Nymphadora Tonks was without a doubt the cutest baby I had ever seen in my life, expect for maybe you, Harry. Of course, it would probably be hard to say that with complete certainty because she kept changing her appearance every five seconds, but there was something innately adorable about her mannerisms.
We all traipsed down two flights of stairs to see her every day, where she would be sitting in Andromeda's arms. Andromeda was somewhere in the middle of Bellatrix and Narcissa in looks. She had Bellatrix's dark eyes, but Narcissa's kindness, and her hair was neither black nor blonde but light brown. She was clearly favoured by Cissy, though, who went up to her older sister smiling whilst Bellatrix stalked past her room, muttering something about treachery and 'mudblood spawn'.
As we approached Tonks, her eyes lit up with glee and she immediately changed her light brown hair to a long, blonde-and-black-streaked mess, greeting her aunt. Narcissa knelt by her, gratefully accepting the bundle of baby from a tired looking Andromeda. The rest of us gathered around and Tonks, bombarded with new faces to mimic, turned her hair black and short with my hazel eyes. To be fair, to a baby her age Sirius, Regulus and I probably did look like brothers with our messy black hair, so it was understandable why we became boring to her when she saw Remus, and with a tremendous smile she copied his light brown hair and style, changing her eyes to match his and even mimicking the new scars on his cheeks. Andromeda gasped.
"She's never been able to show that much detail before!" She said excitedly.
"She must like you, Remus!" Cissy said, as Tonks reached her podgy little arms out towards Remus. She handed her to him, and Tonks giggled loudly. Remus tenderly stroked her cheek, laughing as she grabbed his finger in her little fist and squeezed. It was a beautiful and heart warming exchange, so of course we had to make a joke out of it before actual feelings were expressed.
"Nymphadora Lupin, how does that sound?" Sirius mused, proudly slapping a sickle into Regulus' hand, worth the joke. I rolled on the floor laughing.
"Don't be ridiculous," Remus chided, although it just came out as a coo, his affection for Tonks still painting his expression a sickening rosy hue. Cissy and Andromeda watched him with Tonks admiringly as he made her smile and laugh, and from somewhere in the back of the room emerged the figure of Ted Tonks, Andromeda's husband, who came to watch as well. He placed a protective hand on his wife's shoulder, who instinctively placed her hand back over his.
After about a minute, Ted spoke up, stepping awkwardly in between the semi-circle to relieve Remus of his daughter.
"There we go, Tonks," he said, lifting her into the air and chuckling at how the new nickname sounded. "Daddy's here." When he lifted Tonks to see his face, however, nothing happened. She maintained Remus' features, craning her head back to get a look at him again. Ted frowned. "Looks like this one's faulty," he said, taking her under the arms and shaking her, gaining screeches of laughter from Tonks. "Think we ought to get a new one, Dromeda."
"Careful with her, Teddy," Andromeda chided, taking the baby into her capable hands. At the appearance of her mother, Tonks changed her features once more, and Andromeda turned with a smug smile to Ted, who furrowed his eyebrows. I turned back to the group to see an odd expression on his face. Was it... jealousy maybe? Jealousy of this child, who would grow up with loving parents who had no pure-blood expectations of her? Probably. I caught Sirius' eye and he immediately pulled a face, trying to shake off whatever it was he was feeling. I pulled one back and turned back to marvel at Tonks.
At that moment, Bellatrix marched into the room.
"Dinner's almost ready," she spat at her older sister, hatred burning in her eyes as she stared malevolently at the baby Tonks, who did not dare change her appearance to match that of her aunt, who was staring at her with detestation. "Try to look a little better than you do." Then she turned and flounced off. Andromeda sighed.
"She'll come around," Cissy said soothingly. "She said 'hi' to Sirius when he walked in, and he's not even in Slytherin!"
"Hey!" Sirius said, holding up both hands, palms facing outwards.
"Not like you've made much of a secret of it, mate," Regulus reminded him, referring to Sirius' red and yellow bedroom.
We departed the room and went back upstairs, taking it in turns to shower and putting on our dress-robes. For some reason, Remus spent more time in front of the mirror than usual, flattening his hair, then messing it up, then flattening it again.
"Would you move out of the way, Princess, some of us have ties to straighten," said Sirius, fiddling with the black tie Kreacher had bitterly brought him earlier, telling him his mother wanted him to wear it. Sirius had replied with a colourful chain of swear words.
"Does this look alright?" Remus asked, ignoring the 'princess' comment.
"You look marvelously spiffing," Sirius mocked. Remus shrugged, messed up his hair again and moved obligingly out of the way so that Sirius could puzzle over the tie once more, this time in his reflection instead.
I myself hadn't worn my dress-robes since a distant cousin's wedding two years ago, when I was significantly shorter and chubbier, and was having trouble enough without magic trying to make myself look presentable. I had never needed to wear something so formal for a celebration like Christmas Eve, and began to feel apprehensive about what this meant for the rest of the evening. Unfortunately, I would never know because I would be stuck up in this room dying of embarrassment before I went down in these robes.
"Dromeda worked in Madame Malkin's for a while after she left Hogwarts," Sirius suggested, noticing me desperately trying to pull down my sleeves.
"Would she really want to help me?" I asked meekly, giving up on the sleeves. "I am, after all, one of your friends."
"Definitely. There's a reason she's my favorite cousin, you know," he said matter-of-fact-ly, tucking his uneven tie out of view and driving me out of the door of his bedroom and down the stairs. I reached the bedroom door and knocked timidly. The door was opened by Ted, who welcomed me in.
"Tonks is napping," he said, apparently having taken a liking to calling his daughter by her second name. The pretentious name probably wasn't his idea after all. "I'll get Dromeda for you."
Just as he whispered her name, Andromeda appeared from the en-suite bathroom, tying her wet hair back in a ponytail and dusting off her dress. She walked over to Tonks' cot, patting her stomach. "You've ruined me, you know that?" she said, gesturing to the small lump left over on her once-pregnant belly.
"You look beautiful, Dromeda," Ted said, rolling his eyes. She did too. It wasn't the conventional beauty seen in Witch Weekly, a copy of which was lying discarded over an armchair. It wasn't some kind of 'glow of motherhood', either. But it was close. It was love. The love that shone from her small subset of a family as they looked at her, the way Ted's eyes lit up when she began to walk over to him, radiating with so much love,how could she not be beautiful?
"Oh, hello James," she said, noticing me. "what can I do for you?"
In answer, I raised my arm, my sleeve rising all the way to my elbow. She tutted, drawing out her wand which was strapped to her ankle under the long, flowing dress.
"Well that won't do, will it?" she asked, almost to herself, and she swiftly began to mutter spells I had never heard, waving her wand in complicated patterns as the sleeves grew to the right size and the torso began to grow slimmer to fit me. Finally, she finished, tapping her wand against her chin and admiring her handiwork. "That's good enough, I think. Come take a look." She gestured to a full length mirror which I walked over to.
It looked better than 'good enough'. I looked like something out of a bloody fashion magazine. The kind of thing Sophia had stuck up on her walls when I had once crept in to her dorm, running up the stairs too quickly for them to turn into a slide and not allow me entrance. The robes suddenly looked how they were meant to look, with smooth lines down the collar and well angled lapels, falling straight down but not in such a way that it looked rigid. I rumpled my hair, commending Andromeda's work.
"You look so much like Sirius when you do that," she said.
"Your daughter seems to think so too," I replied, smiling.
"That she does," Ted chuckled, crossing the room to join us.
"Well, thanks," I said awkwardly, making to leave.
"No problem," Andromeda said. "And James?" I turned back expectantly, eyebrows raised. "It's nice, you know, you being Sirius' friend. Goodness knows he won't have many around here for long."
"He'll have you," I protested.
"Not here," she replied sadly. "not after tonight. I have a feeling the Black family tree is about to gain another scorch mark." I cocked an eyebrow, unsure of what that meant, but she ushered me out of the room as Tonks began to stir.
"She'll want to be fed." she explained, so I left.
I was hurried downstairs by Cissy and Regulus a few minutes later along with Sirius and Remus, saying that Walburga wanted to start with dinner already Whatever she had planning, it couldn't wait.
We all sat down at the magically enchanted dinner table, extended to fit all of us whilst somehow managing to fit in the dining room, clearly not built for gatherings of this many people. Along the walls of the dining room sat Slytherin and Black family crests, shields and swords worn and wielded by famous Slytherins and portraits of stuffy looking old men who all frowned when Sirius entered the room, muttering to each other. So this is him.
I sat in between Sirius and Regulus on one side, whilst Remus and Cissy sat opposite us. Bellatrix sat next to Cissy whilst at the same time not sitting next to her, but sitting next to the adults, showing that she was too good to sit down at this end with the rest of us children. Andromeda had no problem sitting with us though, and sat gladly next to Sirius, giving him a little hug as Ted took his place next to her.
At the head of the table, Walburga stood, welcoming everyone. As she did so, food began to float into the room. Bottles of pumpkin juice picked themselves up off of the tables and began to fill people's goblets as roast potatoes, vegetables and a whole array of Christmas specialties ambled into the room from the kitchen and laid themselves out on the table. Thanks to Kreacher, none of the food looked too badly scorched and we began to tuck in, gratuitously filling our plates with food, stomachs rumbling.
"Everybody!" Walburga began, demanding quiet, obviously not done, "We have some special people to welcome tonight, my dearest niece Andromeda and her unfortunately muggle-born husband!" The couple looked nervously at one another, surprised at Walburga's obvious restraint not calling Ted a mudblood. Sirius applauded loudly and the portraits all scowled even more at him. "In fact," Walburga shrieked excitedly, obviously coming to the climax of her plan, "We even have a special treat for the happy couple!"
Right on cue, in floated something from the kitchen. The smell of turkey filled the nostrils of the gathered. Everyone craned their necks to see Walburga's creation, and there were outcries from the table of wild pleasure. The turkey landed directly in front of Ted, whose face turned stark white. I craned my neck to see and instinctively swore.
The turkey looked much like a turkey should for the most part, roasted golden. However, the meat seemed to extend to far past the body, swelling where the head should be, magically carved into the most spiteful shape. Ted Tonks. Worse still was the word smeared on top in red cranberry sauce, MUDBLOOD.
Andromeda cried as she fled the table, fat tears surging down her cheeks. Ted stood as well, his eyes unnaturally dark.
"You are vile, evil people," he said, his voice dangerously low, before storming off to find his distraught wife. The portraits scoffed at him, pointing fingers and laughing malevolently. Walburga looked extremely proud of herself. At that point, Sirius clearly couldn't take it anymore and he stood, his eyes darker than I'd ever seen them, his face growing redder by the second. The table was so stunned by his abruptness they stopped laughing and all eyes turned to look at him.
"How dare you, mother?" Sirius asked. A sentence that should have sounded childish suddenly sounded menacing, tainted with absolute loathing. "How dare you try and ruin the only happy thing in this family?" He began to shout, "THE ONLY THING OF GOODNESS, THE ONLY THING PURE, THE ONLY THING NOT TAINTED BY YOUR INSANE PREJUDICES? THE ONLY LOVE?"
Walburga gave him a malicious smile. "I love Regulus," she said, watching as Sirius' moment of defiance was quelled, his anger extinguished as pure hurt filled his face. Slowly, however, it was filled with anger once again.
"I hate you." he said. Quietly. In front of the entire room. Walburga flushed, beaten. No words could rival those that Sirius had uttered with absolute conviction. She had been bested by her prodigal son in front of her entire family, and it was a downright embarrassment. Walburga let out a long, powerful shriek, a string of incoherent words escaping her enraged lips as she ranted, drawing out her wand and storming out the room to the Black family tree that hung in the hall and, with a tremendous gesture and a terrifying scream of a hex, blew Andromeda clean off, leaving an ugly black scorch where her face should have been. Sirius, too, fled the room, and Remus and I ran after him
A/N: I hope that wasn't a bit of a let down, i just couldn't really think of anything evil enough, I suppose. A particularly long chapter for you though, so I hope you enjoyed it. Really enjoyed writing about little Tonks and the nice side of the Blacks, as I have said before. Haven't really got big plans for the next chapter though, this was sort of the Christmas climax, nonetheless if you enjoyed it please comment!