FIC: Ill Met By Moonlight (Part One)
Title: Ill Met By Moonlight
Author: jesspallas
Rating & Warnings: PG-13 for swearing
Prompts: Hotel or holiday cottage and
“Every time I look at you the world just melts away
All my troubles all my fears dissolve in your affections
You've seen me at my weakest but you take me as I am
And when I fall you offer me a softer place to land” Push - Sarah McLachlan
Word Count: 10,830 (yes, I know! I don’t know how it happened either!)
Summary: “It was moments like this that Tonks couldn’t help but feel that some of Remus’ frequent jibes about her impulsive nature and total lack of forward planning might just have a tinge of accuracy about them. After all, if she’d taken a moment or two to think this through, perhaps at least let somebody, anybody know where she was going before she’d gone there, then maybe she wouldn’t now be stuck wandless in the attic of a rotting, creaky old seafront hotel whilst an extremely cranky graphorn did its level best to smash […] anything else that happened to be in its way to pieces.”
Author’s Notes: This story is set in the Portalverse I created for my story A Little More Time which is technically not AU but is generally regarded as such. The only thing you really need to know in respect of it is that a year or so after the DH epilogue, Teddy Lupin used a time portal in the Department of Mysteries to drag his parents twenty years into the future a moment before their deaths, leaving fake corpses behind so that history would play out as it should. It’s all a great deal more complicated than that and many shenanigans ensued as a result, but the upshot was that Remus and Tonks, still physically the age they were in DH, were able to pick up their lives twenty years in the future. This story also follows on from my second Portalverse piece Family Ties in which Tonks discovers she is pregnant and Teddy gets engaged to Victoire and my third piece Counting Legs in which Remus and Tonks discover they will be having a daughter shortly before they have to stop an acromantula that is unleashed at St Mungo’s by a narrow faced man that Remus finds inexplicably familiar. This story went a bit nuts on me and has ended up bizarrely long in spite of itself. Also, given the fact that the quote is from my favourite romantic song, it’s a little odd I’ve ended up writing yet another action based chapter. Strange how things turn out… LJ is also telling me it's too big so I shall have to post it in two parts.
BANG!
CRASH!
Oh sweet Merlin. What the bloody hell have I got myself into now?
It was moments like this that Tonks couldn’t help but feel that some of Remus’ frequent jibes about her impulsive nature and total lack of forward planning might just have a tinge of accuracy about them. After all, if she’d taken a moment or two to think this through, perhaps at least let somebody, anybody know where she was going before she’d gone there, then maybe she wouldn’t now be stuck wandless in the attic of a rotting, creaky old seafront hotel whilst an extremely cranky graphorn did its level best to smash the trapdoor she’d pulled closed, the ladder she’d climbed up, the floorboards on which she stood and indeed anything else that happened to be in its way to pieces.
BAM!
The fragile, woodworm riddled support beams gave a distinctly unhealthy lurch. The floor creaked ominously. Judging by the genuine darkness that had set in outside, she’d already been trapped for getting on for an hour and until recently the boards had held out well. But the graphorn was mindlessly persistent and showed no sign of losing interest. If she didn’t get out of here soon, the blasted thing was going bring the entire building down.
And knowing her luck, the man who’d got her into this was probably long gone by now. And no help would be coming unless… Would Remus have noticed how long she’d been gone? Would he try and come after her in spite of what night it was?
She wasn’t sure if she wanted that or not. Even Kingsley would have trouble defending him if anybody saw…
Oh bloody hell. A holiday had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
But what else could she have done? She was an Auror. And to have Britain’s most wanted criminal just wander into her path like that... How could she have turned her back? He’d caused four deaths now and untold chaos in the few months since his vindictive campaign had started. The whole Auror division had been hunting him since June with only the most meagre success. She’d gone for a walk, just a walk and he’d been standing there in that broken down old hotel’s doorway as though butter wouldn’t melt, grasping a too familiar potion bottle…
She glanced down at the bulge of her ever swelling stomach and sighed. One of these days she would learn to start thinking for two…
To her left, pale silver light glinted through a narrow, broken window. The full moon gleamed.
Wood splintered violently mere inches from her foot. Twin long sharp horns that a horde of apothecaries would have paid a small fortune to acquire lanced up through the abruptly gashed hole.
Well, there was no going down and she couldn’t lurk here for much longer. And stupid as it seemed on top of a five storey building, the attic window was as good as it was going to get. Trying desperately to ignore the disconcerting lurch and shake of the floorboards beneath her, Tonks staggered as best she could over to the dirty, pitted window frame, knocking the clinging remainders of the misty glass out of the way with a nearby lump of graphorn-shattered wood. She peered outside.
The sea stretched away before her, dark and imposing, lit only by the old-fashioned wrought iron lamps of the promenade. The beach itself was invisible beneath darkness and tide but she could just make out the hunkered shape of the bench she and Remus had sat together on only a few hours before, beside the children’s play area that was now no more than a series of odd, shadowed heaps by moonlight. Below, the haphazard roof-tiles slipped down to an extremely perilous looking gutter before falling away towards the coloured paving of the promenade.
And then she saw it. And froze.
For lingering beneath the glow of the nearest lamp stood a lean werewolf. It was staring at her.
So a werewolf was waiting for her. But the question was which one?
Tonks gritted her teeth. This wasn’t the way this week had been supposed to go. Even just a few hours before, it had been so different. She stared at the dark shape of the bench and just for a moment the scream of breaking wood, the roar of the angry graphorn and the inexplicable gaze of the waiting werewolf all faded away. There was nothing, nothing but that afternoon, nothing but sunshine and ice cream and a warm, bony shoulder on which to rest her head…
* * *
“That can’t be comfortable.”
Barely pausing from her intensive assault on her chocolate and raspberry ripple ice cream cone, Tonks nevertheless managed to stick an extremely sticky tongue in the direction of her husband’s cheek as she pointedly snuggled more firmly into the admittedly rather sharp cornered shoulder that she had commandeered the moment they’d sat down on the seafront bench. Remus winced and pulled a face.
“And that’s disgusting,” he informed her with a prissy indignity that was entirely put on. “For you, lady-like is something that happens to other people, isn’t it?” He gestured to the cavorting band of children hurling themselves around the little play area just to their right, leaping down slides and bouncing noisily on a small trampoline. “What kind of example is that to set for impressionable children, hmmm? Will you teaching our daughter things like that?”
“Spoken like a true teacher.” Tonks slurpily helped herself to another cooling dose of unhealthy goodness as she tilted her head to drink in the warm August sunshine beating down upon the promenade. Below, the distant sea was sparkling as it slowly but surely began its inevitable advance to consume the expansive sands. “It’s the summer holidays, Remus. Let it go.” She waggled her eyebrows playfully. “Unless of course you want to give me a detention.”
Remus offered a pointed glance in the direction of her five month old bump before rolling his eyes. “I don’t think either of us are quite in the right state for the practical element of that innuendo,” he remarked with what Tonks considered to be unreasonable common sense. “Given that between us we’ve managed a grand total of three hundred yards down the promenade before having to sit down. Not to mention you’re on your third energy-boosting ice cream.”
With deliberate exactitude, Tonks allowed her tongue to work its way around the rim of the cone. “It’s a craving,” she retorted deliberately. “You can’t deny a pregnant woman what she’s craving, can you?”
Remus eyed with outright suspicion. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he drawled. “Even if I have noticed that your cravings tend to err in the direction of the sweetest, stickiest thing that happens to be available at the time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” With a crunch, Tonks delved her way into the ice cream caverns hidden in the depths of the cone. “Coincidence, pure and simple.”
“Hmph.” Remus folded his arms but Tonks could tell by the set of his jaw line that he was only playing around. “So it was cravings that made you have three chocolate based desserts at lunch?”
“It’s awful. I just can’t control myself.”
“And the two boxes of luxury biscuits on your desk at work?”
“Harry Potter is a liar and a snitch.”
“He said it took three days for the swelling on Zach Woodvine’s hand to go down.”
“My biscuits are my biscuits. Stealing them means consequences.”
“But hexing the tin?”
“I was practising the spells and the tins got in the way. I wanted to make sure that the next time we’re on the trail of our friend the Monster Master, we can bring him down before he gets anybody else hurt.”
Tonks felt rather than saw the gentle gaze that Remus had fixed upon her at the sudden hardening of her tone. “It really wasn’t your fault, you know. Everybody’s said so.”
The Auror felt herself sigh. It had been a hard few months for the Auror office. The incident with the acromantula in St Mungo’s had seemed so huge at the time, but to the horror of the entire wizarding world, it had turned out to be the tip of a highly unpleasant iceberg. It had been the troll in Hogsmeade next, followed by the horde of kappas unleashed in The Leaky Cauldron, the angry griffin in the reception of the Ministry, the Hairy MacBoon in Gringotts and, oh Merlin, the lethifold on the Knight Bus that had consumed a goblin, a witch and two wizards asleep on their beds before it had been spotted by the driver and driven away by a curse breaker who happened to be on board. And at every place, a burnt and tattered note would be hurled through the Floo or found on the floor tied to a lump of rock.
THIS is a monster.
And the deaths had been her fault.
She’d seen him. That narrow face, grey hair, the harsh expression that had stared down from wanted posters, from the front pages of the Prophet and the Crucible had darted across her vision as she’d rushed into Diagon Alley in response to the Gringotts call. Just for a moment, she’d had a clean shot.
And she’d missed it. Missed him. A screaming witch had pounded into her as she’d fired and her spell had ricocheted off a hanging sign and stunned a bewildered shopper instead. The eruption of an enormous, hairy, five-legged monster out of Gringotts behind her had distracted her attention and by the time she’d been able to turn back, the Monster Master had been long gone.
And in his next attack, four innocent people had died.
The Monster Master. It was the Prophet’s name for him and it had stuck. And despite the posters and the campaigns and Remus’ almost desperate efforts to remember where he might have seen the man before, a real name continued to elude them. The attacks until recently had been weekly events and all Auror leave had been cancelled - it had only been after a lull of more than a fortnight that Harry had been willing to grant any of his Aurors time off at all. Normally Tonks and Remus would not have dreamed about going away during a week that contained a full moon, but as things stood, they simply had to take what they could get.
It had been a shame that Teddy and Victoire had been unable to join them. The four of them had planned to go away together at some point that summer but Victoire had been unable to get leave from St Mungo’s and Teddy hadn’t wanted to desert her to deal with the latest ideas of a family full of amateur wedding planners alone. But they’d spoken by Floo last night, rebuffing yet another attempt he made to offer them a list of baby names. Teddy was a worrier like his father and the responsibility of naming his new baby sister had left him in a desperate tizzy not to pick something they’d hate. But Tonks was determined that the choice was going to be his and that, like it or not, whatever he picked would be it. As Remus had pointed out afterwards though, telling him that hadn’t necessarily helped.
But a holiday was a holiday, with or without Teddy, and even if with the full moon looming, Remus was tired and achy and Tonks was tired and heavy; both of them were determined to enjoy whatever they could manage in the quiet little seaside town they’d retreated to. The town was the unwitting home to Bubblins, wizarding Britain’s first ever holiday camp, with its cheery red-cloaked entertainers, but much as Remus in particular would have preferred to shun the terrifying prospect of fun en masse, the regulations regarding werewolves did state that they were asked not to transform in Muggle public premises. That meant an immediate limitation on any holiday spots and so they had booked a Bubblins chalet (accepting the proviso that Remus drink his wolfsbane in front of reliable witnesses before arrival) and fled the camp early each morning to avoid having to be sociable. Tonks personally had no huge objections to wart growing competitions and hippogriff rides, although sing-along with Celestina had sent her fleeing for the exits. But the look on Remus’ face as they’d arrived had suggested to her strongly that the wellbeing of her husband over the next few days depended on keeping him away from the unrelenting horror of anyone likely to wish him “a bright and bubbly Bubblins day!”
But the horror would have to be faced soon. The afternoon was winding down.
“We’ll have to head back soon.” The look on Remus’ face told her at once that he hadn’t missed the way she’d dodged the painful subject but he chose not to press the matter. “This afternoon’s wearing on and we aren’t exactly speedy.”
It was Remus’ turn to sigh. “Ah yes, my pending monthly appointment. Joy of joys.”
Tonks squeezed his hand. “At least the wolfsbane programme is reliable these days. You don’t have to worry about all those doses or getting a bad batch.”
“I know.” Remus gazed absently out towards the rolling sea for a moment. “But it’s never going to be fun.” He glanced down at her. “If you want to take a walk this evening, go right ahead, I won’t be offended. I know it’ll be quite late with the summer sun but…”
Tonks struggled to hide her grimace. She had witnessed her husband’s transformation a couple of times in their life together and, cruel as it made her feel, she had no desire to repeat the experience. Only a masochist would voluntarily endure watching the person they loved in so much pain.
“I might,” she said softly. “If you don’t mind.”
His smile was one of relief. “Of course not. Come on then.” He rose rather tentatively and offered her his hand. “Let’s head back. Unless of course you have a sudden overwhelming urge to try out that trampoline.”
He jerked his head in the direction of the play area as she laughed. “Nah,” she replied, nuzzling her head back into his bony shoulder once more as they linked arms and turned back the way they had come. “Me on a trampoline? I’d be lucky to come away with all my limbs still attached.”
“It’d be a softer bounce than the paving stones. Although after all those ice creams you could probably get up a decent ripple on the promenade…”
“Oi!” She poked him in the shoulder. “I’ll have you know this belly is your doing and nothing else!”
She spotted the innocent air with which he grinned at once. “I’m starting to wonder. I mean, how would it look to everyone if come December you gave birth to a bouncing baby Cornetto?”
Tonks glared into his neck. “I hope you realise that if I wasn’t a loving wife who is sensitive to your currently delicate disposition, you’d be dead meat right now.”
“Oh, completely,” Remus replied with an airy smile. “I thought of that joke the first day we got here, after that raid you made on that poor unsuspecting Muggle ice cream van. Why do you think I waited until today to say it?”
* * *
The promenade was quiet against a backdrop of thickening twilight. Bubblins had been a noisy mass when she’d left, a cheerful horde of badly-tuned voices all gathered in the glass building shaped like a half-buried crystal ball as young and old alike belted out badly-tuned renditions of the latest musical hits. But this little Muggle seaside town was not a place designed by nature to have a heavy nightlife - the reeling, drunken young revellers that couldn’t afford to hold their parties in warmer climbs tended to head for the bright lights of better known resorts further down the coast. Tonks suspected that in spite of the waning tourist industry here, that was probably a matter of no small relief to the local residents.
A late night ice cream van might have been nice though. And it was definitely a craving. She didn’t care what Remus thought.
Remus.
Tonks glanced at the sky. The bloated full moon had still yet to make an appearance on the darkening horizon. Her husband was still human.
For now.
Tonks had never cared that the man she’d fallen so deeply in love with was a werewolf. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
He’d still be waiting then. Lurking naked in the spare bedroom of their rented chalet with that ratty old yellow blanket that Molly had made him years ago. He generally set aside a bowl of water and some sandwiches too and even a book, since, in Remus’ little world, spending the night as a werewolf with a wolfsbane-preserved human mind was as good a time as any to catch up on some reading. He’d just been in the process of locking himself in when she’d kissed his cheek and left, promising to be back right after moonset. He liked to have someone call through the door. Just in case. Just to be sure he was himself…
It was his routine. She knew it off by heart. When had being married to a man who turned into a wolf once a month become so mundane?
It seemed wrong that something so extraordinary and horrific should become so every day. But it was infinite times better than the alternative.
She still remembered that awful year after Sirius died, the state she’d seen him in after a transformation with Greyback’s pack. Lying wrapped in a blanket with some sandwiches and a book was nothing…
Her eyes drifted along the shadowy promenade. It was getting very late now and night was making a serious effort of rolling in. The trampoline, swings and slides of the children’s play area formed dusky shapes opposite the ragged outline of a derelict old hotel. The rainbow colours of the play equipment leeched away in the twilight even as the same creeping night-time blurred the edges of the boarded up windows and gaping maw of a doorway…
The open gaping maw. With a shadow standing inside it.
With an awkward stutter, the first of the promenade’s cast iron lanterns chose that moment to hum into life. It was the one directly beside the hotel.
The face it illuminated was very familiar. The bottle he held even more so.
Tonks froze. It was the surprise as much as anything. But several seconds of highly unprofessional staring was enough to confirm what her eyes had told her. A narrow, unshaven face, a shock of wild grey hair all over shabby clothes and lurking in his hands, a potion bottle of such familiar shape and colour that it made her blood run cold.
The Monster Master. And he was holding a bottle of wolfsbane.
For one cold instant, Tonks was convinced that this had to have something to do with Remus, that this collector of dangerous monsters must have followed him here in order to unleash him upon Bubblins and the town as the latest ploy in his terrible game. But even as she backed hurriedly away into the shadow of the now shuttered snack kiosk, the sane and logical part of her brain kicked back in. Remus had had his wolfsbane. It had been brewed by the wife of the Minister for Magic and administered in front of said Minister, not to mention a certain Harry Potter, which was, in the reliable witness stakes, a difficult combination to top. It couldn’t have been tampered with, which was the only way that Remus would have been a danger to anyone tonight. And more wolfsbane would only make him ill, not dangerous.
So this couldn’t be about Remus. Not sensibly.
And now that the white glow of the light was strengthening, Tonks could see that the man who was currently terrorising wizarding Britain looked extremely drawn and pale, drawn and pale in a way that Tonks found extremely familiar.
Werewolf. The Monster Master was a werewolf.
And the moon was about to rise.
Her heart lurched. If he was still holding the wolfsbane, he hadn’t drunk it yet. And if he wasn’t planning to unleash Remus, what if the plan was to unleash himself?
She groped for her wand. She probably wouldn’t get more than one shot. No magic, not even an Unforgivable, would work on a transformed werewolf and moonrise could only be minutes away. She had to take him out before he…
But the thought was left standing as, with a casual smirk towards the horizon, the wizarding world’s most wanted turned and sauntered back inside out of sight.
And it took only a few moments’ more groping to realise that her wand wasn’t there. In her hurry to leave the chalet, she’d left it on the dining table.
In hindsight, Tonks would realise that this was the moment when she should have gone for help. She should have hurried back to Bubblins to raise the alarm, to get her wand and send a patronus to Harry. But all she could see in her mind’s eyes was four empty beds on the Knight Bus and a figure fleeing down Diagon Alley that she was supposed to have brought down. Help would arrive too late. It was up to her.
Luckily, only the one light had thus far stuttered into life and waddling her way awkwardly across the promenade by the cover of shadows proved no vast chore. The front door still stood open and the way before her was clear. An umbrella stand beside the door provided her with a hefty walking stick that would hopefully prove sufficient to knock a ruthless psychopath unconscious long enough for her to fetch help. She could hear a strange grunting noise from some distant part of the hotel but she chose for the time being to move as silently as she was able down the cracked marble of the hallway towards the glow of light at the rear of the building. A faded series of letters on the wooden panel over the door indicated that the glow was coming from the visitors lounge.
And from within, a hoarse, hard-edged voice drifted into earshot.
“…attacks were warnings. But now I’m ready for people to understand. Oh, they say things have changed now, don’t they, and the old laws that screwed over me and my kind for all them years have gone. They say, awww, poor, poor little werewolves, pat them on the head, give them a biscuit, we can all feel nice and sorry for them now the filthy beasts is behaving themselves!” Tonks hoped it was only in her imagination that the harsh snort carried the echoes of a guttural growl. “But I don’t care. Twenty-five years they stole from me! Those same smug bastards who stand around all self-righteous now, congratulating themselves on how progressive they are about the poor, poor little werewolves are the same smug bastards who cheered them on when they ground us down!” The words were virtually spat out, almost tumbling over each other as they poured out of the unseen lips. “Liars, the lot of them! Two-faced scum! They don’t know what it’s like to be chased down by a monster! Every werewolf, every one, he knows! He’s been there, done that, got the bloody teeth-marks! And do they say, oh gawd, how awful, it weren’t your fault though, have a cuppa tea love, we’ll look after you! No! For ten years I’d repaired people’s Floos, they let me into their homes, no questions, a smile, a cuppa tea, a ginger newt and I’d fix their fire, no hassle, no problems. But when it’s a werewolf they’re letting through the door, oh no, we can’t be having that. Suddenly I ain’t good enough no more! What if the filthy bugger’s catching? What if he attacks the little darlings or eats the cat? How do we know we can trust him?”
So. Not just a werewolf, a bitter werewolf too. But who’s he talking to? If he wasn’t alone, that meant a whole new set of issues but Tonks could not spare much concentration for mental commentary - it was all she could do to keep her ever treacherous feet from betraying her as she crept closer, treading as quickly as she dared along the passageway. Ahead, the tirade of the angry werewolf was rising to a new intensity.
“But why should I have to prove I could still be trusted, eh? I was the same old Jack I always was! No, it was them that couldn’t be trusted, them that turned on me, them that didn’t understand that what makes a werewolf dangerous is people! Stupid, stupid people! If stupid people didn’t treat werewolves the way they always have, do you think the likes of Greyback would have turned on them, huh? If they’d taken him aside after he got bit, looked after him, made him feel welcome, you reckon he’d have gone out and turned wild? But no, they treated him like a monster and he lived up to what they wanted, didn’t he? And then he took it out and dumped it on the rest of us! Dumped it on me! And cos of stupid, stupid people, I had nowhere to go but back to him in the end, did I? Back to him just in time to be locked up and dragged off to Azkaban! Me, that’d never broken a law in me life! And then the Minister, him that said he’d help the poor werewolves in honour of that sodding dead friend of his, he left me there to rot. Left me there for twenty-five bloody years! Scared, he was! Scared of Greyback’s name coming up again! He said he’d help, but he knew people were stupid too and he didn’t dare mean it until he thought he’d be safe. ”
Greyback. Tonks went cold as memories of that awful year swamped her mind once more. So he was one of Greyback’s, was he? Was that how Remus had known his face? Had he been one of those blighted, bedraggled souls he’d met on that stupid mission that had pulled them apart?
The odd grunting noise was getting louder, coming, it seemed, from somewhere on the far side of the derelict lounge. Carefully resting herself against the edge of the doorframe with her walking stick still grasped in her hand, Tonks peered through the crack in the half open door into the room beyond. Rotting, threadbare armchairs were scattered across the room, spilling their stuffing onto a distinctly unhealthy looking carpet by the light of an enormous and hotly blazing arched fireplace. A bent coffee table was slumped nearby, scattered with papers - with a cold chill, Tonks recognised a brightly coloured Bubblins map and what looked like a Floo fireplace diagram amongst them. One connection had been circled heavily in red and Tonks was willing to bet she knew which one.
The main Floo hearth at Bubblins reception was only yards from the hall where at that very moment, shockingly bad karaoke was in full swing.
There was a jar of what was clearly Floo Powder sitting on the table beside the papers. And although this Muggle fire would not have been on the network, how much effort would it take for a man who’d mended fires for ten years to hook it up?
Not much, she suspected. And that was a big fireplace.
Oh Merlin.
Her vision was restricted by the narrowness of the crack. She could not see the far side of the room. But she could see from the shadows that something large was moving. It was sluggish for now, but Tonks was willing to bet it wouldn’t stay that way.
And then finally, she looked at the Monster Master.
He was apparently alone after all in spite of his diatribe, kneeling beside the fire and staring into the flames as shadow and light played across his pale features in a grim dance. In one hand, he gripped the open bottle of wolfsbane. In the other, he held a small, transparent sphere in which odd snakes of colour wound in ever-changing rainbow patterns, jumping at the crack of the fire and the harsh, angry breathing of the man who grasped it. Tonks recognised it at once. Sonic Spheres had recently been invented as a more wizardly way of recording and listening to music, although Harry had taken to using them to record interviews of suspects for use as evidence. He believed and Tonks agreed that hearing the accused’s own words was more effective before the Wizengamot than a transcribed statement from a magical Recording Quill.
The Monster Master was recording his rant. He was explaining himself.
And then the colours began to dance once more as the angry words resumed.
“Now, you’re likely sat listening to this thinking; barking old werewolf, ungrateful sod, monster in his brain, we should never have given them no rights back at all! I know how you buggers think!” The narrow face contorted violently. “But listen to this!” The wolfsbane bottle swung violently to his lips as he flung his head back - there was a frantic glugging sound, a harsh swallow and then a glassy clunk as he tossed it over his shoulder. The now blessedly empty wolfsbane bottle bounced off an armchair, hit the carpet with a loud tink and rolled slowly into the hall to come to a gentle halt against Tonks’ foot. Aware of its tripping potential, she nudged it quietly aside.
“Do you hear that?” The Monster Master’s face contorted as he glared violently down at the inoffensive glass sphere grasped in his hands. “I drink my wolfsbane! Cos it ain’t no monster trying to get his own back on you bastards! It’s a man! A human man who thinks for himself and had twenty five years in jail he didn’t deserve to think good and hard about how to show you all what real dangerous beasts are when he got out! Ain’t nobody going to get hurt by me on a full moon night! I’ll be off and safe and killing no one. It’s the real monsters that you’ll have had to worry about! The real dangerous beasts! You all say you’ve changed, clasp your hands all pious like and try to help us. But you still don’t think we’re people, not really, not deep down. You lump us in with all the savage monsters of the world, sending us to the Beast Division, putting us in books like Fantastic Beasts like we ain’t just humans at all. Well, I ain’t never going to be able to forgive that. But I will make sure you all see the difference when the real thing comes rushing for your stupid little darlings and eats your bloody cat. It ain’t Greyback who made a monster out of me. It’s the human race.” He leaned his face closer to the sphere and Tonks saw the savage red shape in the glass that accompanied the cruel smirk. “Enjoy,” he hissed softly.
He tapped the side of the sphere. The rainbow colours congealed and froze into a ball at the centre. The recording was over. The Monster Master placed it carefully down on the table with his papers for a moment before he whisked the lot into a metal box he pulled from under the table. With a shove, he pushed it back under this nominal protection, his eyes drifting over the unseen but threatening shadows on the far side of the room. There was another bad-tempered grunt.
“Oh pipe down your whining.” The reprimand was almost affectionate. “The drug’ll wear off in a minute and then you’ll be trampling bastards to your heart’s content once I put you back in that Floo. Trust me, it’ll be better than walloping mountain trolls in Slovenia any da… Aah!”
The spasm that crossed his face was alarmingly familiar. Tonks knew the signs as well as he did. There was probably less than a half a minute now.
It’s rising…
And so was he, stiff and awkward, his teeth gritted as he reached for the Floo powder. Tonks knew that any second the change would rip in and although, since she had no wand, his immunity to magic would make little difference, she would prefer to face a rangy man in his fifties than a transformed werewolf any day. She had to act and act quickly.
An unknown beast and a transforming werewolf lay before her. She was wandless and pregnant and nobody knew she was here.
But it didn’t change the facts. He had to be stopped. Even something as terrible as Bubblins karaoke night didn’t deserve this.
He was moving towards the fire now, dipping his fingers into the Floo powder. She couldn’t let him open a connection, she just couldn’t.
His back was turned to her. It was the only chance she was going to get.
And so, grasping the walking stick firmly in both hands, Tonks girded her tired and reluctant body and hurled herself forwards.
Her swing was a thing of beauty; any professional golfer would have sighed in desperate envy. The stick’s curved handle smashed into the Monster Master’s arm and sent the jar of Floo powder hurtling out of his grasp to shatter with an explosion of grey against the peeling wallpaper. A hagged, shocked face half turned towards her but the element of surprise and the power of adrenalin were still on her side - her second blow caught him emphatically around the side of the head and sent him sprawling to the ground with a thud. Stunned and shaking his head, he roared with anger and started to rise but a sudden spasm rocked his features and drove him back to the carpet. His skin rippled and contorted as grey tufts of matted fur erupted began to erupt from across his skin. His eyes turned gold as he screamed, his voice tailing away into a wild and blood-curdling howl.
Her third blow caught him sharply across the half-formed muzzle. The fourth smacked into his skull, glazing the golden eyes and silencing his growling.
It wasn’t Remus. There was no love lost here and Tonks had seen it all before. He needed to be downed and after the last few months, she wasn’t about to be delicate.
For a moment, she could only stand, gasping, walking stick grasped in her hands as she stared down at the unconscious and now fully transformed werewolf laid out before her. She’d got him. She’d done it. She’d actually…
It was no longer a grunt. It was a bellow. And it was very close.
A huge greyish-purple shape loomed in her peripheral vision. There was a distinct edge of sharpness about it.
She looked up. And wished she hadn’t. Being eyeballed by a clearly infuriated and distinctly no-longer-doped-up graphorn at close range was not a pleasant experience.
It lowered its head. A four thumped foot scraped nastily against the carpet.
Tonks did at that point what any sensible person in her position would do. She turned on her heel and bolted for the door.
It’s too narrow for a beast that big, he must have brought it through the fireplace, it’ll never get out of there to…
SMASH!
Bugger.
The building literally shook as a graphorn shaped hole was gouged out of the wall surrounding the door frame, sending timbers and plasterboard crashing down into the marble corridor ahead of her. Although Tonks was certain that such a barrier would in no way impede a massive and angry mountain beast, they definitely got in the way of a small, pregnant Auror armed with nothing but a walking stick.
And given that fallen timbers were blocking one end of the corridor and a graphorn was blocking the other, there really was no choice left but the stone staircase that wound away up to her left.
She hurled the stick at the graphorn for the spirit of the thing, almost wrenching her arm in the process but she wasn’t at all surprised when twin horns hefted it violently and sent it spinning to smash against the battered ceiling. But the distraction gave her a brief head start as she hurled herself up the stairs, scrambling almost on all fours as heavy footsteps echoed on the marble below her. Bugger again, it was still following her…
And why not? It’s a ruddy mountain beast. Stairs aren’t going to worry it, idiot!
And indeed, four thumbed feet were making short work of the climb, shorter work than the clumsy limbs of the ungainly figure it was pursuing. The occasional narrow corner impeded its progress marginally but the crunch and thud and shake of the building implied they weren’t putting up too much of a barrier.
Her feet skidded against the dirty floor, her hands scrabbled for purchase; she could hear her own breathing rasping in her ears, her heartbeat drumming.
Or was it two heartbeats?
I’ve got to get away. I have got to get away. For her. For Remus and Teddy and her.
For my family.
Some thoughtful and considerate soul had locked the fire doors at every level, rusty padlocks that probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds under a good assault but a few seconds would be too long. If she got out of the situation alive, Tonks fully intended to track down the bastard that had put them there and kick them well into the next century.
And so she climbed and climbed and climbed, treacherous marble sliding and sending her reeling as the building shook and shuddered from the efforts of the graphorn to follow her. Who knew the blasted things were so persistent?
Ahead, the stairs petered out onto a landing. A small ladder hung down into an open space. With a hitherto unimaginable agility, Tonks reached the foot of it in a flying leap, narrowly avoiding the whistling swipe of twin horns past her foot as she scrambled the last few feet into the dark attic and slammed the trapdoor shut behind her.
Moonlight poured in through a misty, cracked window. The light was poor, but it told her enough. There was no other door.
Below her, the floor trembled. The graphorn roared.
She was trapped.
Continued in Part Two http://community.livejournal.com/metamorfic_moon/176200.html#cutid1
Author: jesspallas
Rating & Warnings: PG-13 for swearing
Prompts: Hotel or holiday cottage and
“Every time I look at you the world just melts away
All my troubles all my fears dissolve in your affections
You've seen me at my weakest but you take me as I am
And when I fall you offer me a softer place to land” Push - Sarah McLachlan
Word Count: 10,830 (yes, I know! I don’t know how it happened either!)
Summary: “It was moments like this that Tonks couldn’t help but feel that some of Remus’ frequent jibes about her impulsive nature and total lack of forward planning might just have a tinge of accuracy about them. After all, if she’d taken a moment or two to think this through, perhaps at least let somebody, anybody know where she was going before she’d gone there, then maybe she wouldn’t now be stuck wandless in the attic of a rotting, creaky old seafront hotel whilst an extremely cranky graphorn did its level best to smash […] anything else that happened to be in its way to pieces.”
Author’s Notes: This story is set in the Portalverse I created for my story A Little More Time which is technically not AU but is generally regarded as such. The only thing you really need to know in respect of it is that a year or so after the DH epilogue, Teddy Lupin used a time portal in the Department of Mysteries to drag his parents twenty years into the future a moment before their deaths, leaving fake corpses behind so that history would play out as it should. It’s all a great deal more complicated than that and many shenanigans ensued as a result, but the upshot was that Remus and Tonks, still physically the age they were in DH, were able to pick up their lives twenty years in the future. This story also follows on from my second Portalverse piece Family Ties in which Tonks discovers she is pregnant and Teddy gets engaged to Victoire and my third piece Counting Legs in which Remus and Tonks discover they will be having a daughter shortly before they have to stop an acromantula that is unleashed at St Mungo’s by a narrow faced man that Remus finds inexplicably familiar. This story went a bit nuts on me and has ended up bizarrely long in spite of itself. Also, given the fact that the quote is from my favourite romantic song, it’s a little odd I’ve ended up writing yet another action based chapter. Strange how things turn out… LJ is also telling me it's too big so I shall have to post it in two parts.
BANG!
CRASH!
Oh sweet Merlin. What the bloody hell have I got myself into now?
It was moments like this that Tonks couldn’t help but feel that some of Remus’ frequent jibes about her impulsive nature and total lack of forward planning might just have a tinge of accuracy about them. After all, if she’d taken a moment or two to think this through, perhaps at least let somebody, anybody know where she was going before she’d gone there, then maybe she wouldn’t now be stuck wandless in the attic of a rotting, creaky old seafront hotel whilst an extremely cranky graphorn did its level best to smash the trapdoor she’d pulled closed, the ladder she’d climbed up, the floorboards on which she stood and indeed anything else that happened to be in its way to pieces.
BAM!
The fragile, woodworm riddled support beams gave a distinctly unhealthy lurch. The floor creaked ominously. Judging by the genuine darkness that had set in outside, she’d already been trapped for getting on for an hour and until recently the boards had held out well. But the graphorn was mindlessly persistent and showed no sign of losing interest. If she didn’t get out of here soon, the blasted thing was going bring the entire building down.
And knowing her luck, the man who’d got her into this was probably long gone by now. And no help would be coming unless… Would Remus have noticed how long she’d been gone? Would he try and come after her in spite of what night it was?
She wasn’t sure if she wanted that or not. Even Kingsley would have trouble defending him if anybody saw…
Oh bloody hell. A holiday had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
But what else could she have done? She was an Auror. And to have Britain’s most wanted criminal just wander into her path like that... How could she have turned her back? He’d caused four deaths now and untold chaos in the few months since his vindictive campaign had started. The whole Auror division had been hunting him since June with only the most meagre success. She’d gone for a walk, just a walk and he’d been standing there in that broken down old hotel’s doorway as though butter wouldn’t melt, grasping a too familiar potion bottle…
She glanced down at the bulge of her ever swelling stomach and sighed. One of these days she would learn to start thinking for two…
To her left, pale silver light glinted through a narrow, broken window. The full moon gleamed.
Wood splintered violently mere inches from her foot. Twin long sharp horns that a horde of apothecaries would have paid a small fortune to acquire lanced up through the abruptly gashed hole.
Well, there was no going down and she couldn’t lurk here for much longer. And stupid as it seemed on top of a five storey building, the attic window was as good as it was going to get. Trying desperately to ignore the disconcerting lurch and shake of the floorboards beneath her, Tonks staggered as best she could over to the dirty, pitted window frame, knocking the clinging remainders of the misty glass out of the way with a nearby lump of graphorn-shattered wood. She peered outside.
The sea stretched away before her, dark and imposing, lit only by the old-fashioned wrought iron lamps of the promenade. The beach itself was invisible beneath darkness and tide but she could just make out the hunkered shape of the bench she and Remus had sat together on only a few hours before, beside the children’s play area that was now no more than a series of odd, shadowed heaps by moonlight. Below, the haphazard roof-tiles slipped down to an extremely perilous looking gutter before falling away towards the coloured paving of the promenade.
And then she saw it. And froze.
For lingering beneath the glow of the nearest lamp stood a lean werewolf. It was staring at her.
So a werewolf was waiting for her. But the question was which one?
Tonks gritted her teeth. This wasn’t the way this week had been supposed to go. Even just a few hours before, it had been so different. She stared at the dark shape of the bench and just for a moment the scream of breaking wood, the roar of the angry graphorn and the inexplicable gaze of the waiting werewolf all faded away. There was nothing, nothing but that afternoon, nothing but sunshine and ice cream and a warm, bony shoulder on which to rest her head…
* * *
“That can’t be comfortable.”
Barely pausing from her intensive assault on her chocolate and raspberry ripple ice cream cone, Tonks nevertheless managed to stick an extremely sticky tongue in the direction of her husband’s cheek as she pointedly snuggled more firmly into the admittedly rather sharp cornered shoulder that she had commandeered the moment they’d sat down on the seafront bench. Remus winced and pulled a face.
“And that’s disgusting,” he informed her with a prissy indignity that was entirely put on. “For you, lady-like is something that happens to other people, isn’t it?” He gestured to the cavorting band of children hurling themselves around the little play area just to their right, leaping down slides and bouncing noisily on a small trampoline. “What kind of example is that to set for impressionable children, hmmm? Will you teaching our daughter things like that?”
“Spoken like a true teacher.” Tonks slurpily helped herself to another cooling dose of unhealthy goodness as she tilted her head to drink in the warm August sunshine beating down upon the promenade. Below, the distant sea was sparkling as it slowly but surely began its inevitable advance to consume the expansive sands. “It’s the summer holidays, Remus. Let it go.” She waggled her eyebrows playfully. “Unless of course you want to give me a detention.”
Remus offered a pointed glance in the direction of her five month old bump before rolling his eyes. “I don’t think either of us are quite in the right state for the practical element of that innuendo,” he remarked with what Tonks considered to be unreasonable common sense. “Given that between us we’ve managed a grand total of three hundred yards down the promenade before having to sit down. Not to mention you’re on your third energy-boosting ice cream.”
With deliberate exactitude, Tonks allowed her tongue to work its way around the rim of the cone. “It’s a craving,” she retorted deliberately. “You can’t deny a pregnant woman what she’s craving, can you?”
Remus eyed with outright suspicion. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he drawled. “Even if I have noticed that your cravings tend to err in the direction of the sweetest, stickiest thing that happens to be available at the time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” With a crunch, Tonks delved her way into the ice cream caverns hidden in the depths of the cone. “Coincidence, pure and simple.”
“Hmph.” Remus folded his arms but Tonks could tell by the set of his jaw line that he was only playing around. “So it was cravings that made you have three chocolate based desserts at lunch?”
“It’s awful. I just can’t control myself.”
“And the two boxes of luxury biscuits on your desk at work?”
“Harry Potter is a liar and a snitch.”
“He said it took three days for the swelling on Zach Woodvine’s hand to go down.”
“My biscuits are my biscuits. Stealing them means consequences.”
“But hexing the tin?”
“I was practising the spells and the tins got in the way. I wanted to make sure that the next time we’re on the trail of our friend the Monster Master, we can bring him down before he gets anybody else hurt.”
Tonks felt rather than saw the gentle gaze that Remus had fixed upon her at the sudden hardening of her tone. “It really wasn’t your fault, you know. Everybody’s said so.”
The Auror felt herself sigh. It had been a hard few months for the Auror office. The incident with the acromantula in St Mungo’s had seemed so huge at the time, but to the horror of the entire wizarding world, it had turned out to be the tip of a highly unpleasant iceberg. It had been the troll in Hogsmeade next, followed by the horde of kappas unleashed in The Leaky Cauldron, the angry griffin in the reception of the Ministry, the Hairy MacBoon in Gringotts and, oh Merlin, the lethifold on the Knight Bus that had consumed a goblin, a witch and two wizards asleep on their beds before it had been spotted by the driver and driven away by a curse breaker who happened to be on board. And at every place, a burnt and tattered note would be hurled through the Floo or found on the floor tied to a lump of rock.
THIS is a monster.
And the deaths had been her fault.
She’d seen him. That narrow face, grey hair, the harsh expression that had stared down from wanted posters, from the front pages of the Prophet and the Crucible had darted across her vision as she’d rushed into Diagon Alley in response to the Gringotts call. Just for a moment, she’d had a clean shot.
And she’d missed it. Missed him. A screaming witch had pounded into her as she’d fired and her spell had ricocheted off a hanging sign and stunned a bewildered shopper instead. The eruption of an enormous, hairy, five-legged monster out of Gringotts behind her had distracted her attention and by the time she’d been able to turn back, the Monster Master had been long gone.
And in his next attack, four innocent people had died.
The Monster Master. It was the Prophet’s name for him and it had stuck. And despite the posters and the campaigns and Remus’ almost desperate efforts to remember where he might have seen the man before, a real name continued to elude them. The attacks until recently had been weekly events and all Auror leave had been cancelled - it had only been after a lull of more than a fortnight that Harry had been willing to grant any of his Aurors time off at all. Normally Tonks and Remus would not have dreamed about going away during a week that contained a full moon, but as things stood, they simply had to take what they could get.
It had been a shame that Teddy and Victoire had been unable to join them. The four of them had planned to go away together at some point that summer but Victoire had been unable to get leave from St Mungo’s and Teddy hadn’t wanted to desert her to deal with the latest ideas of a family full of amateur wedding planners alone. But they’d spoken by Floo last night, rebuffing yet another attempt he made to offer them a list of baby names. Teddy was a worrier like his father and the responsibility of naming his new baby sister had left him in a desperate tizzy not to pick something they’d hate. But Tonks was determined that the choice was going to be his and that, like it or not, whatever he picked would be it. As Remus had pointed out afterwards though, telling him that hadn’t necessarily helped.
But a holiday was a holiday, with or without Teddy, and even if with the full moon looming, Remus was tired and achy and Tonks was tired and heavy; both of them were determined to enjoy whatever they could manage in the quiet little seaside town they’d retreated to. The town was the unwitting home to Bubblins, wizarding Britain’s first ever holiday camp, with its cheery red-cloaked entertainers, but much as Remus in particular would have preferred to shun the terrifying prospect of fun en masse, the regulations regarding werewolves did state that they were asked not to transform in Muggle public premises. That meant an immediate limitation on any holiday spots and so they had booked a Bubblins chalet (accepting the proviso that Remus drink his wolfsbane in front of reliable witnesses before arrival) and fled the camp early each morning to avoid having to be sociable. Tonks personally had no huge objections to wart growing competitions and hippogriff rides, although sing-along with Celestina had sent her fleeing for the exits. But the look on Remus’ face as they’d arrived had suggested to her strongly that the wellbeing of her husband over the next few days depended on keeping him away from the unrelenting horror of anyone likely to wish him “a bright and bubbly Bubblins day!”
But the horror would have to be faced soon. The afternoon was winding down.
“We’ll have to head back soon.” The look on Remus’ face told her at once that he hadn’t missed the way she’d dodged the painful subject but he chose not to press the matter. “This afternoon’s wearing on and we aren’t exactly speedy.”
It was Remus’ turn to sigh. “Ah yes, my pending monthly appointment. Joy of joys.”
Tonks squeezed his hand. “At least the wolfsbane programme is reliable these days. You don’t have to worry about all those doses or getting a bad batch.”
“I know.” Remus gazed absently out towards the rolling sea for a moment. “But it’s never going to be fun.” He glanced down at her. “If you want to take a walk this evening, go right ahead, I won’t be offended. I know it’ll be quite late with the summer sun but…”
Tonks struggled to hide her grimace. She had witnessed her husband’s transformation a couple of times in their life together and, cruel as it made her feel, she had no desire to repeat the experience. Only a masochist would voluntarily endure watching the person they loved in so much pain.
“I might,” she said softly. “If you don’t mind.”
His smile was one of relief. “Of course not. Come on then.” He rose rather tentatively and offered her his hand. “Let’s head back. Unless of course you have a sudden overwhelming urge to try out that trampoline.”
He jerked his head in the direction of the play area as she laughed. “Nah,” she replied, nuzzling her head back into his bony shoulder once more as they linked arms and turned back the way they had come. “Me on a trampoline? I’d be lucky to come away with all my limbs still attached.”
“It’d be a softer bounce than the paving stones. Although after all those ice creams you could probably get up a decent ripple on the promenade…”
“Oi!” She poked him in the shoulder. “I’ll have you know this belly is your doing and nothing else!”
She spotted the innocent air with which he grinned at once. “I’m starting to wonder. I mean, how would it look to everyone if come December you gave birth to a bouncing baby Cornetto?”
Tonks glared into his neck. “I hope you realise that if I wasn’t a loving wife who is sensitive to your currently delicate disposition, you’d be dead meat right now.”
“Oh, completely,” Remus replied with an airy smile. “I thought of that joke the first day we got here, after that raid you made on that poor unsuspecting Muggle ice cream van. Why do you think I waited until today to say it?”
* * *
The promenade was quiet against a backdrop of thickening twilight. Bubblins had been a noisy mass when she’d left, a cheerful horde of badly-tuned voices all gathered in the glass building shaped like a half-buried crystal ball as young and old alike belted out badly-tuned renditions of the latest musical hits. But this little Muggle seaside town was not a place designed by nature to have a heavy nightlife - the reeling, drunken young revellers that couldn’t afford to hold their parties in warmer climbs tended to head for the bright lights of better known resorts further down the coast. Tonks suspected that in spite of the waning tourist industry here, that was probably a matter of no small relief to the local residents.
A late night ice cream van might have been nice though. And it was definitely a craving. She didn’t care what Remus thought.
Remus.
Tonks glanced at the sky. The bloated full moon had still yet to make an appearance on the darkening horizon. Her husband was still human.
For now.
Tonks had never cared that the man she’d fallen so deeply in love with was a werewolf. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
He’d still be waiting then. Lurking naked in the spare bedroom of their rented chalet with that ratty old yellow blanket that Molly had made him years ago. He generally set aside a bowl of water and some sandwiches too and even a book, since, in Remus’ little world, spending the night as a werewolf with a wolfsbane-preserved human mind was as good a time as any to catch up on some reading. He’d just been in the process of locking himself in when she’d kissed his cheek and left, promising to be back right after moonset. He liked to have someone call through the door. Just in case. Just to be sure he was himself…
It was his routine. She knew it off by heart. When had being married to a man who turned into a wolf once a month become so mundane?
It seemed wrong that something so extraordinary and horrific should become so every day. But it was infinite times better than the alternative.
She still remembered that awful year after Sirius died, the state she’d seen him in after a transformation with Greyback’s pack. Lying wrapped in a blanket with some sandwiches and a book was nothing…
Her eyes drifted along the shadowy promenade. It was getting very late now and night was making a serious effort of rolling in. The trampoline, swings and slides of the children’s play area formed dusky shapes opposite the ragged outline of a derelict old hotel. The rainbow colours of the play equipment leeched away in the twilight even as the same creeping night-time blurred the edges of the boarded up windows and gaping maw of a doorway…
The open gaping maw. With a shadow standing inside it.
With an awkward stutter, the first of the promenade’s cast iron lanterns chose that moment to hum into life. It was the one directly beside the hotel.
The face it illuminated was very familiar. The bottle he held even more so.
Tonks froze. It was the surprise as much as anything. But several seconds of highly unprofessional staring was enough to confirm what her eyes had told her. A narrow, unshaven face, a shock of wild grey hair all over shabby clothes and lurking in his hands, a potion bottle of such familiar shape and colour that it made her blood run cold.
The Monster Master. And he was holding a bottle of wolfsbane.
For one cold instant, Tonks was convinced that this had to have something to do with Remus, that this collector of dangerous monsters must have followed him here in order to unleash him upon Bubblins and the town as the latest ploy in his terrible game. But even as she backed hurriedly away into the shadow of the now shuttered snack kiosk, the sane and logical part of her brain kicked back in. Remus had had his wolfsbane. It had been brewed by the wife of the Minister for Magic and administered in front of said Minister, not to mention a certain Harry Potter, which was, in the reliable witness stakes, a difficult combination to top. It couldn’t have been tampered with, which was the only way that Remus would have been a danger to anyone tonight. And more wolfsbane would only make him ill, not dangerous.
So this couldn’t be about Remus. Not sensibly.
And now that the white glow of the light was strengthening, Tonks could see that the man who was currently terrorising wizarding Britain looked extremely drawn and pale, drawn and pale in a way that Tonks found extremely familiar.
Werewolf. The Monster Master was a werewolf.
And the moon was about to rise.
Her heart lurched. If he was still holding the wolfsbane, he hadn’t drunk it yet. And if he wasn’t planning to unleash Remus, what if the plan was to unleash himself?
She groped for her wand. She probably wouldn’t get more than one shot. No magic, not even an Unforgivable, would work on a transformed werewolf and moonrise could only be minutes away. She had to take him out before he…
But the thought was left standing as, with a casual smirk towards the horizon, the wizarding world’s most wanted turned and sauntered back inside out of sight.
And it took only a few moments’ more groping to realise that her wand wasn’t there. In her hurry to leave the chalet, she’d left it on the dining table.
In hindsight, Tonks would realise that this was the moment when she should have gone for help. She should have hurried back to Bubblins to raise the alarm, to get her wand and send a patronus to Harry. But all she could see in her mind’s eyes was four empty beds on the Knight Bus and a figure fleeing down Diagon Alley that she was supposed to have brought down. Help would arrive too late. It was up to her.
Luckily, only the one light had thus far stuttered into life and waddling her way awkwardly across the promenade by the cover of shadows proved no vast chore. The front door still stood open and the way before her was clear. An umbrella stand beside the door provided her with a hefty walking stick that would hopefully prove sufficient to knock a ruthless psychopath unconscious long enough for her to fetch help. She could hear a strange grunting noise from some distant part of the hotel but she chose for the time being to move as silently as she was able down the cracked marble of the hallway towards the glow of light at the rear of the building. A faded series of letters on the wooden panel over the door indicated that the glow was coming from the visitors lounge.
And from within, a hoarse, hard-edged voice drifted into earshot.
“…attacks were warnings. But now I’m ready for people to understand. Oh, they say things have changed now, don’t they, and the old laws that screwed over me and my kind for all them years have gone. They say, awww, poor, poor little werewolves, pat them on the head, give them a biscuit, we can all feel nice and sorry for them now the filthy beasts is behaving themselves!” Tonks hoped it was only in her imagination that the harsh snort carried the echoes of a guttural growl. “But I don’t care. Twenty-five years they stole from me! Those same smug bastards who stand around all self-righteous now, congratulating themselves on how progressive they are about the poor, poor little werewolves are the same smug bastards who cheered them on when they ground us down!” The words were virtually spat out, almost tumbling over each other as they poured out of the unseen lips. “Liars, the lot of them! Two-faced scum! They don’t know what it’s like to be chased down by a monster! Every werewolf, every one, he knows! He’s been there, done that, got the bloody teeth-marks! And do they say, oh gawd, how awful, it weren’t your fault though, have a cuppa tea love, we’ll look after you! No! For ten years I’d repaired people’s Floos, they let me into their homes, no questions, a smile, a cuppa tea, a ginger newt and I’d fix their fire, no hassle, no problems. But when it’s a werewolf they’re letting through the door, oh no, we can’t be having that. Suddenly I ain’t good enough no more! What if the filthy bugger’s catching? What if he attacks the little darlings or eats the cat? How do we know we can trust him?”
So. Not just a werewolf, a bitter werewolf too. But who’s he talking to? If he wasn’t alone, that meant a whole new set of issues but Tonks could not spare much concentration for mental commentary - it was all she could do to keep her ever treacherous feet from betraying her as she crept closer, treading as quickly as she dared along the passageway. Ahead, the tirade of the angry werewolf was rising to a new intensity.
“But why should I have to prove I could still be trusted, eh? I was the same old Jack I always was! No, it was them that couldn’t be trusted, them that turned on me, them that didn’t understand that what makes a werewolf dangerous is people! Stupid, stupid people! If stupid people didn’t treat werewolves the way they always have, do you think the likes of Greyback would have turned on them, huh? If they’d taken him aside after he got bit, looked after him, made him feel welcome, you reckon he’d have gone out and turned wild? But no, they treated him like a monster and he lived up to what they wanted, didn’t he? And then he took it out and dumped it on the rest of us! Dumped it on me! And cos of stupid, stupid people, I had nowhere to go but back to him in the end, did I? Back to him just in time to be locked up and dragged off to Azkaban! Me, that’d never broken a law in me life! And then the Minister, him that said he’d help the poor werewolves in honour of that sodding dead friend of his, he left me there to rot. Left me there for twenty-five bloody years! Scared, he was! Scared of Greyback’s name coming up again! He said he’d help, but he knew people were stupid too and he didn’t dare mean it until he thought he’d be safe. ”
Greyback. Tonks went cold as memories of that awful year swamped her mind once more. So he was one of Greyback’s, was he? Was that how Remus had known his face? Had he been one of those blighted, bedraggled souls he’d met on that stupid mission that had pulled them apart?
The odd grunting noise was getting louder, coming, it seemed, from somewhere on the far side of the derelict lounge. Carefully resting herself against the edge of the doorframe with her walking stick still grasped in her hand, Tonks peered through the crack in the half open door into the room beyond. Rotting, threadbare armchairs were scattered across the room, spilling their stuffing onto a distinctly unhealthy looking carpet by the light of an enormous and hotly blazing arched fireplace. A bent coffee table was slumped nearby, scattered with papers - with a cold chill, Tonks recognised a brightly coloured Bubblins map and what looked like a Floo fireplace diagram amongst them. One connection had been circled heavily in red and Tonks was willing to bet she knew which one.
The main Floo hearth at Bubblins reception was only yards from the hall where at that very moment, shockingly bad karaoke was in full swing.
There was a jar of what was clearly Floo Powder sitting on the table beside the papers. And although this Muggle fire would not have been on the network, how much effort would it take for a man who’d mended fires for ten years to hook it up?
Not much, she suspected. And that was a big fireplace.
Oh Merlin.
Her vision was restricted by the narrowness of the crack. She could not see the far side of the room. But she could see from the shadows that something large was moving. It was sluggish for now, but Tonks was willing to bet it wouldn’t stay that way.
And then finally, she looked at the Monster Master.
He was apparently alone after all in spite of his diatribe, kneeling beside the fire and staring into the flames as shadow and light played across his pale features in a grim dance. In one hand, he gripped the open bottle of wolfsbane. In the other, he held a small, transparent sphere in which odd snakes of colour wound in ever-changing rainbow patterns, jumping at the crack of the fire and the harsh, angry breathing of the man who grasped it. Tonks recognised it at once. Sonic Spheres had recently been invented as a more wizardly way of recording and listening to music, although Harry had taken to using them to record interviews of suspects for use as evidence. He believed and Tonks agreed that hearing the accused’s own words was more effective before the Wizengamot than a transcribed statement from a magical Recording Quill.
The Monster Master was recording his rant. He was explaining himself.
And then the colours began to dance once more as the angry words resumed.
“Now, you’re likely sat listening to this thinking; barking old werewolf, ungrateful sod, monster in his brain, we should never have given them no rights back at all! I know how you buggers think!” The narrow face contorted violently. “But listen to this!” The wolfsbane bottle swung violently to his lips as he flung his head back - there was a frantic glugging sound, a harsh swallow and then a glassy clunk as he tossed it over his shoulder. The now blessedly empty wolfsbane bottle bounced off an armchair, hit the carpet with a loud tink and rolled slowly into the hall to come to a gentle halt against Tonks’ foot. Aware of its tripping potential, she nudged it quietly aside.
“Do you hear that?” The Monster Master’s face contorted as he glared violently down at the inoffensive glass sphere grasped in his hands. “I drink my wolfsbane! Cos it ain’t no monster trying to get his own back on you bastards! It’s a man! A human man who thinks for himself and had twenty five years in jail he didn’t deserve to think good and hard about how to show you all what real dangerous beasts are when he got out! Ain’t nobody going to get hurt by me on a full moon night! I’ll be off and safe and killing no one. It’s the real monsters that you’ll have had to worry about! The real dangerous beasts! You all say you’ve changed, clasp your hands all pious like and try to help us. But you still don’t think we’re people, not really, not deep down. You lump us in with all the savage monsters of the world, sending us to the Beast Division, putting us in books like Fantastic Beasts like we ain’t just humans at all. Well, I ain’t never going to be able to forgive that. But I will make sure you all see the difference when the real thing comes rushing for your stupid little darlings and eats your bloody cat. It ain’t Greyback who made a monster out of me. It’s the human race.” He leaned his face closer to the sphere and Tonks saw the savage red shape in the glass that accompanied the cruel smirk. “Enjoy,” he hissed softly.
He tapped the side of the sphere. The rainbow colours congealed and froze into a ball at the centre. The recording was over. The Monster Master placed it carefully down on the table with his papers for a moment before he whisked the lot into a metal box he pulled from under the table. With a shove, he pushed it back under this nominal protection, his eyes drifting over the unseen but threatening shadows on the far side of the room. There was another bad-tempered grunt.
“Oh pipe down your whining.” The reprimand was almost affectionate. “The drug’ll wear off in a minute and then you’ll be trampling bastards to your heart’s content once I put you back in that Floo. Trust me, it’ll be better than walloping mountain trolls in Slovenia any da… Aah!”
The spasm that crossed his face was alarmingly familiar. Tonks knew the signs as well as he did. There was probably less than a half a minute now.
It’s rising…
And so was he, stiff and awkward, his teeth gritted as he reached for the Floo powder. Tonks knew that any second the change would rip in and although, since she had no wand, his immunity to magic would make little difference, she would prefer to face a rangy man in his fifties than a transformed werewolf any day. She had to act and act quickly.
An unknown beast and a transforming werewolf lay before her. She was wandless and pregnant and nobody knew she was here.
But it didn’t change the facts. He had to be stopped. Even something as terrible as Bubblins karaoke night didn’t deserve this.
He was moving towards the fire now, dipping his fingers into the Floo powder. She couldn’t let him open a connection, she just couldn’t.
His back was turned to her. It was the only chance she was going to get.
And so, grasping the walking stick firmly in both hands, Tonks girded her tired and reluctant body and hurled herself forwards.
Her swing was a thing of beauty; any professional golfer would have sighed in desperate envy. The stick’s curved handle smashed into the Monster Master’s arm and sent the jar of Floo powder hurtling out of his grasp to shatter with an explosion of grey against the peeling wallpaper. A hagged, shocked face half turned towards her but the element of surprise and the power of adrenalin were still on her side - her second blow caught him emphatically around the side of the head and sent him sprawling to the ground with a thud. Stunned and shaking his head, he roared with anger and started to rise but a sudden spasm rocked his features and drove him back to the carpet. His skin rippled and contorted as grey tufts of matted fur erupted began to erupt from across his skin. His eyes turned gold as he screamed, his voice tailing away into a wild and blood-curdling howl.
Her third blow caught him sharply across the half-formed muzzle. The fourth smacked into his skull, glazing the golden eyes and silencing his growling.
It wasn’t Remus. There was no love lost here and Tonks had seen it all before. He needed to be downed and after the last few months, she wasn’t about to be delicate.
For a moment, she could only stand, gasping, walking stick grasped in her hands as she stared down at the unconscious and now fully transformed werewolf laid out before her. She’d got him. She’d done it. She’d actually…
It was no longer a grunt. It was a bellow. And it was very close.
A huge greyish-purple shape loomed in her peripheral vision. There was a distinct edge of sharpness about it.
She looked up. And wished she hadn’t. Being eyeballed by a clearly infuriated and distinctly no-longer-doped-up graphorn at close range was not a pleasant experience.
It lowered its head. A four thumped foot scraped nastily against the carpet.
Tonks did at that point what any sensible person in her position would do. She turned on her heel and bolted for the door.
It’s too narrow for a beast that big, he must have brought it through the fireplace, it’ll never get out of there to…
SMASH!
Bugger.
The building literally shook as a graphorn shaped hole was gouged out of the wall surrounding the door frame, sending timbers and plasterboard crashing down into the marble corridor ahead of her. Although Tonks was certain that such a barrier would in no way impede a massive and angry mountain beast, they definitely got in the way of a small, pregnant Auror armed with nothing but a walking stick.
And given that fallen timbers were blocking one end of the corridor and a graphorn was blocking the other, there really was no choice left but the stone staircase that wound away up to her left.
She hurled the stick at the graphorn for the spirit of the thing, almost wrenching her arm in the process but she wasn’t at all surprised when twin horns hefted it violently and sent it spinning to smash against the battered ceiling. But the distraction gave her a brief head start as she hurled herself up the stairs, scrambling almost on all fours as heavy footsteps echoed on the marble below her. Bugger again, it was still following her…
And why not? It’s a ruddy mountain beast. Stairs aren’t going to worry it, idiot!
And indeed, four thumbed feet were making short work of the climb, shorter work than the clumsy limbs of the ungainly figure it was pursuing. The occasional narrow corner impeded its progress marginally but the crunch and thud and shake of the building implied they weren’t putting up too much of a barrier.
Her feet skidded against the dirty floor, her hands scrabbled for purchase; she could hear her own breathing rasping in her ears, her heartbeat drumming.
Or was it two heartbeats?
I’ve got to get away. I have got to get away. For her. For Remus and Teddy and her.
For my family.
Some thoughtful and considerate soul had locked the fire doors at every level, rusty padlocks that probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds under a good assault but a few seconds would be too long. If she got out of the situation alive, Tonks fully intended to track down the bastard that had put them there and kick them well into the next century.
And so she climbed and climbed and climbed, treacherous marble sliding and sending her reeling as the building shook and shuddered from the efforts of the graphorn to follow her. Who knew the blasted things were so persistent?
Ahead, the stairs petered out onto a landing. A small ladder hung down into an open space. With a hitherto unimaginable agility, Tonks reached the foot of it in a flying leap, narrowly avoiding the whistling swipe of twin horns past her foot as she scrambled the last few feet into the dark attic and slammed the trapdoor shut behind her.
Moonlight poured in through a misty, cracked window. The light was poor, but it told her enough. There was no other door.
Below her, the floor trembled. The graphorn roared.
She was trapped.
Continued in Part Two http://community.livejournal.com/metamorfic_moon/176200.html#cutid1