Chapter 6: Stepping Out
On the day that Hogwarts's Christmas vacation ended, Tonks turned up in grey hair and tweeds to escort the Weasleys, Harry, and Hermione back to school. She had been experimenting with older looks a lot lately; she always ended up looking like an ingénue of sixty-two. And, Remus reflected, that was probably exactly what she would be at sixty-two. An elderly ingénue with a disarming intelligence and alternately pink and grey hair.
They stumbled off the Knight Bus, which hurtled away, bade the children goodbye, and watched them till the castle doors shut securely behind them.
"Come for a drink at the Three Broomsticks?" said Tonks. They had recently fallen into the habit of going for drinks at wizarding pubs, where they analyzed the Order's next move in sparsely coded language, far away from Sirius's jocular interruptions and the vocal and contradictory anxieties of Molly and Mad-Eye. Remus invariably spent these evenings scanning the pub nervously for spies and wishing that he, like Mad-Eye, could see out of the back of his head. Fortunately he and Tonks seemed to understand each other's half-finished sentences and allusive code names just fine.
At the Three Broomsticks, they ordered butterbeer and took a table near the back.
"To a safe term at Hogwarts!" toasted Remus.
"May Harry, Ron, and Ginny be bored out of their minds!" toasted Tonks.
"What about Hermione?"
"Hermione will be studying for OWLs. The great thing about being a swot is that you never get bored."
"I'm sure you learned that by experience."
"The experience of watching you walk around with your nose in a book for the last six months. Sirius told me you don't even stop reading when you're doing spells."
Remus smiled. "Did Sirius tell you that I put an Impervius charm on the Daily Prophet so that I could read it in the shower?"
"You read in the shower?"
"No, actually, but it's one of his favorite stories."
"Sirius needs to get out more."
Remus raised his eyebrows. "Don't say that in front of him. Molly told me he tried to go visit Arthur at St. Mungo's—as Snuffles, of course. It would have been a disaster, after his being seen on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters last fall."
"I know. But sometimes I worry that Sirius's staying indoors will be just as fatal."
Remus put down his butterbeer. "What do you mean?"
"Well, you've known him longer than I have. But I think frustration is coloring his judgment. It's not like he's getting to do anything exciting at Grimmauld Place—if he had some real indoor work to take his mind off—but he doesn't. He just feels like he's in prison again."
"Sirius always liked adventure," said Remus slowly. "And he never minded risk. Actually he liked risk. He—well, he put others in harm's way as well as himself."
"Yes," said Tonks. "I know what you mean. Bright as he is, brave as he is, he wouldn't be my first choice of partner for a dangerous mission." Her eyes danced on Remus. "But I think maybe his recklessness is his strength. Maybe we should let him use it sometime. His judgment's not improving from sitting around locked up in Grimmauld Place."
"His temper's not improving, either," muttered Remus under his breath.
Tonks looked at him searchingly.
"Not that I'm complaining," he added with a smile. "I—after James and Lily died, after Sirius was taken to Azkaban, I never imagined I'd see him again. I never imagined that I would want to see him again. I tried to bury every memory I had of him—though I've never been good at getting rid of unwanted memories. When we realized it was Peter, not Sirius—I felt like he had come back from the dead, and part of my own past with him."
"But sometimes he's rather wearing company."
"Well, as you said, he feels like he's in prison. Especially when everyone else has gone home, and he has to make do with me and Kreacher."
"He had an awful fit of the sullens last week," said Tonks. "Why don't you take an evening off from him now and then?"
"I do," said Remus. "I go to libraries." Tonks laughed. "And bookstores. Seriously. When I moved in with Sirius, he offered me two rooms, one for me and one for the books."
"Don't you sometimes want to be around other people?"
Remus hesitated. Solitude was the penalty—one of the penalties— for being a werewolf. "I don't entirely trust myself around other people," he said slowly. "Especially those who don't know about my condition. It's often easier to be alone." He paused. "It was different at Hogwarts. Sirius and James were like family."
"A family of unregistered Animagi," grinned Tonks.
"Right. And now I have a family consisting of the Boy Who Lived, a Muggle-born genius, seven red-headed rascals, and one large black dog."
"I'm madly in love with the Weasleys," said Tonks, with an edge in her voice that took Remus by surprise.
"So am I. But you've got parents and siblings and whatnot of your own, haven't you?"
"Parents, yes. You've heard about them. No siblings, and half my mother's family are Death Eaters. We don't see much of each other," she added dryly.
Remus looked at her, wheels turning in his head. He realized, now, that he had seldom heard Tonks refer affectionately to any relatives other than her Muggle grandparents in Liverpool. She didn't talk about friends much, either. In fact, she didn't allude to any recreations other than morphing for Ginny and Hermione at Molly's Sunday night dinners. He had never realized quite how much Grimmauld Place and the Order must mean to her.
"Cheer up, Remus," said Tonks, interrupting his reverie. "It's not that bad. My father's cousins are decent. They don't know I'm a witch. They're under the impression that I work for a fantasy magazine and get my hair dyed once a month at a hippie beauty parlor in the East End, and they think I'm absolutely nuts, but they always take me in for the holidays."
"Must be restful."
"It would be restful for you to spend an evening on something other than work, Sirius, or a bookstore. Otherwise you'll go mad."
Remus grimaced. He was, in fact, privately afraid of going mad. The suicide rate among werewolves was high. Work and Weasleys seemed like the best insurance against it. Of course, Tonks partook of both these things, and she did know about his condition.
Aloud, against his better judgment, he said slowly, "There's a concert at the Leaky Cauldron on Saturday night. Melliflua Mandolo is charming a piano, a flute, and a set of cowbells. It sounds dreadful. Do you want to go?"
On Saturday night it was snowing. Tonks apparated into Diagon Alley, slipped on a thin layer of ice, skidded, and fell flat on her face, snowflakes staining her hair like a thousand tiny stars. Remus (having told Sirius he was going to Flourish & Blotts and arrived twenty minutes early in order to make that not be a misrepresentation) chuckled and pulled Tonks to her feet, dusting the snow from her robes. She steadied herself and teasingly tried to brush the flecks of grey from his hair.
In the Leaky Cauldron, it was dark and noisy. Fresh faces, months out of Hogwarts, whispering over mead; middle-aged witches in garish robes, applauding loudly as Melliflua Mandolo demonstrated her experimental charms and deplored the state of musical education in the wizarding world; in the corner, an ungainly troll tapping a huge webbed foot out of time and grunting to himself. Tonks took one look around and burst out laughing.
"I told you it would be dreadful," said Remus.
"It's wonderful," said Tonks. "I've never seen anything like it."
"Come on! You grew up in the wizarding world. You saw scenes like this every Hogsmeade weekend."
Tonks shook her head. "Daylight, gaggles of fourteen-year-olds, no music, no mead, and hardly any trolls."
"Haven't your post-Hogwarts boyfriends taken you to pub concerts?"
"No such persons." Remus raised his eyebrows. "Not surprising, really. I went straight into Auror training, where there was very little free time and not many men my age. Boys my own age never paid much attention to me anyway." Remus made an indeterminate gesture with his chin. "They liked me, I think—you know, very nice, very clever, but definitely weird. A tomboy and a Metamorphmagus to boot."
"Why would anyone mind your being a Metamorphmagus?" exclaimed Remus, dusting the last few snowflakes from her hair, which tonight was tawny brown and wavy, much as his own had been before it started to grey.
"Oh. Well, it's very unusual, and there's sort of an If-I-can't-recognize-you-I-can't-trust-you syndrome. Part of it was my own fault. I played around with morphing a lot at Hogwarts. I used to do really absurd things, like reverse my feet and add a sixth finger. Now, unless I'm disguising myself for work, I mostly just do hair."
Remus gazed appraisingly at Tonks, shutting out Melliflua Mandolo's raucously charmed cowbells. It baffled him that any eighteen-year-old boy could have failed to find this woman attractive.