Chapter Five

Tonks

I found the gramophone while I was helping the Weasley kids and Sirius clean out the billiard room. It was sitting there in its box, dusty but still useable, next to a pile of old records of boring wizarding music from the stone age. I didn't care about the records once I'd leafed through them, but the gramophone I wanted to keep around. Sirius and I set it up in the drawing room and everyone who had some pitched in old records. Molly especially liked the idea.

"It'll make the house so much more cheerful to have a little music playing!" she said, putting a Selestina Warbeck record on. Everyone except Arthur, who she forcibly restrained, left the room rather quickly.

If it had been left up to Sirius and me the record would have been blasting the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the New York Dolls, T-Rex, and the Weird Sisters all the time, but of course other people like music too. Even if their tastes are strange and inexplicable.

A few days after we found the gramophone I came over for dinner and, since I had guard duty tonight from one till five, I decided to stay till then and keep Sirius company. We sat in the drawing room, listening to all our favorite songs and reminiscing. Or rather, he reminisced and I listened.

At eleven fifty two he went to bed and left me all alone in the creepy drawing room, listening to a Led Zeppelin song with an equally creepy baseline. I took it off and searched through the stack for something quieter. Finally I came up with a battered Simon and Garfunkel Greatest Hits record. It wasn't really my style, more my mum's speed. When I was little she used to play "Sound of Silence" to me, and it always calmed me down. Guard duty was dull as dirt, but I always got a little jumpy right before I did it. Maybe this was what I needed right now.

I lay back on the couch and listened. It was so nice, being in the room with the dying fire, the crackly old music playing. I was half asleep when someone came into the room and scared me out of my wits.

"Oh!" he said. "Sorry, I didn't know anyone was in here."

I sat up so fast I knocked an empty glass off the table by the couch. It landed on the carpet, sending up a little cloud of dust but, thankfully, not breaking.

He was standing in the doorway, back lit by the low light in the hallway so I couldn't see his face. I recognized his voice though.

"Remus?"

"Sorry if I disturbed you. I just heard the record playing and….." he trailed off, looking around the room as if he were slightly lost.

"It's alright," I said, scooting over on the sofa. "Come in, I could use some company."

"Actually I should probably go to bed….."

"C'mon please! I have to be all alone here till one and I can either be awake and heebie-jeebied out by this room or asleep and late for guard duty."

He hesitated and I thought, oh God he hates me. I could just hear what he was thinking; Ew Tonks! Why would I want to hang around with her? She's probably retarded, always falling over like a big footed duck-woman.

"Well I wouldn't want you to be 'heebie-jeebied out'," he said, a trace of a smile in his voice. He sank down next to me and the faint light of the fire touched his face.

"Good God! What's happened to you?" I jumped of the sofa and knelt in front of him, trying to hold his chin as gently as I could while I inspected his face, which resembled a bowl of rotten fruit. His left eye was swollen shut and the cheekbone below it was badly bruised. His lower lip was also split and the blood had spattered on his t-shirt.

"It's not a big deal," he muttered, trying to turn his face away.

"Clearly you haven't looked in a mirror!" I turned his face from side to side, trying to see if there was anything I'd missed, checking that he still had both ears.

"I still have both ears," he said, grinning crookedly.

"Who did it?" I asked, touching his cheek bone lightly, checking it hadn't been shattered. He winced.

"Sorry."

"It's alright. Who d'you think did it?"

"The other werewolves?" I guessed, using my amazing deductive abilities. "But why?"

"I smell wrong."

I thought it was a joke until I saw his face. "You aren't serious? What…..but I can't smell anything."

"Werewolves have a keener sense of smell than most. I smell too much of magic."

"Magic has a smell?"

He nodded. "Well, it's more of a……I dunno, really. It's odd, like a smell but a taste too, and a feeling, like static electricity. It makes the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck stand up when you smell it. It bothers most werewolves. It'd bother me too, I reckon, if I wasn't so used to it."

I shook my head. "That's really bloody weird, Remus."

He laughed and then winced when the cut on his lip reopened and oozed blood down his chin.

"Let me fix that," I wiped the blood away and then tapped his face lightly with my wand. I've always been good at minor healing spells. The bruises faded and the swelling went down until he could open his eye again. His lip stitched itself back together.

"Cheers," he prodded his cheek. "You're good."

"Oh ta. Look I'm blushing," I fluttered my eyelashes and he laughed.

"Did you go to charm school, Tonks?"

"How on earth did you guess?" I climbed back on to the sofa. "So the werewolf thing didn't go so well?"

"Actually, it looks promising."

Perhaps he was the insane one. "Getting a thumping equals 'promising' does it?"

"Oh no. No they did that before I talked to them. I scared them, I reckon. It's a bit of an odd story, really." He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment.

"What?" I asked. Had I got something in my face? I swiped at my cheek involuntarily.

"Nothing," he said quickly.

"Tell me the story then," I said.

And so he did. And it was an odd story. In summary he was attacked the second he walked into their territory, saved from being beaten to death by a seventeen year old girl who turned out to be the girlfriend of Tom White. She got him a meeting with Tom, but only after she threatened him at gunpoint, demanding his wand and one of his fags ("You shouldn't smoke, you know," I said.) At his meeting with Tom White he told them what he wanted, fully expecting to be ripped to pieces at any moment, and instead Tom agreed to think about it and talk to him again in a month.

"But that's brilliant!" I said, and before I'd even had a chance to think about it I was hugging him. It started out as one of those stupid, pally, arms-around-the-neck hugs, and then changed, and suddenly I wasn't sure what kind of hug it was. It was something between 'oh what a lovely friend you are' and 'I luuuurve you!'. I was very aware of the song, "Mrs. Robinson", playing in the background, and at the same time how nice his arms felt around me, and also that I didn't think he smelt at all funny, but very nice. Oh God, I thought. You can't fancy Remus! You just can't.

"Erm….." I said when we stopped hugging (which happened later it should have in a pally hug and sooner than it should in an 'I fancy you' hug.)

"God bless you please Mrs. Robinson/ heaven holds a place for those who pray/ hey hey hey!" said Simon and Garfunkel.

"Yes," said Remus.

The clock chimed one.

"Well, I'm off," I stood up and promptly fell over.

Remus helped me up, "Are you alright?"

"Oh fine, fine," I said, airily. "Happens all the time, you know." Feeling like a complete clod I concentrated hard on the three Ds (which I still have to do, otherwise I'd splinch myself) and disappeared to four dull as dirt hours on guard duty, thinking that Simon and Garfunkel weren't so relaxing after all.