A loud buzzer sounded. And sounded. A cat pounced. And then another. A chorus of miaows added to the racket. It was 4:00 A.M. It was 4:00 A.M. already. 'Alright. Alright. I'm up,' muttered a disheveled woman, her lithe legs leaping her body to her feet before the sleep-addled mind attached had a chance to catch up. She slammed her fist on the alarm, running long fingers through currently short hair, bending backward her naked chest, without shame or awareness, into a long, crackling stretch.
The bare chested woman in question was a Metamorphmagus and at the moment her hair was shifting swiftly from color to color: tomato red, baby blue, zebra stripes, neon green, while her eyes were flickering wildly through each color of the rainbow. This happened often when she first got up. But for the last 10 years, since the war ended, these involuntary morning morphs were usually as far as she could go in terms of changing her appearance. In a few minutes, she knew, her hair and eyes would settle. Her hair would hang limp and mousy to her chin, her eyes would turn black so that iris was indistinguishable from pupil. It gave her a vacant look. She was used to startling people when they first made eye contact these days.
She was equally staid in her way of dressing. Just the same jeans, shirt, and sneakers combination day to day. Her wild and colorful dresses, her ripped tights, her floral crop tops, her Doc Martens, her Weird Sisters tee collection, in short her punked out uniforms she gleefully swore she'd wear into her 80s and beyond — all of it was collecting dust in the corner of her small but roomy New York City closet. So far away, so far away from…all that had been. From all that might have been. Well. At least she was home now. Home without a soul who knew what happened, what horrors were locked up in the past, in London, a decade earlier, with the Order, the war, with the man she almost placed her hopes in, almost her heart…Yeah. At least she was home. And anonymous. She appreciated the way she could be anonymous here like nowhere else.
Nymphadora Tonks was now in her mid-thirties, having shelved what she now saw as teenage delusions — delusions, she learned the hard way, that tend to last well into your twenties. Sometimes a bit beyond. Time had been cruel to her. She had lost so much. Her body was as charming if as clumsy as ever (a little less so), and yet…who cared? She shut her body and with it her desires down long ago. Her body was now nothing but an instrument to support her daily movements and travels. Men looked at her with lust, why, she couldn't understand, but for the most part she didn't notice them. She had stopped noticing them a long time ago. Their need was disgusting, and she was genuinely uninterested. No, repulsed. She was genuinely repulsed. Her still girlish appearance also repulsed her, since to her horror men tended to think she was a good 10 to even 15 years younger than she actually was. And this fact attracted the worst kinds of men, men who believed she was naive and eager to please just because of her alleged age, men who wouldn't just leave her the fuck alone, men who were out to deceive easily and believed they could, men who believed she was low hanging fruit, men who couldn't just leave her to her peace and solitude…men who, to her fury, couldn't see how aged and jaded she was through and through, not anything like a fresh young girl.
Older people, like her mother, reminded her that she was not only in fact still young, but that she looked far younger than her age. They said this was a silver lining for her. They said, after all she'd been through, she was lucky to not bear her scars outwardly, and suggested she count her appearance as a blessing. Others, after all, had not fared so nicely. To say the least.
But Tonks didn't see it that way. She hated when people said that. For it was as if she had been tossed back to an earlier time in life, a time which, in fact, had been cruelly wrenched from her, and yet there it was staring her in the mirror each morning, mocking her misery: the evidence and concealment of her trauma all in one glance. She hated the foolish wide-eyed girl staring back at her, but she could not get rid of her face. It was so much harder to move around in the mind she actually occupied, the old and weary mind, when her body was youthful and light, her face seemingly graced with cheeky innocence. She wanted people to look at her and immediately understand, see her marked as unavailable and damaged. If she could morph these days she probably would have chosen the warty face of a traditional Muggle witch…because she knew that then, and only then, but maybe not even then, yet still more so…men would leave her alone. At least most men would. And then she could have the world finally acknowledge that she was done with men and done with frivolity and done with anything but what the world still needed in terms of her work.
At the moment, Tonks was staring down the girl in the mirror again, shaking her head in disapproval (though her cat Cleo perched on her shoulder couldn't but coax a smile from her). Her appearance had settled for the rest of the day. At least it always settled in the same drab way. Had she gotten stuck with bubblegum hair the attention would reach an even more unbearable pitch. She splashed cold water on her face, standing as naked as she slept (it saved on laundry) in front of her closet. She selected some workout clothes, and popped in a DVD. That was one thing she also hated. The way her figure betrayed her. She saw men eye her every day, cat whistling, nodding in approval. Oh fuck them. She wasn't being coy or disingenuous as her mother accused. Her body simply wasn't for them. Her body wasn't for pleasure, wasn't for sex, wasn't for anyone but her. She needed to exercise, though, which kept her already Auror-ready physique in top shape, because exercise was and continued to be one of the main ways she would keep herself from going insane. However crazy she felt, she knew it'd all be hundreds of times worse if she were not exercising, something she'd done since she was a teenager on the Quiditch team with Auror aspirations. She put on her intensive barre DVD (hey, don't knock those ballerinas — they're strong as fuck, at least the non-anorexic ones), peeled a banana and turned on the radio to listen to the news as she worked out.
'…on this unseasonably warm day in Central Park. The time is 4:06.
Our main story today examines the unlikely but trenchant progress of the Orderers over the last 10 years. From a ragtag group of outcasts who heroically and against all odds stood up to the evil reign of He Who Must Not Be Named Even After Death and his followers, to the most popular political party to gain ascendancy over the Ministry of Magic, we sent our reporters out into the field to interview some of the Orderers' leaders, the ones who had been there from the very beginning. Here's what they had to say…'
Tonks halted mid-plie and approached the radio. She shut it off and continued her workout. But she stopped before completing her final set. She never did that. She saw things through to conclusion. Today, though, she couldn't. It was too hard. Too difficult. Too damn infuriating. Everything that had happened…Since the war, since…since her final innocence had been lost…
'The Orderers.' Huh. The success of the Order of the Phoenix at defeating Voldemort and the Death Eaters was the worst thing that had ever happened to it, Tonks thought ruefully. That seemed a traitorous thing to think, but it was true. 'Constant vigilance,' as Mad-Eye said. Well, when you emerge from a war victorious, you let the triumph go to your head. Genuine reasons to rejoice imperceptibly become excuses to stop thinking, to stop challenging, to stop…questioning, growing. People take advantage. The ones who want to seize power come out, confident that people are convinced the evil is gone…They come out when they are sure everyone's let their guard down. They're looking to stop fighting, to get back to everyday life, to indulge themselves, to forget the past. Tonks could hardly blame them. Still, she did.
The Order, as Tonks remembered it, that truly ragtag and mostly impoverished assortment of oddballs hellbent on fighting for a genuinely just and better tomorrow, was not the Order celebrated and popularized across the Wizarding World today. The Order everyone seemed to remember were the salivating politicians biding their time towards the end of the War, waiting to see how things would turn out, not the Order members Tonks knew and loved so tenderly at 12 Grimmauld Place. These politicians waited until they were sure things were settled, that Voldemort was truly defeated and the original Order of the Phoenix had won the day. Then they highjacked the name of the winning side, declared their victory, rewrote history in their favor at a time when people were desperate for comfort, solace, order, calm…They were old money, mostly purebloods who were too clever to cast their lot with either side during the war. Wizards like Adam Woods, the current Minister of Magic and, incredibly, in the pivotal weeks leading up to the last battle, Dolores Umbridge, now Headmistress of the New York City Wizarding Academy and the editor in chief of the Quibbler, which had, in the aftermath of the war, managed to regain mainstream respectability as it featured tear-jerking story after tear-jerking story praising the fallen and depicting the up close and personal struggles of war widows and orphaned children. Folks like Woods and Umbridge maintained a politically savvy neutrality at just the right moment and had the power and money to popularize their version of things. 'Weirdos like us don't become heroes…we just get forgotten and kicked to the curb,' Tonks muttered. Courted by Death Eaters, but without actually taking the bait, Woods and Umbridge held their influence in check until they could fully exercise it on a flailing, mourning population that just wanted to embrace unadulterated victory. The cost of 'victory' was high. 'Too high,' Tonks thought. And she wasn't so certain that the world was a better place, either.
