Raise Your Lantern High, chapter 14: Questions and Offers
RAISE YOUR LANTERN HIGH
Summary: In which Remus and Tonks fight battles, arrest criminals, befriend werewolves, overcome inner demons and, despite it all, find themselves a happy ending. A love story, and a story of the Order years. (My Remus/Tonks epic, which has been years in the making! This is the second half of the story, set in the Half-Blood Prince year.)
Chapter 14: Questions and Offers
Sometimes in the frozen nights I go roaming
In the bed you used to share with me
I wake in the field with the cold and the lonesome
The moon’s the only face that I see
-Josh Ritter, Wolves
“Didn’t expect to see you here again,” said the Alpha.
After once again concealing his wand outside the village, Remus had made his way across the snow-covered moor and found the pack much as he had left them, gathered around an evening fire at the doorway of the lean-to. He had gone straight to the Alpha, bowed his head in submissive greeting and waited for acknowledgement.
Now, at the Alpha’s words, Remus could look up. Was that a spark of amusement in the man’s eyes? Because he didn’t look surprised to see Remus. If anything, he looked like a man pleased to have been proved right.
“It seems your time with our pack is not quite finished,” the Alpha went on, his tone still somehow teasing. Then, more gently, he added, “Welcome back, Quiet.”
“Thank you, Alpha.” Remus bowed again and stepped back.
He looked around at the pack, and most of them nodded in acknowledgement. Little Joy gave him a grin. Remus found a seat by the fire on a log next to Ashmita, who offered him a hunk of bread. He took it with thanks, surprised at the fondness he felt as he looked around at this circle of werewolves.
But it was clear within Remus’ first night and day back that all was not well. The tension he’d sensed before, the discontent of the younger ones, was more palpable than ever. Remus thought guiltily that he ought not to have left, even for those few days. But what could he have done, if he had been here? He ranked lower in the pack than even the teenagers.
On his second day back, Remus was sent out with Ronan - Hardwood - to hunt for small game. Remus was as useless as he had ever been at hunting, but the Alpha seemed implacably determined to train Remus into a successful wild-living werewolf, no matter how long it took.
Ronan looked pensive and talked little for most of the day. It was only as they were heading back, a hare slung over Ronan’s shoulder and the pale winter sun low in the sky although it was only mid-afternoon, that Ronan asked, looking at the ground in front of him rather than at Remus, “Have you ever killed person?”
Remus bit back his startled response, calling up the teacher within himself instead. “No, I haven’t,” he said, keeping his voice calm and neutral. “Why do you ask?”
Ronan scuffled his feet through the dusting of snow on the ground as they walked. “Just - I dunno. The others” - surely meaning Narun and Tamara and Adair - ”talk about it like it must be the greatest rush, you know, this incredible thrill of power, but I keep thinking, that’s a person, right? Even if it’s only a Muggle, or some stupid bigoted wizard who hates us anyway. It’s -” He broke off, unsure. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Remus said, matching his walking pace to Ronan’s but avoiding the boy’s eyes, because Ronan seemed less uncomfortable in this conversation when he didn’t have to look at Remus directly. “I know exactly what you mean. I would never deliberately take a human life. No matter who that person was or what he or she believed.”
“Yeah,” Ronan mumbled. “That’s - yeah.” Then he fell silent again, no sound but the crunching of his well-worn boots on the snow.
Remus waited to see if further questions emerged, but for the moment Ronan’s curiosity seemed to be assuaged.
Even with the undercurrent of tension simmering in the pack, the winter nights around the fire were cosy. The adults chatted together, though the younger ones often withdrew to the far side of the fire and kept their own company.
And nearly every evening, Joy begged Anna, the Mother, to tell stories. But Anna tired early on these long, cold nights, so once Joy discovered that Remus could also be prevailed upon for storytelling, she would often crawl into his lap and badger him until he told her a tale.
He was cautious, at first, unsure how well talk of wizarding culture would be received here. No Tales of Beedle the Bard would be welcome, surely, with their emphasis on wizarding magic. So Remus drew instead on anecdotes from his own travels abroad in younger years.
One evening, though, he slipped up and mentioned Hogwarts.
“Hogwarts? What’s that?” Joy’s curiosity was instantly aroused.
Remus glanced across at Serena, sitting nearby, to gauge her reaction, and she gave him a small nod. All right, then. “It’s a school of magic,” he told Joy, who was nestled in his lap with her head on his shoulder. It was achingly sweet, her trusting weight against his chest.
“Magic? Like the magic that Mother does around our camp, so humans won’t find us?”
“Not exactly,” Remus said. “It’s a school for learning a different kind of magic. The kind that wizards do with wands.”
Joy craned her neck around to look at him. Remus wondered if she’d ever seen wand magic performed. Surely in her younger childhood, before she was turned? But perhaps she didn’t remember.
“Could I go there? To that school?”
Remus glanced helplessly towards Serena, but this time she offered no assistance.
“I suppose so,” he answered slowly. “The school is open to anyone with magical ability.”
“Do I have magical abil - ability? How do I know?”
“Have you ever made something happen, accidentally, just because of how you were feeling? Made things shrink, or grow, or fly through the air?”
“When I was little, I could make my dollies talk to each other. That was when I was little, though, I don’t have dolls anymore,” she added in an explanatory tone, as though Remus might have failed to notice this.
Remus glanced at Serena again, and caught a fleeting glimpse of some private pain on her face. So, for all Serena’s talk of the inferiority of life among wizards, she was also sorry for what Joy had lost. Remus hurriedly looked away.
He was about to shift the conversation to a less fraught topic, when Joy asked, “Did you go to that school? To Hogwarts?”
“Yes,” Remus said, because he couldn’t lie to this child. “I did.”
Predictably, her eyes went wide. “Oh! Tell me about it! Tell me stories!” She settled more determinedly into his lap and fixed her great dark eyes on him.
Remus could see there was no getting out of this now. He shifted Joy onto one knee, so they were both sitting comfortably. “Well, first of all, everyone who comes to the school gets Sorted into one of four houses,” he began. Despite himself, he was warming to this task, of sharing stories from the happiest days of his werewolf childhood with this particular werewolf child. “And I was very lucky, because in my house, I had three wonderful friends…”
- - - - -
Each morning all through that cold January, as Tonks hurriedly pulled on clothes in her draughty attic room, she told herself fiercely, Today I will do one thing that makes a difference. She hated feeling idle, feeling that the war was getting worse and she wasn’t doing anything to stop it. So she threw herself into her census list and her rounds of the village, her eyes always open for the slightest shreds of information.
“You know, I thought I saw a window open at the Three Broomsticks, the day that poor girl from the school was cursed,” a plump-faced Hogsmeade matron mused, in one of the seemingly casual conversations Tonks was growing adept at guiding subtly towards the topics she most needed to hear about. The woman went on, “And that was even though it was October then, and such a chilly day. Might have been one of the windows in the toilets, it seems to me.”
Tonks had lunch at the Three Broomsticks several days a week, keeping her eyes and ears open from over a sandwich or a slice of Rosmerta’s hearty cottage pie, as the village’s inhabitants came and went. So the next time she was at the pub, Tonks took the opportunity to ask Rosmerta if she’d noticed an open window that day.
“An open window? In October?” Rosmerta frowned from behind the bar, her hands busy as always, pulling pints. “I couldn’t say for sure, but I doubt it, love. I’d have noticed something like that.”
She looked more tired than usual, Tonks thought, but then, didn’t they all. The cold and the war and the endless grey winter were so wearying, no matter how Tonks tried to ignore everything else and focus only on her work. Rosmerta looked the way everyone in Hogsmeade seemed to feel these days, grey and worn.
Hogwarts arranged a special one-off Floo connection to transport the students safely and speedily back to school at the end of their break, and Tonks was one of the Aurors who patrolled the grounds that day, as children Flooed in from all over the country.
The very idea of Flooing to Hogwarts struck Tonks as all wrong. The ritual of boarding the train; of seeing your friends again after what felt like ages, not mere weeks; of winding your way north through changing scenery as your excitement grew, all of that was part of the magic of Hogwarts.
Sometimes, it was the smallest of things that made Tonks long for this war to be over. She wanted back the days when kids could ride the Hogwarts Express without fear.
That same evening, after all the students had arrived back safely, Tonks was off-duty and curled up in her attic room with a book when her Aurorlog blared out its alarm. The hand position said Savage, who was currently on duty, and the colour meant Dementors.
Tonks leapt up and threw on her cloak, then Apparated to the edge of town in the direction the arrow on the Aurorlog’s metal rim was pointing. She found Savage and Dawlish there, casting their Patronus Charms at a swarm of Dementors that were gliding menacingly towards the town.
Tonks took up position beside them and cast her own Patronus, which charged down the Dementors in its new form, shaggy and huge. Despite her complicated feelings about her new Patronus, Tonks had to admit she found its fierce, protective wolf shape a comfort.
The nearest Dementors faltered as her Patronus charged, but there were more behind them. Now Proudfoot appeared, too, shouting as he cast his own Patronus. Between the four of them, all spell-casting with all their might, slowly they were able to drive the Dementors back beyond the next hill. Pushed that far from the village, the foully rattling creatures began to disperse with an air of defeat.
Panting, Tonks wiped sweat from her forehead, when the last of the Dementors had finally gone.
“Nice work,” Savage said, turning to the rest of them. “Good response time, too.”
“How long do you suppose until they try again?” Tonks asked.
Savage shrugged. “Couple of days, maybe? There are so many of them, now, and this is one of the biggest concentrations of human emotions in the area. The students arriving today probably drew them.”
Tonks nodded. That was what she had figured, too, that fending off Dementors was going to become a routine part of her work here. But it didn’t mean she had to like it.
She was doing her patrol rounds of the village a few days later, just turning a corner from the high street into a smaller lane, when a voice in her ear growled, “Look alive, lass! Where’s your vigilance?”
It was only her years of hard-won training that kept Tonks from jumping into the air in surprise. But thanks to those years of training, instead of startling, she spun on her heel and directed her wand up and at her unseen assailant’s throat, all in one smooth motion.
Even though she would recognise that particular voice anywhere.
Mad-Eye Moody - because of course it was him, and only he could look so thoroughly unconcerned at having a wand pressed into the soft skin beneath his Adam’s apple - gave Tonks that familiar grimace that she knew counted, with him, as almost a hint of a smile. She knew he was more pleased with her than he would willingly let on.
“That vigilant enough for you, Mad-Eye?” she asked, politely removing her wand from its position tight against his throat.
Moody coughed experimentally, found everything in working order, and frowned at her. “Your wand-carrying position is lax,” he said, and Tonks grinned, because that meant he couldn’t find anything else to criticise about her form, technique or reaction time.
“You come all the way up to Hogsmeade just to insult me?” Tonks asked, starting to walk again in the direction she’d been patrolling and trusting Moody to follow.
He gave a noncommittal grunt, as he stumped along beside her. “Wanted to make sure you weren’t slipping up.”
Tonks bit her lip against another smile. Coming from Moody, that was practically an expression of affection. He’d only been here grumping at her for half a minute, and already the grey Hogsmeade day seemed a little brighter.
“You don’t get to Order meetings often these days, being stationed up here,” he went on, his magical and non-magical eyes both swivelling side to side as they walked, always scanning for danger. “Thought you could do with a little extra training.”
It was true, her nearly round-the-clock responsibilities in Hogsmeade made it hard to slip away unnoticed for Order meetings. And as always, Dumbledore felt it was more important that Tonks maintain her good standing with the Auror Office. She missed the conviviality of the meetings, and a few of those duelling practice sessions Moody sometimes oversaw after the official end of a meeting wouldn’t go amiss either. Tonks missed that too, duelling for fun, but with professional-level focus. Fighting off Dementors did not count in the same way.
“So?” Moody demanded, and Tonks scanned back through his previous terse sentences, trying to figure out what question he thought he’d asked her and was waiting to hear answered.
“Oh!” she realised. “You came up here to run training exercises?”
Moody stumped his wooden leg a little harder against the ground with his next step, a bizarre form of conversational emphasis. “Good girl. I’ll find you after your patrol shift ends.”
With that, he turned and clomped away, in the direction of the Hog’s Head Inn. Tonks grinned at his receding back. Good old Moody, needing to be surly and dramatic at all times. She’d missed the old codger, and it seemed he’d missed her too, if he was coming out of his way to visit her in Hogsmeade. Whatever excuses he might make about his visit being merely for training purposes.
True to his word, Moody found Tonks when her shift ended for the day. He jerked his head at her, then took off walking towards the edge of town. “Thought we’d do better to find a field somewhere to practise in,” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t want to be scaring the locals.”
They found an open meadow about ten minutes’ walk outside of town and squared off in duelling stance, wands held ready. Tonks felt excitement thrum through her veins. She loved a good duel, and few people she’d ever fought were as good and as fast and as fearsome as Mad-Eye Moody. When you started your career as an Auror by training under Moody for three years, when you finally got out on active duty and fought actual criminals it was like a stroll in the park.
“Ready?” Moody growled. “Three, two, one -”
Light blasted at Tonks from the end of Moody’s wand. She dodged the spell, her body moving on pure instinct, shouting “Impedimenta!” at him as she went. Oh, it felt good to move. It felt like waking up after months of staying still.
Moody shifted into trying to Stun her, so Tonks did the same, and they spent an exhilarating several minutes ducking and dodging, trying to out-Stupefy each other. Then Moody shifted tack again, into water spells, then again to sneaky physical jinxes like Jelly-Legs and Sponge-Knees.
They duelled until the sun sank behind the hills and then for a while longer after that, until the dusk grew so deep that it was impossible to see their opponent’s movements. “Halt!” Moody yelled, from somewhere in the dark, and Tonks stowed her wand away in her robe, her breath heaving. She felt alive.
Moody came up beside her, his gnarled face barely visible in the gloom.
“Not bad,” he allowed. “You’re a little out of practice, but nothing regular training can’t fix. Same time next week?”
“Mad-Eye -” Tonks started to protest, thinking of her thousand duties, her punishing work schedule for the Aurors, her own personal task of keeping track of anything that changed amongst the population of the village, not to mention her occasional check-ins up at the castle to keep in communication with Dumbledore. The only time Tonks could remember getting a full night’s sleep in months had been at Christmas, and even that had been marred by heart-pounding dreams of shouting and flashes of light in the Department of Mysteries.
But then she stopped and took stock of how she felt right now, how her chest heaved and her legs ached and for once she didn’t feel that dreary, ever-present weight, like everything she did was pointless and she wasn’t even sure why she tried.
So instead she said, “Yeah. Same time next week. But next time, Mad-Eye, watch out, because I’m going to be the one who creeps up from behind and startles you.”
“Not likely,” Moody scoffed, but Tonks thought she saw a glimpse of that almost-smile as he Apparated away.
- - - - -
Sometimes in the pale afternoons, if Anna had enough energy, she would direct one of the others to lift little Joy up into the hammock with her, and she would teach the girl werewolf magic, the small but powerful incantations that werewolves used to protect their territory, to seek prey, to fend off predators. Joy picked up the spells quickly, displaying a clear aptitude for both magic and learning.
“Don’t you ever consider sending her to school?” Remus asked Serena. The two of them were once again taking a turn guarding the Mother, which in this case simply meant sitting nearby and watching as the pack’s oldest member and youngest member wove spells together.
“No,” Serena said, in a tone that discouraged further questioning.
Remus had known that would be her answer, of course, yet he couldn’t quite let it go. “She has undeniable magical talent. It would be a pity not to let her train and develop her skills.”
Serena turned to him, her elbows on her knees, her gaze fierce. “And where would that land her? One foot in a world that hates her, the other in a world where she’ll never quite belong, if she lives away from it for most of her growing up? No, thank you. You go on being in love with your precious wizarding world, but that’s not what I want for River.”
“It’s not ‘my’ wizarding world, and I’m not in love with it,” Remus said quietly. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’ve learned the value of the way you live here. This is your culture, and I would never tell you to send her away from it. But surely, someday, couldn’t there be a way for us to have both? Preserve werewolf traditions, but learn wand magic, too?”
Serena just shook her head, not looking at Remus. Her gaze out over the moor was distant.
Just old enough to be really looking forward to my school letter, she had once said, in telling Remus her own story of how she’d been turned into a werewolf. She, too, had once dreamed of a different life, before it had been stolen away from her.
“If you ever change your mind,” Remus said gently, “I know the headmaster and the deputy headmistress of Hogwarts. I could talk to them. It’s not as impossible as it sounds.”
“Thanks for the sentiment,” Serena snorted, her voice wry.
He let the matter drop for the time being.
The January full moon came and went, and Remus woke the morning after with his throat hoarse and sore. (Had he been howling? Did everyone else know it but him?) Ashmita laughed when she heard how his voice came out in a croak, but Serena, in her quiet way, went and fetched Remus cold water from the nearest iced-in creek. It amazed him now to think how hostile she had been towards him in the beginning, and now it seemed almost as if they were - dare he think it? - friends.
“Thank you, Serena,” he said, when she handed him the water in an old, chipped mug, one of the few castaway dishes in the camp. Then he corrected himself, “Trouble, I mean. I’m sorry. All these months, and I still can’t seem to get my head around werewolf names.”
“That’s all right,” she said, as she squatted down next to him on the ground and watched him sip from the cup. “I think I sort of like it. No one’s called me that in decades.”
Later that afternoon, Joy came and wriggled her way into Remus’ lap, digging her elbows into his knees and demanding stories. The day after a full moon was always a rest day for the pack, but for Joy, that simply meant more grown-ups around to entertain her.
Remus shifted her onto his knee and brushed a stray slim plait out of her eyes.
“Once upon a time, there was a young boy who was a wizard,” he began. Remus had all too soon run through all the fairy tales he knew, at least the ones he judged to be not too offensive to werewolf sensibilities, and begun to wonder what other stories he could tell Joy. Then, to his chagrin, he’d discovered that his own Hogwarts boyhood provided endless fodder for amusing anecdotes and tales of bold daring.
“Was his name James?” Joy demanded with a child’s sage assurance that she knew all. Remus wasn’t sure what it said about him that, even when it was his own childhood he was narrating, James and Sirius generally managed to take the leading roles.
“Why, yes, how did you know?” he agreed, smiling down into Joy’s eager face.
“And did he have a best friend named Sirius?” she demanded.
“You’re a very good guesser.”
“Did they play lots of pranks and get in trouble at school?”
With an internal sigh, hoping he wasn’t hopelessly corrupting this child, Remus said, “Yes, they did. But they also had lots of adventures, and did daring deeds, and were very clever at magic. And on this particular spring morning when our story takes place, James and Sirius were meant to be doing an assignment for their Potions class.”
“Potions class?” Joy contorted her face into the quizzical expression that meant he’d used a term she didn’t know and he was now expected to explain himself.
“The study of how to make magical drinks and special mixtures that have different powers,” Remus told her. “There are potions that can make you look like a different person, or make someone laugh, or make you breathe fire for a day.”
“Fun!” Joy declared, wriggling with excitement at the idea. Remus glanced over at Serena, wondering if he was treading too far into the territory of the human magic Serena didn’t want her daughter learning, but Serena, sitting nearby with her back resting against a log, was simply watching the two of them with a faint smile.
“Anyway,” Remus hurried on, “James and Sirius and two other friends were meant to be doing their Potions homework. But it was a beautiful day, and James said he wanted to go outside, and Sirius said he wanted to go outside, too. So they talked their friend Remus into doing the assignment for the whole group.”
“Remus as in you-Remus?” Somehow Joy had picked up that this was also his name, although the pack only ever called him as Quiet.
“Yes, Remus as in me-Remus. But this was a long-time-ago-Remus. And that Remus didn’t think he was any good at Potions. It always took him twice as long in class to do the assignments that James and Sirius completed without even trying. And Remus’ potions never came out quite the right colour; sometimes they were cobalt blue when they were meant to be royal blue. Sometimes they were lime green when they were supposed to be chartreuse.”
“What’s chartreuse?”
Remus tried to think of anything Joy might have seen in her life on the moor that matched that colour and came up blank. “It’s a very bright green-y yellow,” he said, wishing he could do better for her. If only they had books here! If only he could use his wand to draw images in the air, and demonstrate concepts for her that way.
Joy nodded, accepting this explanation as adequate.
“So on this particular day, Remus’ friends left him to mix a Drowsiness Draught by himself.”
“A what?”
“A drink that makes a person feel sleepy. It’s not a very difficult potion, just five ingredients and a lot of stirring after they’re put together, but Remus was used to working in class with a partner to help him, not having to do it alone. So he got his five ingredients all laid out and ready, and chopped everything up just the way the book said to do. Then it was time to mix the ingredients together in his cauldron. And what do you think happened?”
“It was the best potion ever!” Joy cheered.
Remus laughed. “What makes you say that?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Because it’s a story. Stories always have a happy ending.”
Remus blinked. However untrue that statement often proved in real life, he was glad Joy still believed it when it came to stories. Even despite the tragedy that had marred her young life, she was still very much a child, innocent and curious and brimming over with joy.
“Well,” he said, pulling himself together. “You’re almost right. It wasn’t the very best potion in the class - another boy from a different house brewed the best potion, as he almost always did - but it was a very good potion. It was just the right shade of pinkish purple, and it made James and Sirius fall straight asleep when Remus tried it out on them at dinner that evening, by slipping a few drops of the potion into their pumpkin juice.”
Joy burst out in delighted laughter. “You tricked them! You tricked them and made them drink the potion?”
Ruefully, Remus said, “Yes, I did. Which wasn’t very nice, I admit, but I’ll have you know that Remus researched the counter-charm for the Drowsiness Draught ahead of time, and woke them up again right away.” And then they’d all spent the next week or so gleefully taking turns tricking each other into eating foods laced with Drowsiness Draught, but perhaps he didn’t need to give Joy quite that much information about his irresponsible youth.
Joy gave a decisive nod. “It’s only fair, because they made you do their work. Everybody’s supposed to do as much work as they can, not make somebody else do it. Right?”
Remus smiled to think how thoroughly she’d absorbed the werewolves’ share-and-share-alike ethos. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Everybody works if they can, and everybody helps one another.”
He glanced towards Serena again, and was surprised to find her still watching him. She looked at him like this, sometimes, when he was telling stories to Joy, in a very particular way that Remus saw and tried not to see. It was a considering look. Considering him as a man, as a werewolf, as a surrogate parent figure for a now fatherless child. Considering him, perhaps, as a potential mate.
Remus quickly looked away.
The most uncomfortable thing about Serena’s consideration was how much sense it made, from a purely logical point of view. Forming a relationship with another werewolf was the only rational way for Remus to have a partner without fearing constantly for that person’s safety. And loving someone else’s child was the only way he could be a parent, because he did not dare to become a father himself and risk passing on his condition.
And life here among the werewolves, for all its physical discomforts, was in other ways so simple. There was no struggle against prejudice here, just the day-to-day business of feeding themselves and looking out for one another. In Serena’s eyes sometimes, Remus thought he saw the promise of a life like that. He could, if he chose, stay here and be someone’s mate, be a full member of the pack.
But he knew he could never accept that offer. It would be unfair to Serena, when his heart was with someone else.
“Quiet,” Joy repeated. Remus realised she’d said his name once already.
“Yes, River?”
“Tell another story!”
Remus smiled and acquiesced.
- - - - -
Tonks was leaving after one of her occasional check-in meetings with Dumbledore one evening when she spotted coming towards her down the school corridor two girls she recognised very well, along with one she didn’t.
“Tonks!” Ginny cried, and even despite her weariness after a long work day, Tonks found herself smiling. It never failed to touch her how the kids of the Order seemed to look on her as their cool big sister among all the adults, and Ginny especially never seemed to be able to greet Tonks with less than a shriek of delight.
“Hi, Tonks,” Hermione said, less loudly but no less warmly, once they’d all reached each other in the middle of the corridor. Dusk had fallen while Tonks was in Dumbledore’s office and now the wall sconces all along the corridor were lit.
Ginny and Hermione each carried a school bag bulging with books, although the friend who walked beside them was empty-handed. This third girl had blonde hair and big grey eyes, and was regarding Tonks with a kind of dreamy curiosity.
“Wotcher, kids,” Tonks said. “Where are you off to?”
“Library,” Ginny said, with an expressive frown. “I’m sitting my O.W.L.s this year, and Hermione seems to think I should start revising now, even though they’re still half a year away.”
“It’s never too soon to start preparing -” Hermione protested, then broke off when she realised Ginny was deliberately winding her up.
Hermione made a face at Ginny, and Ginny returned it in kind. Tonks, who was used to seeing Hermione always cast in the role of the Very Earnest One in her friendship with Harry and Ron, was glad to see she also had friends she could be a bit silly with.
“Tonks,” Ginny said, when she’d finished rolling her eyes at Hermione, and had turned towards the blonde girl on her other side, “this is our friend Luna. She’s in my year, in Ravenclaw. She was with us at the Ministry that night,” she added, then looked stricken, like she hadn’t meant to recall any of their minds to memories of that terrible night.
“Wotcher, Luna, I’m Tonks,” Tonks said firmly, wanting to show Ginny that it was okay.
“I know.” The blonde girl nodded thoughtfully. “You duelled Bellatrix Lestrange in the Death Chamber.”
“Yes,” Tonks said, disconcerted.
Luna continued to gaze at her with those soulful eyes. “And then Bellatrix Lestrange killed your cousin Sirius. You must miss him a lot.”
Hermione coughed, awkward and embarrassed. Ginny’s cheeks went pink as she tried to look like the conversation hadn’t just taken a highly unusual turn.
“Er,” Ginny said. “Maybe we should…go?” She glanced at Hermione.
“Yes!” Hermione said. “We really should hurry to the library, because, you know -” She didn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence, since a library wasn’t usually a place to which one needed to hurry.
But Tonks said, “Yes, Luna, that’s true. I miss Sirius all the time. He was one of my best friends.”
Luna nodded, brushing a stray wisp of hair back from her face. “I thought so. I miss my mum, too, but she died a long time ago, so it’s not as easy for people to see anymore that I’m sad about it.”
Ginny was going increasingly pink and Hermione’s eyes had widened in alarm. Hermione glanced sideways at Luna, clearly wondering what she might say next.
Tonks, though, felt a strange lifting in her chest. She didn’t know when she’d last got to talk about Sirius, properly talk about him and not just dance around it.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I miss him. And I’m sorry about your mum. I’m sure you’ve never stopped missing her, no matter how long ago it was.”
Luna nodded soberly. “That’s true,” she said. “But there are also lots of things that make me happy, now. So I think you’ll probably find some of them, too.”
Tonks blinked at her in surprise. “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that, actually.”
Several quiet seconds passed.
“We probably should get on to the library,” Hermione said, her voice hushed now. “I promised Ginny I’d help her revise before she has to go to Quidditch practice.”
Ginny nodded, similarly subdued by the turn their conversation had taken. “But I’m glad we saw you, Tonks.” She turned to Luna. “Luna? Are you coming to the library?”
Luna tilted her head and considered. “No, thank you, I think I’ll walk downstairs with Tonks instead. I’ve already done all the revising I’ll be able to do until I get rid of this Wrackspurt.”
Tonks raised an eyebrow, but Ginny just smiled. Tonks could see that it was a fond-of-Luna smile, not a mocking one. Hermione bit her lip and seemed to wrestle with herself, but managed to hold back whatever it was she had wanted to say on the subject of Wrackspurts.
“Right,” Hermione said instead. “Well. We’ll see you later, Luna, all right?”
Luna nodded dreamily, like she’d already said goodbye to Hermione in her head, and thus had forgotten there was any need to speak the words aloud as well.
Ginny gave Tonks a grin and said, “See you, Tonks.”
“Take care, you two,” Tonks said.
Then Ginny and Hermione continued past her on their way to the library, while Luna turned and drifted along next to Tonks, like a pleasant but absent-minded shadow.
They were in the entrance hallway, approaching the school’s great front doors, before Luna spoke again.
“Have you ever seen a Thestral?” she asked, in her dreamy voice.
“No, I can’t see them, because -”
Tonks stopped short.
Oh.
As a Hogwarts student, she’d been quite fascinated by the fact that a Thestral herd lived right there in the woods by the castle. Like everyone, she’d ridden in the Thestral-drawn coaches at the start and end of each school year, but she’d never seen the creatures themselves, because you had to have witnessed death to see Thestrals, and Tonks had never seen someone die. Now, though…
“I guess I could see them, now,” Tonks said softly.
It was painful to say it. All those petulant teenaged thoughts she’d had about how annoying it was that Thestrals didn’t become visible to anyone unless they’d seen death, how much she wanted to see one and it wasn’t fair… This was not at all how she would have chosen to solve that problem.
Luna nodded, not seeming at all perturbed that Tonks had come to a standstill in the middle of the entranceway. It must be nearly dinnertime, because gaggles of students were streaming past them, chatting and laughing as they entered the Great Hall.
Tonks hadn’t seen Sirius die, of course. She’d been knocked unconscious before he was killed. But she’d been there in the Death Chamber when it happened, and she’d heard about it in vivid, horrible detail afterward, and all the literature said that the crucial point, when it came to Thestrals, was how deeply you’d internalised the death, not how much of it you’d physically seen.
Tonks laughed shortly, not feeling very mirthful. “When I was a student here, I got a little obsessed with trying to find the Thestrals in the Forbidden Forest, even though I couldn’t even see them to know what I was looking for. I guess now I’d be able to go looking for them with no trouble at all.”
“I can take you to see them, if you’d like,” Luna said, her voice as gently impassive as ever.
Tonks turned and stared at her. “What, really?”
“I visit them sometimes. They know me, because I often bring them food, but I imagine they’ll come and greet us even if I don’t have anything to give them this time. We’re friends, I think.”
Tonks was rapidly reassessing her impression of the mild-mannered girl beside her. Luna went wandering off into the Forbidden Forest, alone? Regularly?
“Would you like to see them?” Luna asked.
“What - right now?” Tonks fumbled. As intriguing as the offer sounded, luring students into the woods after dark was decidedly not meant to be a part of her duties, as an Auror stationed here to protect the school.
In answer, Luna drifted the last few steps across the entranceway and pushed open one of the great oak doors. A few soft flakes of snow whirled inside, and Luna stood framed in the doorway looking out at the evening dark.
“I was going to visit the Thestrals this evening anyway,” she called over her shoulder. “So you needn’t worry you would be the reason I’m doing something out of bounds. And don’t worry about Nargles. I know which trees they nest in, so we can avoid them.”
Tonks laughed at the unexpectedness of that last statement, and even as she did so, she knew she’d made her decision already.
“All right,” she said, crossing to join Luna in the doorway. “I’ll go with you, and I’ll try to put my annoyingly grown-up responsible instincts aside for a bit. But if we see anything other than Thestrals out there, I want you to run back to the castle, no questions asked, okay?”
Luna turned and regarded Tonks with her head slightly tilted. Tonks wondered what she was thinking.
“All right,” Luna said vaguely. “I don’t mind promising if it will make you feel better.” She stepped lightly away and down the flagstone steps. Tonks let the door swing closed behind them, and followed.
“Won’t you be cold?” she asked, as they crossed the lawn. Luna was wearing her school robes and had a sort of downy shawl cast about her shoulders, but she wasn’t wearing anything approaching a winter cloak.
“Oh…perhaps a bit,” Luna said musingly. “But it is winter, isn’t it?”
Tonks had sneaked into the Forbidden Forest so many times in her Hogwarts years, both with and without various combinations of her friends, that even now she had to remind herself it was, in fact, forbidden to students. She probably ought to feel more dismayed at herself for accompanying a student there, now that she was an ostensible adult. But Luna seemed so eminently capable of looking after herself.
As if reading her thoughts, Luna said in her gentle voice, “We won’t go far into the Forest. They’ll come to meet us at the edge.”
The dark woods seemed to rise up at them out of the dusk, and suddenly Tonks and Luna were standing in front of the first of the trees. Tonks breathed in deeply. The Forbidden Forest smelled like nowhere else she knew, earthy and deep and a little mysterious, in a way Tonks had never been able to quantify. It also smelled wonderfully familiar, like a kind of coming home.
“There,” said Luna softly, and Tonks looked up.
Coming towards them, stalking delicately through the deep gloom between the greyish outlines of tree trunks, was an otherworldly creature, strange even by the standards of all the magical beasts Tonks had seen and known.
The creature was darker even than the woods around it, its body leathery and sleek and skeleton-thin. Its papery wings, held away from its flanks and half unfurled, were enormous, like the wings of a bat built on a monstrous scale. Its wide, white eyes formed the only bright spots in the woods, luminous in the dark. It was grotesque and strange and somehow very beautiful.
“Oh,” Tonks breathed.
It was true, what she’d told Luna - she’d always wanted to find a Thestral, back in her schooldays, even though she knew she wouldn’t be able to see it. She’d found Thestrals deeply mysterious, and to school-age Tonks anything that was mysterious was also fascinating, a puzzle she wanted to take apart until she understood exactly how it worked.
More than once, she’d cajoled the Hogwarts elves into giving her kitchen scraps, the bloodier the better, and she’d read up on how to summon a Thestral, and she’d sneaked into the Forest to try her luck. She’d never succeeded in finding one, of course. But the pursuit itself had been joyful.
“It’s beautiful,” Tonks whispered.
Beside her, Luna murmured, “Hold out your hand.”
Wordlessly, Tonks did as she was told. The Thestral pranced forward, until it stood directly in front of them, then it bent its head to meet Tonks’ hand. Cool, leathery lips danced across her outstretched fingers, but the breath that gusted over her palm was surprisingly hot.
“Hello, friend,” Luna said to the animal in front of them. She, too, extended her hand, and the Thestral’s wide, expressive nostrils flared to take in its scent. Then it let out a small but pleased-sounding whuff of air.
Luna stroked one finger along the top of the Thestral’s nose ridge, then lowered her hand to her side.
“Stroke her nose,” Luna said to Tonks. “She likes that.”
Moving slowly, so as not to startle the animal, Tonks circled her palm from below its muzzle to above. Then she ran a finger, very lightly, along that long nose.
The Thestral gave a ghostly version of a horse’s whinny, and tossed its head.
Tonks stilled her hand completely. “Was that a good noise or a bad one?” she asked Luna quietly.
“Good, I think,” Luna replied, just as softly. “Wait and see if she butts her head against you or if she pulls away.”
For several breathless moments, Tonks waited. Then the Thestral dipped her head and pressed her cool, leathery muzzle into Tonks’ fingers.
Tonks laughed softly in surprise, and Luna turned and smiled at her, a smile that was full of air and sunshine even in those dark woods. “Aren’t they nice? Look, here comes another.”
More Thestrals were stepping out of the shadows, with that strange, prancing walk they had. More and more eerie, white-eyed faces appeared out of the dark, until there were eight or nine of them in a semi-circle around Tonks and Luna, nudging their muzzles against their hands and into Luna’s long hair, breathing with whispery, whistling noises that seemed loud in the quiet amidst the trees.
“They’re lovely, Luna,” Tonks said. Then, “Thank you.”
Tonks felt her eyes prick with tears, for no good reason she could name. She was thinking about Sirius, she supposed. And about how beautiful things and ugly things got so mixed up together that sometimes you couldn’t tell anymore what was what. She was thinking about her schooldays, her naïve wish to find a Thestral in the Forest, and how little she had understood, then, about what that really meant.
And she was thinking, too, that too many kids of Harry’s generation - of Luna’s generation - had never had the luxury of not understanding.
Stroking gentle fingers down the noses of two Thestrals at once, Luna said conversationally, “Yes, I often find I feel quite sad, when I visit the Thestrals. But they make me happy, too. Do you feel like that? Happy and sad at once?”
Tonks nodded, though she didn’t know if Luna could really see her in the near-dark there at the edge of the Forest. Yes, she felt happy and sad; she felt alone even as she was surrounded by these monstrous, gentle creatures. She felt protective towards this odd young woman beside her, and at the same time she felt awed by Luna’s self-possession.
She felt an almost overwhelming sadness, as she stroked the nose of the Thestral closest to her and let it nibble curiously on her fingers. But after so long of feeling frustrated and nearly numb, feeling even a painful emotion this deeply was, in some strange way, a relief.
- - - - -
Remus continued to dodge Serena’s eyes when she turned that thoughtful gaze on him, as the days passed and the seasons carried them slowly past the darkest hours of winter, to Imbolc.
This was a seasonal festival, akin to Samhain or Beltane, marking the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox. A celebration of the tentative beginnings of spring, although snow still lay heavy on the moor.
The pack’s celebration was tense and quiet, a small gathering around a hearth-like fireplace they had built for the occasion inside the lean-to. Brighid, the Alpha’s mate, had tended the fire carefully all day. Now, the pack gathered around and passed from hand to hand a jug of sweet, fresh milk - whether bartered or stolen Remus didn’t know, but he knew better than to ask - and lit long, tapered candles Anna had stored safely away until this day, symbols of the returning sun and its warmth. Fire and fertility, hearth and home, these were the touchstones of Imbolc.
Often, multiple werewolf packs gathered together for this and other seasonal festivals, taking these sacred days as an opportunity to meet, celebrate and share news. This year, the pack celebrated alone. Remus remembered words Narun had uttered, months ago now: Alpha hasn’t let us go to any of the big gatherings in ages. Doesn’t want us getting ideas, you know?
The last time the Alpha had taken members of his pack to a large gathering had been at Imbolc the year before, and now here it was already Imbolc again. The pack had kept themselves apart from the wider werewolf community all this time. It was unusual for a pack to stay so isolated, and Remus knew it served as another sign that the dire political climate had grown inescapable even for a peaceable group of werewolves who wanted nothing to do with Voldemort’s war.
Now, sitting quietly around their own fire, the silence felt morose. Narun and the other young ones were surely remembering the days when they had travelled freely to meet other packs and other young folks. Remus could see them casting guardedly discontented looks at the Alpha when they thought no one was looking.
Gazing into the fire, his shoulders taut with sympathetic pain at the tension around him, Remus, too, was remembering the year before, though for different reasons.
It had been the one time he’d got himself in too deep, in all his months of reconnaissance for Dumbledore. There had been a large gathering of packs in France, in the days around the full moon nearest Imbolc. Greyback had been there, with his big talk about everything Voldemort claimed to offer werewolves: prey and status and violent dominion over Muggles. The atmosphere at the gathering had grown ugly and a small group had attacked Remus, sensing that he was not like them, that he was an outsider who did not belong, a spy.
He’d managed to get away and made it onto a train back to England, ribs creaking and head pounding. Arriving in London, barely keeping himself upright, Remus had tried to fix his mind on the idea of home as he Apparated unsteadily away from St Pancras Station, and had somehow ended up at the door of Tonks’ flat, instead of Grimmauld Place as he’d intended.
Tonks had patched him up, competent and exasperated and concerned, then let him sleep off the worst of his injuries in her bed while she was at work. That had perhaps been the moment most of all, out of so many moments, when the tentative thing between the two of them had begun to be something definite and real.
But those memories belonged to the past. They’d been a stolen glimpse into the kind of life other people got to lead, and even those few months were more than Remus should have allowed himself to have.
If he’d been stronger and stayed away from the start, perhaps Tonks wouldn’t now look as blanched and miserable as she had done when he’d encountered her outside the Hogwarts gates. Remus would give anything if only he could undo the pain he’d caused.
“Quiet. Quiet!” Serena’s voice startled Remus out his reverie. She’d been trying to pass him the jug of milk as it made its way around the circle again.
“Sorry,” Remus said, accepting the jug from her hand and taking a swallow before passing it to Ronan on his other side. Ronan seemed distant from the other young ones these days, torn between his desire to belong with his peers and uncertainty whether he wanted to align himself with their increasingly radical opinions.
Eirwen, too, had retreated back into herself. It was painfully evident how badly she, too, wanted to belong with the others; but she had come here from Greyback’s pack and was clearly determined never to return to anything like it.
But the other three, Adair and Tamara and Narun… Remus’ skin prickled as he looked at them now, sitting together at the edge of the pack, their simmering discontent palpable. United in their shared, if covert, disdain for their elders, the connection between the three of them was electric and intense. Sometimes, Remus felt sure he saw signs of a growing romance between Tamara and Adair. Other times, he was equally certain it was Narun and Adair who were captivated by one another. Or perhaps it was all three.
Whatever its precise nature, the growing bond among the three of them had only heightened their distance from the rest of the pack. So far, the Alpha had tolerated their increasing apartness, but Remus knew this state of affairs couldn’t last.
- - - - -
At Scrivenshaft’s, the young shop assistant lit up when Tonks next came by on her rounds. She remembered Ariadne’s words (“He likes you!”) and his shy smile across the pub on New Year’s Eve. Then she wondered if she was currently making that face Ariadne insisted she made whenever “a guy fancies you but you don’t fancy him.”
Trying to resolve her face into something that was professional and polite, but not that expression, Tonks crossed the shop to the assistant, who’d glanced up from where he was arranging sheaves of parchment on a low shelf.
This was Tonks’ work, talking to people in the village, and she wasn’t going to shirk it just because someone had smiled at her.
“Good morning,” she said. That was suitably professional and polite, right?
“Morning!” the young man said. He slid the rest of the parchment onto the shelf and stood up, dusting off his hands against his robes. “I’m Andy, by the way. I’ve seen you around a bunch, but I guess I’ve never introduced myself.”
“I’m Tonks,” said Tonks. “I mean, my name’s Nymphadora Tonks, but I go by just Tonks.”
“Nice to officially meet you, Tonks,” Andy said, beaming. Tonks gave him a perfunctory smile and hastily turned the conversation to business, asking whether the shop had made good sales at Christmas and what items had been the big sellers.
She left the shop a few minutes later feeling unsettled. Despite her best efforts, the conversation had felt flirtatious. There was nothing actually wrong with flirting with someone new, of course - Remus had made quite clear where he stood - but it left her feeling off-balance and strange.
End notes:
Yup, once again Imbolc is a real Celtic Pagan holiday, one of the eight seasonal festivals throughout the year.
It always amuses me when I unintentionally develop an ongoing bit of headcanon backstory... The "young Tonks wants to find a Thestral" theme has made previous appearances in " Waiting for the Snow" (a fluffy future Teddy-centric fic) and in " Unexpected" (my perhaps-not-quite-canonical look at Tonks and Charlie Weasley's friendship).
Also, since Moody got his cameo in this chapter, this seems like an apt time to mention that I recently wrote a very short one-shot from his perspective! It's called " Relentless Sunshine" and it also features Lily Potter and the young folks of the first-war Order.
Here again for reference is the werewolf pack:
the Alpha, a male in his 40s, the pack’s leader
Anna, or the Mother, the oldest pack member, symbolic mother of all
Brighid, or Fire, the Alpha’s mate, roughly his age
Serena, or Trouble, roughly Remus’ age
Jack, or Thunderstorm, a little younger than the Alpha, Ashmita’s mate
Ashmita, or Rock Crag, Jack’s mate
Ronan, or Hardwood, young adult member of the pack, perhaps 20
Narun, or Rapids, roughly the same age
Adair, or Jump, roughly the same age
Tamara, or Blackthorn, roughly the same age
Eirwen, or Slither, a young teenager, 13 or 14
Joy, or River Run, the pack’s youngest member, 6 or 7
(continue to CHAPTER 15: Alone Apart)
Summary: In which Remus and Tonks fight battles, arrest criminals, befriend werewolves, overcome inner demons and, despite it all, find themselves a happy ending. A love story, and a story of the Order years. (My Remus/Tonks epic, which has been years in the making! This is the second half of the story, set in the Half-Blood Prince year.)
Chapter 14: Questions and Offers
Sometimes in the frozen nights I go roaming
In the bed you used to share with me
I wake in the field with the cold and the lonesome
The moon’s the only face that I see
-Josh Ritter, Wolves
“Didn’t expect to see you here again,” said the Alpha.
After once again concealing his wand outside the village, Remus had made his way across the snow-covered moor and found the pack much as he had left them, gathered around an evening fire at the doorway of the lean-to. He had gone straight to the Alpha, bowed his head in submissive greeting and waited for acknowledgement.
Now, at the Alpha’s words, Remus could look up. Was that a spark of amusement in the man’s eyes? Because he didn’t look surprised to see Remus. If anything, he looked like a man pleased to have been proved right.
“It seems your time with our pack is not quite finished,” the Alpha went on, his tone still somehow teasing. Then, more gently, he added, “Welcome back, Quiet.”
“Thank you, Alpha.” Remus bowed again and stepped back.
He looked around at the pack, and most of them nodded in acknowledgement. Little Joy gave him a grin. Remus found a seat by the fire on a log next to Ashmita, who offered him a hunk of bread. He took it with thanks, surprised at the fondness he felt as he looked around at this circle of werewolves.
But it was clear within Remus’ first night and day back that all was not well. The tension he’d sensed before, the discontent of the younger ones, was more palpable than ever. Remus thought guiltily that he ought not to have left, even for those few days. But what could he have done, if he had been here? He ranked lower in the pack than even the teenagers.
On his second day back, Remus was sent out with Ronan - Hardwood - to hunt for small game. Remus was as useless as he had ever been at hunting, but the Alpha seemed implacably determined to train Remus into a successful wild-living werewolf, no matter how long it took.
Ronan looked pensive and talked little for most of the day. It was only as they were heading back, a hare slung over Ronan’s shoulder and the pale winter sun low in the sky although it was only mid-afternoon, that Ronan asked, looking at the ground in front of him rather than at Remus, “Have you ever killed person?”
Remus bit back his startled response, calling up the teacher within himself instead. “No, I haven’t,” he said, keeping his voice calm and neutral. “Why do you ask?”
Ronan scuffled his feet through the dusting of snow on the ground as they walked. “Just - I dunno. The others” - surely meaning Narun and Tamara and Adair - ”talk about it like it must be the greatest rush, you know, this incredible thrill of power, but I keep thinking, that’s a person, right? Even if it’s only a Muggle, or some stupid bigoted wizard who hates us anyway. It’s -” He broke off, unsure. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Remus said, matching his walking pace to Ronan’s but avoiding the boy’s eyes, because Ronan seemed less uncomfortable in this conversation when he didn’t have to look at Remus directly. “I know exactly what you mean. I would never deliberately take a human life. No matter who that person was or what he or she believed.”
“Yeah,” Ronan mumbled. “That’s - yeah.” Then he fell silent again, no sound but the crunching of his well-worn boots on the snow.
Remus waited to see if further questions emerged, but for the moment Ronan’s curiosity seemed to be assuaged.
Even with the undercurrent of tension simmering in the pack, the winter nights around the fire were cosy. The adults chatted together, though the younger ones often withdrew to the far side of the fire and kept their own company.
And nearly every evening, Joy begged Anna, the Mother, to tell stories. But Anna tired early on these long, cold nights, so once Joy discovered that Remus could also be prevailed upon for storytelling, she would often crawl into his lap and badger him until he told her a tale.
He was cautious, at first, unsure how well talk of wizarding culture would be received here. No Tales of Beedle the Bard would be welcome, surely, with their emphasis on wizarding magic. So Remus drew instead on anecdotes from his own travels abroad in younger years.
One evening, though, he slipped up and mentioned Hogwarts.
“Hogwarts? What’s that?” Joy’s curiosity was instantly aroused.
Remus glanced across at Serena, sitting nearby, to gauge her reaction, and she gave him a small nod. All right, then. “It’s a school of magic,” he told Joy, who was nestled in his lap with her head on his shoulder. It was achingly sweet, her trusting weight against his chest.
“Magic? Like the magic that Mother does around our camp, so humans won’t find us?”
“Not exactly,” Remus said. “It’s a school for learning a different kind of magic. The kind that wizards do with wands.”
Joy craned her neck around to look at him. Remus wondered if she’d ever seen wand magic performed. Surely in her younger childhood, before she was turned? But perhaps she didn’t remember.
“Could I go there? To that school?”
Remus glanced helplessly towards Serena, but this time she offered no assistance.
“I suppose so,” he answered slowly. “The school is open to anyone with magical ability.”
“Do I have magical abil - ability? How do I know?”
“Have you ever made something happen, accidentally, just because of how you were feeling? Made things shrink, or grow, or fly through the air?”
“When I was little, I could make my dollies talk to each other. That was when I was little, though, I don’t have dolls anymore,” she added in an explanatory tone, as though Remus might have failed to notice this.
Remus glanced at Serena again, and caught a fleeting glimpse of some private pain on her face. So, for all Serena’s talk of the inferiority of life among wizards, she was also sorry for what Joy had lost. Remus hurriedly looked away.
He was about to shift the conversation to a less fraught topic, when Joy asked, “Did you go to that school? To Hogwarts?”
“Yes,” Remus said, because he couldn’t lie to this child. “I did.”
Predictably, her eyes went wide. “Oh! Tell me about it! Tell me stories!” She settled more determinedly into his lap and fixed her great dark eyes on him.
Remus could see there was no getting out of this now. He shifted Joy onto one knee, so they were both sitting comfortably. “Well, first of all, everyone who comes to the school gets Sorted into one of four houses,” he began. Despite himself, he was warming to this task, of sharing stories from the happiest days of his werewolf childhood with this particular werewolf child. “And I was very lucky, because in my house, I had three wonderful friends…”
- - - - -
Each morning all through that cold January, as Tonks hurriedly pulled on clothes in her draughty attic room, she told herself fiercely, Today I will do one thing that makes a difference. She hated feeling idle, feeling that the war was getting worse and she wasn’t doing anything to stop it. So she threw herself into her census list and her rounds of the village, her eyes always open for the slightest shreds of information.
“You know, I thought I saw a window open at the Three Broomsticks, the day that poor girl from the school was cursed,” a plump-faced Hogsmeade matron mused, in one of the seemingly casual conversations Tonks was growing adept at guiding subtly towards the topics she most needed to hear about. The woman went on, “And that was even though it was October then, and such a chilly day. Might have been one of the windows in the toilets, it seems to me.”
Tonks had lunch at the Three Broomsticks several days a week, keeping her eyes and ears open from over a sandwich or a slice of Rosmerta’s hearty cottage pie, as the village’s inhabitants came and went. So the next time she was at the pub, Tonks took the opportunity to ask Rosmerta if she’d noticed an open window that day.
“An open window? In October?” Rosmerta frowned from behind the bar, her hands busy as always, pulling pints. “I couldn’t say for sure, but I doubt it, love. I’d have noticed something like that.”
She looked more tired than usual, Tonks thought, but then, didn’t they all. The cold and the war and the endless grey winter were so wearying, no matter how Tonks tried to ignore everything else and focus only on her work. Rosmerta looked the way everyone in Hogsmeade seemed to feel these days, grey and worn.
Hogwarts arranged a special one-off Floo connection to transport the students safely and speedily back to school at the end of their break, and Tonks was one of the Aurors who patrolled the grounds that day, as children Flooed in from all over the country.
The very idea of Flooing to Hogwarts struck Tonks as all wrong. The ritual of boarding the train; of seeing your friends again after what felt like ages, not mere weeks; of winding your way north through changing scenery as your excitement grew, all of that was part of the magic of Hogwarts.
Sometimes, it was the smallest of things that made Tonks long for this war to be over. She wanted back the days when kids could ride the Hogwarts Express without fear.
That same evening, after all the students had arrived back safely, Tonks was off-duty and curled up in her attic room with a book when her Aurorlog blared out its alarm. The hand position said Savage, who was currently on duty, and the colour meant Dementors.
Tonks leapt up and threw on her cloak, then Apparated to the edge of town in the direction the arrow on the Aurorlog’s metal rim was pointing. She found Savage and Dawlish there, casting their Patronus Charms at a swarm of Dementors that were gliding menacingly towards the town.
Tonks took up position beside them and cast her own Patronus, which charged down the Dementors in its new form, shaggy and huge. Despite her complicated feelings about her new Patronus, Tonks had to admit she found its fierce, protective wolf shape a comfort.
The nearest Dementors faltered as her Patronus charged, but there were more behind them. Now Proudfoot appeared, too, shouting as he cast his own Patronus. Between the four of them, all spell-casting with all their might, slowly they were able to drive the Dementors back beyond the next hill. Pushed that far from the village, the foully rattling creatures began to disperse with an air of defeat.
Panting, Tonks wiped sweat from her forehead, when the last of the Dementors had finally gone.
“Nice work,” Savage said, turning to the rest of them. “Good response time, too.”
“How long do you suppose until they try again?” Tonks asked.
Savage shrugged. “Couple of days, maybe? There are so many of them, now, and this is one of the biggest concentrations of human emotions in the area. The students arriving today probably drew them.”
Tonks nodded. That was what she had figured, too, that fending off Dementors was going to become a routine part of her work here. But it didn’t mean she had to like it.
She was doing her patrol rounds of the village a few days later, just turning a corner from the high street into a smaller lane, when a voice in her ear growled, “Look alive, lass! Where’s your vigilance?”
It was only her years of hard-won training that kept Tonks from jumping into the air in surprise. But thanks to those years of training, instead of startling, she spun on her heel and directed her wand up and at her unseen assailant’s throat, all in one smooth motion.
Even though she would recognise that particular voice anywhere.
Mad-Eye Moody - because of course it was him, and only he could look so thoroughly unconcerned at having a wand pressed into the soft skin beneath his Adam’s apple - gave Tonks that familiar grimace that she knew counted, with him, as almost a hint of a smile. She knew he was more pleased with her than he would willingly let on.
“That vigilant enough for you, Mad-Eye?” she asked, politely removing her wand from its position tight against his throat.
Moody coughed experimentally, found everything in working order, and frowned at her. “Your wand-carrying position is lax,” he said, and Tonks grinned, because that meant he couldn’t find anything else to criticise about her form, technique or reaction time.
“You come all the way up to Hogsmeade just to insult me?” Tonks asked, starting to walk again in the direction she’d been patrolling and trusting Moody to follow.
He gave a noncommittal grunt, as he stumped along beside her. “Wanted to make sure you weren’t slipping up.”
Tonks bit her lip against another smile. Coming from Moody, that was practically an expression of affection. He’d only been here grumping at her for half a minute, and already the grey Hogsmeade day seemed a little brighter.
“You don’t get to Order meetings often these days, being stationed up here,” he went on, his magical and non-magical eyes both swivelling side to side as they walked, always scanning for danger. “Thought you could do with a little extra training.”
It was true, her nearly round-the-clock responsibilities in Hogsmeade made it hard to slip away unnoticed for Order meetings. And as always, Dumbledore felt it was more important that Tonks maintain her good standing with the Auror Office. She missed the conviviality of the meetings, and a few of those duelling practice sessions Moody sometimes oversaw after the official end of a meeting wouldn’t go amiss either. Tonks missed that too, duelling for fun, but with professional-level focus. Fighting off Dementors did not count in the same way.
“So?” Moody demanded, and Tonks scanned back through his previous terse sentences, trying to figure out what question he thought he’d asked her and was waiting to hear answered.
“Oh!” she realised. “You came up here to run training exercises?”
Moody stumped his wooden leg a little harder against the ground with his next step, a bizarre form of conversational emphasis. “Good girl. I’ll find you after your patrol shift ends.”
With that, he turned and clomped away, in the direction of the Hog’s Head Inn. Tonks grinned at his receding back. Good old Moody, needing to be surly and dramatic at all times. She’d missed the old codger, and it seemed he’d missed her too, if he was coming out of his way to visit her in Hogsmeade. Whatever excuses he might make about his visit being merely for training purposes.
True to his word, Moody found Tonks when her shift ended for the day. He jerked his head at her, then took off walking towards the edge of town. “Thought we’d do better to find a field somewhere to practise in,” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t want to be scaring the locals.”
They found an open meadow about ten minutes’ walk outside of town and squared off in duelling stance, wands held ready. Tonks felt excitement thrum through her veins. She loved a good duel, and few people she’d ever fought were as good and as fast and as fearsome as Mad-Eye Moody. When you started your career as an Auror by training under Moody for three years, when you finally got out on active duty and fought actual criminals it was like a stroll in the park.
“Ready?” Moody growled. “Three, two, one -”
Light blasted at Tonks from the end of Moody’s wand. She dodged the spell, her body moving on pure instinct, shouting “Impedimenta!” at him as she went. Oh, it felt good to move. It felt like waking up after months of staying still.
Moody shifted into trying to Stun her, so Tonks did the same, and they spent an exhilarating several minutes ducking and dodging, trying to out-Stupefy each other. Then Moody shifted tack again, into water spells, then again to sneaky physical jinxes like Jelly-Legs and Sponge-Knees.
They duelled until the sun sank behind the hills and then for a while longer after that, until the dusk grew so deep that it was impossible to see their opponent’s movements. “Halt!” Moody yelled, from somewhere in the dark, and Tonks stowed her wand away in her robe, her breath heaving. She felt alive.
Moody came up beside her, his gnarled face barely visible in the gloom.
“Not bad,” he allowed. “You’re a little out of practice, but nothing regular training can’t fix. Same time next week?”
“Mad-Eye -” Tonks started to protest, thinking of her thousand duties, her punishing work schedule for the Aurors, her own personal task of keeping track of anything that changed amongst the population of the village, not to mention her occasional check-ins up at the castle to keep in communication with Dumbledore. The only time Tonks could remember getting a full night’s sleep in months had been at Christmas, and even that had been marred by heart-pounding dreams of shouting and flashes of light in the Department of Mysteries.
But then she stopped and took stock of how she felt right now, how her chest heaved and her legs ached and for once she didn’t feel that dreary, ever-present weight, like everything she did was pointless and she wasn’t even sure why she tried.
So instead she said, “Yeah. Same time next week. But next time, Mad-Eye, watch out, because I’m going to be the one who creeps up from behind and startles you.”
“Not likely,” Moody scoffed, but Tonks thought she saw a glimpse of that almost-smile as he Apparated away.
- - - - -
Sometimes in the pale afternoons, if Anna had enough energy, she would direct one of the others to lift little Joy up into the hammock with her, and she would teach the girl werewolf magic, the small but powerful incantations that werewolves used to protect their territory, to seek prey, to fend off predators. Joy picked up the spells quickly, displaying a clear aptitude for both magic and learning.
“Don’t you ever consider sending her to school?” Remus asked Serena. The two of them were once again taking a turn guarding the Mother, which in this case simply meant sitting nearby and watching as the pack’s oldest member and youngest member wove spells together.
“No,” Serena said, in a tone that discouraged further questioning.
Remus had known that would be her answer, of course, yet he couldn’t quite let it go. “She has undeniable magical talent. It would be a pity not to let her train and develop her skills.”
Serena turned to him, her elbows on her knees, her gaze fierce. “And where would that land her? One foot in a world that hates her, the other in a world where she’ll never quite belong, if she lives away from it for most of her growing up? No, thank you. You go on being in love with your precious wizarding world, but that’s not what I want for River.”
“It’s not ‘my’ wizarding world, and I’m not in love with it,” Remus said quietly. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’ve learned the value of the way you live here. This is your culture, and I would never tell you to send her away from it. But surely, someday, couldn’t there be a way for us to have both? Preserve werewolf traditions, but learn wand magic, too?”
Serena just shook her head, not looking at Remus. Her gaze out over the moor was distant.
Just old enough to be really looking forward to my school letter, she had once said, in telling Remus her own story of how she’d been turned into a werewolf. She, too, had once dreamed of a different life, before it had been stolen away from her.
“If you ever change your mind,” Remus said gently, “I know the headmaster and the deputy headmistress of Hogwarts. I could talk to them. It’s not as impossible as it sounds.”
“Thanks for the sentiment,” Serena snorted, her voice wry.
He let the matter drop for the time being.
The January full moon came and went, and Remus woke the morning after with his throat hoarse and sore. (Had he been howling? Did everyone else know it but him?) Ashmita laughed when she heard how his voice came out in a croak, but Serena, in her quiet way, went and fetched Remus cold water from the nearest iced-in creek. It amazed him now to think how hostile she had been towards him in the beginning, and now it seemed almost as if they were - dare he think it? - friends.
“Thank you, Serena,” he said, when she handed him the water in an old, chipped mug, one of the few castaway dishes in the camp. Then he corrected himself, “Trouble, I mean. I’m sorry. All these months, and I still can’t seem to get my head around werewolf names.”
“That’s all right,” she said, as she squatted down next to him on the ground and watched him sip from the cup. “I think I sort of like it. No one’s called me that in decades.”
Later that afternoon, Joy came and wriggled her way into Remus’ lap, digging her elbows into his knees and demanding stories. The day after a full moon was always a rest day for the pack, but for Joy, that simply meant more grown-ups around to entertain her.
Remus shifted her onto his knee and brushed a stray slim plait out of her eyes.
“Once upon a time, there was a young boy who was a wizard,” he began. Remus had all too soon run through all the fairy tales he knew, at least the ones he judged to be not too offensive to werewolf sensibilities, and begun to wonder what other stories he could tell Joy. Then, to his chagrin, he’d discovered that his own Hogwarts boyhood provided endless fodder for amusing anecdotes and tales of bold daring.
“Was his name James?” Joy demanded with a child’s sage assurance that she knew all. Remus wasn’t sure what it said about him that, even when it was his own childhood he was narrating, James and Sirius generally managed to take the leading roles.
“Why, yes, how did you know?” he agreed, smiling down into Joy’s eager face.
“And did he have a best friend named Sirius?” she demanded.
“You’re a very good guesser.”
“Did they play lots of pranks and get in trouble at school?”
With an internal sigh, hoping he wasn’t hopelessly corrupting this child, Remus said, “Yes, they did. But they also had lots of adventures, and did daring deeds, and were very clever at magic. And on this particular spring morning when our story takes place, James and Sirius were meant to be doing an assignment for their Potions class.”
“Potions class?” Joy contorted her face into the quizzical expression that meant he’d used a term she didn’t know and he was now expected to explain himself.
“The study of how to make magical drinks and special mixtures that have different powers,” Remus told her. “There are potions that can make you look like a different person, or make someone laugh, or make you breathe fire for a day.”
“Fun!” Joy declared, wriggling with excitement at the idea. Remus glanced over at Serena, wondering if he was treading too far into the territory of the human magic Serena didn’t want her daughter learning, but Serena, sitting nearby with her back resting against a log, was simply watching the two of them with a faint smile.
“Anyway,” Remus hurried on, “James and Sirius and two other friends were meant to be doing their Potions homework. But it was a beautiful day, and James said he wanted to go outside, and Sirius said he wanted to go outside, too. So they talked their friend Remus into doing the assignment for the whole group.”
“Remus as in you-Remus?” Somehow Joy had picked up that this was also his name, although the pack only ever called him as Quiet.
“Yes, Remus as in me-Remus. But this was a long-time-ago-Remus. And that Remus didn’t think he was any good at Potions. It always took him twice as long in class to do the assignments that James and Sirius completed without even trying. And Remus’ potions never came out quite the right colour; sometimes they were cobalt blue when they were meant to be royal blue. Sometimes they were lime green when they were supposed to be chartreuse.”
“What’s chartreuse?”
Remus tried to think of anything Joy might have seen in her life on the moor that matched that colour and came up blank. “It’s a very bright green-y yellow,” he said, wishing he could do better for her. If only they had books here! If only he could use his wand to draw images in the air, and demonstrate concepts for her that way.
Joy nodded, accepting this explanation as adequate.
“So on this particular day, Remus’ friends left him to mix a Drowsiness Draught by himself.”
“A what?”
“A drink that makes a person feel sleepy. It’s not a very difficult potion, just five ingredients and a lot of stirring after they’re put together, but Remus was used to working in class with a partner to help him, not having to do it alone. So he got his five ingredients all laid out and ready, and chopped everything up just the way the book said to do. Then it was time to mix the ingredients together in his cauldron. And what do you think happened?”
“It was the best potion ever!” Joy cheered.
Remus laughed. “What makes you say that?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Because it’s a story. Stories always have a happy ending.”
Remus blinked. However untrue that statement often proved in real life, he was glad Joy still believed it when it came to stories. Even despite the tragedy that had marred her young life, she was still very much a child, innocent and curious and brimming over with joy.
“Well,” he said, pulling himself together. “You’re almost right. It wasn’t the very best potion in the class - another boy from a different house brewed the best potion, as he almost always did - but it was a very good potion. It was just the right shade of pinkish purple, and it made James and Sirius fall straight asleep when Remus tried it out on them at dinner that evening, by slipping a few drops of the potion into their pumpkin juice.”
Joy burst out in delighted laughter. “You tricked them! You tricked them and made them drink the potion?”
Ruefully, Remus said, “Yes, I did. Which wasn’t very nice, I admit, but I’ll have you know that Remus researched the counter-charm for the Drowsiness Draught ahead of time, and woke them up again right away.” And then they’d all spent the next week or so gleefully taking turns tricking each other into eating foods laced with Drowsiness Draught, but perhaps he didn’t need to give Joy quite that much information about his irresponsible youth.
Joy gave a decisive nod. “It’s only fair, because they made you do their work. Everybody’s supposed to do as much work as they can, not make somebody else do it. Right?”
Remus smiled to think how thoroughly she’d absorbed the werewolves’ share-and-share-alike ethos. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Everybody works if they can, and everybody helps one another.”
He glanced towards Serena again, and was surprised to find her still watching him. She looked at him like this, sometimes, when he was telling stories to Joy, in a very particular way that Remus saw and tried not to see. It was a considering look. Considering him as a man, as a werewolf, as a surrogate parent figure for a now fatherless child. Considering him, perhaps, as a potential mate.
Remus quickly looked away.
The most uncomfortable thing about Serena’s consideration was how much sense it made, from a purely logical point of view. Forming a relationship with another werewolf was the only rational way for Remus to have a partner without fearing constantly for that person’s safety. And loving someone else’s child was the only way he could be a parent, because he did not dare to become a father himself and risk passing on his condition.
And life here among the werewolves, for all its physical discomforts, was in other ways so simple. There was no struggle against prejudice here, just the day-to-day business of feeding themselves and looking out for one another. In Serena’s eyes sometimes, Remus thought he saw the promise of a life like that. He could, if he chose, stay here and be someone’s mate, be a full member of the pack.
But he knew he could never accept that offer. It would be unfair to Serena, when his heart was with someone else.
“Quiet,” Joy repeated. Remus realised she’d said his name once already.
“Yes, River?”
“Tell another story!”
Remus smiled and acquiesced.
- - - - -
Tonks was leaving after one of her occasional check-in meetings with Dumbledore one evening when she spotted coming towards her down the school corridor two girls she recognised very well, along with one she didn’t.
“Tonks!” Ginny cried, and even despite her weariness after a long work day, Tonks found herself smiling. It never failed to touch her how the kids of the Order seemed to look on her as their cool big sister among all the adults, and Ginny especially never seemed to be able to greet Tonks with less than a shriek of delight.
“Hi, Tonks,” Hermione said, less loudly but no less warmly, once they’d all reached each other in the middle of the corridor. Dusk had fallen while Tonks was in Dumbledore’s office and now the wall sconces all along the corridor were lit.
Ginny and Hermione each carried a school bag bulging with books, although the friend who walked beside them was empty-handed. This third girl had blonde hair and big grey eyes, and was regarding Tonks with a kind of dreamy curiosity.
“Wotcher, kids,” Tonks said. “Where are you off to?”
“Library,” Ginny said, with an expressive frown. “I’m sitting my O.W.L.s this year, and Hermione seems to think I should start revising now, even though they’re still half a year away.”
“It’s never too soon to start preparing -” Hermione protested, then broke off when she realised Ginny was deliberately winding her up.
Hermione made a face at Ginny, and Ginny returned it in kind. Tonks, who was used to seeing Hermione always cast in the role of the Very Earnest One in her friendship with Harry and Ron, was glad to see she also had friends she could be a bit silly with.
“Tonks,” Ginny said, when she’d finished rolling her eyes at Hermione, and had turned towards the blonde girl on her other side, “this is our friend Luna. She’s in my year, in Ravenclaw. She was with us at the Ministry that night,” she added, then looked stricken, like she hadn’t meant to recall any of their minds to memories of that terrible night.
“Wotcher, Luna, I’m Tonks,” Tonks said firmly, wanting to show Ginny that it was okay.
“I know.” The blonde girl nodded thoughtfully. “You duelled Bellatrix Lestrange in the Death Chamber.”
“Yes,” Tonks said, disconcerted.
Luna continued to gaze at her with those soulful eyes. “And then Bellatrix Lestrange killed your cousin Sirius. You must miss him a lot.”
Hermione coughed, awkward and embarrassed. Ginny’s cheeks went pink as she tried to look like the conversation hadn’t just taken a highly unusual turn.
“Er,” Ginny said. “Maybe we should…go?” She glanced at Hermione.
“Yes!” Hermione said. “We really should hurry to the library, because, you know -” She didn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence, since a library wasn’t usually a place to which one needed to hurry.
But Tonks said, “Yes, Luna, that’s true. I miss Sirius all the time. He was one of my best friends.”
Luna nodded, brushing a stray wisp of hair back from her face. “I thought so. I miss my mum, too, but she died a long time ago, so it’s not as easy for people to see anymore that I’m sad about it.”
Ginny was going increasingly pink and Hermione’s eyes had widened in alarm. Hermione glanced sideways at Luna, clearly wondering what she might say next.
Tonks, though, felt a strange lifting in her chest. She didn’t know when she’d last got to talk about Sirius, properly talk about him and not just dance around it.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I miss him. And I’m sorry about your mum. I’m sure you’ve never stopped missing her, no matter how long ago it was.”
Luna nodded soberly. “That’s true,” she said. “But there are also lots of things that make me happy, now. So I think you’ll probably find some of them, too.”
Tonks blinked at her in surprise. “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that, actually.”
Several quiet seconds passed.
“We probably should get on to the library,” Hermione said, her voice hushed now. “I promised Ginny I’d help her revise before she has to go to Quidditch practice.”
Ginny nodded, similarly subdued by the turn their conversation had taken. “But I’m glad we saw you, Tonks.” She turned to Luna. “Luna? Are you coming to the library?”
Luna tilted her head and considered. “No, thank you, I think I’ll walk downstairs with Tonks instead. I’ve already done all the revising I’ll be able to do until I get rid of this Wrackspurt.”
Tonks raised an eyebrow, but Ginny just smiled. Tonks could see that it was a fond-of-Luna smile, not a mocking one. Hermione bit her lip and seemed to wrestle with herself, but managed to hold back whatever it was she had wanted to say on the subject of Wrackspurts.
“Right,” Hermione said instead. “Well. We’ll see you later, Luna, all right?”
Luna nodded dreamily, like she’d already said goodbye to Hermione in her head, and thus had forgotten there was any need to speak the words aloud as well.
Ginny gave Tonks a grin and said, “See you, Tonks.”
“Take care, you two,” Tonks said.
Then Ginny and Hermione continued past her on their way to the library, while Luna turned and drifted along next to Tonks, like a pleasant but absent-minded shadow.
They were in the entrance hallway, approaching the school’s great front doors, before Luna spoke again.
“Have you ever seen a Thestral?” she asked, in her dreamy voice.
“No, I can’t see them, because -”
Tonks stopped short.
Oh.
As a Hogwarts student, she’d been quite fascinated by the fact that a Thestral herd lived right there in the woods by the castle. Like everyone, she’d ridden in the Thestral-drawn coaches at the start and end of each school year, but she’d never seen the creatures themselves, because you had to have witnessed death to see Thestrals, and Tonks had never seen someone die. Now, though…
“I guess I could see them, now,” Tonks said softly.
It was painful to say it. All those petulant teenaged thoughts she’d had about how annoying it was that Thestrals didn’t become visible to anyone unless they’d seen death, how much she wanted to see one and it wasn’t fair… This was not at all how she would have chosen to solve that problem.
Luna nodded, not seeming at all perturbed that Tonks had come to a standstill in the middle of the entranceway. It must be nearly dinnertime, because gaggles of students were streaming past them, chatting and laughing as they entered the Great Hall.
Tonks hadn’t seen Sirius die, of course. She’d been knocked unconscious before he was killed. But she’d been there in the Death Chamber when it happened, and she’d heard about it in vivid, horrible detail afterward, and all the literature said that the crucial point, when it came to Thestrals, was how deeply you’d internalised the death, not how much of it you’d physically seen.
Tonks laughed shortly, not feeling very mirthful. “When I was a student here, I got a little obsessed with trying to find the Thestrals in the Forbidden Forest, even though I couldn’t even see them to know what I was looking for. I guess now I’d be able to go looking for them with no trouble at all.”
“I can take you to see them, if you’d like,” Luna said, her voice as gently impassive as ever.
Tonks turned and stared at her. “What, really?”
“I visit them sometimes. They know me, because I often bring them food, but I imagine they’ll come and greet us even if I don’t have anything to give them this time. We’re friends, I think.”
Tonks was rapidly reassessing her impression of the mild-mannered girl beside her. Luna went wandering off into the Forbidden Forest, alone? Regularly?
“Would you like to see them?” Luna asked.
“What - right now?” Tonks fumbled. As intriguing as the offer sounded, luring students into the woods after dark was decidedly not meant to be a part of her duties, as an Auror stationed here to protect the school.
In answer, Luna drifted the last few steps across the entranceway and pushed open one of the great oak doors. A few soft flakes of snow whirled inside, and Luna stood framed in the doorway looking out at the evening dark.
“I was going to visit the Thestrals this evening anyway,” she called over her shoulder. “So you needn’t worry you would be the reason I’m doing something out of bounds. And don’t worry about Nargles. I know which trees they nest in, so we can avoid them.”
Tonks laughed at the unexpectedness of that last statement, and even as she did so, she knew she’d made her decision already.
“All right,” she said, crossing to join Luna in the doorway. “I’ll go with you, and I’ll try to put my annoyingly grown-up responsible instincts aside for a bit. But if we see anything other than Thestrals out there, I want you to run back to the castle, no questions asked, okay?”
Luna turned and regarded Tonks with her head slightly tilted. Tonks wondered what she was thinking.
“All right,” Luna said vaguely. “I don’t mind promising if it will make you feel better.” She stepped lightly away and down the flagstone steps. Tonks let the door swing closed behind them, and followed.
“Won’t you be cold?” she asked, as they crossed the lawn. Luna was wearing her school robes and had a sort of downy shawl cast about her shoulders, but she wasn’t wearing anything approaching a winter cloak.
“Oh…perhaps a bit,” Luna said musingly. “But it is winter, isn’t it?”
Tonks had sneaked into the Forbidden Forest so many times in her Hogwarts years, both with and without various combinations of her friends, that even now she had to remind herself it was, in fact, forbidden to students. She probably ought to feel more dismayed at herself for accompanying a student there, now that she was an ostensible adult. But Luna seemed so eminently capable of looking after herself.
As if reading her thoughts, Luna said in her gentle voice, “We won’t go far into the Forest. They’ll come to meet us at the edge.”
The dark woods seemed to rise up at them out of the dusk, and suddenly Tonks and Luna were standing in front of the first of the trees. Tonks breathed in deeply. The Forbidden Forest smelled like nowhere else she knew, earthy and deep and a little mysterious, in a way Tonks had never been able to quantify. It also smelled wonderfully familiar, like a kind of coming home.
“There,” said Luna softly, and Tonks looked up.
Coming towards them, stalking delicately through the deep gloom between the greyish outlines of tree trunks, was an otherworldly creature, strange even by the standards of all the magical beasts Tonks had seen and known.
The creature was darker even than the woods around it, its body leathery and sleek and skeleton-thin. Its papery wings, held away from its flanks and half unfurled, were enormous, like the wings of a bat built on a monstrous scale. Its wide, white eyes formed the only bright spots in the woods, luminous in the dark. It was grotesque and strange and somehow very beautiful.
“Oh,” Tonks breathed.
It was true, what she’d told Luna - she’d always wanted to find a Thestral, back in her schooldays, even though she knew she wouldn’t be able to see it. She’d found Thestrals deeply mysterious, and to school-age Tonks anything that was mysterious was also fascinating, a puzzle she wanted to take apart until she understood exactly how it worked.
More than once, she’d cajoled the Hogwarts elves into giving her kitchen scraps, the bloodier the better, and she’d read up on how to summon a Thestral, and she’d sneaked into the Forest to try her luck. She’d never succeeded in finding one, of course. But the pursuit itself had been joyful.
“It’s beautiful,” Tonks whispered.
Beside her, Luna murmured, “Hold out your hand.”
Wordlessly, Tonks did as she was told. The Thestral pranced forward, until it stood directly in front of them, then it bent its head to meet Tonks’ hand. Cool, leathery lips danced across her outstretched fingers, but the breath that gusted over her palm was surprisingly hot.
“Hello, friend,” Luna said to the animal in front of them. She, too, extended her hand, and the Thestral’s wide, expressive nostrils flared to take in its scent. Then it let out a small but pleased-sounding whuff of air.
Luna stroked one finger along the top of the Thestral’s nose ridge, then lowered her hand to her side.
“Stroke her nose,” Luna said to Tonks. “She likes that.”
Moving slowly, so as not to startle the animal, Tonks circled her palm from below its muzzle to above. Then she ran a finger, very lightly, along that long nose.
The Thestral gave a ghostly version of a horse’s whinny, and tossed its head.
Tonks stilled her hand completely. “Was that a good noise or a bad one?” she asked Luna quietly.
“Good, I think,” Luna replied, just as softly. “Wait and see if she butts her head against you or if she pulls away.”
For several breathless moments, Tonks waited. Then the Thestral dipped her head and pressed her cool, leathery muzzle into Tonks’ fingers.
Tonks laughed softly in surprise, and Luna turned and smiled at her, a smile that was full of air and sunshine even in those dark woods. “Aren’t they nice? Look, here comes another.”
More Thestrals were stepping out of the shadows, with that strange, prancing walk they had. More and more eerie, white-eyed faces appeared out of the dark, until there were eight or nine of them in a semi-circle around Tonks and Luna, nudging their muzzles against their hands and into Luna’s long hair, breathing with whispery, whistling noises that seemed loud in the quiet amidst the trees.
“They’re lovely, Luna,” Tonks said. Then, “Thank you.”
Tonks felt her eyes prick with tears, for no good reason she could name. She was thinking about Sirius, she supposed. And about how beautiful things and ugly things got so mixed up together that sometimes you couldn’t tell anymore what was what. She was thinking about her schooldays, her naïve wish to find a Thestral in the Forest, and how little she had understood, then, about what that really meant.
And she was thinking, too, that too many kids of Harry’s generation - of Luna’s generation - had never had the luxury of not understanding.
Stroking gentle fingers down the noses of two Thestrals at once, Luna said conversationally, “Yes, I often find I feel quite sad, when I visit the Thestrals. But they make me happy, too. Do you feel like that? Happy and sad at once?”
Tonks nodded, though she didn’t know if Luna could really see her in the near-dark there at the edge of the Forest. Yes, she felt happy and sad; she felt alone even as she was surrounded by these monstrous, gentle creatures. She felt protective towards this odd young woman beside her, and at the same time she felt awed by Luna’s self-possession.
She felt an almost overwhelming sadness, as she stroked the nose of the Thestral closest to her and let it nibble curiously on her fingers. But after so long of feeling frustrated and nearly numb, feeling even a painful emotion this deeply was, in some strange way, a relief.
- - - - -
Remus continued to dodge Serena’s eyes when she turned that thoughtful gaze on him, as the days passed and the seasons carried them slowly past the darkest hours of winter, to Imbolc.
This was a seasonal festival, akin to Samhain or Beltane, marking the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox. A celebration of the tentative beginnings of spring, although snow still lay heavy on the moor.
The pack’s celebration was tense and quiet, a small gathering around a hearth-like fireplace they had built for the occasion inside the lean-to. Brighid, the Alpha’s mate, had tended the fire carefully all day. Now, the pack gathered around and passed from hand to hand a jug of sweet, fresh milk - whether bartered or stolen Remus didn’t know, but he knew better than to ask - and lit long, tapered candles Anna had stored safely away until this day, symbols of the returning sun and its warmth. Fire and fertility, hearth and home, these were the touchstones of Imbolc.
Often, multiple werewolf packs gathered together for this and other seasonal festivals, taking these sacred days as an opportunity to meet, celebrate and share news. This year, the pack celebrated alone. Remus remembered words Narun had uttered, months ago now: Alpha hasn’t let us go to any of the big gatherings in ages. Doesn’t want us getting ideas, you know?
The last time the Alpha had taken members of his pack to a large gathering had been at Imbolc the year before, and now here it was already Imbolc again. The pack had kept themselves apart from the wider werewolf community all this time. It was unusual for a pack to stay so isolated, and Remus knew it served as another sign that the dire political climate had grown inescapable even for a peaceable group of werewolves who wanted nothing to do with Voldemort’s war.
Now, sitting quietly around their own fire, the silence felt morose. Narun and the other young ones were surely remembering the days when they had travelled freely to meet other packs and other young folks. Remus could see them casting guardedly discontented looks at the Alpha when they thought no one was looking.
Gazing into the fire, his shoulders taut with sympathetic pain at the tension around him, Remus, too, was remembering the year before, though for different reasons.
It had been the one time he’d got himself in too deep, in all his months of reconnaissance for Dumbledore. There had been a large gathering of packs in France, in the days around the full moon nearest Imbolc. Greyback had been there, with his big talk about everything Voldemort claimed to offer werewolves: prey and status and violent dominion over Muggles. The atmosphere at the gathering had grown ugly and a small group had attacked Remus, sensing that he was not like them, that he was an outsider who did not belong, a spy.
He’d managed to get away and made it onto a train back to England, ribs creaking and head pounding. Arriving in London, barely keeping himself upright, Remus had tried to fix his mind on the idea of home as he Apparated unsteadily away from St Pancras Station, and had somehow ended up at the door of Tonks’ flat, instead of Grimmauld Place as he’d intended.
Tonks had patched him up, competent and exasperated and concerned, then let him sleep off the worst of his injuries in her bed while she was at work. That had perhaps been the moment most of all, out of so many moments, when the tentative thing between the two of them had begun to be something definite and real.
But those memories belonged to the past. They’d been a stolen glimpse into the kind of life other people got to lead, and even those few months were more than Remus should have allowed himself to have.
If he’d been stronger and stayed away from the start, perhaps Tonks wouldn’t now look as blanched and miserable as she had done when he’d encountered her outside the Hogwarts gates. Remus would give anything if only he could undo the pain he’d caused.
“Quiet. Quiet!” Serena’s voice startled Remus out his reverie. She’d been trying to pass him the jug of milk as it made its way around the circle again.
“Sorry,” Remus said, accepting the jug from her hand and taking a swallow before passing it to Ronan on his other side. Ronan seemed distant from the other young ones these days, torn between his desire to belong with his peers and uncertainty whether he wanted to align himself with their increasingly radical opinions.
Eirwen, too, had retreated back into herself. It was painfully evident how badly she, too, wanted to belong with the others; but she had come here from Greyback’s pack and was clearly determined never to return to anything like it.
But the other three, Adair and Tamara and Narun… Remus’ skin prickled as he looked at them now, sitting together at the edge of the pack, their simmering discontent palpable. United in their shared, if covert, disdain for their elders, the connection between the three of them was electric and intense. Sometimes, Remus felt sure he saw signs of a growing romance between Tamara and Adair. Other times, he was equally certain it was Narun and Adair who were captivated by one another. Or perhaps it was all three.
Whatever its precise nature, the growing bond among the three of them had only heightened their distance from the rest of the pack. So far, the Alpha had tolerated their increasing apartness, but Remus knew this state of affairs couldn’t last.
- - - - -
At Scrivenshaft’s, the young shop assistant lit up when Tonks next came by on her rounds. She remembered Ariadne’s words (“He likes you!”) and his shy smile across the pub on New Year’s Eve. Then she wondered if she was currently making that face Ariadne insisted she made whenever “a guy fancies you but you don’t fancy him.”
Trying to resolve her face into something that was professional and polite, but not that expression, Tonks crossed the shop to the assistant, who’d glanced up from where he was arranging sheaves of parchment on a low shelf.
This was Tonks’ work, talking to people in the village, and she wasn’t going to shirk it just because someone had smiled at her.
“Good morning,” she said. That was suitably professional and polite, right?
“Morning!” the young man said. He slid the rest of the parchment onto the shelf and stood up, dusting off his hands against his robes. “I’m Andy, by the way. I’ve seen you around a bunch, but I guess I’ve never introduced myself.”
“I’m Tonks,” said Tonks. “I mean, my name’s Nymphadora Tonks, but I go by just Tonks.”
“Nice to officially meet you, Tonks,” Andy said, beaming. Tonks gave him a perfunctory smile and hastily turned the conversation to business, asking whether the shop had made good sales at Christmas and what items had been the big sellers.
She left the shop a few minutes later feeling unsettled. Despite her best efforts, the conversation had felt flirtatious. There was nothing actually wrong with flirting with someone new, of course - Remus had made quite clear where he stood - but it left her feeling off-balance and strange.
End notes:
Yup, once again Imbolc is a real Celtic Pagan holiday, one of the eight seasonal festivals throughout the year.
It always amuses me when I unintentionally develop an ongoing bit of headcanon backstory... The "young Tonks wants to find a Thestral" theme has made previous appearances in " Waiting for the Snow" (a fluffy future Teddy-centric fic) and in " Unexpected" (my perhaps-not-quite-canonical look at Tonks and Charlie Weasley's friendship).
Also, since Moody got his cameo in this chapter, this seems like an apt time to mention that I recently wrote a very short one-shot from his perspective! It's called " Relentless Sunshine" and it also features Lily Potter and the young folks of the first-war Order.
Here again for reference is the werewolf pack:
the Alpha, a male in his 40s, the pack’s leader
Anna, or the Mother, the oldest pack member, symbolic mother of all
Brighid, or Fire, the Alpha’s mate, roughly his age
Serena, or Trouble, roughly Remus’ age
Jack, or Thunderstorm, a little younger than the Alpha, Ashmita’s mate
Ashmita, or Rock Crag, Jack’s mate
Ronan, or Hardwood, young adult member of the pack, perhaps 20
Narun, or Rapids, roughly the same age
Adair, or Jump, roughly the same age
Tamara, or Blackthorn, roughly the same age
Eirwen, or Slither, a young teenager, 13 or 14
Joy, or River Run, the pack’s youngest member, 6 or 7
(continue to CHAPTER 15: Alone Apart)