The Wise and the Lovely, a harry potter fanfic

Author's Note: I do realise this is long. Please read and review, as I have spent several months on it. Much, much thanks is due to those on LiveJournal who encouraged, inspired, and kept my grammar straight. "Dirge Without Music" belongs to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Remus and Tonks belong to J.K. Rowling, as much as I wish they were mine. Also quoted or referenced are "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas, and "The Hollow Men", by T.S. Eliot. Do go hunt up these poets (and fangirl them madly!) if so inclined.

The Wise and the Lovely
by Vintage Blue

The book was Remus'. He had a languorous, dusty stack of them, tilting sideways (as books tend to do) and hesitant by a Grimmauld Place bookshelf because, as he told her once, he was wary of actually setting them on the ornate carved monstrosity, lest it burn them or otherwise purge them of his unnatural stain.

"You never know," he said, when she laughed. "I met Sirius' mum, you know, when we were in school, and when she wasn't quite as mad. She didn't like me. She had no idea that I was a werewolf, but I wouldn't be surprised if she—I don't know, smelled it or something. She could tell I was a filthy half-blood just by looking at me, anyway." He was only half joking.

Tonks said, "Oh, well, dear old Auntie," and smiled, or grimaced, or both, and ran an absent finger down the spine of one dusty tome. "Your books are Muggle," she said suddenly, laughing. "Most of them. You're right; the shelf would probably burn them."

"I like Muggle poetry," he said, still smiling. "Have you read Eliot?"

She rested her chin on her arms, crossed over her drawn-up knees. "Was he the one who wrote the—those cat poems? Dad used to read them to me, before I got too busy to be about for bedtime stories. We agreed they were very true to form." She screwed her face up, thinking. "I think you read one or two to me, once—Mum and Dad had Sirius for dinner and he dragged you along because you weren't busy and he was probably afraid I'd pelt him with food or something, so he needed backup. Or maybe he wanted someone who could bribe me with stories better than he could."

"Sirius can tell wonderful stories."

She laughed. "Oh, yes, splendid. But you're a better reader. Anyway, I think you did. I probably bullied you into it. I was a very bossy child."

"I remember."

She liked how his words complimented hers: quiet, putting spaces between her effervescent ramblings.

"Read to me," she said, grinning a little, and making her eyes go wide and blue and innocent. "For old time's sake, and whatnot." She wasn't quite sure why she said this, other than that she hadn't heard him read aloud for a very long time, and he had been reading words that belonged to her; she had an idea that she rather wanted to hear his voice adding trimming to the words he'd taken as his own.

"And because you're making me," he said, eyebrows raised.

"And because I'm making you."

He read Eliot, his voice running tenderly over the weird, elegant imagery, and later Tennyson, and they laughed over his mistakes—"Camelot wasn't really quite that way, you know"—and in the end he pressed a book of poetry at her and insisted she take it home to read.

"I'd rather listen to you," she said, but took the book from him, because she thought maybe sometime at night, when her shift had been too long, and she was too exhausted to sleep, she could pretend he was reading to her. Which was, she realised quite abruptly, a profoundly sentimental thought. She cast it out immediately.

Later, the night did come that she was too exhausted to sleep, and she took the book from where it had been resting on her nightstand and read it, flipping through the pages looking for words to catch her eye. Edna St. Vincent Millay, some Muggle woman far away and possibly dead. But the words said things. And she thought, oh. This is why Remus loves poetry. And she fell asleep, finally, with her face nestled in the pages.

Remus didn't ask for the book back; she supposed he must have forgotten. She didn't mention it or offer to return it, because in the midst of everything they both made a surprising and disconcerting discovery: they loved each other. It was all so new and mystifying and fragile, and she was taken with weird, uncharacteristic fits of shyness. She didn't feel quite up to saying, "Oh, here's the book you lent me ages ago, which I never bothered to return, and which I might have possibly spilled tea on, even though I did a marvellous job of cleaning it up." She was trying to make things fit, and this wasn't the sort of thing that happened in the storybooks. Of course, neither was she.

And he still read to her, not (mostly) because she made him.

Then Sirius died. And the world fell apart.

She remembered being cursed, remembered waking up in hospital, remembered Remus stumbling over words trying to tell her. Remembered that they held each other, trying to keep their shared grief from shattering them. Remembered that he was the first to pull away. She remembered this last more poignantly after. It was, she thought, the first time. Before, they'd been too much enthralled to think about things, and she thought she didn't need to think about things (she'd never been in love before; she had no idea it was this easy, or this hard).

There was no grave to mourn at. There was no funeral, as there was no body. So she mourned in her own way, stumbling through it as she wasn't sure how. She read Remus' book more often now at night, because she could never seem to sleep anymore. And the words spoke: "Dirge Without Music", truth in paradox.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

She thought, I am not resigned, in a tentative sort of way. She thought, suddenly, we're at war; we really are this time, and it was real in a way that it had never been before, even with clandestine Order meetings and having to bite her tongue over the Ministry's policies and Cedric Diggory, seventeen, dead for no good reason. She thought, Sirius, we needed your laughter, and shut the book.

Summer drifted away, autumn began to enshroud the world (she used to love the leaves, the colours, the vivid scents and the brisk wind, but all she could think of now was death, red and gold trees darkening slowly to black), and Remus pulled further away and began a litany of too old, too poor, too dangerous that sometimes she was too exhausted to argue with. He never really went away, which was easier and harder, and things grew and darkened until her hair faded like the autumn leaves and refused to go back. She stumbled out of her room one morning to find him asleep, crookedly, on her sofa, and she thought suddenly, I am not resigned.

She read poetry while he slept, drinking it, because she hadn't much else to cling to at night. By daylight, she could fill her mind with work and work and work, and when the sorrows of the world were distanced from her, they didn't sting in quite the same way. (Still, they mentioned Sirius sometimes at work, and she thought, Into the darkness they go, the wise and lovely, and at the same time wondered if Remus would be amused, even though grief, to see her thinking in poetry. This hurt twofold.)

The autumn grew, and he left on some mad, mad mission in service to the moon (My people, he said, and she thought No, no; these are not your people; they are like you but you are not like them), and oddly she missed the soundlessness of him in her flat, because the awkwardness, the tip-toeing around each other, was real and tangible, and this waiting and not knowing was not. She opened the paper, once, and Sirius stared out at her, under headlines asking why, why, why, as if they didn't know themselves. She didn't open the paper anymore; she took the Edna St. Vincent Millay book from the nightstand it had claimed long ago as its own and read.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

She found old Prophet clippings from 1981, hunting under the bed for—something; she couldn't remember what. Sirius was laughing in the yellowed photos, laughing, laughing, laughing in a way she remembered hearing once when he and Mum had somehow gotten themselves onto the topic of their family.

Andromeda Tonks asked, "Why did you leave then, Sirius?"

And he laughed, harshly, bitterly, mirthlessly: "What else was there to do?"

Six-year-old Dora, hiding behind the doorframe, wondered what could be so horrible to make her cousin Sirius laugh as if he were compensating for crying.

Twenty-four-year-old Nymphadora Tonks, holding the shoebox full of crumbling pictures in her hands, wondered if she'd ever forget Sirius laughing, with bitterness or with joy. She looked at the pictures, laughing silently under her fingers, and remembered once seeing Padfoot come out of the rain and into Grimmauld Place, shaking wetness from his fur and then straightening up into Sirius and laughing, because he was alive and he was Sirius, and Sirius laughed. And all that remained now were memories and bitter photographs. And Remus, she thought suddenly—Remus who had seen Sirius laugh without bitterness (most of the time). She found that she would rather not think of him just now.

She was surprised when Remus came back, several days after the moon, looking a little shaken and a little more shabby than usual. He gave some account of wanting to check in, wanting to talk to Dumbledore, wanting to see if she was all right. She took this to mean that despite his protests, he did, in fact, miss her; and he did not, in fact, exactly want to go away. Which she knew, really, but seeing him know, even briefly, was a comfort, if a dim and fleeting one.

He said, "I can't come back much—they'll wonder, you know. We don't—well, I'm already odd enough."

She was disconcerted at the use of the word "we", but didn't say anything, because she hadn't anything to say.

He also said, "Try not to send me owls. They'll wonder."

She said, fiercely, "Am I supposed to ignore you, then?"

He said, glancing sideways as he always did when dancing around an issue, "I think that might be best for the both of us."

She crossed her arms close over her chest, suddenly colder. "I think you're being ridiculous."

"They could—do things to you. They might make me do things to you. What if I killed you, or—or turned you? I couldn't—"

"I," she said, not quite firmly, "am an Auror."

"You," he said, very quietly, staring at the sofa cushions, "are twenty-four." And, still without looking at her, he ran through too old ("I look like your father", he said, sounding almost ashamed, "and I read you stories when you were seven"), too poor ("I don't even have a house, you know", to which she said, "You need someone to take care of you, then") and he added, quite finally, his last: too dangerous. Afterwards, when a silence had hung between them, stiff and ugly, he righted himself from her sofa, said, "I shouldn't be imposing upon you", and walked out her door. She leaned her head against the thin wood and listened for his footsteps treading slowly down the rickety stairs.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

She read Remus' book more often now, hearing his voice reading it in her head, cursing herself for being so disgustingly sentimental. As three moons waxed and waned and she wrote fragments of letters (some angry, some sentimental, some blotted with ink—never tears) which were never sent, she thought, more precious was the light in your eyes... She remembered, with a sudden clarity, reading Eliot and Tennyson in the dusty antiquity of Grimmauld Place, when Sirius was still running from room to room and mood to mood, when Remus didn't care about her age or his lycanthropy, when her hair wasn't dull, dead brown, and the war was more words and furtive meetings than curses and killings.

After feeding on Dumbledore's occasional news (which was not often especially encouraging), she broke down, pulled out her quill, and wrote Remus a brief letter.

Remus— (she resisted the entirely sentimental urge to front his name with "dearest" or some similar endearment)

This is ridiculous. I'm sorry for writing.

No. I'm not. I'm sorry for any inconveniences this letter might cause, but I am not in the least sorry for writing. I am not going to ask you to come back; I've said my piece enough times and I doubt that repeating it ad nauseum is going to have any positive effect whatsoever. However: I miss you incredibly. I am also worried about you, which is entirely fair, and in your present circumstances no news is not particularly good news, though perhaps it could be (however, as an Auror, I can think up any number of nasty situations to keep my overly vivid imagination busy and keep me worried). And Remus—I am not going to go away.

After a moment, she scrawled,

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

I love you.

- Nymphadora

She shoved the parchment into an envelope, sealed it, and sent it off before she had time to reconsider.

The owl came back almost a week later, and she laughed, cried, with relief.

My Dora—

I knew I wouldn't be able to stop you from sending letters. You are much too tenacious for your own good. Thankfully, your owl found me alone. I am afraid Greyback might—sense something, though. He's frighteningly keen on such things. Please, please don't write back. Yes. I am all right, at least inasmuch as one can be, living with werewolves.

More carefully, So you do still have that book I gave you.

- Remus

She held the letter and finally let herself cry, briefly, then wiped her sleeve across her face resolutely. She would have turned her eyes steely grey if morphing wasn't so difficult these days, with Sirius dead and Remus practically killing himself. She thought, once more, with all the steely grey that her eyes wouldn't take on, I am not resigned. I am not resigned.

The months and the moons wore on relentlessly. She saw him, briefly, several times. Once he turned up at her door, shaking, looking older than she'd ever seen him look. He never told her what happened; he just sat on her sofa and she tucked a quilt around his shoulders (Granny Tonks had made it, long ago) and made tea. He drank four cups, very absently, and she clutched his hand in hers while he stared at her wall. They remained thus for several hours, and she could feel his hand shaking in hers. She felt ill. She wanted to ask, What is Greyback doing to you? but there was no room for words. He glanced at her once, twice, skittishly; glanced away, shuddered deeply. He did not speak, but she suspected, staring at his shoulders that quivered erratically beneath the quilt, that he could not. Shaken herself, she laid her head on his shoulder and held him. He let her.

It was morning when he took his leave, still looking shaken. When she grabbed for his hand at the door, he suddenly lurched towards her, burying his scarred hands in her tousled hair, caressing the circles beneath her eyes, kissing her hungrily, longingly, and then he pulled away, whispering fragmented apologies, and his endless litany of too old, too poor, too dangerous, all the while still clutching at her hand like a mainstay.

She said, fiercely, "I don't care," and again, "I don't care," her voice ascending the scale and nearly breaking, "I don't care!"

"No, no, no," he choked, pulling away, away, still shaking. "I could—you—Greyback—"

Seeing Remus this broken made her feel sick. Seeing anyone like this would make anyone sick.

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely, she thought, trying not to weep or retch as she listened to his footsteps fleeing erratically from the flat, down the stairs, into the fog and the darkness below. She hated Greyback suddenly so much that she could barely see—for trying, once, to ruin a young boy's life, and for coming back to finish the job on the man.

Winter raged and went. Tonks spent a lonely Christmas missing Mum and Dad, looking up at the changing moon and worrying. Molly Weasley had invited her to spend Christmas at the Burrow, but she declined. If Remus were there, Christmas would be awkward and aching. If he weren't, imagining where he might be spending Christmas instead would be hellish. And she couldn't imagine trying to keep her spirits up for a houseful of people making merry—and she couldn't help remembering last Christmas, and Sirius rushing through the house in a flame of inspiration and his thin, fierce joy.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

Winter became spring, a wet, dripping, mournful spring, and Remus appeared in it sporadically—sometimes showing up for Order meetings, occasionally still showing up at her flat when he said he hadn't anywhere else to go. He didn't speak much of his dealings with the werewolf pack, maybe, she thought, because he couldn't. Into the dark...the best is lost...

Once, lying on her sofa half-delirious, he looked up at her with blank eyes and murmured childishly, "Would you read to me?" He'd left most of his books at her flat, as they couldn't stay at Grimmauld Place and couldn't go where he was going, and she hadn't touched them. It seemed sacrilegious, somehow. But she drew a book blindly from the pile on her coffee table—Dylan Thomas—and tried to read through eyes that swam with tears.

Her voice trembled faintly.

"Do not go gentle into that good night;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Dimly, Remus smiled.

She filled her days with work work work work, filled her mind with words, with actions and happenings that had nothing to do with her. She patrolled Hogwarts and tried not to talk to anyone. Once, Dumbledore looked at her over his half-moon glasses after she gave him a report (which contained almost nothing she thought would be of interest), and said quietly, in his way, that he missed the pink hair.

She said, "I know. Me too," and fingered the tired, lank locks brushing her shoulders. And thought, You sent him, you sent him; you know—how could you—how could you—

Dumbledore looked at her and said simply, sadly, gravely, "I'm very sorry, Nymphadora."

Again, she said, "I know," the angry thoughts in her head settling to a pained disquiet, and she thought that perhaps—perhaps—Dumbledore was nearly as concerned for Remus as she was.

There was a vestige of guilt in the old man's eyes when he said, "Many things must be risked in war. I hope I have not misjudged."

Tonks left his office, thinking of the wise and the lovely and the darkness.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

She waited, because this was one thing that she was good at, if more by default than anything else. She had grown up waiting, because she had always been impatient, and because she'd been born into the middle of a war. And she thought, each war has lost me something, and she thought, in this one I have lost twice. She thought of Sirius, and of Remus, of both of them laughing when there were still reasons to laugh. She poured herself into any work she could—Order work, Auror work, Hogwarts work—so that she wouldn't have to think.

She was drinking tea and reading poetry frenetically when the phoenix Patronus drifted through the door and relayed its message: Dumbledore was leaving Hogwarts briefly—on some venture of at least marginal importance, she thought was implied, and wondered—and he wanted her at Hogwarts. She had her cloak half-on before the message was finished, managing to knock her teacup onto the floor where it shattered and splashed tea on her battered rug. She found a curious sort of comfort in muttering "Reparo!" at it and watching the pieces spring back into a teacup again.

The world fell down again that night, fell down with a clang and a clatter, a harshness which meant to say that nothing would ever be all right again, but she was so used to nothing being all right that she barely knew what all right was anymore. It was bitterly ironic that she should see Remus here for the first time in weeks, in a shadowed Hogwarts diving into a battle that no one expected. When she came out of Minerva McGonagall's fireplace and saw him standing with his hands apologetically in his pockets, looking grey and haggard, she thought, achingly, Remus, Remus, Remus; you look as if you're falling all to pieces.

She'd thought a year ago that she would never be in this sickening position of defending children from Death Eaters again, had found herself struggling through so many failures (Sirius, we need your laughter) that she had sworn, however vainly, not to let anything like it happen again. But this was war, this was darkness; she realised that there were vows that no one could keep. She watched everything fall down, watched the strange, painful paradox of Remus coming flamingly alive in the face of adversity, watched fifteen-year-old Ginny Weasley (with her bright hair flying like a banner), who managed to Stun two Death Eaters and in a brief moment of respite leaned against a wall white-faced: so this, her face said, is what it's like. Tonks remembered the look, the feeling, but she had been twenty-two before she'd lost that sort of innocence. The wise and the lovely, she thought, almost bitterly, but there was no time for bitterness now.

She remembered a blur, because she didn't want to remember anything else, didn't want to remember young, handsome Bill Weasley, whom she had known in school, who was engaged to be married, who was reduced to a bloody, barely-breathing pulp by the monster of a man who had nearly destroyed Remus. She didn't want to remember the way Remus' face had drained of—of everything when the gaunt, grotesque figure of Fenrir Greyback had sauntered into the fray, looking more wolf than man. She was an Auror, and being such had needed to learn how to forget things.

It was all over very suddenly and she was not entirely sure she understood what had happened. She stood by the wall, panting, feeling more ill and possibly more terrified than she had anytime in the past hell of a year. Very suddenly Remus was beside her, saying something about getting Bill to the hospital wing in a very far-away sort of voice, and she glanced up at him dimly with odd bits of poetry floating through her head like a lurid dream. She said something, maybe yes, yes, of course I'll help; maybe Remus, Remus, help me please; she thought, here I am helpless when he's the one who needs me, and then she was past thinking and sagged against his side. She thought, I am going to fall, and clutched for Remus' hand, because it was warm, warm, not dead, not bloody; it was human. He led her to the hospital wing in the darkness that smelled of burnt things and blood, or maybe she led him, and all the while her thoughts spun in frenzied fragments. Into the darkness of the grave, she thought, feeling hard wood against her arms as she leaned against the post of the bed that was suddenly beneath her, crowned with lilies and with laurel they go...lilies and laurel... The world went dark and blurred for a very long time, and when she came out of it and looked at Remus, neither of them spoke.

She thought, watching Remus watch Bill on the bed nearest them, that the world had reached a zenith of devastation. She thought, she thought, and Ginny Weasley, looking older than she had a mere few hours ago, led a stumbling Harry Potter into the ward, and he said, with a sort of burning in his face, "Dumbledore is dead. Snape killed him."

Perhaps the world fell out from beneath her feet. Perhaps it was only the last of the innocence she'd managed to retain, going down, down, down, into the darkness of the grave. Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave, was all she could think before she was relinquished from all thought.

Albus Dumbledore was not the sort of man who died.

Remus slumped beside her with his hands over his face, and she looked around at the faces in the ward, shocked and blank and distraught in turn. She thought, disconnectedly, so it goes again, and she remembered the weird coldness of the Department of Mysteries, and Sirius floating elegantly behind that black, black curtain, and she thought, at least this time there will be a body to bury.

She wanted to close her eyes, maybe drown (no, she was drowning already); she did not want to speak when the time came, did not want to relive the night's events, but she wove her words around Remus' anyway, tried to speak without remembering. She watched Remus, listened to his voice, which remained remarkably steady. Sitting beside him, she could see the faint trembling of his hands against the bed-sheets; she rested her hand on his for a moment and he went on resolutely making words out of the darkness.

The tangled confusion of a story was interrupted by the entrance of Arthur and Molly Weasley, and young Fleur Delacour in their wake (young Fleur, who wasn't much younger than she was); Tonks looked up at them and quite suddenly did not want to look again, but Remus grasped her wrist and said that they ought to move to another bed, as he pulled her up, to give Molly and Arthur the place closest to their son.

There were too many words just now, and people looking here and there; she felt that if it weren't for everything, she just wanted to curl up cat-wise in a corner of her own and sleep until everything was comfortably gone. Sleep, until her head and her limbs and her self stopped aching in their long, dull throb, because this was too much like Sirius. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, a formula, a phrase remains—but the best is lost.

She leaned her forehead on her arm, propped on the bedpost, and shut her eyes. Behind her lids, green light danced.

Fleur's voice, shrill and girlish, piped over the thin, quiet noises of the ward suddenly; Tonks looked up tiredly to see her arguing with Molly, who was bent over Bill. Flame-eyed, the younger woman flung her head up, dignified, fierce: "It would take more zan a werewolf to stop Bill loving me!"

She felt a sudden ache, and wished she had Fleur's determination, but it seemed to be leaking out of her like thin, thin smoke; she watched the world blur around her again, and Fleur, gesticulating madly, snatching a bottle of ointment away from Molly, insisting that she would do it; there was a stunned moment, as Fleur dabbed her fiancé's wounds resolutely, and then Molly, with an odd, careful sort of tenderness, was offering Fleur a goblin-made tiara 'for the wedding', and, quite abruptly, the two women were crying together, Fleur flinging her arms impulsively over Molly's shoulders.

Tonks suddenly yearned for her mother, and wanted to shrink downwards into a small, eager being with braids flapping down her back and then curling up into lurid purple ringlets, and Sirius tugging on them; Dad telling stories and Remus reading them. She thought, abruptly, I am not resigned. She thought, on its tail, I am, I am: she thought of Remus lying blank-eyed on her sofa and Greyback leering in the hallway, and Remus saying, "Go away, please", and the long, ghastly winter. She thought of being powerless, and of shutting down and shutting away, and she thought, not quite incongruously, Remus, I love you.

Her mouth said, "See? She still wants to marry him, even though he's been bitten!"—and then she thought it was the worst thing she could have said, here, now, in the middle of things. He looked shocked, uncomfortable; not here, Dora, he seemed to be saying, don't air all of this out in front of everyone.

He stopped looking at her. "It's different," he said, quietly and a little roughly. "Bill won't be a full werewolf—"

I am not resigned was coursing through her head, flying like a banner on a battlefield, and here were her hands gripping his shirt—if he hadn't looked so lost and shattered, she might have shaken him. "But I don't care either, I don't care—I've told you a million times—" And then she had no more words, no more voice; it came to a shrill halt and she stared at her hands, and his just below them, and felt her thoughts running distractedly to and fro, and she was so tired...

He did not look at her, but uncurled her fingers from his shirt and laid them gently on her lap. "And I've told you a million times," he said, with all the calm sternness he could muster, "that I am too old for you, too poor—too dangerous..."

She managed to look at him fiercely for a moment; she wanted to say I know, but I do not approve, but she could not manage to make things work, somehow. Molly Weasley was saying something in a magnificently motherly way, but Tonks couldn't hear with her head whirling this way, only watch Remus' hands on the bed, and the shadows of movement behind him, and this is the darkness.

"I am not being ridiculous," he said steadily; she was not sure whom he was speaking to, and she didn't think he was looking at anyone. He said, "Tonks deserves someone young and whole", and she winced at Remus, who had known her since she was an infant, referring to her by her surname, trying to carve a chasm between them; but there were chasms, chasms in the world, holes where stars had been...

Arthur Weasley said, "Young and whole men do not necessarily remain so," with a poignant glance at his son. Remus, looking grey and frustrated and awkward, twisted a fold of blanket in one hand and said that now was not the time to discuss the matter. "Dumbledore," he said, "is—" and then he couldn't go on.

There was a great deal of talk, then; somehow busy and sharp and quiet all at once, but Tonks could not make it stay in her head, so she curled against the bedposts and rested her head on her arms and shut her eyes, listened for footsteps as people entered the room and then left it again. The world swung languorously, like a pendulum or a metronome, and she felt herself swing with it, steadily, unceasingly, towards the faint hope of some oblivion.

She fluttered half out of it after a while, still feeling the pulse in some corner of herself. The room had mostly emptied, and Remus was sitting on the other side of the bed with his face propped on one hand, staring at the infirmary as if he did not see it at all.

She didn't mean to, but she reached for him. He looked at her, suddenly, then pushed himself from the bed and turned, sharply, shoulders rigid beneath the severe, hard set of his jaw. He found the door almost as if he was searching for it blindly and stumbled through. Almost blindly herself, she followed, feeling small things like urgent proddings of reality: the ragged wood of the bed frame, the cold touch of the doorknob, the stone of the long corridor walls as her hesitant fingers brushed against it. There were candles on the walls, and she stared at them with eyes that burned from exhaustion.

Remus said, "I'm not sure I meant for you to follow," in his old polite fashion; she noticed a long scratch down his arm because she was noticing everything just now, and she looked at how he seemed to droop, hair, shoulders, eyes, in a defeated, worn sort of way: she thought, as she had in McGonagall's office, you look as if you're falling all to pieces, but this time she thought, and so am I.

He looked down, tiredly, thrusting hands in threadbare pockets with that gesture that was his, and then he looked up again, no less tiredly, but a little more determinedly, as he always did when he was about to tell her to go away, please, one more time. She couldn't bear, not now, to hear him say it again; she stopped him with, "You don't need to cover from Greyback anymore."

He nearly winced at the name. "I know," he said, very quietly, "but that isn't the entire point."

"I don't care about your bloody point! I don't care!"

"Dora, don't." The use of the old childhood nickname (Dad's name, and Sirius') unfettered her half-controlled ache, and she pressed trembling hands to her face. I know. But I do not approve. She thought, weirdly, in the silence of that horrible moment, Dumbledore is dead, and she was blind all over again and reached towards Remus with a kind of terror. His arms went around her instinctively, and she wept silently against him for a moment, until she realised that he was clinging to her the way he'd clung to her hand all through the long, awful night he'd turned up wordlessly at her door—clinging to her like a bridge between land and stormy sea.

She pulled away first, just a little, because she did not want him to, and (barely meaning to), she whispered, or croaked, "I am not resigned." When he looked at her, startled, she plunged on, half-stuttering. "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground," she said, feeling half-delirious, maybe, or just mad, gibbering poetry as if she hadn't any of her own words to give. (But she hadn't, nothing that meant anything, and in all of this she couldn't find energy or space for words of her own.)

Remus stared at her, and after a moment said "oh," because he understood, she thought: she could picture, even in the middle of now, him wandering achingly through Eliot or Thomas in the aftermath of October 1981. But his arms went gently to her shoulders, and he pushed her away (softly, softly). He said, "I'm too old, Dora—" (because maybe that was an easier tangent, she thought bitterly, than I'm a monster once a month)

"And too dangerous," she said, "and too poor—and I don't care, and we've said the same words so many times they don't mean anything anymore," and I am not resigned to the shutting away. She felt a little hysterical, a little sharp-edged, a little ragged and frayed at the ends. "But I need you." Once it was out, she couldn't stop herself, hiccupping over the words as if half-drunk. "I need you—I need you to remember, and I need you to tell me that the world isn't going to fall apart after all, and I need you to stop falling to pieces; I need you to help me; I need you to let me help you; you're killing yourself, you great stupid git, and I am not resigned!" Her voice crumpled over itself in that dismal way it always did when she cried; she had always hated crying, because her voice did strange things and she couldn't keep her words straight and her face tightened up, and she could never concentrate enough to morph when she was crying—hang it all! "I am not resigned," she said, more softly, still hiccupping: "I'm not, I'm not; I love you, I love you—oh, plague," and she coiled her arms over her face and blubbered into her sleeves, full of incongruous memories of Mum blasting Sirius out of photos, and herself, small and heartbroken and wondering why, why, why.

He said, very softly, and a little lostly, "Dora," just "Dora", carefully, and the word was at once imbued with a tender sort of sternness and a long, lonesome sound. She waited, face against the wall, but he did not, perhaps could not say more. She did not know why, but she calmed then, feeling blessedly a little more rational. She wanted to say, I don't care, I don't care either, but she was afraid of breaking this sudden frail truce of emotions, and she realised suddenly how much, how very much she did not want to open her eyes. So she said, "Remus," instead, turning away from the wall and feeling the hard salty stains of tears across her face.

He looked at her a moment, in a dazed kind of way, and said, finally, "Not now. Please, not now. Dumbledore is..." He shook his head in a way that reminded her of Sirius, a canine-like eradication of clinging things. A hand came down the lines of his face, and he seemed to sink a little more. "I can't even..." Again, the shaking of the head. "I am not— I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She said, "It's not like it was," meaning two things at once.

He said, "Yes. I know. Nothing's as it was." He said, "Dora, thank you."

He said, "Dora, I do love you."

She couldn't smile yet, but she said, "I know," and thought, don't go back into that, don't; you are not that way. You are not them. She thought of how he hadn't called her Dora much after—well, after, and she thought that maybe he was beginning to reconcile the two worlds of her.

There was a silence then, but it demanded nothing of her, and she waited for nothing, feeling bone-tired. Into the silence, Remus said, "I need to—sleep. I—" He shut his eyes. "I need to get out."

She thought, a little detachedly, this is going to feel real in the morning. This is going to hurt in the morning. She said, "I do love you."

He said, "Yes," tiredly, perhaps a little hopefully, and turned down the candle-lit hall, and she watched him stumble down it and if things were not so fragile she wanted to help him find his way. She wanted him in the morning because everything was going to be sharp and real and jagged-edged in the morning, and she wanted him to tell her it was going to be all right even if it wasn't, and she wanted to burn toast and spill milk and knock over his tea and laugh about it. She wanted Sirius to stand in the doorway and smirk at them, say "I told you so," laugh like he was meant to laugh. She wanted—the light in his eyes—and all the roses—

She barely remembered stumbling back to Minerva McGonagall's office and into the fireplace, into her own slightly battered flat, but the colours all looked a little more grey, and she tumbled onto the sofa and pulled up the blanket, because her room was too far, and she shut her eyes and slept.

When she woke, with the sun streaming as best it could through her dim windows, it was past noon, and there was an indignant owl on her coffee table with a note from Kingsley telling her not to come to work that morning. She sobbed, because she was awake enough to, and the owl stared at her until she shooed it out the window again. She sobbed, because she had not for months; she sobbed, because there didn't seem to be anything else to do. She sobbed, because this was the darkness, and this was the indiscriminate dust.

Later, she baked, furiously and haphazardly, making great messes of sugar and flour and dough all about her narrow counters and dilapidated kitchen table. Biscuits took shape under her hands, and she remembered Sirius, who used to tease her about her cooking, whether it turned out all right or dismally; she remembered shoving biscuits at him sternly at the age of six and insisting he eat them; she remembered a dark, lonely day in Grimmauld Place, when Sirius stood in the rain, and Remus coaxed him in and they had tea and biscuits that Tonks had somehow managed to get right, and told raucous, fiercely comical stories and laughed, and as the night drifted by, things began to seem like some pieced-together sort of normalcy. Later, Sirius, lulled to sleep by one too many firewhiskeys and the exhaustion of quieted despair, had slumped in an armchair, and Remus looked at her over his head and smiled sadly. In the dim remnant of the firelight, they'd shared a sudden, intense communion; a thing of shared pain and sympathy, and the world was oddly quiet, and new, and astonishing, until Remus turned his head away and stared at the coals, and she had fumbled for her coat and umbrella and walked home in the rain with the half-moon staring down at her like a half-face; her umbrella dangled at her side and she barely felt the rain.

She remembered this now, with rain sliding down her tiny windows, and she wondered if it were more like cleansing or more like tears; if the world could, perhaps, be crying for Albus Dumbledore, because if any man was ever worth the sky crying...

(The world was tired, she thought; the world was coming to a slow, exhausted end; she and Remus and all the rest would crumble into a grey, dim expanse and fade into nothing and nothing again. Not with a bang, but a whimper; she had read that somewhere: this is the way the world ends.)

It might have been noon—a cold, un-summer noon, but she was hot with baking and flour had made its way into every possible corner of the kitchen—when the doorbell shrilled, and she nearly dropped a pan of sugar-drowned biscuits, because things like doorbells didn't enter into the ending of the world. She pretended she didn't know why she pressed her ear to the door; pretended a moment later that the slow, slow footsteps on the stairs did not sound so familiar as to give her reason to choke on everything within her; she pretended later that when she opened the door, flour-dashed, tired-eyed, November-haired, that she did not stare for a long, still moment while the world spun on beneath her feet, until her mouth said, very quietly, "Wotcher, Remus."

He said, "Dora," which was enough (oh, enough!), and she found herself clinging to him, anchor-like, with the familiar worn-softness of his overcoat all over and embracing; and here were his arms coming round, and suddenly she was laugh-sobbing, sneezing on flour, and he kissed the top of her head with a fragile tenderness and said, "Won't you let me in?"

She pulled him in (words danced away from her) and he reached back to latch the door, and then he held her for a space of minutes that could have held an eternity, and she thought of being un-resigned, of the rain and the roses, and here were his hands in her hair, on her face, her shoulders, and rain on his overcoat and in his hair when he kissed her, gently, then fiercely, longingly, tenderly, with everything neither of them had words for.

After a moment he said, "Dora, Dora; I need you. But that's selfish, and I am too dangerous—"

She found his hands and clasped hers into them, lacing her fingers through his like a promise. "It doesn't matter," she said, not angrily. "Don't make it matter. There's a danger in anything, you know. There's a danger in the shutting away."

He smiled.

"There's a war on," she whispered, "and Sirius is gone, and Dumbledore—and I need you. I need you not to be resigned. I need you to show me that there are still things I can do in the face of darkness. I need you to need me, because being needed makes me feel human. And you"—with an attempt at sternness—"need to be looked after."

He said, "All the roses," and he wiped flour from her cheek and kissed her again, and the rain poured on in a steady metronome, drowning all the other sounds. She thought, we're going into the darkness, but so help me, I am not resigned. So help me, there will be no shutting away.

She looked up suddenly. "The biscuits," she said, pulling away. "I think I've burned them." And then she laughed, ridiculously, and cried again, and he pulled her close, and there was no end to the world.