A/N: Firstly, apologies for the extreme delay in updating this story. Real life took over, and some unforeseen technical issues arose, taking my life by the hair and dragging it around. Those issues have yet to be resolved, but I'm going to do my best to press forward on this story just in case. If there's another story of mine that you read and haven't had updated recently, feel free to pester me about that as well! I'll make a special note for it on my to-do list to ensure that it doesn't get overlooked in the chaos. Again, super-big apologies, and I hope you can all forgive me.
-C
Christmas with the Weasleys meant celebrating over Christmas Eve, and then for family members (and Harry, Fleur, and Emma) staying the night, opening presents upon waking up, and having a large brunch the following morning. Emma had helped the Weasley brothers and Ginny decorate the Burrow for the party while Mrs. Weasley prepared the food. Fleur mostly sat in the corner torn between disgust and being charmed at how naïve everything was. She did seem to appreciate Bill and she took a liking to Emma, but the idea of Fleur having Molly Weasley as a mother-in-law made Emma want to laugh until she cried tears of hysteria.
Remus arrived with a large jug of butterbeer and chocolate for everyone not long after the decorations had finished going up.
"The place looks lovely," he told Molly earnestly. His eyes were tired, and he greeted Arthur with an almost limp handshake as Arthur arrived home from work.
"Let me take your cloak, Remus," Emma said, helping him unclasp it. His fingers looked frozen stiff. "How have you been? It seems ages since we last talked."
"As well as one can be in a war like this," Remus told her with a tired smile. "You look lovely, Emma. Kingsley tells me you're doing a beautiful job at the Ministry."
Emma blushed and shrugged.
"I do my best," she said. "Come on, let's get you settled."
Emma gave him a glass of eggnog and sat down with him by the fireplace, looking around the room. Molly had turned on the terrible annual special of Celestina Warbeck, Molly's favorite singer. "A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love" was playing in the background, and Emma fought the urge to explode the wireless. The only thing that made her feel better was the knowledge George had shared with her that Lee was the one who had to sit there and broadcast the disaster. She could send him a joking nasty letter about it later.
The volume kept going up because Fleur kept trying to talk over the radio, clearly not interested in listening to the terrible music. Knowing that the radio was too loud for them to be noticed, Fred and George lured Ginny into a game of Exploding Snap in the other corner of the room. Ron was watching Bill and Fleur being romantic like some sort of strange stalker. And Remus, Remus was ignoring everything, staring at the fire, deep in some sort of thought. Emma thought about talking to him about Tonks, about anything, but Remus did not have many moments of quiet in his life, so she thought she'd let him enjoy this one for a bit longer.
The music hit a note that actually hurt Emma's ears and Molly tittered, "We danced to this when we were eighteen! Do you remember, Arthur?"
Much to Emma's amusement, Molly wiped her eyes on her knitting, and Arthur – who had begun to fall asleep over a satsuma he'd been peeling – jerked awake at the mention of his name.
"Oh, yes...marvelous tune..."
It was very clear that he'd determined what she must have said based on what was playing, and Emma covered her mouth to keep herself from giggling. She felt that she was watching a badly trained circus. From the look Harry shot her, he felt much the same. Arthur sat up a little straighter and turned to Emma and Harry, peeling his satsuma again.
"Sorry about this," he said in a voice low enough not to be heard over the music. "Be over soon."
"No problem," Harry said with a grin. "Has it been busy at the Ministry?"
"Very," Arthur said, nodding. "I wouldn't mind if we were getting anywhere, but most of what Emma does is busywork, and of the three arrests we've made in the last couple of months, I doubt that one of them is a genuine Death Eater – only don't repeat that, Harry."
Arthur finished suddenly quite awake and much more alert, and Emma raised her eyebrows at him, amused.
"The one thing we can say," she said, still smiling a little, "is that they're still holding Stan Shunpike, if that gives you more of a sense of what we're dealing with."
Harry looked astonished and Arthur nodded solemnly.
"I'm afraid so," he told Harry. "I know Dumbledore's tried appealing directly to Scrimgeour about Stan... I mean, anybody who has actually interviewed him agrees that he's about as much a Death Eater as this satsuma here...but the top levels want to look as though they're making some progress, and 'three arrests' sounds better than 'three mistaken arrests and releases'...but again, this is all top secret..."
"I won't say anything," Harry assured them, watching Arthur continue peeling the satsuma. The song changed to a ballad called "You Charmed the Heart Right out of Me" and Emma shifted, stoking the fire slightly. Then he continued, "Mr. Weasley, you know what I told you at the station when we were setting off for school?"
Emma raised her eyebrows and turned to Arthur, who blushed slightly. Apparently, this was something to do with the war effort, something that perhaps Arthur should have brought to the attention of others, but had not.
"What's this?" she asked. Harry looked a little uncomfortable, but clearly too eager to wait until she wasn't around.
"I checked, Harry," Arthur said, pretending not to hear her prompting. "I went and searched the Malfoys' house. There was nothing, either broken or whole, that shouldn't have been there."
"Yeah, I know, I saw in The Prophet that you'd looked...but this is something different... Well, something more..."
Harry related to them a conversation between Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy that Emma had to admit to herself sounded a lot like exactly what Harry seemed to think it all was: Draco was doing something for the Death Eaters, perhaps as one of their number, and Severus Snape was trying to get him to accept help. Highly suspicious, especially with the letter she'd been given, the one she'd burned, but she'd made a promise, and she appreciated when Arthur came up with the logical explanation for it all:
"Don't you think, Harry, that it's equally plausible that Snape was offering this help to learn more about Malfoy's plan?"
Harry scowled at her slightly.
"Yeah, I thought you'd say that," Harry said. Likely, Hermione Granger had already said the same. "But how do we know?"
"It isn't our business to know," Remus said. Emma jumped, slightly startled at his sudden interjection into their conversation. She hadn't realized he'd been listening, but sometime between stoking the fire and the end of Harry's tale, he'd turned his back to the flames and was now facing into the little circle. "It's Dumbledore's business. Dumbledore trusts Severus, and that ought to be good enough for all of us."
"Besides," Emma pressed, "whatever you're thinking about the mess with Katie, I know Malfoy didn't buy the necklace. I've been following up on the case for the Auror office from a trade standpoint. I can assure you, Harry, that it's physically impossible for Draco or his mother to have bought that necklace."
She hated the lie, and Harry looked a bit skeptical, but he didn't argue, and that was something. He seemed more keen on the direction Remus had taken things.
"But just say – just say Dumbledore's wrong about Snape-"
"People have said it," Remus said with a small sort of nod, "many times. It comes down to whether or not you trust Dumbledore's judgment. I do; therefore, I trust Severus."
Emma only wished the world was that simple. She knew from June that Albus Dumbledore's judgment was far from flawless, or Sirius Black might still be alive. But on the other hand, she had to trust Severus Snape or she couldn't live with herself for dropping Katie's case.
"But Dumbledore makes mistakes. He says it himself. And you – do you honestly like Snape?"
At this, Emma laughed, nearly spilling her eggnog.
"Harry," she said, "the world is not that simple. If liking someone was a prerequisite for trusting them, I think a great many things would never get done."
Remus smiled a little.
"For my part, I neither like nor dislike Severus. No, Harry, I am speaking the truth. We shall never be bosom friends, perhaps; after all that happened between James and Sirius and Severus, there is too much bitterness there. But I do not forget that during the year I taught at Hogwarts, Severus made the Wolfsbane Potion for me every month, made it perfectly, so that I did not have to suffer as I usually do at the full moon."
Harry countered furiously, "But he 'accidentally let it slip that you were a werewolf, so you had to leave!"
Remus just shrugged, but Emma knew how Harry must be feeling and felt that he deserved some kind of explanation. She pressed, saying, "Harry, eventually that was going to come out into the open anyway. Hermione may be uncommonly clever, but she wouldn't have been the last student to discover the signs, especially in a class that studies werewolves for a whole chapter. Eventually, he would have had to leave anyway. Considering how badly we all know Severus wanted that job, it was actually very big of him not to do worse. Wolfsbane is a very complicated potion. He could have easily killed Remus and made it look like an accident. He chose to help instead."
Determined not to budge, Harry offered a new solution: "Maybe he didn't dare mess with the potion with Dumbledore watching him!"
Shaking his head, Remus smiled. "You are determined to hate him, Harry," he said. "And I understand; with James as your father, with Sirius as your godfather, you have inherited an old prejudice. By all means tell Dumbledore what you have told Arthur and Emma and me, but do not expect him to share your view of the matter; do not even expect him to be surprised by what you tell him. It might have been on Dumbledore's orders that Severus questioned Draco."
If Harry had planned to say more on that subject, it was cut off by the horrific end of Celestina Warbeck's song, punctuated with violent applause from the broadcast site that Molly dropped her knitting to eagerly partake in.
Fleur perked up at the applause.
"Eez eet over?" she asked loudly. "Thank goodness, what an 'orrible-"
"Who wants a nightcap?" Arthur said loudly, with a sudden rush of vigor. Emma snickered into her hand again. "Anyone for more eggnog?"
"How have things been working on your end lately, Remus?" Emma pressed, now that she had his attention and Arthur was moving for the kitchen. There was no point letting the conversation fall back into talk of Draco Malfoy. "What have you been up to?"
"Well, as you know," he said, stretching his legs in front of him, "I've been underground. Almost literally. That's why I haven't been able to write, Harry; sending letters to you, or really anyone, would have been something of a giveaway."
Harry frowned and sat forward.
"What do you mean?"
"He's been...living with an unstable minority population," Emma said delicately, in case Ginny or Ron were listening. She wasn't sure how much they were allowed to know, not being Harry. When Harry didn't seem to understand, Remus smiled and threw him a bone.
"Werewolves," he explained. "Nearly all of them are on Voldemort's side. Dumbledore wanted a spy and here I was...ready-made." Emma even started at the bitterness in his voice, and when Remus noticed her reaction he smiled a bit a softened his tone as he continued, "I am not complaining; it is necessary work and who can do it better than I? However, it has been difficult, gaining their trust. I bear the unmistakable signs of having tried to live among wizards, you see, whereas they have shunned normal society and live on the margins, stealing – and sometimes killing – to eat. When Emma says minority, she is being kind."
"How come they like Voldemort?" Harry asked.
"Well, Harry," Emma said, stretching out, "if you needed to steal or kill to eat, you'd be looking for a way to overthrow an unjust system as well. And Voldemort makes attractive offers about a better life to fringe groups, through the likes of Greyback-"
"Who's Greyback?"
"You haven't heard of him?" Emma watched Remus clench his hands slightly in his lap as he spoke, not looking either of them in the eye. "Fenrir Greyback is, perhaps, the most savage werewolf alive today. He regards it as his mission in life to bite and to contaminate as many people as possible; he wants to create enough werewolves to overcome the wizards. Voldemort has promised him prey in return for his services. Greyback specializes in children... Bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards. Voldemort has threatened to unleash him upon people's sons and daughters; it is a threat that usually produces good results." He licked his lips and looked at the fire for a moment. "It was Greyback who bit me."
Emma blinked, shocked.
"I never knew that," she said softly, suddenly realizing exactly how hard it was for Remus to be in love with Tonks, how hard it was to do his Order mission, to have a constant reminder of why he shouldn't be with her.
"Yes. My father had offended him. I did not know, for a very long time, the identity of the werewolf who had attacked me; I even felt pity for him, thinking that he had had no control, knowing by then how it felt to transform. But Greyback is not like that. At the full moon, he positions himself close to victims, ensuring that he is near enough to strike. He plans it all. And this is the man Voldemort is using to marshal the werewolves. I cannot pretend that my particular brand of reasoned argument is making much headway against Greyback's insistence that we werewolves deserve blood, that we ought to revenge ourselves on normal people."
Emma felt sick to her stomach.
"But you are normal!" Harry insisted. "You've just got a – a problem-"
Remus's laugh was startling, particularly because she hadn't heard it in so long. When he laughed, his eyes lit up and the lines on his face changed and he looked ten years younger, almost his proper age. When he laughed, she could see easily how Tonks had fallen in love with him. If only he could laugh in the mirror, if he could see how perfect they would look together, laughing.
"Sometimes you remind me a lot of James," Remus said, the laughter gone but his face still smiling and youthful. "He called it my 'furry little problem' in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit."
Arthur had returned with fresh eggnog, which he handed to the three of them, sitting down with his own glass. Emma quietly thanked him, taking a sip and looking over at Fred, who was winning the game of Exploding Snap. He glanced up at her and grinned, gesturing that she'd gotten a bit of foam on her lip, winking, and returning to his game. She wiped her lip as Harry asked, "Have you ever heard of someone called the Half-Blood Prince?"
"The Half-Blood what?" she asked, unsure if she'd heard him right.
"Prince."
He sounded very excited, but Remus looked very amused.
"There are no Wizarding princes," he said. "Is this a title you're thinking of adopting? I should have thought being 'the Chosen One' would be enough."
"Remus," Emma said, shaking her head, chiding him slightly. She could recall clearly how much Harry had hated being called The Boy Who Lived at school, and she was certain he wasn't taking much better to his new title, although the vindication must have felt nice.
"It's nothing to do with me!" Harry said, a little indignantly, his neck going slightly pink. "The Half-Blood Prince is someone who used to go to Hogwarts, I have his old Potions book. He wrote spells all over it, spells he invented. One of them was Levicorpus-"
"Oh, that one had a great vogue during my time at Hogwarts," Remus said, going a bit misty-eyed. Emma had never even heard of it. "There were a few months in my fifth year where you couldn't move for being hoisted into the air by your ankle."
She snorted, trying to picture such a spell being used frequently, no doubt by teenaged boys wanting to look at girls' knickers. Remus gave her a knowing smile.
"That sounds terrible," she said. "I hope you didn't use such a thing on any unsuspecting ladies, Remus."
He flushed a little and shook his head, looking down at his eggnog.
"My dad used it," Harry said, in a forced-casual tone. "I saw him in the Pensieve. He used it on Snape."
Remus shifted his knowing smile over to Harry, and Emma hid hers by taking another drink of eggnog.
"Yes," Remus said kindly, "but he wasn't the only one. As I say, it was very popular... You know how these spells come and go..."
"It sounds like it was created while you were there, though," Emma said thoughtfully. Sure, there were a few spells in vogue while she'd been in school, but most of the ones she knew were things like spells for a better-holding curl for your hair. Nothing so crude as this spell sounded.
"Not necessarily. Jinxes go in and out of fashion like everything else." At Harry's slight disappointment, Remus said, "James was a pureblood, Harry, and I promise you, he never asked us to call him 'Prince.'"
At Remus dropping the veil for him, Harry said, "And it wasn't Sirius? Or you?"
"Now that's even less likely," Emma said. "Sirius was pureblooded too, remember? And Remus just said he'd never used it."
Harry looked a little deflated.
"Oh," he said, looking over at the fire. "I just thought – well, he's helped me a lot in Potions classes, the Prince has."
"How old is this book, Harry?" Remus asked.
Emma took another drink of eggnog.
"I dunno, I've never checked."
"Well, perhaps that will give you some clue as to when the Prince was at Hogwarts."
Not even moments later, Fleur began to copy Celestina Warbeck's "A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love" and everyone decided this was the perfect cue to get some sleep. Emma saw Remus to the door and said, "You know, Tonks-"
"Emma, please," Remus sighed, clasping his cloak. "It has been very lovely to see you, and I'm glad that you're doing well, and that you're keeping an eye on her, but please don't get tangled up in this mess. You'll only end up disappointed for taking an interest."
She gave him a rueful smile and said, "It's a bit late for that, Remus. Just...let me say that she's very unhappy. And I know you feel that this is what's best for her, but sometimes...sometimes safest isn't best." She frowned. "If Sirius hadn't been confined to what was safest, and someone thought of his happiness once in a while, maybe he'd still be alive."
"Emma, that's hardly-"
"They've both got Black blood, Remus," she said, raising her eyebrows. "Just...think on it. I'm not asking more of you."
He sighed, rubbing his eyes, obviously not wanting her to see that it hurt him to know Tonks was in pain because of him, but he hugged her and said, "Happy Christmas, Emma. I'll think. I can't promise you more than that. But know...I think about her all the time anyway. I really do."