Loss
Disclaimer: Nymphadora Tonks is not mine, none of these characters are. See also the wizarding world, and anything else you recognise.
AN: I wrote this on the floor of my local Waterstones and it was a very peaceful afternoon indeed, I'm trying to get back into fanfiction properly.
You'll lose her over and over again. Not least when the light goes out of her eyes and she falls to the floor. You lose her at nine, when you tell her that this is "not a game for girls" and she stalks off, bright green braids twitching angrily around her head.
Having regained her respect at eleven, by taking the blame (and unpleasant detention cleaning cauldrons) for a "small" explosion in Snape's first practical potions class of the yea, you lose her almost immediately when she walks on you and Leanne Brown in the broom cupboard. It's not Leanne or the broom cupboard she has an issue with, it's that you're supposed to be dating her best friend, Steph. She might not know an awful lot of spells yet but she is (as she proves) quite capable of kicking you hard enough in the balls that you hear, rather than see, her leave, from your position curled up on the floor.
AT fifteen, her hair a beautiful deep blue, you think you've finally got her forever; she dances in your arms and learns to mic your impossible hazel eyes. She'll giggle at your jokes and tell you exactly how bad your puns are for another year and a half until, at seventeen, the pair of you lie naked in your silenced bed, hidden behind the curtains and talk about the future. Your plans are irreconcilable. She cannot train to be an auror in Romania. You cannot work with dragons in a country where they are mostly illegal. You make the tiny, timid joke that she'd have to track you down and arrest you for it. Her laugh is nearly tears, walking the very narrow line between okay and utter misery. You're walking it too and when you jointly make the decision to leave it there, in your red and gold Gryffindor bed (with the charmed Hufflepuff pillows because she wouldn't kiss you "unless 'puff's are represented too, Charlie Weasley"), you both fall off the narrow line and her hair is never that colour again.
It takes a second to sink in, this image in front of you. There's Dora, her hair bubble gum pink and her hands twisted together. One of those hands has a tiny silver band with one, perfect sapphire on the ring finger and you've really lost her now. She's asking you if you'll be her "man of honour" because you're her best friend now (Steph is dead and neither of you have the strength to talk about her) and you say yes, of course and you never mention the Gryffindor bed with the Hufflepuff pillows.
She's twenty-two, her hair an unfamiliar brown and her mouth is wide, wide open, screaming like you've never heard before, not when she fell off her broom in the last Quidditch match of seventh year, not when her crazy, bitch of an aunt tried to kill her, not even when Lupin left the first time. He's gone now but it's temporary, he's floo-calling Andromeda and Ted and has left you to "Hold the fort Charlie, won't you?". You can almost persuade yourself that this will your baby, that she is your wife, that the last five years could be rewritten. Then Remus returns and for him, she manages a smile, she drops your hand, which you're fairly sure is broken, and reaches for him. That movement, that one gesture sums up neatly your whole relation; she clings to you until you think you're broken, that all you need is escape but when she finally lets go, moves on, all you can feel is the space where she ought to be, where you cast her off.
That bay, tiny Teddy, is left orphaned. You watch it happen, watch as her eyes widen and her nose twitches. You know that face, that's her "I'm beaten" face and all you want t to do in that moment is go back in time and remove every memory you've ever had of it. All you want is not to know what that face means, to not know that she let it happen to her, she let it happen as soon as she saw Remus hit the floor. You watch her leave Teddy, leave her widowed mother, and leave you, because she couldn't bear a world that he wasn't in. That should have been the last time you had to lose her, but it wasn't.
You lose her at the funeral, holding Teddy in one arm, propping Andromeda up with the other, all three of you watching as she is lowered into the hole next to Remus. The stone reads "Nymphadora Lupin" and that isn't someone you know at all. There is no grave marked "Dora Tonks" and that would be where you grieved for her. There is nothing here for you to mourn but your own stupidity in losing the one girl for whom you'd have hung the moon.
Teddy turns his hair beautiful deep blue and points to a phot of you and his mother waving and asks you to tell him about her because "you were her very, very best friend, weren't you". Instead, you tell him about Dora and Steph, tell him about the jokes they played and the detentions they got earned. You tell him how brave they both were, right to the very end. Steph died like she lived, a dancer to the last but you don't tell him the details. She fell fighting his extended family and you don't tell him that either, because there is no need for him to lose his mother than once and you'd rather lived with stories of Dora as she was to you, not of how she feared others saw her.