Hello everyone! This is a sequel to my story, "Parted", but it can stand on its own. Basically all you have to know is that Tonks died in the Battle of Hogwarts, but Remus survived. Thanks to nursie91 for requesting this to be written! Hope you like it!
I never knew my mother. It wasn't exactly one of those things that is always at the back of your mind, nagging you every minute of the day, but it made me sad sometimes. I'd heard a lot about her from my dad and grandma, but it wasn't the same. I know they tried, they really did. Dad always said that he wanted my mum to be a part of my life even though she wasn't here anymore. He and Grandma showed me albums upon albums of photos of her with me and my dad. My favorite was the one of us together as a family, and I had it in my room next to my bed. Mum was holding me, and she was smiling wider than I thought anyone could ever smile. She was sitting in this big armchair with her arms wrapped around me. Dad stood behind the chair, and both he and Mum were smiling at me. Dad said that Gran had taken the picture a few days after I was born.
The picture was taken at Gran's house, I'm sure that it was. I had seen the big chair there in the sitting room. I used to sit in it all the time, just thinking about how my mum had sat there all those years ago.
I got sad when I thought of Mum sometimes, but it wasn't like I was an unhappy person. Actually, I was very happy. I was really close with my dad and grandma, and my godfather, Harry, his wife, Ginny, her brother, Ron, and his wife, Hermione, came over all the time. We would have dinner together, and I would play with baby James afterwards while all the grownups talked. If I was lucky, Harry and my dad would tell me stories about the Marauders and some of the things my parents did in the Order.
I'd heard so many stories about my mum, I felt like I knew a lot about who she was. I know that that's not the same as actually knowing her, but sometimes I would pretend that it was.
Even though everyone had told me so much about who my mother was and what she did, there was one thing I'd never heard much about: how she died. I knew that she had died when I was a baby, but I never really knew how. When I asked Dad about it, he would get really sad and say that we would talk about it later, but we never did.
I asked Gran about it once, and she got sad too and said that it was something I needed to talk about with my dad.
There were times when I wished that my dad would talk to me about it. I don't really know why I wanted to know about it so much. Maybe I hoped that it would make me feel a little better about not ever knowing her. It was kind of like a puzzle that you had almost finished but couldn't find the last piece. I thought that if I knew what had actually happened, it might bring me closer to her somehow.
Anyway, I knew that it was hard for people to talk about, so I didn't ask any more questions. That is until one day when I had a little mishap with the shelves in Dad's closet.
I hadn't meant to knock them all down, really I hadn't. I had been packing for Hogwarts. My first year would start soon, and I was trying to get everything packed so that I would be ready to leave at the end of the week. I had almost finished cramming everything into my trunk when I remembered that I had forgotten to pack my new school robes. Dad had put them in his closet knowing that I was bound to misplace them.
I rushed into his room in search of my robes. When I entered the closet, I found them on the very top shelf. Looking back, I guess I should have known that climbing the shelves wasn't a good idea. I had been told that I had inherited my mum's clumsiness, and I would often trip on stairs and over my own feet. I probably should have seen it coming. Even a coordinated person would have had trouble, but I climbed anyways.
I climbed all the way to the top shelf. I was just about to grasp my robes and pull them down, when all of a sudden, a loud creaking sound came from beneath my feet. Before I knew what was happening, I fell through the air, and landed on the floor with a loud thud.
I landed hard, and my bum was sore from the impact with the hard floor. As I looked around, I realized that I was going to be in so much trouble once my dad saw what happened. All the shelves lay on the floor, and all of their contents were thrown around me in a huge pile. I quickly began picking things up from the floor, eager to hide my mess.
"Teddy?" Dad called from downstairs. "Is everything alright up there?"
"Yeah, everything's fine," I called back a little more shakily than I would have liked. I was worried that he would catch the lie in my voice as he always did, but seeing as I didn't hear his footsteps coming up the staircase, I guessed that he hadn't noticed.
I tried to put the shelves back in their place on the tiny hinges on the wall. I easily slid the first one into place and moved to pick up the second one, but a tiny piece of paper grabbed my attention. I bent down and picked it up.
It was a newspaper clipping. It was yellowing with age, and I could tell that it had been put away hastily; a large crease ran down the center, twisting like a bolt of lightning, and the corners were bent and frayed. I turned the sheet over and found my mother's happy face smiling at me. I couldn't help but smile back as her eyes twinkled in my direction. It wasn't until I glanced at the heading that I realized what the article was really about. The word "OBITUARY" was written in big, black letters right above my mum's picture. Directly below the heading, in small letters was the date, May 3rd 1998.
I didn't know whether to love that little square of paper or hate it. On the one hand, it was the answer to the question that had been bothering me for quite a while, the missing piece, but on the other hand, I felt a hint of worry that this tiny piece of paper would pull me further away from the mother I never really knew.
My curiosity got the better of me. I took a deep breath and started reading.
Nymphadora Tonks-Lupin, 25, was killed last night, May 2nd, at Hogwarts castle. Lupin was the daughter of Andromeda Black-Tonks and Ted Tonks and was also an avid member of the Order of the Phoenix. She worked as an Auror for the Ministry of Magic from 1994 until her death. She was killed during what has come to be known as The Battle of Hogwarts, during which Harry Potter defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. She was killed by her aunt's, Bellatrix Lestrange, Killing Curse. Lestrange was also later killed in the Battle by Molly Weasley.
There was more written, but I didn't get a chance to read it; I could hear my dad starting up the stairs. I stuffed the clipping in my jeans pocket and started to clean the floors as quickly as I could. I wasn't fast enough, though. Dad stepped into his room and immediately saw the mess on the floor.
I looked at him, and I could tell that he was upset. Dad was never one of those people that "wore his heart on his sleeve". You would never know exactly how he was feeling unless you'd been around him for a long time, and even then it could be hard to tell. He usually hid his feelings. Like when the full moon was coming. I knew that he was scared of the full moon, but he never let anyone know about it. I think it's because he didn't want people worrying about him.
I had gotten used to guessing what he felt, and I could tell that right now he was a mixture of confused and worried. Confused, probably because he wondered how I managed to knock every one of the shelves off of its hinge and spill all their contents onto the floor, and worried because he thought I had gotten hurt by the shelves.
"What happened?" he asked, helping me up.
"Well," I began, "I was trying to finish packing, and my robes were up too high. When I tried to get them down, all the shelves came down too."
"And how exactly did the shelves fall down?" He was giving me that look that meant that he could tell I wasn't telling him the whole truth. It was the look that made my hair glow scarlet and instantly give me away, as it did now. I fidgeted under his gaze. "Teddy," he warned.
"I climbed them," I admitted quietly.
"Teddy, I've told you to be careful about these things. You could have really hurt yourself."
"I'm fine, Dad," I said as he started checking my arms for bruises. He lifted my left arm up and turned it over, searching for scratches and bumps. Suddenly, he stopped checking me for injuries.
"What's this?" he asked, pulling the clipping out of my pocket. My face turned bright red. He'd discovered my secret.
He scanned over the tiny piece of paper before his eyes widened. "Where did you find this?"
"It fell down with everything else," I told him. He looked at me with sad eyes. I could tell he was thinking of my mum.
Gran had said that she was worried that a piece of my dad had died with my mum. It's not that Dad was a sad person; we'd had many happy times together. It was just that I'd never seen him smile the way he did in the pictures with my mum.
When I looked back at Dad, he had tears in his eyes. I had never seen my father cry, and it was strange to see him kneeling down so that his teary eyes were level with mine. "I expect you wanted to know what happened, and that's why you were trying to sneak this away," he guessed, holding the yellowy clipping. I nodded. He sighed and gave me a weak smile. "Well it's about time you knew," he sniffled. He sat on the edge of his bed and motioned for me to sit next to him.
"Do you remember all the stories Harry told you about when he, Ron, and Hermione were kids, and they spent all that time in the woods?" Dad asked. I nodded. Harry had said it was a sort of treasure hunt. "Well," Dad started again, "that year in May, barely two weeks after you were born, your mother and I got word that there was going to be this big fight at Hogwarts." I nodded to show that I was following the story. "I went to help the others that were fighting, and your mum was going to stay back with you, but she ended up coming to Hogwarts a little while later," Dad took a deep breath and brushed away a tear. "She died in the fighting. They say that her aunt killed her."
I suddenly wished that I hadn't known the story. "She left me?" I asked quietly. How could she have left me and gone to die? Why couldn't she just have stayed? Did she want to leave me?
Dad waved me off, "No, no," he assured me, "your mother loved you very much. It's because she loved you that she went to fight," he said. "Teddy, things were very bad around the time you were born. A lot of people were dying. Your mum and I didn't want you to have to live like that. That's why we joined the fighting, not because we wanted to leave you. I'm sure your mother would have given anything to come back home to you," he added.
I looked down at the tattered clipping in my hands, my mum's face smiling at me. I couldn't get over the fact that if Mum hadn't left and she had stayed like she was supposed to, she would still be here now. Dad patted my shoulder, "C'mon," he instructed, "I think that it's time you saw something." He led me to the pile of things on the floor. He sifted through it for a while before he pulled out an old VHS tape. "Do we still have the VCR downstairs?" he asked.
"I think so," I answered. Dad led me past the pile of knickknacks and shelves and down the stairs into the living room, where an old T.V. was set up with a VCR.
"Sit down, and I'll put it in," Dad instructed. I sat on the edge of the couch and watched as my dad put in the tape. A series of black and white bars came across the screen before turning into the living room of the old house dad and I used to live in.
The person holding the camera moved forward until they were directly behind a patched rocking chair. I could see the back of someone's head sitting in the chair as they rocked back and forth at an easy, steady pace.
"Rock a bye baby on the treetops," the person sang rather out of tune. "When the wind blows the cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby cradle and all," the voice ended with a crack. I was thankful for the end of the song, I wasn't sure if my ears could take it anymore.
"That was lovely, dear," Dad's voice said from behind the camera. The person in the rocking chair turned around, and I could see that it was my mum.
"Remus!" she scolded quietly. "What are you doing with that old thing?"
"I couldn't miss the show you were putting on for Teddy," Dad laughed.
Mum scrunched up her face mockingly. "Keep it down. He's finally asleep." Dad moved closer to the rocking chair and bent the camera down so it was focused on the tiny baby in Mum's arms. "It took five hours, but I think he's finally out," Mum said, relieved.
The baby's hair turned from dark brown to red that faded into orange then blue. Mum glanced back at the camera, a smile brightening her tired face. She grinned widely while Dad moved to the front of the chair to get a better view.
"He's morphing!" Mum cheered. Dad chuckled. Mum looked down lovingly at the little baby, at me, and I couldn't help but get tears in my eyes. The screen went black, and I turned to my dad.
"Your mother loved you, Teddy," he said quietly. "She would have given anything to be with you now."
I knew now that he was right. My mum would have done anything for me. She hadn't left me; she had fought for me, even died to try to give me a better life.
I looked down at the clipping I still held in my hands, and I felt like I knew the woman in the photo. She was a fighter, a friend, but she was also my mother. I felt like I had found the missing piece.