4 Auror's Office
"You're late." Williamson hadn't even looked up from his desk, and he was already giving Tonks a hard time.
"Where's the fire?" she quipped back.
He pointed to her desk, covered in files. On Thursdays, the grave emergency was always buried in the mounds of parchment piled on her desk. She kept the rest of her grumbling to herself and sat down to sort it all out. A brief glance at Williamson's greying ponytail suggested to her that it might be a good idea not to disturb him for a while. The Senior Auror's job was to give his Junior counterpart a hard time most days, and recently, he'd been doing a stellar job of it.
As he moved a stack of parchment from one side of his desk to the other, Tonks noticed that her piles were twice as large as his.
"Sod it all," she muttered to herself, kicking at the desk with the toe of her boot. Just because she was a few minutes late, didn't mean she deserved half of the old goat's load. She rose angrily from her seat, about to cause a scene, but then she saw the clock over the door and sat back down.
An hour and a half late. Normally, they'd dock her pay for that, but Williamson was granting her leniency for once.
From the other desk, Williamson turned slightly and quirked a bushy eyebrow in her direction. Tonks gave him an inky salute with her quill and started signing off on the closed cases from last week. Then the hard ass got up with a stack of papers from his desk, cutting his "to do" pile in half yet again. He turned to her.
"Found something, did you?"
Tonks jutted out her chin in the affirmative. She wasn't going to deny anything.
"Wanna talk about it?"
"No," she grunted, scrawling a messy signature on another case file and slamming it shut.
"You know where to find me," he said.
Tonks looked up from her stack and locked eyes with her superior. He wasn't being unkind. He had always supported her circumstances, and he'd granted her space for now. It wouldn't last forever, but she was going to take what she could get.
"Sure," she said. "Thanks."
She tried to smile to let him know she was okay. Williamson gave her a curt nod and made to leave, but first slammed the stack of files on top of her "to do" pile.
Without a word, he strode down the hall to the breakroom. Tonks stared grimly at the new pile of files and wanted to find a suitable name for him that would embody her frustrations, but her issue had never been with Williamson.
Searching for the toerag that had nearly cost her her own life was one thing, but meeting him face to face was entirely another matter. The wrinkled, sagging cheeks and sunken eyes made him look like he belonged in another century, but when he'd transformed, it seemed that he'd been wearing another skin entirely. The dangerously robust creature she'd faced had lost his grey entirely, gaining thick, auburn hair all over. But then if people were after him, it would make sense for him to disguise his real features.
He'd apologized for almost killing her, which had surprised her. She'd dreamt so many nights about what would happen when she finally found him. She'd wondered if her temper would stay in check, or if she would have ended up pummeling him into the ground for attempting to end her. She probably had no right to judge him when she knew so little. The fact that he was still in danger, practically running for his life from some unknown threat just this morning, made her keep her barbed comments to herself. From what she'd seen of his situation, their lives were still in grave danger, and she was going to have to fix that first before anything else.
In the five minutes she'd been signing closed cases, it had finally sunk in. Her bloody soulmate was real, but the Unspeakables in the Department of Mysteries couldn't tell her why the mark had appeared on her wrist last year. She didn't want this. She didn't know anyone who would. The whole idea of a soulmate was stupid. She'd already loved and lost. Her short time with Remus Lupin had been wonderful, and tragic, and she wasn't ready to go through any of that ever again. She wasn't sure she'd ever be ready for anyone else.
And Williamson hadn't deserved the blow off she'd given him. The old bloke had been with her when she'd suddenly collapsed with no other explanation than a strange glowing red mark that had appeared on her wrist. His quick thinking, rushing her to the Department of Mysteries instead of the emergency ward of St. Mungo's Hospital, had saved her life.
The Unspeakables had been able to render the link 'ineffective' mostly by putting her into a magical coma to stop the effects of whatever was happening on the other end of the connection. They'd also helped her figure out a way to scry for where the other mark was located, but that was as far as they could help.
Grumbling, she brushed aside the stack of remaining files and did a cursory search through public records for the name that he'd given her. Bill Weasley, son of Molly and Arthur Weasley. Of course she knew Molly and Arthur Weasley, which meant that Bill had likely gone to Hogwarts. She held the picture from his Apparition License up to the light. His face was smooth and matched the lilting voice that she'd grown accustomed to, and of course there were the broad shoulders that she recognized. He seemed familiar, but she couldn't match his face inside her memories. She would have remembered that smile too, full of promise and way too photogenic for his own good. How had she missed him? She leafed through school records and nodded. Gryffindor. Of course. Damned Gryffindors.
Well, that answered that question. Remus had been a Gryffindor, but she had excused him for that a long time ago. She'd mostly stayed with her Hufflepuff classmates and rarely made friends outside of her own House in school. But after Hogwarts, she'd befriended Mrs. Weasley. Molly had been the one to convince Remus to give Tonks a chance. In the middle of conflict, in the middle of chaos and corruption and imminent danger, they'd fallen in love and made it work, and he had been worth fighting for.
Remus had lived with Lycanthropy almost all his life. It had taken Tonks a long time to get through to him and to get him to trust her, and himself. She was familiar with Wolfsbane and how it smelled – as well as how to administer it, and that was why she'd recognized the obvious symptoms in Bill… Marcus... she'd found his alias while snooping through the Gringotts employee listings, and a few other things that were highly interesting to her.
Underneath the bitter circumstances was a curious twist of fate. Coffeeshop bloke and Remus had way too much in common.
This was the part where her mind wanted to slip back to her morning indulgence, the sleek broad shoulders of the man she knew nothing about, except his lovely voice and peculiar taste in breakfast beverages. But that ancient looking face and that hair, well, it had been a convincing disguise, because he hadn't looked anything like a Weasley. She scribbled the name he'd given her on a scrap of parchment and spelled it over to Magical Records Inquiries.
Tonks Vanished the public Weasley records off her desk and went back to signing her closed case files. Maybe there would be more useful information in the Inquiry findings. At the moment, he was just a bloke with strong shoulders and an adventurous smile, and she was just an Auror with resources and a strong will to live. This whole Soulmate thing was simply a Curse of Convenience. The sooner she handled his problems, the sooner they could get on with their separate lives.
She allowed the monotony of the parchment singing to lull her into a mindless daze, and soon enough, the stack had dwindled to a few remaining files, and her head was clear again.
"Thank Merlin for Closed Case Thursdays!"
Tonks looked up to see Williamson's weathered face peering down at her. In his hand was a small stack of confidential files that he set deliberately on the corner of her desk.
Not in her "to do" pile. Beside it. Her eyes flickered over the labels:
Bill Weasley…
Bill Weasley…
Bill Weasley…
Tonks waited until Williamson was back at his desk before she tore into the first file. Some of the information, she'd figured out for herself. He'd been attacked on June 30th, 1997, by the same werewolf that had attacked Remus: Fenrir Greyback. But because Greyback was in human form at the time of the attack, he hadn't contracted full-blown Lycanthropy. The St. Mungo's reports had all come back negative for the active version of the virus.
That had changed. He had transformed right before her eyes – not completely, and it wasn't the full moon either… and all of that was deeply troubling.
Then Fleur Weasley's file stopped her in her tracks. The official report concluded that she had been murdered by a werewolf… the date looked strangely familiar, but Tonks couldn't place it yet. The Auror assigned to the case stated that there was no sign of the husband. Subsequent inquiries stated that his family hadn't heard from him after the incident.
The family… the Weasleys…
Tonks set down the files and took a slow breath, counting to ten. She hadn't known Bill, but she had known Molly and Arthur, his parents, who were in the Order with Remus. More recently, Tonks had gotten to know their youngest son, Ronald Weasley, a hot headed Auror trainee, along with Potter, Longbottom, and Bones.
Molly had been like a second mother to her when she needed her the most. Tonks felt ashamed that she hadn't been there for her when she'd heard talk of the family planning the funeral of their daughter-in-law, and remembered making an excuse not to go because one more funeral would have broken her. She'd clung to the excuse of her job at the Ministry.
She should go and talk to Molly… and say what? "Hi, I just saw your missing son, his Lycanthropy has been activated and he may have killed his wife… and by the way he's my soulmate."
Bollocks.
"You won't believe this!"
Richard Savage announced to the mostly empty room. Williamson looked up from his reading, an open case file since Tonks had finished signing all of his closed ones.
"What have you got, Savage?" the Senior Auror asked.
"Our contact just came through with a hit list distributed among the Hunters."
Tonks groaned. "They're so cocky that they're advertising?"
"Hey, I say we don't knock 'em", Savage said. "Last week's kill shortened our workload considerably. We should send them a cheesecake… and then arrest the lot of them, of course," he added at Williamson's pointed glare.
"Who's under their wand this time?" Williamson asked.
Savage leaned over his supervisor's desk and showed him the report.
"Show this to Tonks," Williamson said.
"But it's Closed Case Thursday. She drew the short straw, which means I get the actives today."
"Show her, now," Williamson ordered.
Savage tossed the report onto Tonk's desk. She gave Williamson a questioning look, but the back of his head didn't respond, so she scanned the names and stopped dead at number one.
Bill Weasley…
Great. This was just great.
Hunters. That's what he was running from. So far, when the Hunters put a name on their list, the name ended up in the obituaries soon enough, or strange bits of them were found in conspicuous spots around town, (ripped off fingernails that matched the DNA test of so and so put in an envelope and mailed to the Ministry – taunting them that they could do the job better, and faster than the Ministry) and the Aurors had their hands full with everything else, so the rogue group had largely gone unchecked…
If Bill was on that list and the Hunters succeeded in bringing down their next target, Tonks wouldn't have to worry about whether her soulmate was a dunderheaded buffoon, because she'd be dead along with him.
Savage had gone off to the breakroom, and Tonks had no idea how to process this information.
"Time's up, Tonks," Williamson said from his desk. He swiveled his chair around and met her, glare to glare.
"I'm all ears."