There's a chill in the air, which Tonks thinks is strange for May, and maybe she's imagining it when she watches shadows pass the alley huddled in furs. But then she looks over her shoulder and watches as Remus' breath comes out in even lines of white cloud as he speaks with the goblin shrouded in grey behind the pub, and if she's not mistaken, he's paying for their silent passage out of the street.

They shake hands. A stiff meeting. More breath lingers in the air.

Yes, it's cold.

And she doesn't feel a damn thing.

Well, that's not entirely true. She knows her fingers tingle and that her head is warm. And heavy. Like she's had too much to drink. But she hasn't as far as she knows. As far as she remembers. What does she remember exactly?

Well, definitely the fact that she's not cold. Confused, maybe, but not cold.

And then she's blinking against the terrible weight behind her eyes again and Remus is there, his hand under her arms, around her back, strengthening her gait, steadying her hand.

"M'okay," she mutters.

"I'll be the judge of that," he says, kindly, warmly. Much more so than she's ever heard before from him which is to say a lot because Remus is nothing if not kind to her. There's something like concern clouding his eyes though. It wrinkles his brow and his lashes bat quickly. Too quickly. He's thinking much too hard again.

Before she can tell him to stop, he's hoisting her up because she's slipping, the heavy cargo boots she's usually so fond of, making her a hot mess of twisted ankles and slippery soles.

"I can walk," she says and she's not sure who she's trying to convince. But she musters some semblance of dignity and gropes the brick wall of the pub with her free hand. Remus stops, allowing her the chance to rest, casting wary glances over his shoulder.

Her head's still woozy, but the crisp spring air's doing a wonder with the memory fog and she's able to recall the night much more clearly. Black dress. Blonde Hair. Dainty blue eyes and pink blush. Warm breath and hot skin, dazzling, tantalizing, pale and young and fresh. The bane of every werewolf's existence on a night like this, so close to the moon.

She was the price of information tonight.

Her innocent batting lashes, the slinky gait and turn of her hips, the tipsy act and too-close dances.

She's good at her job. Too good it seems and young werewolves weren't the only ones who took notice of her in the stuffed-up underground pub.

That's where her problem now lies. Fenrir and his pack now stand in the way of the young wolves and her information.

Her fingers ram her eyes, massaging away the ache.

She feels a hand on her head as she slumps down against the wall, soft, warm. She leans into it, only to find that Remus has shifted to cradle the lingering weight she feels.

"What'd they slip me?" she finally asks.

"Some sort of sedative potion. I could smell it in the drink before you even took a sip. Bastards spiked it behind the counter."

"Rookie mistake," she says to herself, shrugging in a way that almost makes Remus angry because he's the one with the werewolf instincts. He should have warned her sooner. But he's too strung out to overanalyse the scene in the pub. He'll do that later when they Apparate back to headquarters. When he knows she's safe.

It had taken him almost two hours to track her down―her scent among the wolves―and when he finally found her it had taken another twenty minutes to get her attention, to let her know he was here to get her out, and the relief he saw in her eyes set his stomach tumbling.

She had been scared. Terrified because Greyback's pack had shown up in the pub, taking too much of an interest in her. Terrified because, despite being an Auror, there was no way for her to hold her own against dozens of werewolves, someone of them trained heavily in the Dark Arts.

It had taken every ounce of resolve he could muster not to rush towards her and drag her out of the pub: to just order a drink, sit down, and watch for an opening.

When the sallow faced werewolves had taken her onto the floor to dance, hands slipping everywhere at once, he had almost launched out of his booth to strangle them. Grinding his teeth, he shakes that thought from his head. "At least you had the good sense to excuse yourself," he says, his hand on her shoulder. With a few gentle strokes his fingers tangle in strands of her hair.

"The loo excuse always works. Knew something was wrong, though," she says, groaning as she adjusts against the wall. Whatever the hell was in that potion has done a number on her muscles. She feels like a slug that's been chewed on by a Mandrake baby. "Felt my morph slipping."

"You do look a lot more Tonks-like now."

"Is my hair pink?" she asks him, almost shyly.

He shakes his head, letting the strands wrapped around his fingers fall.

"Light brown," he says. "And long. Wavy. Sort of like Sirius'."

She hums disapprovingly. This is certainly less hardened than her usual pink locks.

"Well, guess my secret's out." She tries to morph the brown away, but as her face screws up, there's a pounding behind her eyes that makes her topple forward, right into Remus's waiting arms. "Guess that wasn't a stellar idea."

"Perhaps not." He straightens her up. "You know, brown isn't all that bad. Suits you even."

She swallows and sighs and wonders for a second if the only pink thing she can manage tonight―or this morning really seeing as the sun's about to rise―will be her cheeks. Her thoughts are cut off suddenly by the shuffle of unwanted footsteps.

"Ain't this a pretty sight, fellas? Looks like our girl's already found herself a nice wolf to play games with."

The cellar is deep enough that Tonks' ears pop when she's shoved inside by rough hands. The light is snuffed out behind her.

She stumbles against the wall, knocking into a haphazardly placed pile of cauldrons. Remus bangs on the door, whispering charm after counter-charm. "We're trapped," he concludes, spinning somewhere close to her. "It's been spelled or something."

He looks at his watch, illuminating it with his wand, fear widening his eyes to the point of pain and he gasps.

Tonks turns, holding her throbbing head. "What is it, Remus?"

"Dora . . . the full moon's tonight. If we . . . if we don't get out―"

She grabs his hand and squeezes. "We will. Someone will come."

But he wrenches away from her, grabbing fistfuls of hair before kicking over a cart that spills dead flowers around them. They explode, spinning on the air like leaves. Remus swipes them from his jacket. "Ah," he hisses, curling his fingers.

"What?"

He tries to wipe the flowers from his hand but his teeth clench against the pain.

Tonks reaches out and grabs his hand, brushing the petals from his palm; red welts have raised the skin. Peeling the faded purple petals from his hand, she notices they're not just any flower. "It's dried Aconite," she tells him, surprised. "Not as potent as the fresh stuff, but still lethal to werewolves if ingested, I expect. We must be in some sort of store room."

"I guess you've tracked down those missing shipments," Remus says. "Why would they keep crates of Aconite in a community of werewolves?"

"Maybe to keep people in line." Tonks peels the last petal from his hand, wiping away the residual juice from the flower. It melts between her fingertips and her heart thumps in her chest. There's more than enough Aconite here to brew Wolfsbane. She knows there is. If only . . . her eyes linger on the cauldrons she toppled. Yes . . . she could. If they're going to be trapped here. If it's their only option. "Remus?" She looks up at him, fingers threading into his own. "Have you been taking your Wolfsbane this month?"

"Yes, but how does that help―"

"How much time before the moon?"

"So you've been secretly practicing this have you?"

Tonks rolls her sleeves past her elbows and pushes her hair behind her ears. "Not exactly. Just the theory behind it. I was quite the potions student, you know." She works by the light of Remus' wand, using her own to help in the potion making.

"Yes, Kingsley told me as much." His eyes betray the calm in his voice. "It's a very difficult potion to brew."

"Only because the main ingredient is lethal to werewolves. Lucky for us that's the worst of it."

"What do you mean?"

Tonks stokes the fire beneath the cauldron. "Well, we don't have the best of supplies, but I've made do with worse before―you know, in Auror training―so I'll just have to get creative. Measuring out the right amount of Aconite is going to get a little tricky."

"That's the part that could kill me isn't it?"

"Yes," she says, watching the water bubble. Her eyes pinch and she exhales. "Remus, we don't have to do this."

"No. I'd rather die than know I hurt you. I wouldn't be able to live with myself."

"I could defend myself. I'm an Auror, not an idiot. They don't give out those robes because I know how to disarm."

"No. Please brew it." He takes her hand, his fingers almost crushing hers in his urgency. "Please."

"Alright."

She takes his palm and lays it on the ground, tracing around it. Then she lifts it away and begins fill the impression with Aconite petals. "Your hand is roughly one percent of your body's surface area," she explains. "The Aconite needs to be at a fifty-fifty ratio to be effective. Not enough to kill you, but enough to kill the wolf, to let―"

"Me retain my human mind. Yes."

She exhales again, gathers up the handful of Aconite and begins filling the impression again, laying the petals down with painstaking precision. She needs to be exact. Or exact as she can be measuring in the dirt. She fills the handprint fifty times. Once she's finished, she takes the extensive pile of Aconite, pulls a second flat bottomed cauldron into her work space and begins rolling the juice out using her wand as a rolling pin. It's a slow process, but more effective than squeezing the petals between her fingers.

"I need a lock of your hair," she says, startling Remus who had been watching her with such intensity.

He severs a bit with his wand and drops it into the boiling cauldron. Tonks adds the first drop of Aconite flower by dipping her wand in the juice and letting it drop off the end into the water; she watches with bated breath as the water becomes a misty purple.

Hair of the man he is to remain and the bane of the monster he is to become. She stirs the potion, counter clockwise twenty nine times. One revolution for every day since the last full moon.

She lets it bubble for three minutes (Remus counts down on his watch for her) and then adds another drop of Aconite.

They continue this way for several hours. When the potion is the dark purple of a fresh Aconite, almost midnight blue by Tonk's colour perspective, she puts her wand down, letting the potion settle. It's a good deal thicker than it was before and they've reached the final step.

This is the big one.

One counter-clockwise revolution for every moon Remus has seen since he's been bit. For every transformation before tonight.

He's thirty-six.

"You were bit when you were four, yes?"

"Yes. In June. Before the moon."

She nods. Thirty-years of full transformations. That's three hundred sixty transformations. Plus the year he was bit―before June makes seven more moons. And this year―the January, February, and March moons he's already seen add three.

"Three hundred and seventy," she says, her voice hoarse, a whisper.

He nods.

She counts out loud so as not to lose the count.

Remus closes his eyes, so still he could be sleeping, but she knows he isn't; he's counting, too.

She tips the potion into one of the smaller cauldrons. It's a pathetic excuse for a flask, but Remus says that Severus usually provides about four mouthfuls of potion, so with a steady hand and a calculating eye, she measures out what she guesses to be the right amount.

She swallows the sigh she can feel building in her chest because she doesn't want Remus to know how nervous she is. It's a miracle that she's been able to hide her shaky hands from him this long, or if he has noticed he hasn't said anything, just smiles reassuringly at her. She doesn't know who needs it more.

"Bottoms up," she says finally, passing over the cauldron. She wrings her hands together, then swallows, watching the column of his throat expand and contract, the muscles accommodating the potion. He places the cauldron on the floor by his knees. "We won't know if it worked until after―"

"I know."

She catches a breath of air between her cheeks and holds it. She probably looks strange, so she tries not to look at Remus, but she can't bear the thud of her heart in her throat any longer.

"Dora, are you―"

"Fine, yeah. Just. Oh, Merlin I hope I don't kill you." She runs her fingers through her hair, pulling harder than necessary. "I keep thinking over it. All the steps. Looking for . . . I don't know. Something wrong. This feels wrong. This isn't how you make potions. This is―

He grabs her arms then―tight, steadying―shocking her into silence. He looks as pained as she feels. Whether it's from the moon or because the potion's killing him, or because he's worried about her, she doesn't know and it makes her moan against him, her head tucked beneath his chin.

He wraps his arms around her, hands trailing up and down her spine. "Dora, what can I do?"

"Tell me something. Distract me."

"Tell you what?"

"Anything. Just talk. Tell me about how you got bit."

"You've read my file, haven't you?"

"The cookie-cutter story, Remus. Don't tell me the facts, just . . . I don't know, tell me something."

Her fingers dig into his jumper, tight enough to strangle him, but he just pulls her closer. What if this is the last she ever sees of him? What if the Wolfsbane sends him convulsing on the ground? What if it kills him?

But she didn't screw it up. She did everything right. It looked right. Smelled right. Tasted as unpleasant as it should according to Remus . . . but if there's not enough Aconite or too little . . .

"I trust you."

"What?" she says, breaking from her daze. She tips her head back to look at him.

"That you've done your absolute best and I thank you for that. And I want you to know―"

She scrambles and presses her finger to his lips. "Please don't talk like that. Not now. I can't―" She presses her lips to his instead and for the first time since being chucked in the cellar she feels close to him. Like he's let himself want her again.

She pulls away and he rests his forehead against hers. "You're hair's pink again."

"How can you tell? It's dark."

"I just know."

Fog melts the ice that's curled around her fingers. The moon's pale, but a light in the darkness nonetheless―filtering through a narrow venting shaft into the cellar―the first they've seen in hours, and despite the fact that it means she's potentially about to die, Nymphadora Tonks thinks it looks rather beautiful; soft, the glow a subtle yellow, yet radiant in the way it touches and caresses and falls and highlights the terrified blue eyes of the man before her.

Yes, Remus Lupin looks absolutely horror-stricken, grief pulling his face at odd angles, though that might simply be the wolf's curse, terror gouging the light in his eyes, replacing it with a dark wisdom that only the vilest creatures of the night are privy too.

Still, even like this, Remus is the most wonderful person she's ever known, and somehow she knows he thinks the same of her. And maybe that's why his face is so terribly pained right now because he knows it's minutes . . . maybe even just seconds, then twilight will end and his nightmare will begin.

The wolf is coming and her seven years and a potions NEWT is the only thing that stands in the way of him ripping her limb from limb.

"I told you," he whispers, his breath a panicked, shaky ghost across her face. He inhales sharp. Short. Like he can't catch his breath, like he doesn't want to. "I'm no good for you. I'll destroy you."

"Remus," she says, calling him back even as the wolf takes him. "I trust you, too. I do. I do."

And then his jaw is lengthening, stretching, teeth receding and canines sprouting, curled and sharp and laced in black drool. Red blood.

"I trust you," she says again. And she hopes, with every ounce of energy inside her being, that she's done enough. That she is enough. No one said loving this man would be easy, he'd even said it himself, but she does and all she can do now is hope.

She backs away, scrambling on her hands and knees as paws replace hands and clothes tear to accommodate the new length of limbs. There's the pop of vertebrae and his back goes out. In. She doesn't know which way anymore. She doesn't want to look. Not when it sounds so painful.

It makes the Cruciatus look tame and immediately she has to choke down the bile that's filled her throat and threatened to overflow into her lungs. She's choking; choking on the inside where he can't see. On the outside she's put on that brave face.

He doesn't want your pity, she tells herself. So don't look at him like that.

She looks for his eyes. Blue and burdened in the yellow light. Glowing like glass to a flame. Forever reflecting his harsh mistress.

The moon watches as he becomes the monster he fears. The one he's begged her to fear.

And she watches as the beautiful blue becomes stony black. Soulless. Pathless. An abyss of nothingness that threatens to swallow her the way it does him.

Her breath is a puff against the wolf's steam. Hot. Rank.

Foul.

Her hands shake, digging into the cold earth.

"R - remus," she says. Mutters. Does she even speak it? Can he hear her? She fumbles back against the wall, groping for her wand in the chaos. The cauldron turns against her limp legs as she searches blind, spilling the remains of the Wolfsbane.

And as those black eyes meet hers, she knows it's the moment of truth.

The moment she finds out whether she was really worth that potions NEWT after all.

She knows the moment the moon's set because the wolf begins to stir across the cellar, where it collapsed moments after the transformation, turning in a wide circle, dark eyes on her, before promptly going to sleep; it awakens now, fighting against the change, fighting against the man that's clawing to get out.

He heaves when the transformation's done, chest pale and glistening with sweat, the air rushing from his lungs in disjointed gasps. She hasn't dared breathe and the air bleeds between her lips.

He crawls, shifting in the dank shadows of the cellar, a little closer to her, but he stops, leaning against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them.

She sees many things in his eyes as they search for hers in the darkness: fear is paramount, exhaustion, longing, and maybe just a little curious wonder. Almost like awe.

But he doesn't move to her. Doesn't call her. Just watches. The ever patient professor, observing what is left to be observed.

The way he's looking at her though, like she's going to cower away in fear or use her wand to blast him away, breaks her heart just a little bit; a little bit more than it's already broken after watching him scream and break and tear the way no person ever should.

So she does the only logical thing and walks over to him, sitting down at the edge of his feet so his cold toes curl under her legs.

She cups his face, fingers brushing hair behind his ears, following the contours of his cheeks, his jaw. She needs him to feel that she's real; that he didn't scare her away. That he never will, no matter how many times she has to watch him become the wolf. "See, it's okay," she whispers. "Everything's okay."

"You're completely brilliant, you know that?"

"I do." She leans forward and kisses him. He seems unsure, wary in the way her lips move against his, so she kisses him again. When she pulls away she smiles that shy smile that curls her cheeks and has her batting her lashes at the ground. "Remus, you know you're completely starkers, right?"

Deep bellied laughter fills the darkness and for a moment it's easy to forget that she just spent the night with a werewolf, that he almost killed himself with worry for her, that they both just placed their lives in the hands of her potion skills. Right now, she can't feel anything but a giddy rush of happiness that everything turned out okay.

They're still stuck in a cellar bewitched by werewolves.

They still have no way out.

But they survived the moon. Together. And if all it did is buy them time, Tonks couldn't care less and she laughs with Remus at the absurdity of it all.

"That is kind of what happens after I've spent the night as a wolf." He takes her chin between his fingers and whispers against her lips. "Now eyes up here, Nymphadora."

She feels the blush heat her cheeks but doesn't bother with her morph. It's so dim she can hardly see anything but the light in his eyes from the hazy glow cast by her wand. "Sorry," she whispers and they're sharing the same air, same space, and her heart's racing because of it. "Remus?"

"Yes?"

"You do intend to get naked in front of me at some point in our relationship, right?"

He laughs again, softer this time. Perhaps it's a foolish thing to ask considering their circumstances, but near death experiences will do that to a person.

"You've already seen me naked before."

She ignores his jibe at what they now refer to as the shower incident. "I meant of your own accord. Because you want to be and not just because I have no regard for personal space."

"That is the general progression of things, yes. Though this is not exactly how I envisioned it. A quick romp in a dusty cellar where I slept as a werewolf is not suitable for a first time." He brushes his thumb over her lips. "Nymphadora?"

She snaps her eyes up again from where they've been wandering over the glistening skin on his chest. "I'm listening. You said first time?"

He chuckles and leans to kisses both her eyelids. Then he reaches for his wand, tucked between a pair of crates and gets to work patching his cloak in the darkness, least he be a temptation for her. "Right now we have a bigger problem to solve." He eyes the door that keeps them trapped. "I don't relish spending another night in here."