Author's Note: For sanity's sake, don't pay attention to the timeline, I'm 99 percentsure it's already off. This was originally part of a later chapter, but I thought it fit better here.


Random Interlude

Nymphadora Tonks had always been good at seeing things objectively. That skill- and not her metamorphosing- was what had first endeared her to becoming an auror.

Two months ago, she was still just as clumsy, and just as multi-hair colored, and just as fakely optimistic, but she had never felt the urge to take such pains to avoid someone-least of all someone she considered a friend.

And being good at seeing things objectively, she knew that something terrible, and all-encompassing that had begun in the back of her mind had circulated through her blood stream, and traveled to the hard shell that she frequently built upon surrounding her weather-beaten heart.

And was now currently knocking against it mightily, and no matter how hard she panicked and fought against it, was now quite close to breaking through.

She felt like retching, and killing, and shagging him senseless until everything else managed to fade away.

She felt like hitting him though he was not at fault, and snogging him straight away though she's sure he doesn't feel the same way, and screaming until her and Mrs. Black cast all other sounds of life into oblivion because why for goodness' sake did she have to fall for a guy she knows won't accept her, even if she does, somehow manage to make him love her?

But that was only two months ago, when she first figured out that something undeniably had changed.

Now she just feels like crying a lot. Something, being an auror, and a member of the Order, and being in love with a repressed werewolf, she won't allow herself to do.

Instead, she contents herself with watching him when she doesn't think he's looking.

And when that doesn't work, doing research on him.

(By the time of her last talk with Sirius about him, she knows her heart's been officially breached. He's slightly drunk, and tells he used to think Remus had a thing for Lily, and all she can do is weep.)

And when Sirius dies, doing research on werewolves.

She tells herself she ought to give up her obsession as futile, even as she makes hot chocolate twenty minutes before he wakes-up, and leaves it on the table in front of his chair. She knows he'll think Molly did it.

She realizes her heart's been officially pierced, when she could care less, so long as he has the comfort.


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