A/N: Seriously, there's a word count limit? Who knew? Ai. Characters still not at all mine.

—

"It's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Easy for you to say."

She felt better when she was talking back to him. She felt more grounded, more herself. It was too hard to be nice. Whenever she tried, she grew quiet and started thinking too much and eventually shut down altogether.

"I'm serious," Lupin insisted. "Dementors wouldn't be considered so dangerous if the spell were an easy one to carry off. Plenty of fully qualified wizards struggle with it."

"Yes, and plenty of fully unqualified wizards don't," Tonks grumbled.

"Harry Potter is not plenty of wizards."

"Harry Potter is a bloody prodigy."

"In Defence, perhaps," Lupin conceded, refilling her glass of mead before she asked him to. "In most matters, he remains wholly human, let me assure you."

It had never occurred to her, Tonks mused, that she would have Mad-Eye Moody to thank for a private audience with Remus Lupin. But Mad-Eye had sworn up and down after the incident outside the Ministry that Tonks was to perfect her Patronus charm to his satisfaction before being allowed on another assignment for the Order. "That's not fair," Tonks had wailed. "I've done it before. The Ministry's never complained."

Mad-Eye had given her his laugh, the one that sounded more like a cackle than anything. "Listen to her," he bellowed. "The Ministry? The Ministry? What has the Ministry asked of you lately?"

And, of course, he was right, as always. In spite of the rising number of unexplained disappearances, in spite of the dementors that had started to roam outside Ministry control, the list of Tonks' duties, as prescribed by the Ministry, was disturbingly short. "So what's the idea?" Tonks said, nudging Lupin's knee with her foot; she was beginning to relax. "If you can teach the Patronus to a third year, then maybe, just maybe, you can talk the lesson down to my level?"

She expected him to reassure her, but instead he played along, pretending to consider it. "Well, perhaps. Of course, you could always sign back up for Defence class at Hogwarts. The sixth years should be covering the Patronus charm by this point, I should think."

"If their Defence professor hasn't wiped his own memory by now, you mean?"

"Or been sacked for savaging students on the grounds during full moon, yes. Quite."

She couldn't believe he was joking about that, but his laugh didn't seem forced and so she laughed with him. She enjoyed the way he looked younger when he was smiling—not just younger, but less weary somehow, as though whatever weight he had been carrying had grown somewhat lighter with his laughter.

"Nymphadora—"

"Tonks."

"Tonks, then," Lupin said reluctantly. "Is this your first problem with the Patronus?"

"I passed my N.E.W.T., didn't I?"

"That's not what I asked."

Tonks nodded gloomily. "It was my weakest area," she confessed. "I didn't manage to do it until seventh year, and I couldn't even do it regularly then. Not right until the very end of the year. And then—even then, it was never the same."

"The form, you mean."

"Yes."

"It's not as rare as you might think," Lupin said mildly. "When I was at Hogwarts, they taught us the Patronus charm for O.W.L. level—they changed it, actually, when so few students managed it on the practical examination—but it usually took a while for those who could accomplish it to settle on a form. Some didn't have a standard form until N.E.W.T. level."

"So it's an immaturity thing," Tonks said. "Brilliant."

"No," Lupin said thoughtfully. "No, the Patronus has more to do with the people around you than it has to do with you. Teenagers, of course, change loyalties so frequently—friends, girlfriends and the like—it's not uncommon for their Patronuses to shift occasionally before they come of age, and sometimes even after that."

"I don't understand. I thought a Patronus reflected the person casting—"

Lupin shook his head. "You are thinking, I believe, of the Animagus, whose animal form often reflects his or her inner nature. The Patronus reflects something—or, often, someone—to whom we look for protection. Harry, though he has never known his father, associates him with the protection he offered him in his death. His Patronus became James' Animagus form—a stag—and will, I suspect, remain so.

"Sirius, now," Lupin said, a little too casually, and Tonks narrowed her eyes at him through her violet bangs; what was he on about? "Sirius is one of those rare wizards whose Animagus form is identical to his Patronus. The reason for this, of course—" Lupin gestured vaguely around the living room of twelve Grimmauld Place, which Tonks surveyed with distaste, unable to meet the eyes of the house-elves mounted on the wall. "Sirius had no protector within his family when he was growing up. His Patronus would hardly take the form of a parent, as Harry's did. When he was at school, I believe he felt responsible for protecting his friends, rather than being protected by them—for me, of course, because of my—condition—but also for Peter."

"So Sirius' Patronus was—" Tonks paused. "Are you saying that's what I'm like, too? That my Patronus is—"

"—you," Lupin finished. "Ever changing, ever shifting in appearance—"

"But I wasn't like Sirius. I wasn't—I mean, it's not the same thing." She thought about it for a little while, but could make no sense of it. "My mother—I had plenty of support—"

"I think," Lupin said quietly, examining his folded hands carefully, "that support and protection are not exactly the same thing."

She didn't know what to say to him when he said things like that.

"The point is not for you to know why your Patronus is what it is," Lupin said briskly. "The point is for you to understand that your Patronus is not weak in nature because of its shifting form. It is as strong as you are—"

"Some comfort, that," Tonks muttered.

Lupin pretended not to hear. "I blame the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for making you insecure about its form in the first place. I suspect you would have been better off without their interference."

He examined her intently for a moment, as he often did, and for the first time she didn't look away. She looked directly into his eyes—golden brown, she filed away for future reference—and held his gaze. It wasn't so terrible, after all. She couldn't even remember why she had been so afraid of doing it before. "The point," he said again, and stopped, as if he couldn't remember either.

"Yes?" Tonks said innocently. "The point?"

"The point," Lupin said, returning to his brisk manner, "is for you to practise until you regain the confidence they took from you in training. And to practise further, and then to practise more, and still more—"

And she groaned inwardly as Lupin flicked his wand to move the furniture against the walls, preparing a clearing for her Patronus and already off on obscure points of Defence theory about which Tonks, at the moment, could not be bothered to know or care.