A/N: An inner battle? Excuse the paranoia but so long as that's no reflection on my writing, I'm cool.

I kind of contradicted myself last time seeing as I said this wasn't fluff and yet ended with a fluffy moment. Believe me; those are few and far between so please don't let that put anyone off reading!

It was with reluctance that Tonks had left Lupin, having been called by Dumbledore to see him urgently. She hadn't wanted to leave him abruptly, but she was glad to be out of his hold and free to think things over. She really hadn't thought through what she had done properly and she feared that the kiss had meant far more to Lupin than it had to her. To her, it was more of a pity kiss, a kiss given and taken out of comfort, not love.

Sighing, thumbing the note Albus had handed her, a part of her wished to open it so desperately and seek what was inside of it. She knew it was something of great importance, Albus had been most severe on that matter but he had also been insistent that it were to be she who delivered it so Severus.

She could only presume that, that meant this note concerned her. Clutching it in her fist and using the other to balance her way down into the stony basement, she coughed shortly from the amount of unnecessary dust on the staircase.

She rapped upon his door sharply and let herself into the room without as much as a grunt in response from him. Squinting in the darkness, she ignited the three unlit candles in the room and saw that he was bent over a cauldron, sprinkling something that looked like nail clippings, into it.

"Who told you to light more candles?"

Crossing her arms, defending herself, she stammered,

"You can't presume to suggest that you can work properly in these poorly lit conditions, so I saw fit to light more."

He grunted in response, Tonks felt he was probably cursing her and then he said,

"And who told you to enter the room?"

Standing beside him, scowling up at him, she stuffed the note into his chest pocket and glanced at her nails, uninterestedly,

"You clearly weren't about to answer the door to anyone. And if you had, you weren't about to let anyone in, least of all me."

"And there was me thinking you were dim-witted. You seem to have a pretty good grasp on how I estimate you, Nymphadora."

"Tonks." she corrected him defiantly and then added, "Aren't you going to read it then, Mr. I'm-right-about-everything. That's the whole buggaring reason I'm here. You don't to think I'd come and be in your presence of my own free will, do you?" she asked, sneering at him, wondering if he'd like a taste of his own medicine. Instead, as he scanned the letter with his dark sharp eyes, he looked at her slightly hurt and pulled out two chairs, pausing the potion brewing with his wand.

"How easily you seem to have forgotten about what I did for you earlier." he replied, indicating for her to sit down opposite him. She sat, reluctantly and clutched at her bandaged arm, about to apologise to him when she caught herself and prevented her mouth from saying anything. Opening the letter and holding it up vaguely, but so that she couldn't see it's content, he asked, sneering, "You have no idea what this is, do you, child?"

"Why do you insist on calling me a child? I graduated from Hogwarts over five years ago, I don't have the physique or mind of a child, so I am clearly not one."

Removing his outer robe and slinging it on the back of the chair, he ran a scarred hand through his greasy hair and said, "Yes, but you have the patience, curiosity and clumsiness of a child. Now, listen."

He made a motion as if to hand her the note, but she knew better than to take it. Instead, she allowed him to re-open it and thumb the folds out of it, whilst she muttered,

"And since when is your opinion fact."

Hearing her mindless prattle, he shook his head and, infuriated that she clearly couldn't see the seriousness of the matter, he threw the letter down upon the floor and barked, "Why don't you just shut up, for once!"

When he shouted at her, she stood and faced him, rather than just sitting allowing him to shout down at her like a teacher to a child.

Making sure they were eye to eye, she narrowed her pupils at him and scowled, in the deepest hatred she could muster, she snarled,

"My mother taught me to never allow myself to be silenced by men."

For a second and for some peculiar reason, her stand of deviancy had a short impact on him. Students and colleagues for that matter, never or rarely stood up to him. Stunned, he composed himself and felt his fists clenching. Fighting the urge to hit her, he rashly took hold of her shoulders, in a mechanical manner and sat her down on the wooden chair. Placing a hand on either side of the it, so that he were stood over her, his hands just behind her shoulders, he said, almost in a pleading manner, "Just listen."

She swallowed slowly, her heart racing as he had taken a fiercely strong hold on her. For a smidgen of a second, she had thought she were about to be kissed for the second time today. As he thrust her into the chair, she cursed herself for even imaging those thoughts and shuddered at the cold image of this man ever showing any affection toward any human being. Watching his lips move in front of her, she vowed, inside herself, to listen to him, but she would not be silenced.

"I'm all ears." she said, simply with a feigned grin on her face. Taking that this was the most co-operation he could expect to get from her, he sat on the edge of his desk, rather than his chair and grumbled,

"I really don't know why Dumbledore thought you could handle the position of defense against the dark arts teacher, and now he's expecting me to put up with you in other places too. You're seriously going to need to change your attitude."

Folding her arms and crossing her leg, she pulled down on her ruffled skirt and said,

"For you? Not likely. So what are these 'other places' that you speak of?"

She watched him through fixed eyes as he placed a silencing charm around the room with a quick flick of his wand. He placed his wand, then, back down on the dark surface of his inadequate desk and began to roll up his sleeves. Seeing the glint in her eyes, he attempted to halt her before she made another inconvenient and unnecessary comment.

"Before you respond, consider that I would never even entertain the thought of undressing for you."

A blush, most unwanted and unpredicted, crept onto her face and she suddenly found herself grateful for the darkness of the room. Just as she felt her body heat cooling, he moved toward her once more and, to her horror, she saw the dark mark embellished onto his pale and stretched skin. She lifted a finger, as if it were drawing her in and meant to trace the lines with her delicate finger, but he pulled away before she did so.

"Are you completely stupid?" he asked, mortified. "You can't touch the dark mark. You obviously don't have any idea what impact that might have upon you."

Growing tired of him pointing out her faults, she said,

"Look, you've clearly kept me here for a reason. I suggest that you stop being insulting unless you want me to leave."

He carefully pulled back down his sleeve and attempted to re-do the button on the collar of it.

"I do want you to leave." he said, distinctly, "However, you can't. There are things that need to be explained. I will, however, refrain from commenting on your lack of useful knowledge if you will kindly stop interrupting me."

Tonks, who rarely had nothing to say, was lost for words and so tilted her head as she stepped toward the man. He seemed to be having trouble with the button on the collar of his sleeve, so she took it in her hands and began to re-do it. As the red head did so, she failed to notice the way his eyes lit up when he caught the shade of her hair, the wave it formed and the speckled beauty of her freckles. Just as she were about to drop his shirt from her grip, his surprisingly warm fingers gently caressed her ear and his hand came to a steady rest behind it. Confused, she focused on looking at his eyes, knowing it was not her he was seeing.

Unnerved, Tonks took his hand firmly in hers, waking him up instantly, stammering, "I know you don't see me when you look at me like that. Please, don't do it. It disturbs me."

It seemed to do unnerve him equally, as he took her by the shoulders and sat her back in the chair she had once sat, whilst he perched back upon the edge of the desk. Neither said anything for a few minutes and both looked away, wanting to avoid catching the other's eye. Finally, Snape bent down and picked the letter back up from the floor.

"This isn't going to work, Nymphadora, if you insist on being difficult."

She distinctly remembered saying those exact words to him earlier and snorted,

"Those were my previous words, Severus. And how am I being difficult? You're the one who seems to fall into a trance everytime you look into my eyes."

She could tell that her last few words had once again agitated him and he lifted a nervous hand, tracing it along the hairline on the back of his neck.

"You remind me of someone that is all."

"Fine." she said, scrunching her nose up. "I'll change my appearance then." To her surprise, instead of her hair turning deathly black and straight, it became a straggly dirty blonde.

"You looked like that earlier, briefly." he noted.

"Yes, by mistake." she said, as she wrinkled her nose forcibly and eventually succeeded in forcing her hair to become deathly black, straight and her eyes to become vividly red.

Snape could take a guess at what that earlier appearance meant to her, but it was not his place to mention something so personal. Metamorphamagi only showed their true faces in front of people who they deeply cared about. He was not one of them and thinking that he might be would make him feel dreadfully uncomfortable. Glad she had changed back; he took the letter back up in his hands and passed it to her.

"Read it and tell me what you think." he said, commandingly.