The bride shows up half an hour late, with electric orange hair and singe marks on her auror robes. We don’t have to do this, Remus says quietly, touching his fingertips to the new bruise on her cheek. You know we don’t have to do this.
There is blood on her trousers from where Leach bled out (hands scrabbling at his throat, his eyes wide and white as he struggled for breath—he’d been a few years ahead of her at Hogwarts and she’d been too busy trying to defend their position to notice when he’d gone still—)
I do, she tells Remus, who has his own fresh scars, deep shadows under his eyes. I want to. I want to.
it’s only few days from the full moon, so you may kiss the bride tastes of wolfsbane potion and his stubble, rough at her lower lip.
She transfigures her wedding band into a bracelet as Remus slips a few galleons to the only magistrate willing to witness to an illegal intermarriage. But Remus’s hand is warm when they step out into the night, and for a little while, she can pretend they are not going to die.
.
Once, she got drunk with Sirius and Remus in Grimmauld Place. They’d been sprawled out on the carpet in the front room, all three of them, Tonks running through her party tricks—pigs noses and rabbit ears, and a particularly spot-on impression of Dumbledore, which sent Sirius into gales of laughter.
And which face is yours? Remus had asked her, his eyes half-lidded and hungry, lingering on her bare forearms, her throat. Which one are you, really?
I could ask you the same thing, she’d retorted, reckless, daring, and felt a vicious thrill when he’d grinned, wide enough to show the white of his eyeteeth.
She’d worn her hair red as a riding hood for weeks afterwards, but didn’t think he noticed.
.
Sirius carved Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant into his kitchen table with a letter opener—the one embedded deep in the wood, right beside the last letter. The hilt was emblazoned with the Black crest.
Tonks sat there the morning of Sirius’ funeral, tracing the harshly-scraped letters and wondering if she would leave even that much for someone to remember her by.
.
(there’s a plaque, in the auror department—etched in pewter, all the names of all those who have fallen in the line of duty. Tonks does not know them all. No one knows them all. They are the silent, nameless, forgotten dead, upon whose corpses she stands.
some nights she dreams she is down there with them, swimming through the dark water and asking one another, I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody too?)
.
She kissed Remus in November, because she had just walked through a silent house, up silent stairs to bedrooms of sleeping children who won’t ever wake. The Dark Mark had cast a sickly green light over the scene, and she had felt it sink under her skin, looking for some dark and unclean thing within her, some shame it could suckle on—
I don’t want to die faceless, she blurted out when Remus answered his door. I can’t count my dead on my hands anymore, and I don’t want to die unmourned.
He had blinked, then his expression had softened. Tonks, you won’t—
She had kissed him then. It seemed sweeter than whatever lie he had been about to tell.
.
I’m too old, he had told her, too cursed, too dangerous, too—this won’t work, it can’t work. Think of the future.
She had laughed. What future?
.
What could you possibly see in me? he asked, breathlessly, his fingers fumbling with the clasp of her robes. He smelled of pine and running and blood—he always did, coming back from a mission.
You’re something I want, she answered, feeling her heart pounding in her chest, thundering in ears. Something alive.
.
She tried on a hundred different faces with him, different bodies, different ways of moving, of speaking, of fucking. He called her Tonks regardless, and insisted he was unworthy even when coming inside her.
Her happiness felt stolen, unearned.
She was keeping him.
.
She was woken one morning by the sound of faint scratching at the door. She found Remus there on her doorstop, breathing shallowly, bleeding from half a dozen bite marks—the consequence of another full moon spent running with Greyback’s pack. I came home, he said, his voice a rasping growl just on this side of inhuman. I knew to come home. I knew.
She offered out her hands wordlessly.
Marry me, he had said, as she hauled him to his feet. There was blood around his mouth and the yellow was still retreating from his eyes, but he was smiling. Nymphadora Tonks, will you marry me?
Yeah, okay, she’d said, that word (home, home, home) twisting through her like a wound she’d thought long healed. Since you asked.
There was blood in his teeth when he kissed her, and when he said we’re going to live forever, you and me, she let herself believe him.
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