In A Lover's Arms

There were screams and shouts echoing all around us. Jets of light rebounded between the two groups, filling the air with hundreds of differently-coloured sparks. I thought irrationally of fireworks, the memories of being a young girl, hand-in-gloved-hand with my father, the smell of burning wood and apples and being a wide-eyed child writing my name with a sparkler onto the night sky.

I wasn't that little girl anymore. No longer the girl who entertained her friends and family by rapidly changing her appearance, no longer the innocent girl who thought a bike ride with friends what the height of night life, no longer the girl who thought boys were ugly, smelly creatures who ruined the fun and no longer even the teenager who immersed herself in romance novels and hoped one day for a handsome pirate to sweep her away on a voyage to the ends of the earth.

I was a grown woman. I was a woman who had fallen in love with a werewolf and had his child. I was a woman fighting for my life and the lives of those I loved against Voldemort and the Death Eaters. I was a grown woman who had lost so much. I wasn't prepared to lose anything else. Regulus, Sirius, Dad…so many people I had cared about, all swept away by the ravages of time.

I saw Bellatrix's face that night. I saw the loathing in her eyes as she shot curse after curse and I saw people fall around me. Her face was twisted in rage as she fought. She was the most loyal, the most devoted to the Dark Lord. I'd often thought she loved him. She'd killed her own family and so many others for him. I'm sure any psychiatrist would have diagnosed her clinically insane.

"Expelliarmus!" I screamed, proud as the nearest Death Eater lost his wand. I left Kingsley to finish him off and ran after the back of the man I loved, closer to the castle where the battle raged fiercer than ever. That was when I felt it. A prickling on the back of my neck, a psychic twinge. I was going to die.

I turned and saw Bellatrix behind me, her wand raised. Screaming, I leapt out of the way and the green jet of light missed me by inches. But horror soon overwhelmed the relief of my escape when I heard a gasp, a crazed laugh from Bellatrix and several screams. The curse had hit somebody after all. The body on the ground had light brown hair streaked with grey and was wearing a dusty brown travelling cloak.

"Remus!" I screamed. The bangs, the jets of light, the screams, everything seemed to fade as I found myself staring at my husband's body. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. We were supposed to get through it together and go back to our life with our son. We were supposed to live forever in each other's arms.

I tore towards the body, stumbling into people, half-blinded by tears, barely hearing the annoyed comments or sympathies people called out. I knelt down beside Remus. I listened for a breath, a heartbeat, anything. There was nothing except the glazed look in his eyes, the blue eyes that gazed unseeingly up at the sky. Tears dripped from my face onto his as I kissed his smooth, cold forehead, praying to anyone who was listening for it to be a dream.

No one was listening. The battle raged on around me but I was sealed in grief. Bellatrix was approaching, her wand raised, a twisted smile on her face.

"Little Tonksie," she said, her voice almost high enough to constitute a scream. Her eyes were glazed by battle-lust and her hand barely shook as she raised her wand. "Pwepare to die." I saw rather than heard her shout the curse that would kill me.

I lay down on the grass beside Remus, laying my head close to his. I took his stiffening arms and wrapped them around myself, holding me close. In the last moments of my love I could be in a lover's embrace. I pressed my lips to his as the moment of death came.

Not my usual sort of story, is this. I tend to write happy endings and I'm pretty much in denial about Tonks and Lupin dying, but when this idea sprang to mind I wrote it. I hope you enjoyed it anyhow.