and the stream runs in circles from the chasm to the core
Who: MULTIPLE THREADS! Expected: there are some plans. Unexpected: how would I know?
When: Right after this-with flexibility. All sparked by this after this.
Where: The Clinic
Format: [hates choosing] Whatever I start with, do your own thing!
What: Tonks visitations. Lupin's return. Shirley in da house. Trepkos the Grouch. AND MORE.
Warnings: Ow ow ( Read more... )
When: Right after this-with flexibility. All sparked by this after this.
Where: The Clinic
Format: [hates choosing] Whatever I start with, do your own thing!
What: Tonks visitations. Lupin's return. Shirley in da house. Trepkos the Grouch. AND MORE.
Warnings: Ow ow ( Read more... )
Nymphadora heard the familiar pop of disapparation but he did not immediately appear. Her forge device was still resting in her lap. Idly, her fingers brushed over it. She pushed a few buttons but it was not hope that drove her.
She'd given up on hope. She just wanted to know what kept him again.
Tonks lowered her head. She sat in the farthest corner of her room. Her back was in the corner so that no one could sneak up on her. Both the door and window were visible. There was no way anyone could sneak up behind her.
She wasn't doing much else other than sitting. There just wasn't anything she felt like doing. She didn't do much crying and she slept less than that. To sleep meant that she had to dream, dreams brought nightmares. If she didn't sleep she could avoid replaying the grisly scenes in her brain.
Her door was closed but then suddenly it opened. Tonks clutched her wand and aimed it at the door. The person entering the room wasn't who she wanted it to be. It was neither friend nor foe which blessedly kept her from hexing him.
"This isn't your room! Get out!"
Reply
Autopilot muscle memory failure. He'd been distracted.
He should say Sorry they look alike from the outside but instead he raises his eyebrows at her wand.
"Are those standard issue in this place?"
Reply
Why didn't he just roll out? She'd let him but he had to do it now. "Please get out, please."
Reply
His tone is actually… trying to be gentle. With open, unguarded lunacy, he feels more allegiance and sympathy than with anyone putting on put-togetherness in this deranged place.
He tries to turn the wheelchair around. But the door has swung closed behind him. Trying to negotiate the door and the chair and the corner in a hurry is taking obviously more commotion and clamor, more time than was called for…
Reply
She doesn't mean it. Tonks tucks her knees into her chest and covers her head with her hands. She starts screaming, over and over she apologizes but she is not looking at the man in the wheelchair.
Reply
But when Lupin heard that scream, he did indeed rip the door off.
He steps over it into the room, to see Tonks sobbing inconsolably, insensible to all else, curled into one corner; the wall opposite her as blasted and blackened as his plain in the Mist had been, with a negative-image unburned silhouette in the middle of it.
Casting the silhouette, Daniel Trepkos was still sitting in the wheelchair, looking absolutely stunned, clothing all-but burned away… but hair and skin and body absolutely impeccably unharmed and unmarred.
Lupin is momentarily tempted to cast Obliviate. But having seen Trepkos's past reaction to Lupin's wand when being used to soothe and heal, and deducing in an instant what had just happened, Lupin snaps his fingers and banishes his wand back to his pocket. He approaches Trepkos empty-handed to get him out of the room.
Several minutes later, convinced not only emotionally but objectively that Trepkos was not in nearly as much need as Tonks and delegating his care to Miranda, Lupin was back in the charred room, and kneeling before Tonks to gently gently brush his hand against her hand to bring her out of her panic attack.
Reply
She recognizes Remus but can't seem to stop crying. Sobs wrack her body. It is not a pretty effect.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it." Her voice cuts out and she gasps then inhales sharply. "I just wanted to blast the door open. I didn't mean to call the fire." At any other time, she could have forgiven anyone. It had been an accident but this is not any other time. "He wouldn't go away. Why wouldn't he go away?"
She lowers her hands, they shake. In the calamity, she dropped her wand. It's only then that she realizes her wand is gone. "My wand! Where is it." She slides out of her chair and onto the ground. Frantically, and slightly reminiscent of a wounded creature, she looks for her wand. "Where is it? I have to have it."
Her wand is near Lupin's foot but she misses it, somehow.
Reply
He can't even want to kill Bellatrix right now. It wouldn't help Tonks at all.
That he hadn't killed Bellatrix already… that Lestrange's wrath had anything to do with Lupin in a way that didn't even apply to this Tonks… that he hadn't been here… when you love someone it's only natural no matter how illogical to feel that everything bad that ever happens to them must be entirely your own fault…
Trepkos had been untouched by the fire, but everything inside Lupin is burning, burning, as he kneels to take her hands-his foot nudging her wand in the process. He hears the clatter and grabs it to show her; his fingers of one hand wrapped around the wand, those of the other twined through hers.
"He's fine. He's completely unharmed. I don't know how but I promise, it's true. You didn't hurt anyone."
How could she have hurt you…
Reply
"I'm sorry... I didn't mean it. You would never." But she still cannot stop crying.
Her hand grips her wand. As long as she has it no one can hurt her, right? With her other hand, she grips Remus' hand as though she's not going to let go. Tonks leans forward and rests her forehead against his chest. "But I did Remus. I hurt people." She is sure to get his shirt wet from her tears.
It's hard for her to get out between the crying. Some of her words are unintelligible, some of them are cut off by sobbing. However, a few words can be heard quite clearly. She mentions the Cruciatus Curse and then the killing one but they weren't used on her, not that day. Bellatrix brought others into the room. Did she let Bellatrix tear them apart or did Tonks put them out of her misery?
Tonks put them out of her misery.
"Why didn't she kill me Remus?"
Reply
The fire has turned to ice. His heart is pounding fit to bruise. It hurts to beat.
no words no thoughts of course of course of course
At the last question he pulls back, holds her face in his hands, and kisses her cheeks under her eyes. Her tears are on his lips as he sits back to look her in the face. His voice shaking but intent because that is your answer Dora your way to survive what she made you do it's so important you know it's right there you said it you know it let me say it back to you-
"Because killing you would have been merciful. It would have been kind. It would have ended the agony. She didn't and you did because she is cruel and loves evil and you always do the right thing."
Reply
Tonks allows Lupin to pull her close and hold her. Her wandless hand grips the front of his shirt. The hand that holds her wand tightly snakes its way around him. She cries until the sobs no longer wrack her body but it's not over for her, not even close.
Her lips form a thin line. Knowing something is true and believing it are two separate things. Deep down, she knows she did the right thing. She just can't make herself believe it. The curses are Unforgivable for a reason.
When he kisses her, and oh how she would have melted had this scene not be a tragedy, Tonks closes her eyes. Despite his hands holding her head, she shakes it a little bit. "I could've... I could've tried to turn her wand on her."
But Tonks had tried, it just didn't work.
Reply
"I've fought her since coming here. On my feet, uninjured. On neutral ground. Armed with my own wand." Better: Lily's. "It was a draw. Her wand wouldn't have cooperated with you unless you'd already defeated her. And you couldn't defeat her without a wand.
"And this time she defeated me too."
He leans forward to touch his forehead to hers. It's not only her tears on his face now. "I'm sorry I'm so sorry. If I could have died to prevent this I would have. I was trying to find you… I never meant to leave you."
Reply
She knows though. She knows how to go back on her Forge. Bellatrix showed her things, horrible things. Tonks had been shown Bellatrix's trick and heard Bellatrix admission that she had made him bleed.
"Please don't leave me again."
Though she is of no mind to confront it now, a reckoning is coming.
Reply
"I'm yours. I won't leave."
(Until she asks him to.)
…Merlyn, suddenly how obvious now, whether anyone noticed or not, he must have been wearing that wedding ring the whole time…
Reply
Tonks leans her head against him but the top of her head doesn't reach his shoulder. It's only then that she the weight of her exhaustion hits her. She's so tired but she can't sleep either.
"Will you tell me a story Remus? Talk to me? Anything?" She thinks that if she can focus on his voice then maybe the nightmares will stay away.
And as for his ring, she's never noticed. There's never been a reason to.
Reply
His mind is blank of stories, not ones that feel worth anything, but for her… he opens his mouth and trusts that something will be there for her.
It may be.
"Every world goes to war. People carry their wars from one world to the next, whether they apply in the new one or not-whether they ever applied at all. It's easy to look at this trend and think war is eternal and people are incapable of doing or wanting anything else. But then one is reminded-one is shown-that some wars end. And can be worth something. When they leave a better world in their wake."
Shifting away from her ever so slightly, only just enough to free a space over his inner pocket; and rather than displace her further by reaching into it, he held out his hand and murmured, "Accio ecfigia."
Something square and white slipped free from his jacket and flew into his hand. He brought it down to put it into her hand.
She won't know that Io was the one who gave this to him. [ 1 ] That he doesn't know the exact circumstances that would (when?) create it. That he doesn't know rightly how or why it was given to him, except that Io asked someone powerful, because at that time she still cared for him. That showing it to Lestrange had provoked her to mass-murder [ 2 ]-so you see because of her I've killed people here too, for far less reason than you-and may have been the spark that led to the first trick that had made him bleed. Nor that it had helped him back out of it. [ 3 ]
But she can know, as surely as he did, that it's real:
The wizarding-world artifact, the moving photograph of grown-up Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione, standing in a peaceful, repaired street, smiling and waving and laughing, surrounded by (unmistakably their own) children. Alive, victorious, at peace.
"This has helped me many times here," he murmured into her hair. "You take it for a while."
Reply
Leave a comment