Thank you for your patience over the last few months. I hope you're keeping well. This new chapter is set during HBP Chapter 21. Warning for werewolves, child injury and dark themes.

Headmaster: Part Two

- and on the fifth day, there was a reply. Dumbledore's voice responded to her knock on his office door with a "Good afternoon?", though Tonks slammed the door open before he could finish.

"Was it him?!" she demanded.

"I apologise for my abse-"

"But was it him?!"

Dumbledore folded his newspaper. "No,"

Tonks stepped into the office and shoved the door shut behind her.

"Are you sure? Have you heard from him? He is safe? Did he have anything to do with that boy?"

"Remus wrote to me the day after Devadharshan Montgomery was violated. It was Greyback who targeted the boy, and a werewolf called Nidaw who carried out the attack,"

"It wasn't Remus? Do you swear it wasn't Remus?"

"Remus was nowhere near. He has not been invited on any werewolf hunts,"

"Is he safe? Did he tell you he's hurt?"

"He is only suffering from his usual bruising and fatigue from the transformation,"

"Thank God. Oh my God, thank God,"

"Would you care to sit down?"

Tonks stumbled into the chair. She'd hardly slept ever since rumours about a child attacked by werewolves had begun. Somebody who worked in the Hogsmeade post office had a sister whose catsitter's aunt was a potion specialist at St Mungo's, and she'd been treating a five-year-old who had been bitten by a werewolf. Tonks had been immediately terrified, and her horror only increased when the rumours started circulating from other sources too. Savage had mentioned it, and Tonks had overheard someone at the owlery say the words, "Fenrir Greyback". Given it was a rumour about werewolves it wasn't a surprise that Greyback was mentioned, though the mention of the name made Tonks feel even sicker. She'd begged Dawlish to swap patrol shifts with her, and then she'd bolted up to the castle to find Dumbledore. But Dumbledore hadn't been there. Tonks had wandered around the corridors, jittery and overwhelmed with picturing worst-case scenarios: that Remus, at the werewolf pack with no wolfsbane and a bunch of other werewolves to egg him on when transformed, had attacked the boy. That somehow he had been forced into it. That the child's family had defended their son and in doing so had hurt Remus. Killed Remus. Remus was dead. And then Tonks had realised that a five-year-old was lying in hospital while all she was thinking about was the hope that whoever had killed him was safe. That made her feel guiltier, and even more frenzied about what could have happened to Remus.

Dumbledore hadn't returned all afternoon, and eventually Tonks had slunk back to Hogsmeade for her patrol shift. She didn't eat properly that evening and had stayed awake all night, and the next day she'd dashed back up to the castle. When she knocked on Dumbledore's office door, there was no answer. Tonks did it again. No answer. A third time, four, five, and with each knock it became clearer that Dumbledore wasn't there and there wasn't going to be a response, but the hope didn't fade, the stupid blind hope that the headmaster had the radio on or something so he couldn't hear the knocking, or that he'd come strolling up the corridor right now behind her. Tonks' head was thumping with not Remus not Remus, please not Remus. What if he'd been asked to bite the boy and had refused? Would he be punished by Greyback? What if he'd been injured during the attack? Even if Remus wasn't physically hurt himself, the guilt from being involved in the attack on a child would wreck him.

On Wednesday, the victim had been named as Dash Montgomery, and on Thursday the rumours claimed that the boy had died. Yesterday there'd been confirmation of it in the Daily Prophet: A five-year-old boy from Marham has died in St Mungo's hospital after a short illness. Devadharshan Montgomery, known as Dash, passed away in the early hours of yesterday morning. Dash, who was in his first year at a Muggle primary school, was described by a source as a "funny, lively," boy whose smile could "light up a room". The cause of death has not been formally released. Details of a funeral will be forthcoming.

Tonks has read the brief, horrible article so many times that she'd committed it to memory. The article didn't provide any more detail than was circulating as rumour- in fact, it gave less- and the confirmation was both reassuring and appalling. Today was the sixth day since the rumours started, and now finally Dumbledore was back, though Tonks felt too dreadful and dazed from this week to know what to do now.

"I've been scared to death," she squeaked, "This week's been..."

Torture. Five days of total torture.

"I have heard from Remus. He told me about the attack and what he knows of it, though he does not have much information and his recollections from being transformed are of course hazy," Dumbledore explained, "He played no part in the boy's murder,"

"Was it supposed to be a murder? Or did it go wrong?"

"Greyback usually aims to transform when he attacks wizarding children. However, he is so practised in that particular skill that it seems this time the objective was for the boy to die,"

"Was it revenge or something?" Tonks guessed. Greyback bit children as personal revenge, and now You-Know-Who was using him as a threat too.

"Remus doesn't know. In a few weeks I may contact the family to see if they had been asked to do something on Death Eater orders and refused," said Dumbledore. The Ministry would probably look into it too, but Tonks knew she'd been unlikely to get anything out of Emnisovic or Fischer, or any of her Auror colleagues back in London.

"You've got bring him home," Tonks told Dumbledore.

"I can't do that,"

"Five! He was five!" she shouted, "Remus was the same age! What d'you think it's like for him, knowing that he could have been that kid, or that the kid could have been him. You can't imagine, you have no idea- you're taking advantage of him!"

"Nymphadora, I-"

"Jesus Christ will you not all me that?! Imagine what it was like for him to have to witness that, listen to them plot attacking the kid like Greyback did when he bit him, and then plan it with another five-year-old Remus couldn't do anything for? Why would you do that to him? Why?"

Dumbledore looked poised to answer the question, which Tonks didn't want him to. She ploughed on: "And what if Greyback remembers? What if Greyback twigged that it was Remus and he knows he's spying? They'll kill him like they did the Montgomery boy,"

"Remus knows that," said Dumbledore solemnly.

"You could live with that, could you? Sirius and then Remus?"

"I would find it very difficult to live with,"

"I don't know how much longer I can go on worrying about him. I don't know what else to do. You've got to get him away from there," she begged, "I don't care what happens next, but you can't let him be around Greyback any longer,"

"A sudden departure will create even more suspicion. It was difficult to work out how to arrange for Remus to leave for a few days at Christmas," sighed Dumbledore. Tonks knew that Remus had been to the Burrow over Christmas. Molly had suggested that she could come over. Tonks had been both desperate to visit, as well as knowing that visiting would be a catastrophe.

"It was difficult to persuade Remus of it too," Dumbledore admitted.

"He has to keep playing the martyr. You know it's not right," Tonks accused, "You know even Remus must be pretty bad if he doesn't want to go to the Weasleys for Christmas. It's killing him. You're killing him, or Greyback will,"

It was only a matter of time before Greyback found out. Or worse, if Remus got too lonely and frightened up there, if it was all too much for him and he couldn't cope and...

"Remus is safe for now," promised Dumbledore.

"You don't know that. How would you even find out if something happened to him?"

"We have an arrangement,"

"Pretty sophisticated arrangement if it means you can communicate with a dead man," she snarled.

"Remus is safe for now," Dumbledore repeated.

Tonks couldn't listen to him a second longer. He wasn't going to give her any more information, and he was only going to make her more anxious and agitated and angry.

"I'm off," she announced, jumping to her feet, "Goodbye, Professor,"

She'd had to do the same thing when she was here in September. There was something about this claustrophobic office and Dumbledore's calmness that made her feel tense and shut in and ready to smash something. She couldn't sit here and listen and be bloody polite to him any longer. Tonks heard the headmaster bid her goodbye, but she was already out of the door and stumbling downstairs to the corridor. Finally finding Dumbledore had been anticlimactic and far from consoling- and now she had found him, looking for Dumbledore was one less thing to worry about, so there was even more space in her head to anguish about Remus. Remus is safe for now, Remus is safe for now...Dumbledore didn't lie, but he couldn't know for sure because Remus was in constant danger- especially since Dash Montgomery had died.

Tonks tramped back towards the entrance hall, and it was only halfway down the stairs she realised that it wasn't long until the end of lessons, so she'd better get a shift on to avoid bumping into Harry again, or Ginny, or Nicci Huttlestone's little brother (she'd spotted him around Hogsmeade a couple of times and seen him eyeing her with a puzzled look on his face, trying to place her). Even Harry, who Arabella Figg had once described as "dense as a troll's toenail when it comes to other people" had seen that she was het up about something when Tonks had met him in the corridor the other day. Well, everybody could see something was wrong, Tonks reminded herself- she looked atrocious, and had done for months. Sometimes she'd wished that she could stop for five minutes, just turn all this off so she could think about something else. But that wasn't how love worked, was it? Last year, she hadn't been able to turn off thoughts of how fascinating and cool Remus was, how much of a laugh they had together and how phenomenal being in love with him felt. It was part of the bargain that now she couldn't turn off thoughts about how terrified she was for him, how unreasonable he was being, and how dreadful it felt that he was all alone in danger and she wasn't there to protect him. Was the bargain worth it? For Remus, Tonks knew, absolutely not: it would be better for Remus if he'd never met her Physically, emotionally, financially, he'd be better off if they'd never had anything to do with each other. What about herself, though? Were those wonderful months last Spring worth it for the harrowing months since? Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all and all that. Although "lost" implied circumstances beyond anybody's control, and the fact was that Remus had chosen to split up with her. It had been a severance, not a drifting apart. He'd made a choice and taken action, and that had prevented her from taking any action herself. There wasn't anything she could do for Remus or to allay the anxiety about him, apart from humiliate herself by begging Dumbledore for scraps of information. Any news she could scrabble together about him was already out of date. Right now, another attack could be being calculated for the next full moon and Remus could be having to listen to it be plotted. It was the sickest form of torment for him. And it meant that right now, another child could be at school or climbing trees or playing tea parties, not knowing that soon it would be their name in the newspaper, their family distraught, and their body dead on a slab in St Mungo's.