How Remus Lupin Saved the World (although He Didn’t Mean to, He Swears)
Title: How Remus Lupin Saved the World (although He Didn’t Mean to, He Swears)
(Tonks Helped)
Author: shield_wolf
Rating & Warnings: PG-13, mostly for innuendo; Crack!Fic beyond human comprehension, endurance or hope of forgiveness; Wholesale slaughter of all manner of sacred canon and fanon cows
Prompts: Picture # 8 (Flames), Day of Possibility, Dragon-hide Gloves, Horror/Romance
Word Count: 2539
Summary: AU: Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks have abandoned both the war effort and the wizarding world altogether and are trying to create a new life for themselves disguised as Muggles. But an evil figure from their past may be coming back to haunt them....
Author’s Notes: Apologies in advance to everyone I may have offended, both real and imaginary. I’ll be turning in my “Remus/Tonks Fan” badge at the door when I leave. (Can I get away with offering a state of overtime-induced delirium as my excuse instead?) And if AU doesn’t qualify as “Possibility,” what does?
How Remus Lupin Saved the World (although He Didn’t Mean to, He Swears)
(Tonks Helped)
Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks eyed the small square box warily.
“Well, it was your idea.”
“So was allowing Dumbledore to manipulate me into teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts, even though we both knew the position was cursed.” ‘Why did I say that?’ he wondered guiltily. ‘It’s as though I’m not abjectly grateful to him, when the man made me everything I am today.’ He took a mental note to rip a page out of Harry’s house-elf friend Dobby’s book and go iron his hands later as penance.
“Regardless,” Remus continued after completing his mental flagellations. “We need a television. Without access to the Daily Prophet, the Floo Network, the WWN or even the ability to communicate via Patronus, how else will we be able to keep abreast of news of the outside world?”
Tonks giggled.
“What?”
“You said ‘breast,’ you naughty boy,” she replied, whipping off her Weird Sisters T-shirt at the speed of light.
*******
He appeared as though he had just popped out of the ground. His robes were shockingly, vibrantly purple, and they swished around his ankles swishily. His boot heels tapped in rhythm with the bobbing of his long white beard as he walked.
He was coming.
And he was humming.
*******
“So now what?”
“If you’ll just untie these electrical cords from around my wrists, ankles and neck, sweetheart, I. May. Be. Able. To. Help. You.”
Tonks sighed. “You’re so cute when you’re in the throes of scary but somehow still hapless rage, Remus.”
“DON’T BRING DUMBLEDORE INTO THIS!”
“Who said anything about Dumbledore?”
“Erm. Right then. Let’s get to it.”
Tonks lunged enthusiastically.
“No, not that it!”
*******
He was humming.
And he was coming. Up Magnolia Drive. Down Wisteria Lane. Over Magnolia Crescent.
He stopped in the middle of the road.
‘Where the hell am I?’ he thought, tossing his long white beard over the shoulder of his garish green star-spangled robes testily, because passing motorists were looking at him funny, and he supposed it must be the hair.
*******
Remus hung his head milquetoastily.
“I don’t mean to be difficult. It’s just that I regret marrying you, Nymphadora -“
Tonks’ eyes took on an unholy Black glow. “DON’T CALL ME NYMPHADORA! YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I DESPISE THAT NAME MY TERTIARY CHARACTER OF A MOTHER GAVE ME! IN FACT, NEVER EVEN USE THE LETTER ‘N’ IN MY PRESENCE AGAIN!”
“Is that you, Harry?” queried Remus.
Tonks emitted an ear-piercing shriek, inspiring Remus to glance towards the kitchen in the faint hope that he had mistaken the teakettle for his beloved’s dulcet tones. When he returned his gaze to the object of his mid-life crisis, he noticed that both her face and hair had assumed a fetching shade of scarlet. (Being a Metamorphmagus, she could do that.)
“And furthermore,” she continued menacingly, “we aren’t even married, remember? We decided that we would live in sin instead, so that we could blend in with the rest of the self-righteous hypocrite Muggles in suburban Little Whinging. SO REMEMBER THAT!”
“Yes, ymphadora.”
“WHAT WAS THAT?”
“othing.”
Tonks’ livid features reverted to their usual ordinary but somehow still comely state of composure. “Well, that’s settled then,” she concluded chirpily.
Remus favored her with a swift smile, and she turned her attention to the recalcitrant television once again.
Remus' face fell. Possibly off his head entirely.
*******
He was no longer humming. Instead, he had closed his eyes, taken a deep calming breath and concentrated on the words of power that always provided all answers to life’s mysteries for him in times of direst need.
Nitwit. Blubber. Oddment. Tweak.
Aha! there was the house he was seeking, glowing like a beacon in his mind’s eye. Not a very original location for a hideout, all things considered, but --
“Watch where you’re going, you senile old coot!”
He sighed. Silly ignorant Muggles. He really should have listened to Gellert when he’d had the chance.
Then he collided with a tree.
*******
With the television finally plugged into the electrical socket and the two lovebirds ensconced on the sofa, Remus and Tonks expected that it would be smooth rowing from that moment onward.
But they couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Remus, isn’t this a program about Bermuda? Why is it snowing there?”
“No clue,” he muttered shortly. “No, wait a moment. I think Arthur Weasley -- may he rest in peace -- once tried to explain to me about signal reception interference on Muggle televisions, and I believe he may have called it ‘snow.’ Or smog.”
“That does sound familiar,” Tonks replied brightly. “Since my Dad was a Muggleborn, I used to watch the telly all the time when I was visiting my grandparents’ house.”
“So do you remember any solutions for correcting the problem?” Remus asked quietly.
“Seems to me I can recall something about ... bunny toes? That doesn’t sound quite right. But it doesn’t matter right now, since that's given me a few other ideas...."
*******
After using his superior powers of persuasion to convince the Muggle police officer that he had not in fact been drinking and was simply en route to a Halloween party three months early, he continued on his way.
‘Almost there,’ he thought with a mysterious gleam of triumph in his now-open eyes. ‘Being rather cleverer than most men, I should easily be able to convince my foolish wayward Order members to return to the fold. And maybe I can wangle a free dinner invitation out of them too while I’m at it!’
His humming began to assume stentorian proportions.
*******
“I don’t think we have any choice, Tonksadora,” Remus slurred wearily, although it had nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the bottle of Firewhiskey he had conjured and kept surreptitiously inhaling every time she was momentarily distracted. “We’ll have to rezhort to magic to fix thish.”
“But how can we? We snapped our wands when we went into hiding, remember?” she challenged him belligerently. (Being an Auror, as well as unreasonably stubborn and obtuse, she could do that.)
Remus sighed. The words Damn Dumbledore flitterbloomed in his mind for no apparent reason, because he really was ever-so-grateful to the old bast- erm, wiz-ard for making him everything he was today.
“I have something to confess,” he said soberly, which took an heroic effort under the present circumstances. “I don’t really need a wand to do magic, strictly shpeaking. I was never to tell anyone, because my parents and Dumbledore made me promise, but --“
His voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “I’m the Heir of Gryffindor.”
Tonks caught her breath -- after screaming with laughter for at least five minutes and rolling across the floor until a wall finally stopped her progress, then choked out, “And I’m the Bloody Baron, mate!”
This was not precisely the response Remus had anticipated -- nor deeply, desperately craved, since he liked to be liked. Drawing himself up to his full height of between 5’7” and 6’3,” he glowered leoninely, feeling suddenly enflamed with courage, or perhaps Firewhiskey. “You doubt my unfamothable powers, woman? Behold!”
As Tonks was regaining her feet, still dashing tears of mirth from her eyes, Remus adopted his best dueling stance and aimed his index finger at the television. “This is a useful little spell,” he explained. “Please watch closely.”
“Eliminato Interferum!” he roared.
At that very instant, Tonks blindly slipped on a banana peel, careened flailing across the entire living room, executing a 10-point triple-somersault along the way, and lightly bumped Remus’ outstretched arm before collapsing in a pile of indiscriminate body parts at his feet.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Remus. “Why don’t you do that in bed?”
But graver matters than these were afoot, because with his aim spoiled, the “eliminatus interferus” spell of his own secretly ingenious devising had struck nowhere near its intended target but instead had hit a pair of Dragon-hide Gloves conveniently draped over the back of the sofa, even though they shouldn’t have been in the house at all, since they are Magical Objects and Remus and Tonks were pretending to be Muggles. (But Tonks found them kinky and couldn’t bear to leave them behind when she and her paramour abandoned the wizarding world in the dead of night.)
The gloves began to swell ominously, rapidly growing to a size that could comfortably engulf Rubeus Hagrid’s hands. They quivered as though quickening to life. They produced a glow strangely like magical flames.
They roared.
Remus blanched even whiter than his normal pasty, peaky complexion.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” the Heir of Gryffindor said tremulously.
*******
He was coming and humming up the driveway now, his incessant cacophony setting off burglar alarms, his historically-influential footsteps setting off seismographs world-wide. He paused to tip his hat to the window minutely cracked open at the house next door, as a blonde woman was crouched there at the tiny gap with one beady eye pressed against it. She shrieked and fainted.
He had barely arrived at the front door and was just raising his fist to knock, when it opened to reveal the very biddable dupe, erm, dear boy he had been seeking.
Moony’s brown, green, amber, violet or possibly aquamarine eyes stared at him. The twinkling blue eyes behind his gold-rimmed half-moon glasses stared back. His violently vividest red and gold robes billowed impressively around his tall form in the apocalyptically rising wind.
“Hi there,” said Albus Dumbledore. “Mind if I interfere and generally wreak havoc in your lives again?”
Two things happened simultaneously.
Remus opened his mouth to say, beta-maleishly, “Oh my goodness, gracious, yes, Sir! Doratonks and I were just talking about you earlier, reminiscing about how much we missed your infallible sagacity and peerless puppeteering. Would you like to come in? Stay for dinner? Stay the night? Stay forever? Ymphie can sleep on the sofa, and I’ll take the floor--”
But the gloves, still thrumming with the incalculably potent spell that had resurrected them to life and some semblance of their former glory, heard its invocational echo in their draconic pseudo-brain (Eliminato Interferum!) and detected before them the source of all interference in the life of their new Lord and Master -- whether he would ever develop the stones to admit it aloud or not.
They knew their Duty.
And they Obeyed.
'Oh, drat,' thought Dumbledore, seeing his doom swooping towards him, and Disapparated just in the nick of time.
Or maybe not.
The thunderous boom that ensued sent most of the Muggle neighbors scurrying into the street like the witless sheep they were, wondering why the Concorde was flying overhead that time of evening.
And it’s a good thing they did this too, because the Transfigured and Engorged Dragon-hide gloves, still clasped firmly together, albeit dripping an unidentifiable ooze, had shot though the doorway into the sky and celebrated their newly-found freedom by proceeding to zoom around the neighborhood -- and at least thirty others -- shooting flames from their fingertips and setting nearly every roof on fire before the spell finally terminated, sending them plummeting lifelessly into the Thames (which, as everyone knows, is the only river in England).
The people next door were last seen scrambling to join the panic-stricken stampede, husband frantically beating at his walrus-like mustache where a stray floating ember had singed it, wife craning her ostrich-like neck to look back -- never having read the cautionary tale of Lot’s Wife -- and blimp-like son huffing, puffing and loudly sniveling that he’d had no time to pack his eighteen TVs, play-stations and VCRs before running for his life.
*******
The Muggle firemen who arrived at the scene of the disaster were too busy extinguishing flaring hotspots all over the immediate vicinity to observe the two shadowy figures huddled together on the front lawn of one of the few houses that had mysteriously escaped damage, save for the front door hanging at an odd angle from its hinges.
Had they noticed, they would perhaps have been a bit perplexed by the words the couple were uttering in hushed voices as they moved several feet apart, staring at the ground as they walked through the twilight gloom.
“I think this was Dumbledore.”
“I think this was too.”
Tonks winced reverentially. “Voldemort couldn’t do it. Grindelwald couldn’t do it. Who would have thought that, in the end, He would be clapped to death by a pair of gloves? What a way to go.”
"Oh, my God, Albus!" Remus howled. (Being a Werewolf, he could do that.) He fell to his knees in Horror. He rent his garments. He tore handfuls of extremely thick, totally grey wolf-pelt from his head. He ululated Phoenix-like lamentations to the uncaring void above him.
Tonks gently placed a hand on his disconsolate shoulder. "He was a god to you, Remus?"
“He met me in the woods near my parents’ house when I was ten years old and pulled a thorn from my paw, Tonks! He allowed me into Hogwarts -- twice! Despite the fact that I nearly ate a student -- twice! HE WAS THE MAN WHO MADE ME EVERYTHING I AM TODAY!”
Contemplating the bare patches on his scalp, the tufts of lupine fur scattered over the ground around him, the shreds and tatters of what could only charitably be called rags adorning his emaciated frame and, last and certainly least, his Shar-Pei-like face, Tonks couldn’t agree more.
Her chin quivered. “Oh, Remus,” she moaned. “I told you we should have tried rabbit ears first.”
Remus’ eyes took on an unholy Marauderish gleam. Grinning lycanthropically, he backed his non-bride into a dark corner of the front porch. “You know I just love it when you moan,” he said seductively.
******
And so, after our Romantic leads spent several hours sensibly and morally Obliviating everyone in the county, including Mrs. Figg’s cats, so that they wouldn’t continue to worry their cute and empty little Muggle heads over such trivial matters as why half the neighborhood had burnt to the ground overnight without anyone noticing, it was finally off to Bedlam, erm, bed for the dynamic duo. (“You be Robin this time, Remus.”)
And as the sun rose in a blinding burst of Gryffindor red the next morning, this was a Sign to All that the world had mysteriously been put right.
Voldemort suddenly realized that he had been a bad boy, traveled to Tibet and became a Buddhist monk. (And he didn’t even have to shave his head!)
Severus Snape suddenly realized that he had been a bad boy and Avada Kedavra’d himself. (Don’t you just love a happy ending?)
Harry Potter suddenly realized that he had been a bad boy and spent the rest of his life wandering the face of the earth, apologizing profusely to everyone he met about having put them through this “Chosen One” rubbish in the first place. (He was finally stopped by an adorable little girl with an acute case of dead-eye and her brother’s slingshot.)
Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger finally got it on with their lives. (They named their firstborn son Potter Riddle Snape Granger-Weasley.)
All was peaceful. All was still. All was calm. All was bright. All was well.
And Remus and Tonks thought they would finally live happily ever after in their cozy little cottage behind a white picket fence in Muggle-land.
But then the humming began....
Second Author's Note: Don't hurt me.
(Tonks Helped)
Author: shield_wolf
Rating & Warnings: PG-13, mostly for innuendo; Crack!Fic beyond human comprehension, endurance or hope of forgiveness; Wholesale slaughter of all manner of sacred canon and fanon cows
Prompts: Picture # 8 (Flames), Day of Possibility, Dragon-hide Gloves, Horror/Romance
Word Count: 2539
Summary: AU: Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks have abandoned both the war effort and the wizarding world altogether and are trying to create a new life for themselves disguised as Muggles. But an evil figure from their past may be coming back to haunt them....
Author’s Notes: Apologies in advance to everyone I may have offended, both real and imaginary. I’ll be turning in my “Remus/Tonks Fan” badge at the door when I leave. (Can I get away with offering a state of overtime-induced delirium as my excuse instead?) And if AU doesn’t qualify as “Possibility,” what does?
How Remus Lupin Saved the World (although He Didn’t Mean to, He Swears)
(Tonks Helped)
Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks eyed the small square box warily.
“Well, it was your idea.”
“So was allowing Dumbledore to manipulate me into teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts, even though we both knew the position was cursed.” ‘Why did I say that?’ he wondered guiltily. ‘It’s as though I’m not abjectly grateful to him, when the man made me everything I am today.’ He took a mental note to rip a page out of Harry’s house-elf friend Dobby’s book and go iron his hands later as penance.
“Regardless,” Remus continued after completing his mental flagellations. “We need a television. Without access to the Daily Prophet, the Floo Network, the WWN or even the ability to communicate via Patronus, how else will we be able to keep abreast of news of the outside world?”
Tonks giggled.
“What?”
“You said ‘breast,’ you naughty boy,” she replied, whipping off her Weird Sisters T-shirt at the speed of light.
*******
He appeared as though he had just popped out of the ground. His robes were shockingly, vibrantly purple, and they swished around his ankles swishily. His boot heels tapped in rhythm with the bobbing of his long white beard as he walked.
He was coming.
And he was humming.
*******
“So now what?”
“If you’ll just untie these electrical cords from around my wrists, ankles and neck, sweetheart, I. May. Be. Able. To. Help. You.”
Tonks sighed. “You’re so cute when you’re in the throes of scary but somehow still hapless rage, Remus.”
“DON’T BRING DUMBLEDORE INTO THIS!”
“Who said anything about Dumbledore?”
“Erm. Right then. Let’s get to it.”
Tonks lunged enthusiastically.
“No, not that it!”
*******
He was humming.
And he was coming. Up Magnolia Drive. Down Wisteria Lane. Over Magnolia Crescent.
He stopped in the middle of the road.
‘Where the hell am I?’ he thought, tossing his long white beard over the shoulder of his garish green star-spangled robes testily, because passing motorists were looking at him funny, and he supposed it must be the hair.
*******
Remus hung his head milquetoastily.
“I don’t mean to be difficult. It’s just that I regret marrying you, Nymphadora -“
Tonks’ eyes took on an unholy Black glow. “DON’T CALL ME NYMPHADORA! YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I DESPISE THAT NAME MY TERTIARY CHARACTER OF A MOTHER GAVE ME! IN FACT, NEVER EVEN USE THE LETTER ‘N’ IN MY PRESENCE AGAIN!”
“Is that you, Harry?” queried Remus.
Tonks emitted an ear-piercing shriek, inspiring Remus to glance towards the kitchen in the faint hope that he had mistaken the teakettle for his beloved’s dulcet tones. When he returned his gaze to the object of his mid-life crisis, he noticed that both her face and hair had assumed a fetching shade of scarlet. (Being a Metamorphmagus, she could do that.)
“And furthermore,” she continued menacingly, “we aren’t even married, remember? We decided that we would live in sin instead, so that we could blend in with the rest of the self-righteous hypocrite Muggles in suburban Little Whinging. SO REMEMBER THAT!”
“Yes, ymphadora.”
“WHAT WAS THAT?”
“othing.”
Tonks’ livid features reverted to their usual ordinary but somehow still comely state of composure. “Well, that’s settled then,” she concluded chirpily.
Remus favored her with a swift smile, and she turned her attention to the recalcitrant television once again.
Remus' face fell. Possibly off his head entirely.
*******
He was no longer humming. Instead, he had closed his eyes, taken a deep calming breath and concentrated on the words of power that always provided all answers to life’s mysteries for him in times of direst need.
Nitwit. Blubber. Oddment. Tweak.
Aha! there was the house he was seeking, glowing like a beacon in his mind’s eye. Not a very original location for a hideout, all things considered, but --
“Watch where you’re going, you senile old coot!”
He sighed. Silly ignorant Muggles. He really should have listened to Gellert when he’d had the chance.
Then he collided with a tree.
*******
With the television finally plugged into the electrical socket and the two lovebirds ensconced on the sofa, Remus and Tonks expected that it would be smooth rowing from that moment onward.
But they couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Remus, isn’t this a program about Bermuda? Why is it snowing there?”
“No clue,” he muttered shortly. “No, wait a moment. I think Arthur Weasley -- may he rest in peace -- once tried to explain to me about signal reception interference on Muggle televisions, and I believe he may have called it ‘snow.’ Or smog.”
“That does sound familiar,” Tonks replied brightly. “Since my Dad was a Muggleborn, I used to watch the telly all the time when I was visiting my grandparents’ house.”
“So do you remember any solutions for correcting the problem?” Remus asked quietly.
“Seems to me I can recall something about ... bunny toes? That doesn’t sound quite right. But it doesn’t matter right now, since that's given me a few other ideas...."
*******
After using his superior powers of persuasion to convince the Muggle police officer that he had not in fact been drinking and was simply en route to a Halloween party three months early, he continued on his way.
‘Almost there,’ he thought with a mysterious gleam of triumph in his now-open eyes. ‘Being rather cleverer than most men, I should easily be able to convince my foolish wayward Order members to return to the fold. And maybe I can wangle a free dinner invitation out of them too while I’m at it!’
His humming began to assume stentorian proportions.
*******
“I don’t think we have any choice, Tonksadora,” Remus slurred wearily, although it had nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the bottle of Firewhiskey he had conjured and kept surreptitiously inhaling every time she was momentarily distracted. “We’ll have to rezhort to magic to fix thish.”
“But how can we? We snapped our wands when we went into hiding, remember?” she challenged him belligerently. (Being an Auror, as well as unreasonably stubborn and obtuse, she could do that.)
Remus sighed. The words Damn Dumbledore flitterbloomed in his mind for no apparent reason, because he really was ever-so-grateful to the old bast- erm, wiz-ard for making him everything he was today.
“I have something to confess,” he said soberly, which took an heroic effort under the present circumstances. “I don’t really need a wand to do magic, strictly shpeaking. I was never to tell anyone, because my parents and Dumbledore made me promise, but --“
His voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “I’m the Heir of Gryffindor.”
Tonks caught her breath -- after screaming with laughter for at least five minutes and rolling across the floor until a wall finally stopped her progress, then choked out, “And I’m the Bloody Baron, mate!”
This was not precisely the response Remus had anticipated -- nor deeply, desperately craved, since he liked to be liked. Drawing himself up to his full height of between 5’7” and 6’3,” he glowered leoninely, feeling suddenly enflamed with courage, or perhaps Firewhiskey. “You doubt my unfamothable powers, woman? Behold!”
As Tonks was regaining her feet, still dashing tears of mirth from her eyes, Remus adopted his best dueling stance and aimed his index finger at the television. “This is a useful little spell,” he explained. “Please watch closely.”
“Eliminato Interferum!” he roared.
At that very instant, Tonks blindly slipped on a banana peel, careened flailing across the entire living room, executing a 10-point triple-somersault along the way, and lightly bumped Remus’ outstretched arm before collapsing in a pile of indiscriminate body parts at his feet.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Remus. “Why don’t you do that in bed?”
But graver matters than these were afoot, because with his aim spoiled, the “eliminatus interferus” spell of his own secretly ingenious devising had struck nowhere near its intended target but instead had hit a pair of Dragon-hide Gloves conveniently draped over the back of the sofa, even though they shouldn’t have been in the house at all, since they are Magical Objects and Remus and Tonks were pretending to be Muggles. (But Tonks found them kinky and couldn’t bear to leave them behind when she and her paramour abandoned the wizarding world in the dead of night.)
The gloves began to swell ominously, rapidly growing to a size that could comfortably engulf Rubeus Hagrid’s hands. They quivered as though quickening to life. They produced a glow strangely like magical flames.
They roared.
Remus blanched even whiter than his normal pasty, peaky complexion.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” the Heir of Gryffindor said tremulously.
*******
He was coming and humming up the driveway now, his incessant cacophony setting off burglar alarms, his historically-influential footsteps setting off seismographs world-wide. He paused to tip his hat to the window minutely cracked open at the house next door, as a blonde woman was crouched there at the tiny gap with one beady eye pressed against it. She shrieked and fainted.
He had barely arrived at the front door and was just raising his fist to knock, when it opened to reveal the very biddable dupe, erm, dear boy he had been seeking.
Moony’s brown, green, amber, violet or possibly aquamarine eyes stared at him. The twinkling blue eyes behind his gold-rimmed half-moon glasses stared back. His violently vividest red and gold robes billowed impressively around his tall form in the apocalyptically rising wind.
“Hi there,” said Albus Dumbledore. “Mind if I interfere and generally wreak havoc in your lives again?”
Two things happened simultaneously.
Remus opened his mouth to say, beta-maleishly, “Oh my goodness, gracious, yes, Sir! Doratonks and I were just talking about you earlier, reminiscing about how much we missed your infallible sagacity and peerless puppeteering. Would you like to come in? Stay for dinner? Stay the night? Stay forever? Ymphie can sleep on the sofa, and I’ll take the floor--”
But the gloves, still thrumming with the incalculably potent spell that had resurrected them to life and some semblance of their former glory, heard its invocational echo in their draconic pseudo-brain (Eliminato Interferum!) and detected before them the source of all interference in the life of their new Lord and Master -- whether he would ever develop the stones to admit it aloud or not.
They knew their Duty.
And they Obeyed.
'Oh, drat,' thought Dumbledore, seeing his doom swooping towards him, and Disapparated just in the nick of time.
Or maybe not.
The thunderous boom that ensued sent most of the Muggle neighbors scurrying into the street like the witless sheep they were, wondering why the Concorde was flying overhead that time of evening.
And it’s a good thing they did this too, because the Transfigured and Engorged Dragon-hide gloves, still clasped firmly together, albeit dripping an unidentifiable ooze, had shot though the doorway into the sky and celebrated their newly-found freedom by proceeding to zoom around the neighborhood -- and at least thirty others -- shooting flames from their fingertips and setting nearly every roof on fire before the spell finally terminated, sending them plummeting lifelessly into the Thames (which, as everyone knows, is the only river in England).
The people next door were last seen scrambling to join the panic-stricken stampede, husband frantically beating at his walrus-like mustache where a stray floating ember had singed it, wife craning her ostrich-like neck to look back -- never having read the cautionary tale of Lot’s Wife -- and blimp-like son huffing, puffing and loudly sniveling that he’d had no time to pack his eighteen TVs, play-stations and VCRs before running for his life.
*******
The Muggle firemen who arrived at the scene of the disaster were too busy extinguishing flaring hotspots all over the immediate vicinity to observe the two shadowy figures huddled together on the front lawn of one of the few houses that had mysteriously escaped damage, save for the front door hanging at an odd angle from its hinges.
Had they noticed, they would perhaps have been a bit perplexed by the words the couple were uttering in hushed voices as they moved several feet apart, staring at the ground as they walked through the twilight gloom.
“I think this was Dumbledore.”
“I think this was too.”
Tonks winced reverentially. “Voldemort couldn’t do it. Grindelwald couldn’t do it. Who would have thought that, in the end, He would be clapped to death by a pair of gloves? What a way to go.”
"Oh, my God, Albus!" Remus howled. (Being a Werewolf, he could do that.) He fell to his knees in Horror. He rent his garments. He tore handfuls of extremely thick, totally grey wolf-pelt from his head. He ululated Phoenix-like lamentations to the uncaring void above him.
Tonks gently placed a hand on his disconsolate shoulder. "He was a god to you, Remus?"
“He met me in the woods near my parents’ house when I was ten years old and pulled a thorn from my paw, Tonks! He allowed me into Hogwarts -- twice! Despite the fact that I nearly ate a student -- twice! HE WAS THE MAN WHO MADE ME EVERYTHING I AM TODAY!”
Contemplating the bare patches on his scalp, the tufts of lupine fur scattered over the ground around him, the shreds and tatters of what could only charitably be called rags adorning his emaciated frame and, last and certainly least, his Shar-Pei-like face, Tonks couldn’t agree more.
Her chin quivered. “Oh, Remus,” she moaned. “I told you we should have tried rabbit ears first.”
Remus’ eyes took on an unholy Marauderish gleam. Grinning lycanthropically, he backed his non-bride into a dark corner of the front porch. “You know I just love it when you moan,” he said seductively.
******
And so, after our Romantic leads spent several hours sensibly and morally Obliviating everyone in the county, including Mrs. Figg’s cats, so that they wouldn’t continue to worry their cute and empty little Muggle heads over such trivial matters as why half the neighborhood had burnt to the ground overnight without anyone noticing, it was finally off to Bedlam, erm, bed for the dynamic duo. (“You be Robin this time, Remus.”)
And as the sun rose in a blinding burst of Gryffindor red the next morning, this was a Sign to All that the world had mysteriously been put right.
Voldemort suddenly realized that he had been a bad boy, traveled to Tibet and became a Buddhist monk. (And he didn’t even have to shave his head!)
Severus Snape suddenly realized that he had been a bad boy and Avada Kedavra’d himself. (Don’t you just love a happy ending?)
Harry Potter suddenly realized that he had been a bad boy and spent the rest of his life wandering the face of the earth, apologizing profusely to everyone he met about having put them through this “Chosen One” rubbish in the first place. (He was finally stopped by an adorable little girl with an acute case of dead-eye and her brother’s slingshot.)
Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger finally got it on with their lives. (They named their firstborn son Potter Riddle Snape Granger-Weasley.)
All was peaceful. All was still. All was calm. All was bright. All was well.
And Remus and Tonks thought they would finally live happily ever after in their cozy little cottage behind a white picket fence in Muggle-land.
But then the humming began....
Second Author's Note: Don't hurt me.