warning for body horror/bodily functions
mum's little pies
lamb mince
bone stock 2 spoons
sweet onion
mushrooms 1 handful any type
salt
pepper
plain flour in a pile
lamb fat 1 handful
water on the hob 1 half pan
cook the mince and veg mum's way. DON'T forget the salt. wet with the lamb stock and set to wait. oil the tins. melt the fat in the water on the hob. DON'T let it boil. mix into the flour with fingers. hum greensleeves while you do it. when it's big sticky clumps roll it flat and cut out circles with the pink mug. push the circles into the tin and fill. pinch the lids on with fingers and think about the glass bottles in that kitchen window. bake at 180 til it's brown and stay near the oven. DON'T eat them when out of sorts or you'll be in bed crying all day again
When Remus stepped from the sunbright afternoon into the cool dim of the Shrike and Marten, he lost his sight for just a moment as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Bright colours came back first: the burnt orange of the beveled-glass lamps, then the otherworldly pink of Tonks's hair. The white rag in the spotted hand of George the innkeeper, wiping the lip of a pint glass. The glinting auburn of the fox pelt on the wall.
He could hear the low tones of the Minister's voice from somewhere. Tonks groped back for his hand and pulled him along by it. She wasn't squeezing hard like she sometimes did, but gritty pain scrubbed between his knucklebones.
He was getting worse.
His skin felt crackly and oversensitive, like it was embedded with little shards of glass. The temperature change between outside and inside had made him aware of the heat radiating off his skin, and the place on his brow where Tonks had felt for his fever was itchy with sweat.
The two of them wound round tables to the back of the pub in the smooth tow of the Minister's voice. They found him in a wood-walled booth in the corner, his eyes in shadow under the harsh yellow cast of the hanging lamp. A sandy-haired teenage boy in a t-shirt sat beside, leaning in close and whispering. Both looked up and fell silent as Remus and Tonks approached.
"You'll have to excuse me," the Minister said to the boy, with a note of genuine apology in his voice, "duty calls."
"S'all right," the boy muttered, sliding out of the booth. He tossed his fringe from his eyes and turned on Remus and Tonks with an up-and-down look. "Cracking show this morning," he said to Remus. Winking at Tonks, he added, "Love your hair, Miss Jane."
He said her codename with a lopsided wry smile. Tonks blinked rapidly as he sauntered off.
"Good luck, Sebastian," the Minister called after him. There was a strange gravity in the way he said it.
Tonks clambered into the place Sebastian had been sitting. Remus pulled out a chair and eased himself into it. The pain in his left side spiked and retreated.
"Listen," Tonks said quickly and in a low hush, "we're in a bind, it's a bit serious, we're—"
"I'm splinched," Remus cut in. The Minister folded his hands on the table and looked down at them, his brow in creases. After a moment of quiet, Remus added, "That's an apparition injury, when—"
He stopped talking when the Minister and Tonks both turned offended glares on him.
"I know what splinching is," the Minister said icily. "How bad?"
Remus shifted in his seat. "So far it's been manageable," he started, and Tonks glared at him even harder. It made no sense, but he could feel the glare in his rib somehow; it throbbed with the exasperation in her face.
"It's four days on and it's gone bad—probably infected," Tonks said quickly. "He's got a fever—" she shot a quick look around the deserted inn and then touched the tip of her wand to Remus's temple. When she pulled it away, the tip glowed bright orange and she squinted at it. "—about 38C at the moment, but it'll only get worse. I've done what I can—I've got a bit of training—but..." she glanced at Remus, then leaned in toward the Minister and murmured as if she didn't want Remus to hear. "...it'll be out of my hands soon."
Remus hated being discussed in this way: like the chilly arguments behind his parents' bedroom door when he was small, like Sirius and Tonks abruptly hushing when he walked into the kitchen at Number 12. The Minister was staring at the ceiling now, thinlipped and ash-gray. It felt like a long time before he spoke.
"I'll take you to her. It's hard to say how much she can do—if she even decides to help." He gave Tonks a weary look. "She's had quite a day."
Tonks looked so annoyed at this that Remus almost laughed. The Minister slotted himself out of the booth.
"We're due back," he sighed, and walked stiffly out the back door. Tonks got up and tried to help Remus up by the elbow, but he pulled his arm out of her grasp and held in a wince as he stood.
They followed the Minister outside. Pushpins of pain in Remus's eyes as his pupils shrank in the daylight. The Minister lit a cigarette and flicked the spent match into a litter of styrofoam cups. Remus watched the slender body of white smoke writhe from it until it burned out.
"The Elder is having one of his—well, sort of a party. Tomorrow. You'll be expected to—" The Minister waved his cigarette in the air. "Do your thing."
Remus nodded as Tonks shook her head in disbelief.
"A party?" she started, but fell quiet when Remus looked at her.
"I can't take both of you," the Minister muttered. "My apparition—it's—I'm self-taught." He stared at Remus as if challenging him to say something about it. Remus shrugged in a way he hoped was sympathetic, and the Minister unceremoniously grabbed him by the arm and apparated him.
The pull and twist of it was hell on his rib. He fell to his hands and knees on the grass of the Elder's vast estate, the hot pressure of a dry-heave ramming up his throat like a fist.
"Ah—fuck," the Minister growled, sounding quite unlike the smooth, lilting showman he'd been onstage that morning. "Can't seem to ever keep them lit."
His dead cigarette sailed past Remus's head and bounced into the gaping mouth of a daffodil.
A loud pop from behind Remus and he was left alone on the grass. The afternoon sun stung the back of his neck as he hunched on the ground, waiting for the pain and nausea to pass.
It seemed like a very long time before the Minister returned with Tonks. Remus turned to look in time to see them exchange a hard glance, as if they'd just been making some kind of plans.
"Follow me," the Minister said coldly. He walked off toward the house. Tonks bent as if to help Remus off the ground, but stopped herself and stepped back with her hands hovering in the air in front of her.
"What's happened?" Remus whispered harshly as they followed. The Minister's head twitched to one side, clearly listening.
"Nothing," Tonks said flatly. A cold unease washed over Remus as the cool shade of the house swallowed them down.
Dymphna was at the kitchen counter. The muscles in her scrawny shoulders jumped under the spaghetti straps of her pink slip as she worked a rolling pin across a slab of pastry dough with her skinny, freckly arms. The Minister bade them wait outside in the hall, but Tonks peeked round the doorjamb to watch. At her side, Remus leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, breathing slow and deep.
Dymphna didn't seem to acknowledge the Minister until he stopped her rolling pin with his hand. His lips were moving rapidly but Tonks couldn't hear. Dymphna turned to glance over her shoulder at the doorway; there was a streak of flour on her cheek and her eyes were rimmed in red like she'd been crying. She glared at Tonks with a seething expression that Tonks didn't understand before turning around again.
As the Minister spoke, Dymphna's hand inched toward his where it rested on the counter, but just before she could touch him he jerked it back out of her reach.
She stood at the counter for a moment, completely still, before calling back over her shoulder to Tonks: "Come with me, eavesdropper."
She walked to the heavy cellar door, yanked it open with both hands, and descended into the dark. Tonks leaned over to sneak a look at the kitchen counter as she followed behind Remus: neat circles of pastry dough, clumps of grey mince, a bowl of wrinkly cooked mushrooms with iridescent droplets of butter beading on them.
"Don't touch anything," Dymphna's voice echoed up from the cellar. Remus sent her a pleading look from the doorway as she hurried to catch up.
The Minister didn't come downstairs with them. The door creaked shut when they were halfway down the stairs. Dymphna took a rough cotton smock from its peg on the wall and slipped it over her head. It billowed on her like a christening dress. Then she went right to her homemade cinderblock apothecary, tapping her fingertips over the glass jars, bending to peer at the dry fruits and flowers inside.
"Do you have something for him?" Tonks said anxiously.
"Quiet," Dymphna snapped. "He's chosen a terrible time to fall ill, you know." She pulled a jar of white flowers from the shelf—yarrow, Tonks remembered—and set it on her wooden workbench.
"How long the fever?" Dymphna looked past Tonks at Remus.
"This morning," he said.
"How high?"
Remus looked over at Tonks.
"Thirty-eight," Tonks said, but Dymphna huffed in annoyance and stomped over to Remus. She yanked his shirt untucked from his trousers and plunged her hand up underneath it. Tonks felt a pang of sympathetic discomfort as Remus's eyes grew huge and his face flushed. Dymphna shut her eyes and stood there with her hand up his shirt for a moment as if she was listening very closely to something. Remus stared at the floor.
"Do you see things moving at the edges of your sight?" Dymphna asked quietly. He shook his head. "The taste of iron in your mouth? Needles in your joints?" Remus nodded at each of these.
Dymphna looked back at Tonks. "You've let it get quite bad," she scolded her, pulling her hand out from Remus's shirt. He folded his arms over his midsection and slumped against the wall near the stairs. He looked drained, as if Dymphna's touch had sapped him of something.
Dymphna brushed past Tonks and returned to her jars. She pulled a couple from the shelf, twisted off the lids and shook a snow of little blossoms over her workbench.
Tonks watched her crush the flowers in a pestle, pour in some liquor-smelling goop, mash it into a paste. Her bony little wrists looked so fragile, swimming in the mass of her stained old smock, but her hands worked the mortar with a brutal, muscular efficiency. She went back to her shelves of jars, frowning and examining them, glancing over at Remus. She held up a jar of tiny withered flowers, the yellow-grey colour of old newspaper.
"Knotweed," she said, side-eyeing Tonks. "It grows all over here. Invasive. Deep roots. The sheep can rip it up by the roots and it still grows back. It grows through brick and concrete. It will fill and choke a well."
"It's good for a fever?"
Dymphna frowned and shook her head. She unscrewed the jar lid, took a pinch of flowers between her fingers, and turned to sprinkle them into the mortar.
"I don't know how it works," she muttered with her back to Tonks. "It's just the essence of survival."
She capped the jar and went back to her shelves. The cellar smelled of fermentation, alkaline bitterness, unplaceable spice.
"Can I help at all?" Tonks offered. She felt stupid just standing there.
"No. It has to be me," Dymphna said through her teeth, "or it won't work. Open the window." Tonks stepped forward, but Dymphna held up a hand and she stopped.
"No, him," she said imperiously, pointing at Remus.
Remus went and pushed open the narrow window, set high in the basement wall and mottled with generations of dirt-black cobwebs and the rotting detritus of leaves. There was obvious pain in the slowness of his movements. Tonks hadn't even realised the fumes from Dymphna's work were muddying her head until fresh air eddied in and cleared it.
"Now go sit on the stairs," Dymphna muttered to Remus. He passed through the shaft of light that slanted down from the open square of window and for a moment it lit up the silver in his hair. Dymphna's long curls were trailing in her mess of ingredients, so little white flowers adorned the tips. She kept grabbing and adding things to the mixture, green powders and yellowed clumps of grass, making little squeaks of effort as she mashed them under the pestle.
"Come here," she said to Tonks at last. "Pay attention."
Dymphna scraped the sticky red-brown mix she'd made into an empty jar. Tonks came around the workbench, and when their eyes met, she felt a sensation like a pin piercing her right between her eyebrows.
"Feed him half the jar," Dymphna instructed her, speaking low enough that Remus probably couldn't hear, "and do it with your fingers. You have to do it. Don't let him do it himself."
Tonks glanced uneasily back at Remus. His face was in shadow as he hunched on the stairs, but she could feel him watching.
"Why?"
Dymphna snorted like she'd said something stupid. "You love him, do you not?"
Tonks opened her mouth but Dymphna cut right across her.
"Shut up. Pay attention. Touch him when you do it. Put your love in it. He'll upchuck the first bit, so wait ten minutes and feed him the rest."
"If it's just going to make him vomit—"
"Every medicine has a bit of poison in," Dymphna said, suddenly gentle, like she was talking to a child. "Even the pills he keeps in his pocket. Even the little yarrow flowers. He'll not like it, it'll make him quite ill, but in the morning he'll be improved. He may be better tomorrow, but worse the day after."
"What do we do then?"
Dymphna's mouth twisted like she wanted to laugh in Tonks's face.
"Run," she said.
She pushed the little jar into Tonks's hands.
The stairs had bred and multiplied since he'd come down them this morning, and Remus had to stop twice on the long hike up to his room. As soon as the door had shut, Tonks took his temperature again. The tip of her wand glowed cherry-red this time, and it glared at him as she inspected it, a single livid eye.
"Thirty-nine, thirty-nine five," she muttered to herself. She pushed Remus down to sit on the side of his unmade bed. There was sand in the spaces between his bones. His head throbbed to the ragtime of his pulse. She sat next to him and uncapped the little jar.
"I'm going to feed this to you," she said, and climbed into Remus's lap. The weight of her made his thighs ache. She wobbled a bit, and his hand went to the small of her back automatically and steadied her, though the movement sent spikes through his wrist and elbow.
"Open your mouth," she said. Remus blinked at her. Had she changed her face? There was something alien about it. Her eyes were huge and got bigger as he looked into them.
"Remus," Tonks said. "Open your mouth."
He obeyed. His tongue was coated and stale. Tonks dipped two fingers into the scab-coloured paste and stuck them in his mouth. Remus's throat closed at the taste and he gagged slightly at the feel of fingers on his tongue. Tonks wedged the jar into the tight crack where her leg draped over his, and with her other hand she stroked the hair on the back of his neck. She'd done that for him before when he felt unwell, petting his neck like a child, and before it had felt so good but right now his skin crawled under her touch and he fought the urge to push her off of him.
"It's all right," she breathed. "Try swallowing."
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried. Hot acid crawled from his stomach up his throat. The sticky tar on her fingers tasted like the pumpkin wine Sirius had tried to brew inside his trunk in sixth year: more rot than alcohol, bad fruit and the funk of stagnant water. They'd all had a swallow of it, him and James and Peter, more out of solidarity than the hope that it'd get them drunk, and Peter had immediately leant over and vomited it directly back into Sirius's trunk—
Tonks slid her fingers out of his mouth and dipped them back in the jar. Dymphna's potion made an obscene sucking sound when she pulled out another dollop.
"Open," she cooed, as if to a child, and Remus obeyed without a thought, opening his maw like a baby bird. She stuck her two worming fingers inside and he retched again. How had she bamboozled him into tolerating this? She'd had to cajole him for weeks to let her rub his spasming back after the full moon, and he'd only been able to take five minutes of it before the hateful voice that dwelt in his skull had drawled in its hideous whisper that she makes quite a pretty nursemaid, doesn't she, do you think she'll like the smell when she peels back your bandages?
He retched again and flat sour bile flooded his mouth, but he swallowed it and took a shuddering gasp of heavy bedroom air. Redolent with Tonks's bitter fear-sweat and his own sick musk.
"I know, babe," Tonks whispered, and he sputtered around her fingers—half from the foul taste, half with incredulous laughter. She'd never called him that before—no one had ever called him that before, not even his mum, who used to call him washi bach , used to sing it across the garden to summon him to dinner, used to murmur it into little kisses on his forehead when he sweated and thrashed in his bed with the worst sicknesses after the full moon, before he got used to it, before he was his scarred, feckless, broken adult self, when he was only a washi bach , a poor little lad, and did she call him that to remind him he was still a boy, not a creature? Was that another way she loved him that he'd never known and that had died with her?
Tonks's fingers on his neck were like insects crawling, itching the hairs there, and a deep shudder forced its way up his spine and nearly made her topple off his lap as he swallowed. His fingers splayed against her back, digging into the flesh where her shirt had ridden up. His head lolled back and he blinked at the ceiling. Smooth drifts of crown moulding looming at him, moving closer. Tonks's hand, tacky with Dymphna's brown medicine, grabbed his chin and wrested his face back to looking at her, smearing the stuff on his cheeks.
"One more," she said, bringing her face close enough to rest their foreheads together, "then you can puke."
Her hot breath on his nose was suffocating. He wondered where the vicious little voice inside him had gone: it should be reminding him how pathetic he must look, slurping muck off her fingers, and how his stupid pride and stubborn self-sufficience self-delusion self-indulgence had brought him to this: in over his head, more a burden than ever, being eaten from inside by his thoughtless, short-sighted, compounding, unforgivable mistakes.
He swallowed the medicine.
Her hand stopped stroking. Remus pulled back to look her in the face, and whatever disgust or impetration she must have seen there made her disentangle herself and climb off his lap, gripping the jar with both hands.
"I'm going to be sick," he announced, and stumbled to the bathroom. He fell to his knees in front of the toilet. Flinging the seat up with a clank, he gripped the rim of the bowl with both hands, sinews twitching in his forearms. He could see Tonks hovering just outside the door, so he kicked it shut, and then heaved a stream of hot black liquid into the water.
It felt like it kept coming for hours. His bad rib sawed him open with every clench of his gut. The tendons in his neck and shoulders burned with the involuntary tightening and release. The porcelain was icy on his blazing skin. When he was done, he fell back against the striped wallpaper, hollow and exhausted, black spots popping in front of his eyes.
"Are you all right?" Tonks called through the door, and his racing heart leapt, startled, and then slowly sank with the realisation that she'd been right there outside, hearing him retch and moan all this time.
She was sitting with her back against the door when he opened it. She hopped up and took a nervous step back. And where was the castigating interior hiss? He slid past her, he didn't meet her huge worried eyes, and he collapsed face-down on the bed with another sharp complaint from his rib. Even the little rumples in the sheets hurt where he laid on them, but he couldn't bring himself to move.
A knock at the door–every hair on him standing—and Tonks's tapping footfall as she went to open it.
Whispering. With grinding pain in his neck he turned his face to the doorway. Dymphna's wildfire hair. Tonks turning to glance at him, saying in a hush, "I've just given it to him."
Dymphna's terrifying eyes on him, then the click of the door. A fleeting movement in his peripheral vision—someone there–his eyes twitched to follow it so fast that it hurt but couldn't see anyone. A surging anger up his ruined throat: at their cattish little whispering conspiracy, at his own helplessness to it.
"Few more minutes," Tonks said, and she didn't come and sit down next to him on the bed like he expected—she stood in the middle of the room, looking strangely small, fidgeting with her wand like she wanted to do something but wasn't sure she should.
"You keep whispering about me," he rasped. Speaking took a great effort with his aching jaw and his face pressed into the bed but the splintering rage in his chest made him do it.
"What?"
"You and her. And—and the Minister—I know—that you spoke—before he apparated you—"
Tonks blew her fringe out of her face with a huff and put her hands in her hips.
"We did," she confirmed, with a businesslike clip in her voice, like she was just debriefing him after a mission.
"Well?"
She just looked at him for a moment, then: "Well, mate, he's worried we're going to fuck things up and get all of us killed."
With a grunt, Remus turned and wedged himself up on his elbow, glowering at her, his heart hammering.
"Why did he tell you instead of me?"
Tonks's gaze wandered around the room for a second. "I expect he thought you had enough problems to be getting on with."
Remus winced and shut his mouth. He could have sworn they'd just had this conversation, a few minutes ago or yesterday or the day before or sometime in the interminable week they'd been here—had it only been a week? Had it even been a week? He shook his head. He couldn't keep his thoughts in order, they kept chasing each other about and running over each other. Another scrabbling movement in the corner of his eye, a roach or a rat, but when he jerked his head to look there was nothing.
"It's almost time," Tonks sighed. She picked up the jar off the bedside table and stood next to the bed, eyeing Remus uneasily. "Are you ready?"
He nodded and flopped onto his back. Chills coursed through him and he scrabbled for the quilts and pulled them over himself.
Tonks peeled the covers back delicately and slid in beside him.
"Look, I know you're in no mood," she said apologetically. "But I'm supposed to touch you while I do it. Dymphna said so. I don't want it to not work."
He slowly chivvied himself onto his side and faced her. It was hot under the covers but the chills were deep in his bones. He could feel the warmth coming off her body and he wanted to press along it and let it thaw him.
"It's all right," he said weakly.
She stuck her fingers in the jar, then in his mouth. The stuff was ice-cold, but with his mouth still tingling with vomit he could barely taste it. Her other hand rested on his bicep, her thumb just barely moving on his skin. He closed his eyes. In the afterburn of being sick, with his body stretched slack and heavy with exhaustion, her touch felt balmy and gentle now: a stroking lullabye with a rhythm that swayed and soothed him.
She withdrew her fingers and he swallowed, poking his tongue round his mouth to get the residue out of his teeth.
"Will you touch my neck like you were," he pleaded, and while he was dimly aware of how feeble he sounded, he was too tired to care.
Tonks's hand, so gorgeously warm now against the gooseflesh on the back of his neck, palliative and safe as a hot water bottle. Love in that heat, like an ointment, sinking in and spreading through the capillaries under his skin.
"I feel like I'm going to die," he whispered.
"I know," she said, "but I'm not gonna let you."
She stroked him and murmured to him while she fed him the rest of the medicine.
He asked for the rest of his Draught of Peace. Tonks didn't think she should give it to him, but her heart was so sore watching him twist and shiver in the throes of his fever that she lost that argument with herself right away and fished it dutifully out of his trouser pocket. When she sat down beside him and touched her wand to his temple again, the tip turned black—she'd never seen that before, not even on the training mannequin at the Academy. The spell wasn't reliable past 40 degrees, so if it got any higher she wouldn't be able to tell.
"My mum used to do it like you did," he mumbled, dropping the empty vial over the side of the bed. "She got me pills from the chemist for the pain and she'd touch my face and push them in my mouth with her thumb even when I was old enough to take them, I hated it, absolutely hated it, but they worked, do you think it was magic?" He frowned. His eyes were closed and Tonks wasn't sure if he was talking to her or himself. "No, she was a muggle. Couldn't be magic, could it?"
"Dymphna's a muggle," Tonks said.
Remus shook his head.
"No, she's not. She's... she's something else..."
His eyes opened and he looked at her, his eyelids fluttering like he was struggling to focus.
"You are, too," he said. "You have magic nobody really understands, don't you?"
"Try to get some sleep, Remus."
"No—I want to say this—" he groaned and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He spoke so quickly Tonks had trouble keeping up. "–God, there are so many things. I used to stand on the landing and listen for your voice before I'd come down to dinner. I stole a piece of newspaper from your fish and chips and used it as a bookmark. I—"
"You—what?"
Remus gave a wheezing laugh. "You probably don't remember. It was—I don't know—December or January after you joined the Order. You shared your chips with me. You were wearing that jumper with all the rips down the sleeves, and your hair was green—God, you always looked so, so lovely in that forest-green—and when you got up to get another butterbeer I ripped off a piece of the wrapper and put it in my pocket. I didn't even know... why, really. It felt like such a miracle to share your chips and chat and have you smiling at me. The book stank of haddock from it. I had to give it to a charity shop just to get the smell out of my room."
Tonks shook her head slowly.
"Remus, you don't—you should rest. You don't have to tell me any of this stuff."
"No, I do—I—I want to." His voice dropped to a whisper and he squinted at her face as if looking into a bright light. "In case I don't get another chance."
"No talking bollocks, you're going to be—"
"Did you know I got a job just so I could buy you chocolate croissants?" he cut across her.
His eyes were closed now, his brow creased in a frown, and his words came in quick volleys with labored breaths in between.
"And the éclairs you liked with the little gold leaf at the patisserie on Liverpool Road. I worked nights. Restaurant in Camden. I went there straight from our assignments sometimes—I'd go in the house and listen until I heard you apparate and leave again. I wanted to be able to get you... anything you liked. You were such a... spoilt brat. You'd spend eight pounds on coffee and croissant and eat half and throw the rest away. Ridiculous , Dora. I was sure you must have known... I always smelt of cumin and onions..."
Tonks felt like little forking cracks were spreading through the walls of her heart.
"Sirius told me you just really liked doner kebabs."
Remus snorted. "Thank you, Sirius."
Tonks gave him a sad smile. "What a mate, eh?"
Remus started to chuckle, but it turned into a rattling cough and he grimaced with the pain it must have sent through his bad rib.
"All right," Tonks told him, pulling the duvet back up around his shoulders after the coughing shook it off. "That's enough now. You need to sleep."
"No—Tonks—Dora—the point is—about the fish and chips, the newspaper—I was so in love with you already. Hopeless. I didn't even know... what that feeling was, or why... you were always in my mind. It was always, I wish Tonks were here . Or I can't wait to tell Tonks about this . Sometimes I could hear your voice, just like you were standing there next to me..." He chirped in what Tonks assumed must be her accent: " It'll be all right; don't listen to that bollocks; fuck that arsehole; chin up, mate. You could divide my life by the time before I met you and the time after. I never, never thought I'd find... anyone. It could only have been you. No-one else could have... I felt such an awful, fearsome hope... I abandoned so many of my principles... broke so many promises I made to myself..."
He was starting to mumble. Tonks touched the backs of her fingers to Remus's neck: hot and tacky with sweat. She touched the tip of her wand to his forehead at the hairline.
" Aguamenti fria ," she whispered, and runnels of cool water slipped from her wand into his hair and over his brow. The furrows there deepened and he shuddered.
"I'm cold," he murmured, folding his arms around himself and curling into a ball on his side.
Tonks laid down next to him, pressing her forehead aginst his. The pillow was wet under her ear from the conjured water.
"I never told you," he went on, speaking so faintly she could barely hear, "how good it feels when you look after me."
"I know," she said.
"I never told you... everything. So much. So much I never... we never..."
"Shh. It's all right, babe."
"Babe," he repeated, and coughed again, so hard their heads knocked together. His eyes flew open.
"I can't hear the voice," he said. His voice was rough and speaking seemed to cost him a great effort.
"The what?"
"I think it's in my rib now," he breathed, "trying to kill me."
Tonks pulled back to look at him, confused, but his eyelids were falling shut and inside them his eyes rolled drowsily from side to side.
His lips kept moving silently until he fell asleep.
The water had seeped all the way across the pillow and down into the sheets. Tonks didn't do a drying spell; she just laid in the wet spot, leaning her forehead against Remus's, shivering a little and thinking.
They were going to get out of this.
It was up to her to get them out of this.
If Dymphna's potion worked, he might be well enough to make it through the party. They could wait until dark and head for the trees. Walk until they were past the wards and able to apparate. St Mungo's was out after that scene today, but she could take him to Madame Pomfrey: Remus had told Tonks how warmly she'd doted on him when he was in school. She'd help, she wouldn't let anything happen to him.
But then what?
He'd want her to go to her parents'—in case the Elder came after them, but also because it would be a convenient place for him to abandon her again–
No.
That wasn't happening.
Remus had implored her so many times to think of their duty—the duty that was bigger than the two of them, bigger than her racing heart, the sting of tears, and the empty ache he left in her, than the unsatisfied love that stuck like a thorn in her chest, than the future she'd been reckless enough to imagine for them.
But he'd been wrong—he had to know it now, didn't he? The future was their duty. Their duty was making a world where they could love each other. The bleary, bursting delight of the éclair for breakfast and his slow grin as she opened the cardboard box; the electric whispers and kisses under his threadbare fleece in the groaning midnight dark of Headquarters; all the fleeting ecstasies and audacities they produced in each other. The fearsome hope that kept them alive and fighting and tethered them to each other by an invisible cord. These were their duty. These were the necessities of life in a state of war.
She was going to get them out of this and make a future for them. He'd tried to tell her what that really meant, but she understood now that she hadn't really been listening.
The hospital waiting room was only a taste: there'd be the rows with her Mum and her friends and every stupid swaggering bloke in the Auror office. There'd be the sick, shaking, sleepless night every month when he was away somewhere and out of his mind. There'd be the departures, some abrupt and some insidious, of so many of the comforts and safeties and senses of control she had known all her life.
She'd have to let go of other things, too—things she'd never really dared think about. Hammering him with arguments until he was exhausted and she felt like she'd won. Expecting to guilt or badger things out of him that he couldn't give her. She wasn't ever going to possess his heart the way she'd always wanted: too many other things—death, the moon, his stubborn lifelong allegiance to his own grief—had staked their claim, since long before she ever met him.
But she could make whatever time they'd left to each other bright and sweet and worth it. She could show him—every day they lived through this—that war, disease, dread and demoralising losses were no match for the way she loved him, and the way they belonged to each other, and the beautiful little universe of mystifying, inarticulable feeling they'd made inside each other.
Get your head out of your arse, Auror Tonks! barked the Mad-Eye in her mind. Daydreaming's been the death of many a—
She squeezed her eyes shut, pursed her lips, and blew Mad-Eye right out of her head. The puff of air in Remus's face made him moan a little in his sleep.
Maybe someday, if all this was ever over, they'd find somebody willing to marry a witch and a werewolf and get it done.
Tonks had never thought much about a wedding; it had always seemed a bit normal, like something her mum would want for her. But the thought of setting their love down on paper filled her with wondrous longing now: just their names written together, an evidence, an artifact, a permanent record of they way they'd found and warmed and comforted each other. Something that would outlive them, even if only in a dusty box in a Ministry vault somewhere, their love's tiny notch on history.
Remus twitched and tossed all night in the damp, messy bed, but Tonks lay as still as death until morning, drifting in and out of anxious sleep. She dreamed of running, of stumbling in undergrowth, of tangling in weeds which held so fast to the earth that no amount of her desperate pulling could uproot them.