliviators and everything and that means more paperwork - but I wouldn’t have missed seeing Marjorie Dursley for the world. Actually, that was Harry Potter. She’s his aunt, and he blew her up.”
“I remember that,” Tonks said. “He ran away and I spent half the night trying to find him before Sirius Black did. So, did anyone top inflating their auntie?”
“Colin Creevey might have,” Sandra said. “His dad’s a milkman, and Colin went with him on his rounds every Saturday to help out. Apparently, Colin and his dad had an argument in the milkfloat.”
“Did he turn the milk sour?” Tonks asked.
Sandra took a bite of her sandwich and chewed slowly. “Into cheese,” she said. “There was bottled cheese on every doorstep for a mile.”
Tonks laughed, and remembered the name Colin Creevey. Then she sent off the letter.
She received the reply a few days later.
“Dear Mr Creevey", Remus Lupin’s writing was neat and small, but with loops on some of the letters which reminded Tonks a little of Dumbledore’s spindly writing.
I am glad that my lessons interested you and that you have pursued your own research because of them. Thank you for telling me about the Kappas: I shall definitely ask your advice if I ever wish to catch one.
With best wishes,
Remus Lupin
Tonks understood from the note that she was to wait for Lupin to get in touch with her if he needed her. She heard nothing until the following June, almost a year after she’d become qualified as an Auror, when the stories came that a boy had been killed at Hogwarts - and that Harry Potter was claiming that he’d been killed by You Know Who, who had returned to a body. She found it hard to believe the ministry line that Harry Potter was an attention-seeking nutcase who wanted to turn Cedric Diggory’s death into a publicity stunt. The Auror department was buzzing with it all, and they’d been told to uphold the ministry stance at all times. Some, like Dawlish, were doing this a bit too zealously and Tonks felt that she was going to lose her temper and hex him if she didn’t do something soon. She didn’t want to believe that You Know Who was back … but she couldn’t believe that Harry Potter had made the whole thing up. Not if Dumbledore believed him. And Dumbledore had also believed the story about Sirius … she decided to write to Remus Lupin.
As it happened, she didn’t need to. That evening she found him on her doorstep.
“Mad Eye gave me your address,” he said at once. He looked even skinnier than when she’d seen him last, and although he wasn’t as pale, he looked tired. Still, he smiled at her pleasantly enough. “I’m sorry to drop in unannounced.”
“Wotcher,” Tonks said cheerfully. “I was about to write to you anyway, so you’ve saved me a postage owl.”
Remus Lupin blinked at her. “I’m pleased to hear it,” he said. “May I come in?”
Tonks let him in, regretting that she hadn’t tidied up recently … there were a few mugs scattered around the sitting room and piles of papers teetering on the sofa. She waved her wand hopefully, and two of the piles straightened themselves neatly. The third fell over and scattered all over the floor.
“Bother,” she said. “I s’pose two out of three isn’t bad.” She knelt to gather up the stray papers.
“It’s an Exceeds Expectations,” Remus said. Then he looked rather embarrassed. “At OWL level, anyway. Sorry. I still don’t always remember I’m not a teacher.”
“You could be a teacher somewhere else, couldn’t you?” Tonks said.
Remus shrugged. “Only in Muggle schools, and with a great deal of forgery, but that isn’t why I came here. I wanted to ask about, er …”
“About Colin Creevey?” Tonks asked, chucking the armful of papers back on the sofa and pulling up a chair for Remus.
“Ah, yes. Thank you for that communication.”
“No problem,” Tonks said. “Yeah. I’ve kept tabs on it as much as I could, although I’m not allowed near the case. I even looked over some of Kingsley’s notes. Not completely officially.”
“And what did you think?”
“I think that it’s odd you left it a year to carry on this conversation.”
Remus Lupin nodded at her. “All right, Sirius isn’t directly why I came, although he’s part of it as well. I wanted to talk about Lord Voldemort.”
Tonks jumped at the name. She hadn’t heard it spoken before, and it gave her a shock. She looked at Lupin in admiration for being able to say You Know Who’s name in such a calm way. “You want to ask if I believe Harry Potter’s story about Cedric Diggory’s death, do you?”
“Do I need to?”
Tonks felt uncomfortable. Was he just assuming that she believed Harry, a boy she had never even met? But Dumbledore believed him, and Remus Lupin obviously did. Did she?
Lupin fingered the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re the first new person I’ve talked to. I didn’t think that you might not believe Harry’s version of events.”
“I don’t disbelieve him,” Tonks said. “I know the ministry’s telling lies, but the only account I’ve had of Harry’s version was pretty garbled.”
So Remus Lupin told her a second outlandish tale, and Tonks found herself believing it even more readily than she had Sirius’s.
Lupin gave the ghost of a smile. “I seem to be making a habit of asking you to believe unbelievable things.”
“Unbelievable things which I end up believing,” she said.
He smiled at her properly. It made his face look a lot younger, and Tonks suddenly felt rather warm. She fidgeted and changed her hair red.
“I don’t know what you know about the last war,” he said, “but last time Voldemort was powerful, Dumbledore founded an order of witches and wizards dedicated to fighting him.”
Tonks tried not to flinch at the name this time. “What if I want to join this order?” she asked.
“Then we need to see Dumbledore. We’re still regrouping, and trying to set up headquarters.”
“Where?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She nodded, feeling foolish. “Of course you can’t. Sorry. I got ahead of myself. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, no. I really can’t tell you. It’s protected by the Fidelius Charm.”
She felt even more foolish. “Oh. I. I mean … bother. I just want to help get rid of You Know Who, all right? And I don’t think that the ministry’s going to be doing it any time soon.”
Remus smiled, and Tonks felt better. “You’re right. I don’t believe the ministry is going to be making open-minded decisions at the moment.”
Tonks grinned at him. “When can I see Dumbledore?”
*
She hadn’t been on the Hogwarts grounds since she’d left four years ago, and it made her feel like a little girl.
“I can’t believe it’s four years since I was celebrating the end of NEWTs,” she said to Lupin, as they walked past the tree she’d passed out under after celebrating the end of her exams a little too hard.
Lupin sighed. “It was very strange coming back here to teach. It was hard to get used to being a member of staff rather than a student. I thought Minerva McGonagall was going to take points from Gryffindor every time I called her Minerva in the first week.”
Tonks grinned. “I don’t think you ever forget being a student at Hogwarts.”
“No,” Lupin said, and once more his face took on that very youthful expression which made Tonks feel rather confused and aware of her feet. Or unaware, as it turned out, as she took that opportunity to fall over them.
She felt even more like a naughty schoolgirl when they reached Dumbledore’s office (which she had visited in that capacity on a couple of occasions). Her former headmaster peered at her over his half-moon glasses.
“Miss, ahem, Auror Tonks, I must ask you to consider the fact that if you enter the Order of the Phoenix, and in particular enter our headquarters, then you would be required to conceal certain facts from your employers at the ministry.”
“Like a spy?” Tonks asked.
Dumbledore coughed. “I won’t deny it would be useful to have as many people from within the ministry as possible working with us,” he said, “but what I meant was, you will be asked to react differently to certain persons as a member of the Order of the Phoenix than you would do in your capacity as an Auror.”
“In other words, you’re not allowed to arrest Sirius,” Remus Lupin said with a faint smile.
“I think I’d just got that, thanks,” Tonks said weakly. Sirius would be there. Sirius was not a murderer and a Death Eater; he was a member of the Order of the Phoenix. And if she joined - which she had to, now, she realised, they’d told her so much - then she would meet her cousin for the first time in more than thirteen years.
“I’m in,” Tonks said. She added the word ‘trouble’ only in her head. Her mother would kill her if she ever found out about this.
She was inducted there and then. Dumbledore asked her to swear only that she was prepared to fight against Voldemort, but he got her to place her magical mark upon a phoenix feather, and registered her Patronus. Then he looked squarely at her and said, “The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.”
The location rang a bell.
“Well, I have an appointment to be voted out of the Wizengamot,” Dumbledore said happily, “but I daresay Remus will be available to escort you to Headquarters should you wish to go immediately.”
Head swimming, Tonks nodded. She and Remus Lupin walked through the deserted school together and across the grounds.
“It feels as though it’s all happening very quickly,” Tonks said.
Remus looked concerned. “You do not have to go to headquarters if you wish, Nymphadora.”
She groaned. “Tonks, please. And I want to go. I like things to happen fast.”
“Then you will be disappointed with the Order itself, I am afraid. I doubt we shall persuade the ministry very soon.”
Tonks felt as though she’d said something childish, but shrugged it off. “Oh well. It’s better than doing nothing.” They walked in silence for a minute, then she said, “er, Mr Lupin?”
He turned to her with a startled laugh. “For goodness sake, call me Remus.”
“What’s Sirius Black like? Will he be upset to see me because of Mum?”
Remus stopped walking and took a long breath. “Sirius will be very pleased to see you,” he said at last. “He was fond of your mother and of you.”
Tonks thought of the laughing young man in her memory.
“But Sirius has been … hurt by the last thirteen years,” Remus said carefully. “He is not mad, as most prisoners who have spent a prolonged amount of time in Azkaban are, but the experience has affected him.”
“How did he stay sane?” Tonks asked. The image of the laughing man had changed to one of a man sitting in a cell, in the same cell, for twelve years, with the dementors on the other side of the bars.
“Because he was innocent,” Remus Lupin said simply.
Number twelve, Grimmauld Place was not immediately visible, but its location was not prepossessing. It was a scrubby square fronted by houses which had fallen into disrepair. Tonks looked at number eleven, and then at number thirteen. She remembered Dumbledore’s words. The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix is at number twelve, Grimmauld Place.
A house appeared, shouldering its way between numbers eleven and thirteen. It looked no more assuming than its neighbours, and had it not just appeared out of thin air Tonks would never have guessed there was something different about it. That is, of course, until they went up to it.
“Do we knock?” Tonks asked, looking at the silver snake knocker.
“No,” Remus said. He tapped the door with his wand and Tonks heard the clicks of many locks and bolts being drawn back. He opened the door for her. “It’s best to be quiet in the hallway,” he said. “And watch out for the…”
CRASH!
Tonks found herself flat on her face. Screaming was echoing in her ears. She felt a hand at her elbow.
“Here.” Remus had to shout over the screams. She took his hand and let him help her up.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was that?” She peered, trying to see properly in the dim light of the hall. She had tripped over something that looked like a troll’s foot. It had been holding umbrellas: they were scattered over the floor.
Someone was still screaming in an awful, high-pitched voice which sounded familiar. Her mother’s voice sounded like that when she was at her most upset, although Mum never used the kind of language that this woman did. She turned to Remus. He was fighting with a pair of curtains. She lunged forward to help him.
“Thanks,” he grunted. “Can you try and pull … this one … over … her.”
Tonks caught a glimpse of a very ugly old woman in a portrait before the curtains finally met and the portrait silenced.
“Phew,” said Tonks. “This is an … unusual place.” She bent and tried to pick up one of the umbrellas that had fallen from the stand. It had a raven’s head on the handle which tried to bite her. She withdrew her hand. Remus waved his wand and the umbrellas flew back into place.
“That you, Moony?” came a gruff voice. “What did you wake the hag up for?”
Tonks went very still, her heart hammering. That must be …
A door opened at the end of the hall, and a shaggy-haired figure appeared. In the half-light of the house, Tonks looked at her cousin.
“Wotcher, Sirius,” she whispered.
“Let’s go into the kitchen to make the introductions,” Remus said in a firm voice. Tonks followed him towards the door where Sirius still stood.
“Who?”
“Kitchen,” Remus said again. “Your mother’s in fine voice today and I have no desire to hear it again.”
“Your mother?” Tonks said. “That’s Aunt Walburga?”
“Moony, who is this?” Sirius asked in a hard voice. Tonks opened her mouth to tell him, but Remus pushed both of them down the stairs into another dimly lit room. Remus waved his wand and torches on the walls flared brightly. By the new light, Tonks could see that it was a large kitchen, although only a small portion of it looked usable. She looked at Sirius.
Her cousin’s face was a little fuller than in the wanted posters, but not much. His hair was long, although no longer matted. He did not look like the man in her memories of her cousin. She could tell that he had once been very handsome, and even now he managed an air of tortured elegance.
Tortured elegance? She’d been reading too many romance novels.
She realised she’d been staring, but even after she’d looked away, Sirius Black continued to gawp at her.
“Sirius, this is Nymphadora T-”
“Tonks,” Tonks said firmly.
But a light had come into Sirius Black’s eyes. “You’re Andromeda’s Nymphadora?”
“Yes, but it’s Tonks. I don’t go by Nymphadora.”
Sirius Black grinned. “I’m not surprised. I remember being outraged that she’d gone and called you Nymphadora. I thought she was the sane one in the family.”
“We still bully her about it,” said Tonks. She couldn’t quite believe that she was having the conversation about her name with Sirius Black.
“Quite right,” Sirius said. “Remus, this is my cousin. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that this is little Nymphadora.” He frowned. “I saw you when you weren’t two months old. Andromeda brought you to see us in Hogsmeade.” He turned to Remus. “D’you remember?”
Remus nodded. “Yes. It’s making me feel very old.”
“Oh shut up, Moony.”
Tonks registered what it was that Sirius had been calling Remus. Moony. Because he was a werewolf (unless he had a penchant for flashing people, which she doubted somehow). How cruel, she thought. Reminding him of it every time Sirius talked to him. But then she saw the easy expression on Remus’s face. How kind, she realised. How incredibly kind. The name diminished it. It was affectionate, lighthearted, friendly. It showed that he accepted his condition to the extent that he could make fun of it.
Tonks thought that she could love her cousin.
The thought that she could love Remus Lupin came several weeks later.