A/N: Here, my friends, is Nymphadora. She's the last one, since we don't know any other Black women. I finished this in a hurry last night, trying to get it up for my birthday (and yeah, it was yesterday so I kind of missed it, but I did finish it then!). It's a bit of all over the place, but so is Tonks. Hope you like it, and thanks for reading all the way through my first chaptered fic!
Nymphadora (as everyone knows) hates her name. But in Greek mythology, it would mean "gift of the nymphs", and everyone knows the Romans stole their mythology from the Greeks, and he is named after one of the founders of Rome.
She feels about twelve, doing this. Like a first-year with a crush. (And it's not like she needs any help feeling younger – Merlin, she's spent the past two months trying to convince him she's not too young!) But she doesn't know what else to do. He won't let her close to him, so she uses anything she possibly can to get there.
No one has ever taken her seriously. She stumbles through life with pink hair and a loud laugh and a ridiculous sense of humor, and no one can take that seriously. They forget that she's a Black, that behind the pink lies a consuming darkness, that she goes by her last name to cover up her first. She loves that he does take her seriously, that her protests about her name are heard with good humor while actually being acknowledged, that he sees the Auror as well as the klutz. It's wonderful, to be so respected by the first man she has both respected and loved. And that's why it's so odd that he doesn't believe in her love.
She expects that no one else will believe her when she says she's in love, because she's the sort of girl who trips from crush to crush but never has anything serious. She's the kind of girl who falls for a good-looking guy if he even so much as looks at her. But Remus isn't her type; he's smart and strong and graying and cursed, and by all rights she ought to be hunting him down instead of falling for him. She's always gone for the athletic wild Auror type; she had the biggest crush on Bill Weasley in school (also Charlie, who was in her year and her best friend, which, come to think of it, was probably the reason she knew Bill at all). But anyway, that's not Remus, which you would think would prove to anyone who knows her that she's serious about this. And that's how she knows it's serious; since she's had so many crushes, she can tell that this is different. And she's so glad it is, because he listens to her and respects her and helps her and cares about her (even if she can't make him care for her). And she barely does all that for herself; part of the reason no one else takes her seriously is that she doesn't. She likes not taking herself seriously – it keeps her as Tonks instead of Moody. She likes having pink hair and wearing ridiculously bright clothes and having people look at her askance when they find out she's an Auror. She even kind of likes breaking things. She wishes she didn't, but since she does, she might as well enjoy it. She's a fierce optimist, and if she weren't, she would've given up hope long ago. She probably never would've had any, would've simply admired him from a distance and pretended she didn't love him more than she'd ever loved anyone before. But she defies her Black heritage by being optimistic, and she embraces it by being deathly stubborn.
So she keeps her hope, and she holds on, and she tells him over and over and over that she loves him. And it's easier to keep hope because her repeated avowals of love don't make him avoid her – when she's tired or dismal after a hard watch, he'll comfort her, and when she needs a friend most, he's the first one there. And she and Remus and Sirius have had some very fun bull sessions in front of the fire with a bottle of Firewhiskey, and she's noticed that when he's drunk he looks at her more. So she amuses herself by subtly changing her hair shade until suddenly it's blue and he hasn't noticed how it got there (it helps that he's drunk). And Sirius laughs at him, and at her, and she knows that Sirius knows she's in love and that he believes in it. She knew there was a reason he was her favorite cousin, a reason why she missed him against her better judgment all those years when he was in Azkaban. And she's glad Remus is his friend, because they are both desperately tragic men in need of a friend, and they are so different that sometimes she wonders how they don't kill each other, but they don't. And so she loves watching them, and she loves that they love each other, and she loves each of them. And really, that was part of the reason she fell for Remus in the first place. It wasn't that he caught her the first time she fell over the troll's leg umbrella stand when he didn't even know her, or that he just smiled good-naturedly when she apologized profusely; it wasn't that he didn't even blink when Moody introduced her as an Auror and a Metamorphmagus and a Black, or that he could relate to all of those (she's heard about his stint as Defense professor, and his lycanthropy, and of course his friendship with the Black of the age); it wasn't that he encouraged her overwhelming brightness while providing a welcome respite from it, or that they seemed to get along better than anyone else in the Order, compensating for each other and balancing their strengths and weaknesses. Well, actually, it was all of that (she can lie easily to anyone else, but she's never been able to lie to herself). She just didn't realize it until she first saw Remus and Sirius drunk and laughing together and felt that great surge of pride and happiness for both of them, that they'd defied all odds against them to become such good (great) men; knowing she'd always loved Sirius, she could realize she loved Remus. And knowing that, she realized that there was something different there, that she loved Sirius like a brother but Remus like . . . well, like a friend and a brother and a boyfriend combined. And that's what made it real.
So now she keeps telling him that she loves him, and keeps arguing against his protests (he is not too old), and keeps hoping he'll change his mind. And now everyone knows, and Molly Weasley beams whenever she sees them together, and Bill laughs at her like a friend would, and Dumbledore doesn't say anything but his eyes twinkle (she knows Dumbledore and Molly agree with her, that Remus needs someone to love him after all he's been through, and that he's not too old or too poor or too dangerous, not for an Auror; she's not so sure about Molly, but she knows that Dumbledore takes her seriously – he's always been able to see right through her). And she's sure that someday, after the war, maybe, or when she hits thirty and he finally realizes that she really is grown up, he'll realize that he can let himself love her. But it's hard, so hard, to wait, especially knowing that maybe they won't come through this war, and she can feel herself fraying at the edges, so she clings ever more strongly to the pink inside her so as to avoid falling into the Black.