"Mum, how come you never talk about your family?"
Such a simple question should not have made her mother tense up the way she did, but twelve-year-old Tonks saw the way her mother's brow furrowed, and Tonks had always been good with facial expressions. Her mother was not pleased with this.
"Why are you bringing this up, sweetheart?" she said quietly.
It was Christmas break. They were making treacle tart. Half of Tonks wanted to bask in the holiday and the time she was spending with her mum, while her other half...
"It's just, Cynthia's going with her mother to her grandparents' and I thought it was strange that you don't talk about my grandparents. I mean, dad has Granny, and she's a Muggle, so she won't live very long and all that—"
"My parents are dead."
Tonks heard the finality in her mother's voice and sighed. "I figured as much, it's just..."
"What?" Her mother slammed the crust she had been kneading down onto the table. "What, Nymphadora?"
"What about that woman? That one time, in Diagon Alley? Who was she?"
Tonks had been wondering about that woman since last summer. She had waved at her mother, had stopped and said hello to her in the middle of the busy street. She had talked to her mother like she knew her. She had said, "Let's keep in touch, Andy."
Tonks had never before heard anyone call her mother 'Andy.'
"That was my sister," her mother said, refusing to meet her eyes.
Tonks wasn't expecting that at all. "You... you have a sister?"
Tonks had dreamed of having a brother or a sister. To play with, whenever she wanted. She had never really felt alone, but sometimes she felt like something was missing. She imagined that siblings were always close, so to hear that her mother had a sister she had never even mentioned was more than surprising.
"I have two sisters," her mother said softly.
"You have two sisters? I have two aunts?"
"Why do you want aunts, Nymphadora?" her mother asked. "You have your father and me, and you have your gran. You've got a family, stop looking for more."
"But what about your family?" Tonks asked.
Her mother smiled. "I have you and your dad, don't I?"
Tonks was shaking when Molly Weasley handed her a mug of tea. She still felt a bit out of it, and she surmised that she was in some kind of study.
"There you go, dear," Molly said, sitting next to her on the sofa and patting her leg. Tonks was still feeling a bit wonky, so she wished that everyone didn't insist on continuing the conversation while she sat there. "You," Mrs. Weasley said, pointing a finger at Black.
"Me?" he asked.
"Yes. You insisted on telling the poor girl to her face, and look how that turned out!"
"In Sirius's defense, it's not all that likely that Tonks here would've believed it unless she saw it with her own eyes," Remus said.
"It is one of those situations," Kingsley affirmed.
Moody was giving Tonks a look like she'd just failed one of his obstacle courses. "I don't bloody care what kind of situation it was! Tonks, let's get one thing clear: Always act on your gut, but don't go breaking doors open if you think a lunatic's on the other side. It's the third easiest way to get killed."
"What are the first two?" Remus asked.
Tonks turned to Kingsley. "How could you ... how could you ...?"
She very well could've been asking him how he had managed to continue looking for mass murderer Sirius Black knowing that he was innocent, but that wasn't what Tonks was getting at. Out of all the emotions she could possibly feel at the moment, Tonks was in fact feeling a bit left out.
Kingsley gave her a pathetic look. "I honestly haven't known that long. But you could understand why we would keep something like this under wraps?"
"Of course I understand." Tonks sighed. "I suppose I should be flattered you've let me in your confidence at all. I am so bloody sorry that you had to go through all that," she added to Black.
The most distubing thing was that he didn't look like the Wanted poster she had long ago memorized. That Sirius Black looked quite mad and dangerous. This Sirius Black looked relatively clean and... tired.
"It's all right," he said in a world-weary way. "No use crying over spilt potion and all that. Sorry I gave you such a fright. Just don't like when people hear about me secondhand. It tends to make matters harder to believe."
"For the record," Tonks said, lifting her cup to her lips, "hearing it firsthand is a bit shocking, as well."
When Tonks was fourteen, she had joined Professor Flitwick's photography club. She was sprawled across the sofa in the parlor, trying to figure out the best angle to take a picture of Babou, who was asleep on her stomach. She called to her mother in the kitchen.
"Mum, do you have any photos of when you were young?" And then, just because she was feeling particularly obnoxious, "Like, of your sisters?"
"I burnt them all," her mother said easily. "Just like I'll burn dinner if you keep bothering me."
Tonks didn't want to have to look up her family tree in the Hogwarts library, but it really was her only choice.
She didn't like it because only pureblooded Slytherins cared about looking up the family trees, but, after staring at her tree for a while, she decided that maybe, just maybe, she had more in common with the Slytherins than she had previously admitted.
"What are those spells Nymphadora does before bed?" Melanie Ruffle asked. "They're quite odd, aren't they?"
"They're wards, I think," said Samantha Blunt.
The girls couldn't see Tonks from she stood outside the dorm, but she could everything they said.
"Her mum taught them to her." Cynthia spoke in a small voice.
"Her mother must be absolutely mad, then," Melanie concluded. "Everyone knows there aren't bad wizards anymore."