Chapter One: Hold Fast

And then Remus Lupin - what remained of him - apparated with a pop onto the wide slope of grass: ears ringing, badly splinched. Two startled Highland sheep bleated their complaints and cantered away. A disorientating haze of cool wet fog eddied around, displaced by his body, and it took a moment to realize he had taken her with him. Tonks must have grabbed him just as he'd turned: one little white fist was gripping his forearm, her nails digging in through the sleeve of his cloak. She released him at once, wiped her damp brown hair out of her face with one hand and drew her wand with the other. She turned in a slow circle, eyes darting across the shaggy pasture and the wooded foothills beyond. As she came back to facing him her heel went in a rabbit hole and she toppled backwards and sat down hard on the ground.

"You were just going to apparate away from me," she accused.

Remus huffed a frustrated sigh, eyes flicking up at the low gray ceiling of clouds, before he knelt to see to her.

"Tonks." His voice was gravelly. "Are you missing anything?"

She blinked at him for a moment as if confused, then raised her left hand. The pad of her third finger was missing, and blood was smeared across her palm and her face. Remus touched his wand to the wound and murmured as she ran her other hand over her stomach, then each leg. She didn't flinch as her smooth new fingertip unfurled like a leaf and wrapped itself into position. She rolled each ankle and wiggled her feet.

"I think I'm down a toenail," she mused, sticking her right foot up in the air and circling it. Remus's hand went to pull on the knot of her bootlaces, but she set her foot back on the ground and leaned away, picking her wand up off the grass. "I've got it," she mumbled, not meeting his eyes. "You look after yourself."

He could feel a cold sting on his right earlobe; he stroked the tip of his wand down the rim of his ear and the sensation faded. The wand came away bloody. There was a powerful cramp lancing through his left chest wall with every breath and he dug two fingers into his ribcage to find it. The space where one of his left ribs should have been gave way spongily, with a sharp pain that seemed to leap up to his collarbone. He took a quick deep breath - more pain - and slid his wand between the buttons of his shirt to mend it. Tendrils of moss-green smoke curled up from under his collar and snaked into the gray-streaked hair behind his ears.

"You shouldn't have done that," he muttered bitterly.

"Yeah, you keep saying that," she mumbled, sliding her wand out from beneath the tongue of one boot.

"It's my mission. Dumbledore never said anything about a second -"

"Well he's fucking dead and here we are, eh?" The hot flare up the center of him must have tightened his face because she immediately winced and, speaking rapidly, continued: "Sorry - I'm so sorry, Remus - but we always have a second. Even when you were -" she seemed to catch herself "- undercover, you had Mad-Eye as your contact. It makes no sense to just apparate off on your own. What if you got into trouble? Who would know how to extract you?"

Who would bother, said the harsh whisper in his head, but Remus merely pressed his lips together tightly and felt his new rib through his shirt. It was conjured and likely wouldn't last long. It crackled slightly under his touch.

He stood with some pain and effort and offered her a hand; she started to reach for it but suddenly withdrew.

"You're not trying to apparate me back, are you?"

"You're splinched. You'll need a healer to mend it properly."

"One toenail! And a bit of fingerprint. Not nearly as bad as you. And you're not supposed to apparate right after a major splinching."

Remus already had his wand at his side and had been weighing whether he could be quick enough to get a hand round her wrist, but she was irritatingly right and he couldn't risk splinching them worse and having to scrap the mission.

He pocketed his wand.

"Please go home, Tonks," he said stonily.
Without a look back at her he started to lope up the grassy hill. It was four kilometres to town and another one or so to the meeting place. He should have plenty of time to cover it even with his aching rib if he didn't let himself get sidetracked by Tonks.

He felt a nameless hollowness at his core. His back and stomach were tight and sore, more even than usual, and he wondered if he had left behind something else he hadn't found yet. He pressed his left hand to his side.

"You'll be needing Skele-Gro if that's a rib," she called after him, her tone as cold as his. "I can brew you a stopgap if we can find a safe place."

He stopped and exhaled heavily. A dull soreness throbbed in his side. He knew he had a few hours at most before his body started to reject the conjured rib and after that he'd be feverish, achy and fatigued. Vomiting and confusion would come later. He could vanish it and conjure a new one but it would only delay the inevitable. It wasn't ideal. He'd have to abandon the mission and it would be his second failure in a row. He couldn't countenance it.

He loathed how he kept finding reasons to need her.

He turned to face Tonks. She was still sitting on the grass, robes hiked up over scabbed knees, hair a wet mess, exhausted and drawn with a long smudge of blood across her cheekbone. A strange, sick longing swelled inside his chest, and it and the rib and his twingeing back and his crepitating knees and the waxing moon and the blood on her face and Dumbledore is dead and the way he recalled her pale stricken look when he'd turned to disapparate and the pink-white tendons drooping sickeningly out of Bill's neck and her trembling, shrilling voice saying insteadof me you've chosen death! Worse than death! and the seared-in memory of the rusty smell of the little Montgomery boy's blood and the lusty, riotous laughter of his fellows and the ribbon of green light that had buzzed under his wand arm yesterday and sent the Death Eater Gibbon sprawling over the tower stairs and Sirius laughing, falling, laughing, and dead, dead forever all made him want to double over and lie on the ground.

Her face was grim as she stared at him. He broke eye contact and grudgingly jerked his head to beckon her. Her face seemed to soften; she nodded and scrambled to her feet.

He waited for her to catch up.

They walked in quiet past ruminating sheep, yellowing rolls of hay, and over a rickety wooden stile which nearly defeated Tonks. Remus had to help unstick her foot from it. Later, he caught her arms without thinking when she slipped on the smooth stones of a dry creek, before his hands sprung away like she'd burned them. She looked back at him reproachfully but said nothing.

After a while he sighed, "I'm sorry to ask. You can't change your face, can you?"

A long pause. "I can a bit."

He looked at her, and she squeezed her eyes closed as they walked. Her nose arched aquiline, and her brow and chin changed shape too, but the overall effect was uncanny, disproportionate, unnatural. It wasn't her best work, and Remus felt a slow dripping guilt for thinking so.

"Not your...?"

Her jaw seemed to harden and one hand went up to rake through the ends of her messy hair. "Can't."

Her face was an uncanny simulation of a face, but under the same tangled dull-chestnut hair she still looked like Tonks. Remus found it unsettling. He wanted to tell her to change back, but instead he asked, "Would you feel more comfortable in disguise?"

Tonks scrunched her face again and morphed her nose into a miniature elephant's trunk. "Yeah, actually."

A laugh bubbled up inside his chest and, annoyed at himself, he stifled it, sending a zap of pain across his side. He looked at her with all the sternness he could muster. "Tonks."

"I'll change it back after you brief me."

"I'll brief you when we're somewhere safe."

"Guess I'll be an elephant until we arrive, then."

Remus clenched his teeth. "Tonks, for once can you just-"

She morphed her nose into a duckbill, startling him silent. They stopped walking and she turned to look around the gently undulating fields.

"D'you think those sheep back there were Death Eaters?" she stage-whispered. Her voice was nasal from the duckbill. A murmuration of birds rose from the wood at the edge of the pasture, and Tonks pointed to it with barely-supressed delight on her face. "Shit, we've been made!"

"Constant vigilance, isn't it?" Remus said archly. Tonks' face fell immediately into a scowl. She screwed up her face and changed her eyes to the glistening, brownish bud-like stalks of a snail.

Hot frustration was starting to rise in Remus's face and neck and he turned away from her, anxiously carding his fingers through his hair. She always chose the worst times to be obdurate. Childish.

Practically a child, hissed the voice inside him, and what does that make you?

He covered his face with his hands for a moment. He felt drained by her very presence.

He hadn't slept since before the battle. She'd let him use her shower after, when he'd caught up with her on the path back to Hogsmeade in the gray early morning. She'd been shambling down the road like an Inferius. When she had turned to him and he'd seen the tired, beseeching look on her it had felt like something breaking off inside of him. They'd gone in silence up to her filthy room in Hogsmeade and she'd gone to shower first while he sat with his elbows on his knees and his fingers interlaced in his lap on the end of her rumpled bed. She'd smelt so good when she came out. He'd thought about the scent of her and how it would feel to bury his nose in her neck while he had showered, tense and fidgety. When he had gotten out her dark hair was soaking damp patches into the shoulders of her robes and the tip of her nose was pink like she'd been blowing it. He thought he might never have loved her as much as he did at that moment, at half eight in the morning in her cramped bedsit above the Post Office.

She must have seen it in his face because she'd started arguing with him again.

The heavy mist was turning into drizzle. Automatically, he cast an impervius charm over her, then himself.

"So where are we and what are we doing and why," said Tonks's steely voice from behind him. More gently, she added, "You know that I need to know."

He could tell by her voice that she'd gotten rid of the morphs and when he turned to look at her, she was herself again: hair plastered in squiggles on her forehead, dark circles under her eyes, stubborn tension in her jaw. He started to walk and she followed.

"Scotland," he began. "The village of Kilnaricroy."

He heard her whisper a spell and the patter of the light rain on the surface of his impervius charm was silenced. He continued, able to hear himself better: "Mostly muggle. A small Wizarding population in town and in the hills. About forty kilometers northwest of Inverness. On a floodplain of the River Brora." He glanced over at her; she had that hard, focused look she'd get when she was listening to Alastor Moody. "I'll be meeting someone outside of the village." In his peripheral vision he saw Tonks swivel her head toward him and he raised a hand to stop her protesting. "Just an informant. I'll be gathering information and passing on some instructions." She was still looking at him with narrowed eyes. "I don't expect any trouble," he added mildly.

"Well, I can cover you from -"

"You can go into town and collect what you'll need for the potion," he cut across her. "He'll not be expecting a second and it won't do to spook him."

She gave him a deadpan look.

"You had to run out here the day after -" she flapped a hand wearily. "- everything, just to meet an informant?"

"After our first contact, I'm to check into the inn and await further instruction."

"Instruction from...?"

"The informant. I'll be gathering what reconnaisance I can over a few days and compiling a dossier for Kingsley."

"A dossier for Kingsley," she repeated at a murmur. "A lot of faff for a fucking dossier."

"It's only the start. In time, and with luck, I'll be able to arrange for direct observation, possibly even infiltration -"

She grabbed his sleeve, almost unbalancing both of them, scattering the rain rolling off his protective spell.

"Infiltration of what? Helga's minge, will you stop being so bloody vague?"

"It's a church," he said simply. "My informant is a minister."

"Muggle church?"

"The congregation are muggles, yes."

She blinked a few times. "But your minister is a wizard?"

Remus only nodded in reply, watching her study him, letting her piece it together. Her face when she was trying to work something out was so determined and serious it always made his heart flap like a startled thrush in his chest. Even now.

"The congregation are muggles and the clergy are wizards," she continued cautiously. A look of revulsion came over her face. "Blimey, that's..." She shuddered and started walking again, with purpose.

"Performing miracles," Remus said softly, following her. "Healing the afflicted."

At the bottom of a steep hill, they encountered a repelling charm that only seemed to work on Tonks; Remus walked through easily while she kept slowly turning and walking in the opposite direction as if she'd been through a revolving door.

"Jinxed against law enforcement, maybe," he guessed as both bobbed their wands in the air to dismantle it.

Kilnaricroy came into view as they topped the hill. Slate roofs dark with rain, a cobbled high street, patchwork crofts all around, white mist slouching over the dark river in the distance. On a ridge above town stood a leaning old gray-stone chapel, half-ruined.

"Are they working for Voldemort?"

"He has taken an interest. I'm to see to it that that doesn't happen."

"We are," Tonks quietly corrected.

Remus looked over at her. She was scanning the valley that cradled the settlement with a sharp alertness. The Auror in her was unnerving at times, almost predatory.

"Do we have a cover?" she asked. "Small town, we'll be noticed -"

"In town we're Muggles. Muggles come out here to find the church."

"And to our man inside?"

"He knows I'm working for Dum - for the Order." Tonks slowly turned her face to one side, eyeing him, waiting for more. He added in a low voice: "To his superiors I'm a wizard looking to... to get in on the action."

Tonks's face froze and she stared at him, big-eyed. After a second she seemed to gather herself.

"How exciting," she said flatly, her gaze snapping back toward the village. "Where's the rendezvous point?"

Remus pointed to indicate the old church.

Tonks knelt and checked the laces and straps on her boots the way she always had, tugging each one. It hurt his chest to see it again after so long.

She looked up at him. "I'm going to find brassicatcher croziers, cranebill bicuspids, and - er, a few other things. Then I'll try to find a shop in town. When I've finished I'll wait for you on the market street, north side." She stood, leaned in close, pointed with her wand, and a red dot zoomed to float over the view in front of them like a pin in a map. He could feel the warmth of her body against his arm through their robes. "There. You'll brief me on the main points of what you've got from our informant and on our next steps before we go to the inn. Any trouble, send up a red flare. I'll be watching." She leant away and skewered him with a look. "Any trouble."

He squirmed a bit despite himself. He knew he wouldn't be sending up a flare.

"Oi." She prodded him with her wand. "Remus. You know how it works. Say it back."

His old mission partner. Every bit as curt and officious as Alastor, sometimes.

"High street, north end. Red flare," he recited, then assured her, "Three hours at most. I'll be back by dusk. If I don't arrive..."

Tonks rummaged in her robe pockets, one at a time, squinting at the sky as she silently inventoried them.

"If you don't arrive I'm coming after you," she said distractedly.

"Tonks," Remus snapped, but she was already marching toward the treeline. As she walked away, he flicked his wand to vanish the browning stripes of blood from her cheek and hand. Running his fingers over his ear and neck, he realized the blood there had been vanished already.

Back in Tonks's room, the floor was a mess. Strewn with varicolored socks, dirty underwear, bath towels, scrolls embossed with Ministry letterhead, paper wrappers stained translucent with chip grease. Next to the disheveled bed and the pile of curse-singed robes, on the floorboards where they'd stood arguing after the battle, after Bill, after Dumbledore, after everything, lay two toenails, the flesh of a fingertip, five lumpy yellowish gallstones, most of an earlobe and a rib.

Scrabbling brassicatcher is a decent substitute for Chinese chomping cabbage, and it grows in some of the boreal forests north of the Caledonian canal. Tonks crept in a squat down the bank of a slough, slipping on the wet understory, scanning the ground for the telltale leaves. Fernlike, scab-red and curled fractally into a tight spiral at the tips. She'd taken the advanced Field Healing courses at the Auror academy, and the section on field potions was one of those times she had felt like a real Hufflepuff. Making do with what you've got, getting your hands dirty, communicating with the living canopies and carpets of the earth.

Raindrops tapped and drummed on the branches, toadstools, puddles and leaves all around.

When she found a clutch of reddish fiddleheads, she carefully plucked one before it could unfurl and snatch her finger and then rolled it tacky between her palms. She took a long deep sniff: licorice and pepper. Brassicatcher. The smell took her right back to her fourth term at the academy, the chemical-grape bubbles of the stay-awake potion everyone was swilling, the satiny black bob she'd worn for a few weeks that had totally failed to make anyone take her more seriously, her awkward boyfriend Clifford Wycherley and his soft pinches at her elbow when he felt she wasn't paying him enough attention.

Remus never did anything like that. He seemed uncomfortable when she looked at him too much. Sometimes they'd get to talking and laughing together and then suddenly he'd stop and look at her with an expression that seemed confused and unhappy. In bed, when he'd sometimes get excited and forget himself, go a little harder or say something a bit filthy, he'd often look mortified afterward, like he wished he could disappear.

A magpie chittered in the branches right above her head and startled her. She shook her head at herself.

Look sharp, Tonks! said the Mad-Eye in her head. Dreams in your head, curses in your arse!

Tonks squeezed her eyes shut and did the focus trick she'd taught herself in school: she blew a stream of air out her pursed lips and visualized Clifford, Academy robes, purply drink, bob and Remus all blowing out of her mind as if in a strong wind.

She opened her eyes and broke four Brassicatcher leaves off at the stems, stenting open her left robe pocket with her fingers and dropping them on top of the two curled-up dead spiders and the corpse of one Inland Seelie Fae. She'd zapped it with a freezing jinx within ten minutes of laying out fae bait - pure luck, really. She had resolved to try to hide it from Remus later, because she was one of the only people who realised he was wrapping up all the doxies they'd sprayed at headquarters and burying them in back of the house.

Another long breath to send Remus's solemn, tender, finely-lined face in the garden's evening half-light (and Sirius'a knobbly fingers gripping a bottle) skittering away from her mind like tumbleweeds.

All that remained were the cranebill teeth and something to use for a cauldron. If she'd had time to prep she would have brought her Portabru, but she hadn't known he was about to try to end the argument by apparating off. Berk.

The huge, black, blinking eyes of an Inland Seelie Fae saw the brown-haired beast dust its hands off on its thighs and tromp away through the bracken, carrying his mate's murdered body in its pocket. He unleashed a stream of outraged buzzes and clicks from his hiding place in the twigs of an elm tree, but the beast just tripped over a root and then heedlessly stumbled into the dense woods. The fae dropped himself limply onto an ivory shelf fungus below, sending out a poof of white spores, staring up at the canopy, his tiny body stilled by an outsized grief.

Unfamiliar sigils carved in the posts of a garden fence. A fox impaled through the mouth on a post in a hydrangea bed. A wind chime made from dead reptiles and glass bottles, brown and green and brown and green.

Tonks kept a running list of every unsettling thing she clocked as she walked through the village toward the main road.

Curtains twitching closed as she passed a house.

A goat's head nailed above a doorway, tongue lolling, long fingers of dried blood stretching all the way down to the stoop.

No muggle cars on the streets or in the drives.

From the edge of the wood where she'd stashed her robes in a shivering flutterby bush, the village had looked old and sleepy, with white-walled cottages scattered down curving roads. A bit charming, really, from far away.

The rain had swept across the little valley and carried itself away into the highlands by then. When she'd flicked her wand and evaporated Remus's impervius charm, she'd felt a chill brush across her and goosebumps populate the flesh of her upper arms.

Outside of town she had discreetly removed the design on her ironic Celestina Warbeck t-shirt. Remus would be relieved she'd changed into some boring muggle shit. She'd stuck her wand deep in her pocket, out of sight.

Plastic muggle toys had littered the weedy grass around the caravans, their bright colors fading to pastels in the sun. On a rope stretched between a caravan and a tree hung some underwear and two fluttering purple robes that looked like they might belong to a wizard, but were embroidered in gold thread with something like nonsense runes; Tonks had dropped Ancient Runes in fourth year and never looked back, but she had been sure these weren't quite right.

Everything looked closed on the deserted high street besides a corner grocery with an orange-red buzzing neon OPEN sign and yellowed Lucozade adverts papered over all the windows.

Less than an hour until dusk. She felt exposed on the main road, and backed up against a hedgerow, checking around her for any watching eyes. She thought about the artful disguises she used to love to create: green vines of hair, blended with intense precision to the varied greens of a bush; skin in patches of green and brown, shifting subtly with the changing light of late afternoon; robes transfigured into masses of fluttering leaves. She thought about Remus's face when she would whisper to him from her hiding spot and he'd peer until he spotted the whites of her eyes. The blend of wonderment and pride. It had been so long since she'd seen him happy.

No use in any of that palaver now, if she could even manage it. She cast a quick disillusionment charm on herself. The cold dripping sensation felt like dread.

Remus came down the road just as the hills began to blush in the long red light of the sunset. She spotted the look on him from a hundred metres away - hands in his pockets, shoulders slightly hunched - and knew something had gone wrong.

She whistled at him as he got closer. He stopped in the road and there was tension in his posture as he slowly turned toward her, his eyes saccading back and forth across her side of the street. She lifted her charm and stepped forward from the hedge, and for just the barest second she thought his face looked disappointed to see her there.

"Well?" She heard the strain of annoyance in her own voice.

"Never showed," said Remus hollowly, Tonks wrapped her arms around herself and cast a wary look around. She mumbled and enveloped them in the white static of a muffling charm without taking her wand from her pocket.

"I've got a bad feeling, mate," she said in a low voice. "I think we should scrap this and get out. You need food and sleep. And a rib. We both just... we haven't even slept since... everything happened. This isn't a good situation."

"It's a miscommunication, almost certainly," said Remus mildly and Tonks bristled.

"Remus, where is everyone? It's got ambush written all over it. I've been feeling eyes on me," she said gravely. Remus started to shake his head, but she pressed on with urgency. "There were dead animals back there - a goat's head nailed up and some weird sort of art made of... like, all these flat dried lizards. It's not right."

"Yes, Tonks, it's an odd place. Many people here are under the influence of a charismatic religious figure. We're likely to encounter a great many unusual things."

His professor voice was infuriating.

"Don't fucking patronise me, Remus. What's got into you, anyway? This isn't like you, you were always so cautious, always so smart, you never used to take these kinds of risks when we -"

"Go home, then," Remus interrupted, and stepped around her to walk toward the center of town. The muffling charm burst with a crackle as they separated. She wheeled around, chilled by his abruptness.

"That rib is going to rot inside you," she yelled after him, hating that she was shouting at him in public again, hating the shrill and abject version of herself to which he kept reducing her. "You won't last five more hours if you don't take care of it."

His head bowed and his hands jammed themselves into his pockets and he kept walking.

Her fingers found her wand through the fabric of her trousers. She'd apparate to London and find a pub and get pissed. She'd just find some bloke, she told herself for the millionth time, some bloke with a beater's body and a pocket full of clinking galleons and she'd let him get her whiskeys and some hot greasy chips and put his hand up her shirt and maybe she'd feel something besides her relentless pounding heart and her limp hair itching the nape of her neck and this useless, stupid, suffocating love.

The grimace of pain in Remus's face as he felt the missing rib in his chest appeared behind her eyes. Then his face again as she'd imagined it all this year: gray and still with bluing lips that would never be kissed, never wake her with a soft brush against her jaw ever again.

Chips and whiskey and the obliterating drumbeat of someone else fucking her. Her wand warmed under her touch, waiting.

She closed her eyes, blew a long breath out through pursed lips.

Then she started walking.

Note: Thanks for reading! Will update roughly once a week! I appreciate reviews and will try to respond! Love you!