Remus stared at the aftereffects of the green light. He knew what his eyes were telling him, but he also knew it couldn't be true. He'd lost so much already. There was no way he could take this blow too.
But the fact remained that his wife's vibrant, beautiful body, always so full of life-was lying broken and empty on the floor of Hogwarts Castle. No.
He spun around to face her attacker, but the Death Eater seemed to have left. Maybe they hadn't seen Remus there. Or maybe they had, and had run. Because the way Remus was feeling, everything should run from him. He wanted to catch the person responsible for making him feel this way, wanted to tear them apart and make them feel the same pain he was.
For the first time in his life, Remus wished he could become the wolf.
The hall was empty and he made sure it would stay that way, casting quick charms at either end of the corridor to make it seem like solid wall. Nobody would find her. Not until he came back for her. And he would, he promised.
He smoothed the hair away from her face; she had been fighting as her natural self, and he was grateful for it because if this was to be how he remembered her let it be the way she had been in life, not impersonating someone else. He wondered briefly and distantly if, had she died as someone else, she would have remained that way or morphed back. But it was just a thought to pull him away from the moment.
Remus pressed his lips to her forehead, but she was already cool to the touch and he recoiled. He realized, suddenly, that he didn't know what her last words had been. He couldn't recall what she had last said to him, and he hadn't heard the last words out of her mouth.
He had not yet made a sound. He seemed to be stuck, trapped in his silence, unable to call out or cry or even whisper. He felt hard inside, like the emptiness he should have felt was replaced with lead.
Remus left the hall without looking back. He had a war to win.
He rejoined the Order members and helped them in their fights. He duelled viciously, still in perfect silence. He had always been good at casting nonverbally. He remembered how it had annoyed Sirius that he could never tell when Remus was about to hex him, and how James would laugh every time it took him by surprise. He remembered how Tonks would-
No, not yet. He would not, could not, do this now. Now he took that horrible coldness and turned it to heat, into fuel for his fury and venom behind his spells. He could grieve later. Emotion was a luxury he didn't have time for.
Or so he told himself, although he was afraid he was only avoiding the truth: that if he were to start crying now, he would never be able to stop. Something would snap inside him ad be broken forever. He knew it, because he had felt this way before.
And so he fought. He fought but the war was being lost, and then came Voldemort's announcement. Give me Harry Potter.
"No, Harry," whispered Molly, but Remus knew Harry as surely as he knew that James would have done-had done-exactly what Harry must be planning now.
Remus still had not made a sound. None of the others knew anything beyond what they must have guessed. But now Kingsley approached him amidst the terrible eruption of noise as the Death Eaters withdrew and the survivors were left to mourn.
As the Weasleys bent over Fred, Kingsley leaned close and asked Remus, "Where's Tonks? Is she-?"
Remus didn't know whether the next word was going to be "okay" or "dead," because at the deadened, hardened look on his face Kingsley bent his head. "I'm sorry," he said in a low voice that acknowledged just how useless the words were, and left him to his grief alone.
Alone.
He was getting sick of being alone, but he didn't want anyone near him at the moment either. So he stood from the bench and left the Great Hall.
Remus walked. He paced and circled the grounds and always, always kept an eye on the Forest, though he suspected Harry had the sense to use the Cloak. He avoided the dementors; he could not produce a Patronus now for anything. He walked.
Eventually he became aware that he was crying, but he was making no sound and he would not stop walking because if he stopped then reality would start again and he was keeping that at bay; he was done with reality, because when had it ever played fair with him?
Against his will he began listing his losses for the millionth time in his life. Everyone who had ever been good to him, gone. James and Lily and Sirius, all dead. Even Peter, whom he knew he should not miss, had been a friend for years and it was hard to push that aside-although Peter seemed to have managed to do so just fine. And now even he was dead. Dumbledore, who had accepted him into Hogwarts and made it possible to have everything he had, dead.
Now Tonks, his wife, the one spot of brightness he had found and clung to in this time of desperate blackness and despair...now she had left him too.
"Why?" he whispered. It was his first word as a widower, his first word as a new person in this new and uglier world.
Teddy. Oh god, Teddy. He was barely a few months old and now he was half an orphan. If Remus didn't survive this war, he would have nobody but his grandmother.
Andromeda. Thinking of her caused a peculiar ache to form in his torso. He would have to tell her of her daughter's death and he would have to deal with her crying and her grief, and it was terribly selfish of him but he did not want to, didn't want to take on anyone else's pain. In some strange way he felt possessive, like he had known her longer or better than her own mother. What was wrong with him?
He hadn't even stopped to think about what Andromeda must be feeling right now. She had just lost her husband and then watched her daughter march into a war and drop a baby on her.
And Teddy himself…. Remus couldn't bear to think of his son. To think of him was to think of her, and to think of her was to collapse.
But the gates had been opened now and he couldn't help thinking that they'd had so little time together. Less than a year, and how much of that time had he actually spent by her side? He flushed with shame when he thought of how he'd sought out Harry when he learned of Teddy's existence. How could he have done that? Tonks had needed him, and he'd left her.
In some perverse sense, this felt like a sort of payback. He needed her now, and she had left him.
Remus sank to his knees and put his head in his hands, feeling the scars as familiar as any other part of him. Intrinsic. He hardly noticed them anymore. He pressed the pads of his fingers against his eyelids, trying to block everything out. He didn't want to think anymore.
Just then a distraction arrived in the form of the end of the world. It was Voldemort, and he was being followed not only by his Death Eaters but by Hagrid, who was holding something that looked terribly familiar, but it couldn't be….
He rose to his feet and stared at the dead body of Harry Potter, the son of his best friends and the world's best hope.
"No." The word was so low even he had trouble hearing it. It was easily overpowered by the others' screaming. Remus's heart ached for Ginny-to have just lost her brother, and now Harry? Remus understood that pain. And Ron, and Hermione-they would be hurting too. But in that moment Remus allowed himself the privilege to scream in his mind for Lily and James' son, their legacy, now being placed on the ground. He was so small. So young. And he had come so close.
Voldemort was speaking, but Remus heard none of it. He was staring at the bundle of boy-shaped cloth, willing it to move, to breathe, just to twitch….
He only tore his eyes away when Neville started yelling. No, Neville, he thought. He had taught the boy, after all, and though his proficiency and confidence had increased tremendously over the past few years, none of them were a match for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Remus closed his eyes for just a moment so he would not have to see the death of another of his students, then was immediately appalled with himself for such weakness. He owed it to Neville to bear witness to his final moments. He opened his eyes again.
But in those two seconds everything had devolved into chaos. Remus looked around, disoriented, and-
"WHERE'S HARRY?" bellowed Hagrid, and Remus's heart leapt a he spotted the telltale signs of people being jostled slightly by someone under the Cloak. It was faint, but Remus was intimately familiar with that Cloak from a thousand happy moments. He knew what it looked like when invisible people walked.
And then Harry revealed himself, and Remus did not cheer only because he was faint with relief and his throat was filled with suppressed tears. Yet the worst was still coming: Harry now faced Lord Voldemort again, and he seemed to have barely survived last time. What would save him this time?
"Who are you going to use as a shield today, Potter?" sneered Voldemort, and Remus resisted volunteering, because it wouldn't help Harry for Remus to die for him and Teddy needed him, even if every part of him begged to be allowed to die, to give in, to see her again and not be alone anymore….
He was swept out of these thoughts by Harry's explanation. It made little sense to him, but Remus noticed that its effect on Voldemort was stunning. He seemed unsure of himself. It was a side of him most of them had never seen.
A moment later it was over. Tom Marvolo Riddle was dead.
And so was Tonks.