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15 June 1997
When Tonks was a child, her dad liked to remind her that the opposite of love wasn’t hate—it was indifference.
It was usually whenever she came stomping into the house from the yard, hair rippling into an angry shade of puce, blustering with claims of hating Quidditch as she tossed her broom aside—furious that she wasn’t instantly victorious at whatever new feint or roll she’d spent the morning obsessively dissecting in Seeker Weekly. If you care enough to hate something, Dora, Dad would say with that indulgent, crooked grin, you’re not that far off loving it.
It must be true, Tonks thinks vaguely, as she trudges, aimless, down the dark corridors of the Hogwarts dungeons. After all these months spent willing herself to hate Remus for leaving—for choosing cowardice and dressing it up as a kindness—all she’s left with is the truth that her stupid, tender heart was never going to bear that sort of anger, not really. She’d tried to shape herself around it, to make it fit, and now, with the last of her resolve gone, the quiet, suffocating grief of finality has come for her at last, patient and merciless, wrapping around her chest like a vice.
“You see? She still wants to marry him, even though he’s been bitten! She doesn’t care!”
“It’s different.”
She feels a now-familiar flicker of guilt for all the times she scoffed at her mother for poring over the society pages of the Prophet, scrutinizing every image of the Malfoys at twinkling balls and stuffy charity dinners. She remembers the blazing row they had when she’d caught Mum staring at the photograph of Bellatrix that had sneered out from the paper after the Azkaban breakout last year. Her mother had studied that bloody photograph for hours, and Tonks had wondered what the fuck she could possibly be searching for in that arrogant, unkempt face.
“But I don’t care either, I don’t care! I’ve told you a million times—”
“And I’ve told you a million times that I am too old for you, too poor—too dangerous—”
Perhaps she and Mum have something in common after all, beyond their shared talent for riding each other’s last nerve. For all their bluster and bite, neither of them has been able to summon up anything close to indifference—
“Fuck—” Tonks skids to a halt, inches from colliding with a door that has been left slightly ajar. It takes her a moment to recognize why the door is so familiar.
Realization sinks in, and anger rises to meet the grief. She doesn’t know whether her feet brought her here deliberately or by muscle memory built over seven years of constant detention. She doesn’t pause to ponder it as she reaches out and pushes open the door to the Potions master’s office.
She remembers Ginny sniping in a letter about how Snape kept his old office in the dungeons even after becoming Defense professor. She recalls Ginny railing against Harry being sentenced to spend every miserable Saturday in the dank little room, rewriting detention slips from the seventies. Her first instinct had been to respond asking if Remus’s name had cropped up in the slips, and the impulse had made her feel so pathetic that, in the end, she didn’t reply to the letter at all, hadn’t been able to muster the appropriate righteous outrage on Ginny’s behalf. Instead, she’d spent that weekend nursing a fifth of gin in bed, obsessively tuning the wireless to an obscure, crackly Welsh Muggle news station—based in Gwynedd, nine-point-three-seven miles away from the werewolf commune Remus was living with.
The air inside Snape’s office smells the same—damp stone, ink, and formaldehyde. Books still crowd the shelves, flanked by colorful jars of slimy dead creatures, and the fire in the grate sputters faintly. Odd. For a man turned traitor, the bastard hadn’t done much in the way of packing.
There’s a stack of essays on Snape’s desk, a quill abandoned in a puddle of red ink. A great scarlet zero bleeds through the parchment at the top of the pile. The first paragraph is a massacre of slashes and underlines. Beside the opening sentence, in Snape’s sharp, familiar hand, is a single word: WEAK.
The word hits her like a blow.
She doesn’t know why—why the sight of it, so innocuous, breaks something wide open inside her. Maybe it’s the memory of Snape spitting the same word at her from behind wrought-iron gates, jeering at her Patronus. Or maybe it’s just the full-circle tragedy of it all—nearly a full year since that damn night, and here she stands, alone, still feeling like a stranger in her own skin, unable to muster the energy to do a fucking thing with her hair, much less morph away the curse-scar souvenir from the Department of Mysteries, now faded and puckered and folded in on itself like worn fabric, a painful, throbbing, constant reminder of all her failures.
A sound tears out of her—half-sob, half-snarl—as she grabs the stack of essays and flings them at the fireplace. Papers scatter, some catching and curling into singed spirals, others flying up and slapping against the jars on the mantle. Unhinged, she seizes one of the jars and hurls it into the grate as well; glass bursts, and something pale and gelatinous slumps into the flames. She grabs another jar and sends it smashing against the wall.
She’s scuffing through shards, pushing a limp strand of hair from her eyes, reaching for a fifth jar—when she freezes. The firelight flares and catches on a shape in the doorway. Staring at her.
Tonks doesn’t speak, doesn’t even breathe as Remus’s gaze flicks from the jar in her hands to the fire now crackling merrily around the pile of splintered glass in the grate. Then, he moves toward her with that familiar unobtrusive grace—soft around the edges, impossible to read—stepping behind the desk until he’s standing beside her, looking down at the chaos she’s made: glittering splinters, hunks of dead, damned things. Slowly, he reaches out and takes the jar hanging limply from her fingers. She watches the slimy contents slosh, her stomach twisting in sympathy. She closes her eyes. Braces for the soft click of glass being returned neatly to its shelf. She can almost taste his disapproval. Pity.
She is not prepared for the explosive crash as he hurls the jar into the fireplace. Tonks jumps back with a cry, then turns to blink up at him, speechless. And then, she sees it, wonders how she didn’t see it the moment he walked inside—the mask of composure he’s worn for months is frayed, the thin threads holding him together snapping. His face is stripped bare—devastation carved deep, and now that he’s close, she can see the tear tracks cutting clean lines through the grime on his cheeks. Her stomach dips; even in the harsh light of St. Mungo’s, raw and reeling in the wake of Sirius’s death, she never saw him like this. Tonks’s gaze snags on the hole burned into the sleeve of his robes, where Rowle’s Killing Curse missed flesh by inches.
She lets out a shaky breath, the shock settling just enough for her mouth to start working again.
“Well,” she attempts levity. It comes out wobbly and wrong and she realizes she can barely hear herself over her thudding heart. “Reckon that’s fifty points from Gryffindor, at least.”
Remus’s laugh is a thin, craggy thing. “I don’t—” his voice breaks, his eyes still on the shattered glass. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”
It’s on the tip of her tongue to do what she always does, to invite him into the warmth of her heart, to push aside months of pain and build new hope atop the wreckage of her self-esteem. Ply him with wine and a hot meal and pray that it’ll be enough to keep him this time.
She presses her lips together, forces the words back. Instead, she waits for him to sort out whatever polite, eloquent speech he’s been rehearsing because fuck, maybe she needs to hear it, maybe it’ll finally sink in.
Remus shudders. “Dumbledore gone…” He raises a trembling hand, then drops it. “There’s no hope for me now.”
The bitter laugh is out of her mouth before she can swallow it back. “Right. We may as well all stroll onto the High Street now and beg Voldemort to finish the job, yeah?”
Remus flinches but doesn’t look away, doesn’t break her gaze. It’s unexpected enough to render her silent. She watches him watch her, his eyes roving over her face, the softest caress that she feels both nowhere and everywhere at once.
“I love you,” he whispers.
She freezes. “What?”
“I love you.” He says it so quietly. “I don’t want to keep pretending.”
“I—” Her mind is spinning a thousand different directions. She tries to reconcile his words with the ones he spoke in the Hospital Wing, not a half-hour ago. She comes up short.
“Dora,” he rasps. Tonks inhales sharply. “Please, say something.”
Her heart slams into her ribcage once, twice. Thrice. Then, she’s staggering away from the desk and crossing the room in a blur, crashing into his chest with a force that startles them both. He grunts as the breath is punched out of him—but in an instant, she feels his arms lock fiercely around her, feels his lips find hers.
It’s like they’re both starved for this, insatiable—like she’s been frozen for months, and the heat of his mouth thaws her in a single, searing rush. His tongue flicks against hers, one arm bands tight against the small of her back, the other threading into her hair—solid, real, undeniable. Her own fingers roam feverishly, mapping the year of changes etched into him—the half-stone he’s lost, the nicks and scabs on his forearms and neck, the hair that’s gone thin near his temples. She drags him closer, urgent; she needs more, she needs it now—before he pauses, before he comes to his senses, before he remembers why he left—before he slips away again. She catches his hand and slides it under the hem of her shirt, guiding him to warm skin. Every inch he touches ignites, sparking to life—
“Wait,” he pulls back, breathing heavily, his hand still tangled in her hair. “We have to—we need to talk—”
“Later.” She tries to tug his head back down to hers, but he takes a step back, putting more space between them, though he seems unwilling to remove his hands from her body.
“Dora,” he squeezes her waist, “please. Let’s—”
“You want to talk now?” she grips the hair at the back of his head, drags his head back so she can press a kiss to the column of his throat, relishing the way his breath catches. “Because as I recall, half-an-hour ago, you didn't want to talk much at all—didn’t even want to entertain the conversation.”
“I know,” he breathes. “That’s why…we need to…we should discuss—” he stops short, drawing a deep breath. Then, as if the movement pains him, he drops his hands from her waist and her hair and puts a foot of distance between them. “If this is…Dora, if you're sure this is what you want—”
“If I’m sure?” she asks quietly.
Remus goes silent, and she watches his gaze rake over her again, this time lingering on the pathetic stringy mop atop her head, the dark hollows beneath her eyes. She wonders if he can read the rest on her skin—the sleepless nights, the endless nightmares of rippling veils and searing curses and shattered ribs, the panic that steals her breath every morning when she wakes to the Prophet owl tapping on her window. Every day, the same thought—this is it, this is it, this is the day I lose him.
She sees the moment it hits him, sees it in the way his shoulders slump. “I only wanted…” he falters. “You were meant to move on. I wanted you to move on.”
She steps forward and closes the distance between them again, reaches out and takes his face in her hands. He gives in, closing his eyes, leaning into her touch. “And now? Will you stop making decisions for me?”
“I’ll try,” he whispers into her palm. There is a moment of silence, punctuated only by the tinkle of glass fracturing in the fireplace. “I did mean it, Dora, what I said in the Hospital Wing. You deserve better than me. I’ll never…I wish I could stop being terrified of hurting you. If we’re together, I don’t know that I ever will.”
“And what do you think this year was like?” she asks before she can stop herself. “When you left, Remus, what do you think that did to me?”
“I know,” he admits hoarsely, surprising her again. “And I know I have no right to ask it of you, but…will you forgive me?”
“Yes. Eventually,” she brushes a finger over his lips. “In the meantime, come home with me.”
His bewildered look almost ekes a smile out of her.
“You said you wanted to talk,” she whispers. “And I can be angry with you and still want you in my bed. I’m a talented multitasker like that.”
She’ll replay this moment in her head two months later. After they’ve screamed themselves raw, after Remus has shoved the sum total of his life into a rucksack and slammed the door behind him. She’ll replay this moment again and again, and she’ll wonder if it was all in her head, if all she did was beg and beleaguer him into loving her back, pleading with him until he was too worn down to fight her on it. Until he realized he had nowhere else to go.
Her mother will hold her as she sobs and snots into her pristine sofa cushions, stroking her hair and graciously pursing her lips to contain the I knew this would happen, I knew it, I told you so that surely curdles her tongue. Dad will take the opposite approach, fierce and insistent. You didn’t walk him up to the altar at damn wandpoint, Dora. He loves you, misguided, troubled fool though he may be.
And when he comes back to her on bended knee, when they settle uneasily into that delicate truce and she wonders if it’ll ever be like before again, she’ll cling to this moment. She’ll analyze every detail, dissect it piece by piece—the relief that loosened his shoulders when he finally confessed the truth, the softness in his eyes, the heat of his fingers that couldn’t seem to stop touching her. She’ll wrap herself in it like a blanket on the good days. And she’ll whisper it like scripture on the bad ones, on the days she isn’t sure, the days he retreats into himself, cold and distant. He loves me. He loves me.
But right now, as she stares at him across the dark office, all she can see is the firelight catching the wonder in his eyes, the bashful grin that always makes him look a decade younger. The laugh he gives her tastes like victory.