This chapter is SO dedicated to pidwigdeon 385! She reviewed a bunch of chapters within an hour, even though she didn't have to! Omg! How lovely is that? This one's for you, pidge…
And another for princessdza who just about stopped me having a mental breakdown…
And btw, THE FLUFF IS NOT OVER! (I can almost hear the hallelujah chorus from lupinslady's direction.)
She was just a kid, no older than sixteen, as pretty as they come… and she looked dead, lying in the dry leaves with the orange glow of the street light illuminating her skin.
I leant down and felt her warm skin, feeling her neck for a pulse, a shudder, anything.
I let out a sharp sigh when I found her heart beating, albeit slowly.
Kingsley tugged at my arm, telling me we had to get moving, that we were vulnerable, but all I could think of was that I had attacked a young girl. Scarred her for life…
I'll lose my job.
"Tonks, let's go!" Kingsley hissed, "we'll come back for her, she's fine. We have bigger things to worry about!"
Of course, I want to say. Of course there's bigger things to worry about than this one girl, lying unconscious and still in the summer air.
I pulled myself together and stood up, shaking from the cold and the shock, wondering how long it takes someone to become as immune to this as Kingsley is.
We slipped inside with the use of silencing charms and plain luck. There was a fire lit in one room, we could smell the burning wood through the hall, the staircase hanging from wooden stakes and the stone tiles on the floor cracked and scattered beneath our feet.
The door was open just a crack and I looked inside. Teenagers, all of them. About eight in total, sitting in a circle on the floor talking with their wands in their hands. They weren't ready for battle; they hardly looked ready for the world.
The boy with his back most to the fire raised his wand and shot a wavering green symbol into the air above the circle. For a moment it looked like a circle, but then the image came into focus and got clearer and I wanted to wretch from disgust.
The dark mark. These children were practicing the dark mark, the symbol of voldemort and every decent wizards worst fear.
Kingsley nudged me and gave me a look that told me what to do. Orders were orders, but I couldn't kill a child, and Kingsley knew that. I think he must have felt the same.
He nodded once, twice, three times, and we burst into the room, wands raised and ready. The children faced us with fierce and absolute passion; desperate to defend themselves from who they must have thought were crazy people.
Within seconds it was over. Children, even if there were eight of them, were no match for two fully trained aurors, and had immediately surrendered or been magically bound.
Kingsley looked to the dark mark and back to the boy who had produced it and looked to me for help. He, like me, was internally struggling for what should be done. I didn't want to see these kids in Azkaban.
"They're just kids," I said sadly, looking around at each of their scared faces. One of the girls was sobbing so desperately it was breaking my heart. "They haven't done anything."
"They set the dark mark." Kingsley said in return, turning away from the girl. "That's a crime punishable by Azkaban. And that curse that girl outside cast. That was the avadra kadavra, wasn't it?"
There was no denying that, but the strength of the spell was truth in itself. "She didn't mean it, not truly." I explained. "Or it wouldn't have been so easy to deflect."
Kingsley gritted his teeth and stared at each of them in turn. "What were you kids doing?"
"Nothing," the head boy announced, his back straight, his jaw clenched. "We ain't doing nothin'."
"Then what's that." Kingsley stood over him and I thought the boy was rather brave to glare back unflinchingly. In all his height and broadness, Kingsley Shacklebolt was rather scary. "What is a boy like you doing casting a dark mark? You think what Voldemort is doing is right, do you? You think this is all a bit of fun?" he was glowering, breathing hard and furious. "Because I'll tell you kid, what you're doing here is dangerous. Worse than you can ever imagine." He looked to me for support and carried on. "What we've seen, torture, agonising screams that haunt your dreams for years to come, it never leaves you. What voldemort is doing won't bring you power and it won't bring you freedom."
Truer words were never spoken.
But the fact still remained: what to do with the kids?
We should have obliterated them. We should have sent them back several years and broke their wands, giving them new memories and allowing them to think they were muggles. This would have been all very well, of course; had they been adults, but many of the children came from wizarding families and that would mean tracking their roots back for years and that really was far too much trouble for eight kids.
So we signed on their criminal records that they had been using improper magic and swore that if they were ever seen to do this sort of thing again they would have their wands snapped.
We should have sent them to Azkaban, but for our own sakes and our own consciences we didn't. After all, who needs to know they doomed eight kids to a life full of misery and defeat?
I let Kingsley give the report and I went home to sleep, still shaken badly by the girl I had left lying in the leaves for her friends to take care of. What could have possessed a sixteen-year-old girl to set an avadra kedavra curse on me?
I remember being that age. I remember the pressure from my friends to conform and more than once I remember doing just that. But surely, if you were to set a death curse on someone, wouldn't you want to mean it?
"You all right, Tonks?"
Mad-eye Moody. The infamous Alastor Moody was sat next to me in the kitchen at Grimmauld place and all I could do is stare into space. I murmured a reply, incomprehensible even to my ears and blinked a few times to snap myself out of it.
"I'm thinking," I explained, picking at my fingernails and the skin on my hands until I bled. I didn't notice.
"You brooding about Lupin, girl?" he growled at me and I looked up startled. I realised, I hadn't thought about Remus for three days straight, not since my mission with Kingsley, and I immediately blushed. I could use Remus's calming presence right now.
"Do you think I'm up to this?" I asked quietly, mumbling the sounds. "I mean, I'm hardly the most intelligent of witches, am I? And I can't run from one side of the room to the next without hitting something or making a racket."
I couldn't look at him but I saw him raise one very scarred eyebrow. "I think you've got what it takes, girl." He said finally after some thought. I guess Moody isn't renowned for his emotional points. It wasn't exactly part of his brilliance.
"What made you doubt yourself?" he asked in a scarily father like manner, his gruff voice almost kind and caring. A whole new side to a person I thought I knew.
"There was this girl," I explained, sucking the end of my right index finger to stop the blood flow. "Had to be about sixteen. Fresh out of Hogwarts, even. She set the killing curse on me." I looked at him for the first time and was intrigued to see he was watching me aptly. "I just can't stop thinking about it. It's hit me deep and I can't get her pretty face out my mind. How does a girl like that become a potential killer? That's someone's daughter, someone's sister." I dropped my gaze back to the tabletop and picked out every grain in the wood with my eyes, following the pattern with my bleeding finger. "How do you get over that? What if I have to kill? It's all very well and good saying I want to help fight evil, but what if I can't? What if I break down and never get back up again? I don't think I could have killed that girl had she really come for me."
I finished with a sigh, but I didn't feel any better. Moody tilted his head to one side and I thought he was about to say some thing useful, some sort of incredible advice that would make the whole thing better again, but he stood up and slapped me on the shoulder. "You're a good honest girl, Tonks. But I'm afraid this is something you're going to have to figure out on your own."
And that was it, he left me alone in the kitchen feeling worthless and lonely and wishing that perhaps I had followed a less dangerous career, like dragon taming.
There are some things you can't ever go back on.
There are some things that make you stop and think and wonder perhaps if what you've been doing your entire life hasn't been for the greater good after all, but for some worthless cause you don't believe in.
And there are other things, like the return of the man you love, which just makes you feel so happy you want to cry with relief and you're not ashamed for anyone to see.
Remus returned looking pale and shaken two weeks later, premature of the date he'd given me and one week before full moon. He smiled softly and kissed me just as sweetly; taking me in an embrace so tender it made my heart burst.
"I've missed you," he whispered, but I couldn't return the sentiment. My eyes were squeezed shut and I was pressed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat through his shirt and clinging on for what could have been everything.
Instead, I released a breath and whispered, "I love you."
The world was brighter after Remus returned. Infact, all my worries, all my fears that I wouldn't be able to deal with my duties just evaporated, instantly almost, as I lay in bed with Remus that night.
His jaw was rough against my cheek as he spoke and one of the fingernails on his right hand was missing as he encircled my waist and held me against his chest. He smelled of soap and his hair was still damp from the shower he'd had minutes before. I didn't know what had happened, and I knew better than to probe.
I sighed and felt his hand creep into mine, interlacing our fingers and squeezing. "I'm so glad you're home." I said softly, closing my eyes for just one second feeling his chest rise and fall against my back.
"I'm glad to be home." He replied, and kissed my temple. "You wouldn't believe how much a warm welcome meant to me after being around…the other's of my kind."
"They were defensive?" I offered.
"Bitter is more the word. They don't highly like Dumbledore, or anyone else who's magically trained. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn't use my wand at all. It's a shame, a lot of them have an incredible potential, but I suppose they're just too used to being shunned that it was easier for them for simply…fade into he background."
I waited for him to continue, and he did, albeit hesitantly. "I guess that I owe it all to Dumbledore that I didn't turn out like them. He gave me a better life."
"You would have never been like them," I insisted, hoping I was right. "You're too kind in nature."
He shook his head. Him, like me, was tired of this argument, and on our first night together in weeks we were not going to create a rift over something that could easily be discussed in the morning.
Remus was tired, so I let him sleep. But through the quiet breathing and the occasional movement, I lay awake, unable to sleep and just thinking.
Bill Weasley rifled through the papers next to me on the table and frowned, reading through a paper on illegal goblin trade and the dark magic connected with it.
He opened his mouth to protest and I held up my hand to stop him. "Don't say it, I really don't care. I'm tired, I haven't slept properly for days and this coffee is awful." I pulled a face and poured it down the sink.
"All right, but I want you to know the dates in this report are all wrong," he said defensively.
"No they're not, the book said so." I still held the childish belief that if it was written in a book, it had to be right.
"I'm telling you now, Tonks. The dates are wrong." Bill shrugged and sat down. "But if you're going to be like that."
"Yes. I Am." And I could be damn stubborn when I wanted to be.
"Saw you coming out of Remus's room this morning." He said with a sly wink. Honestly. Do all guys think with their-
"Piss off, Bill." I murmured, turning a deep red as scarlet as his hair. "It's not like your love life is exactly thriving."
And then he gave me this look that said perhaps I might be wrong. "Do tell." I said immediately.
"There's nothing to tell."
"Liar, yes there is." I grinned evilly. "Tell me, or I tell your mother."
He rolled his eyes and put his chin in one hand, leaning on the table in an act that reminded me so much of his younger brother. "All right. Fine. If you have to know. She's this girl at work, French, fresh out of school, very pretty." His eyes sparkled with excitement, "infact, she's part veela."
I gaped at him. "And you're dating her?"
He winked and drank his coffee.
I sighed; I guess someone had to say it. "As a mate, bill. You sure you've not just gone a bit ga ga cause she's part veela?" I asked cautiously.
Bill looked at me as if I was the one gone ga ga. "I think I can tell the difference, thanks Tonks." He said, quite acidly. "I'm not some teenager who can't keep his hormones in check."
"All right, chill." I rolled my eyes. "Just…yeah. Whatever." I shook my head. "I'm late for work."
Veela annoyed me. It wasn't because they were so pretty, because, heck, I could be that pretty too, I just don't want to. I like being crazy with my hair and perhaps keeping my original facial features once in a while. It's the way they treat men as paramours, simply toying with their emotions for a cheap compliment and the attention, when the rest of the female population actually has to work to look nice for their man. Or woman, whatever.
I arrived in hell for one more day of paperwork with hopeful spirits. For once in my life it seemed the world was being kind, when I found Kingsley Shacklebolt spinning around in my office chair.
"Ready for another mission, Tonks?" he asked, quite brightly.
I felt my heart jump in excitement. "Sure am, what're we doing?"
"Sirius black mission." He winked and I knew what that meant.
A day in the pub.
Little tussi…scary? Uh..coolie, I guess. Glad you enjoyed it! Keep reading!
Pheo…I liked the computer scene too! And I love it when Remus transforms! Keep reading! I love having new readers! Yay!
Pidwidgeon385…dear god, girl! Nice one! Have a cookie! Glad you're enjoying this! And thank you thank you thank you for all the beautiful reveiwing you did! Muah!
Lupinslady…no no no! More fluffy love! It's not over yet! It's going to keep going for a little while longer, at least. I will try and incorporate your idea in somewhere, any more ideas, PLEASE let me know! I love Kingsley and Charlie. I think they're highly underrated characters who need such a look into! Specially Charlie! He needs a chappie to himself…cough. Xox.
Celi…yes. I am evil. Thank you thank you thank you!
Slightly so…no, it's not Remus. I didn't even think of Remus. Good idea though, Heheheh. Don't worry. Thanx for reveiwing darlin!
Princessdza…aww! You made me cry! I swear, I'd had such a crappy day at school and I came home and read that and you just made me so happy! MUAH! I cannot thank you enough! Thanx for adding me to your C2, it's the first I'm on! Aww thank you again, you saved my happiness that night!
GOT AN IDEA? LET ME KNOW!
READ AND REVIEW!
Bograt. X.