"Where'd you find the girl?" drawled the Minister, eyeing Remus from the side as he drew from his cigarette and exhaled into the blue evening haze. The half-moon overhead made the curls of smoke luminous and Remus' skin crawl unpleasantly.

"We worked together," Remus said, fidgeting his own cigarette between his fingers. He'd accepted it to be polite, but to his surprise he'd quickly smoked three-quarters of it, his throat raw from the heat.

"The Elder will like her," said the Minister, and studied Remus' face.

"I'd prefer to leave her out of it," Remus said quickly. "As much as possible."

"Why bring her, then?"

"I didn't," Remus snapped. "She followed me."

The Minister smiled faintly, knowingly, and tucked the box of cigarettes back into his jacket pocket.

"I see," he said.

CW for some brief implied child abuse and neglect.

It never stopped seeming strange, Remus thought as he ate, that a witch of such talent couldn't manage a competent toasting spell.

She had tailed him all the way up the high street. The mix of relief, dread, jittery elation and failure was hard to bear.

They'd sat themselves on swings in the sad little playground at the center of town to eat in the purpling dusk, cloaked in disillusionment charms. She'd burnt the damp little cellophane-wrapped ham sandwich he'd bought her at the corner market so badly it looked like volcanic rock. He'd wordlessly taken it from her hand and given her his own, so perfectly golden-brown-toasted it had made his stomach nearly roar with hunger. She'd looked at him like he was insane, grabbbed the burnt sandwich back out of his grasp and chucked it over the wooden fence that separated the playground from someone's back garden. Then she'd divided the good sandwich in two with her fingers and pushed half of it into his hand. He'd chuckled at her and pain had flared through his chest and side. It was getting harder to breathe.

The little grocer's where they'd bought the sandwiches, an aluminium pan, and a bottle of paracetamol had been lit by one greenish, flickering fluorescent bulb and every can and bottle and packet inside was coated in a thick shroud of dust. The air had buzzed with fruit flies and the produce bins in the front were empty save for a mouldering pile of something that might once have been cabbages.

After Remus had paid the mute, gangly, blond-eyebrowed teenage clerk Tonks had tried to tease him about how Kingsley never issued her any muggle petty cash, but she'd shut up when he'd muttered that it was his own money. Last year while living at Number 12 he'd managed a job slicing up kebab meat and boiling big pots of basmati rice, cash-in-hand, at a muggle restaurant for a few months until he'd been unable to trade away a shift the day after the moon and kept having to run into the bathroom to vomit and slump against the stall divider catching his breath. He'd been sweaty and exhausted and had scratches on his neck, and he'd heard the owner's daughter whisper the word smack as he'd ducked out of the walk-in.

He'd never told Tonks about any of this.

"So what happens next," she grilled him. "We check into the inn, try again tomorrow?"

Remus nodded.

"Assuming the muggles don't come and pitchfork us in our beds," she added.

"See, I was imagining a scythe," Remus countered dryly.

"D'you think that's what's in the sandwiches?" asked Tonks through a mouthful. "Hapless tourists, cured in local herbs and honey?"

"You know, they do make a particular kind of square sausage round here," Remus said thoughtfully. She'd always been able to draw him into joking around during a mission, no matter how much he'd sworn he'd be strictly professional with her. He had once thought that that was the warmest, sweetest, most terrifyingly intimate feeling he'd ever feel.

"Oh yeah, bang on," she nodded. She cast a sidelong glance down his long legs hanging from the swing. "You're all gristle anyway, not good for much else but sausage."

"Thank you, Tonks." He stuffed the last bite of sandwich in his mouth. It was hard not to eat too fast, after months of never enough. He watched her jaw work as she chewed, and her throat as she swallowed.

"You really should try to change your face," he said softly, not really even meaning to say it out loud. He immediately added: "It would be safer." He glanced uneasily at her, then at the sand around his feet.

Tonks didn't look at him, only chewed in silence and swayed back and forth on her swing with a grave expression. Finally she swallowed and took another big bite.

"Changed your mum's face last night," she mumbled around the mouthful of sandwich, then caught his eye and winked at him. He surprised himself by chuckling a bit, a mix of annoyance and relief.

She poked the pill bottle in his pocket. "Did you get those muggle things in case I fuck up your potion?"

He had already taken two right outside the grocery, and she had rolled her eyes and muttered something he hadn't quite heard and wasn't sure he wanted to.

"Well, yes," he admitted. "They'll keep the pain and fever down for a few hours if necessary."

"Won't be necessary," she said flatly. "Pain relief potion is a piece of cake anyway. I could brew it in my sleep." She kicked a bit of playground sand in the air.

He chewed for a long minute.

"You know what's better than pain relief potion?" he mused.

"What?"

"Alprazolam."

Her brow furrowed. "I don't remember that one," she said slowly, and withdrew her wand from her pocket. Holding it up, she reached across the space between their swings, tapped his chest with it and cried, "Alprazolam!"

A bit of white steam fizzled from from the tip of her wand.

Remus laughed and kept laughing, a dry desperate laugh, until Tonks stared at him with a bewildered scowl and agony stitched through his chest and winded him and water leaked from the corners of his eyes. Despite himself, despite everything.

Mummy thought little Dinah didn't know about things but she did. She knew about all sorts of things. Ever since Daddy and Levi had to go down in the well Mummy had been drinking her juice all every evening and then would have a lie down. So Dinah had nothing to do but go walk round the village and find out about things. She knew about the man and woman banshees that wailed from the bedroom window each night at Mr. Wallace The Bank Man's house. She knew about the hooded monster that sneaked about in the evenings behind Marilu's cousin's mum's house and stood in the hedges behind her bathroom window scratching itself between its legs. The village was full of spirits and creatures. Tonight she'd learned the playground was haunted by ghosts that laughed with a sad crazy joy and shook the swings about with their unseen hands and talked to each other like friends. One of them had made a black rock go flying all the way into Mrs. MacDonaugh's garden and thrown sand in the air. The Elder had taught her at church that she could do magic and see the hidden invisible things if she believed and if she trusted in his word and in his touch. Someday Dinah was going to trust so hard and so good that she would see and speak to all the funny ghosts and beasts around the town and they would be her friends and she would never ever have to be frightened of anything again.

The Shrike and Marten was an ancient, hulking stone building, the last on the road out of Kilnaricroy. Its shadow was long and dark across the tarmac in the blue-gray twilight. Three plank and steel picnic tables were strewn amonsgt the grass and weeds and cigarette ends and styrofoam takeaway plates in the back. Remus could feel the tension in Tonks' body as they paused outside the big wooden door, and when the streetlights crackled to life along the main road she startled just a tiny bit, as if every muscle in her had tightened in readiness.

"Remus," she murmured, putting a hand on his arm to stop him just as he reached for the door handle. "Look."

She pointed up the road toward the center of town. The streetlamps cast an eerie blue light over the town, which flickered and danced like candlelight.

"It looks like bluebell flame," Remus whispered. "Not electric."

"I thought this town was supposed to be muggles. The kid in the shop was a muggle, I'm sure of it."

Remus nodded. "Fiat lux," he said gravely.

Tonks sneered at him. "You what, mate?"

"Nothing." He pushed the heavy door open.

It took a moment to adjust to the dimness inside. It was lit by yellowish dripping candles. An old oaken bar and the stale sweetness of spilt beer. Animal pelts on the walls, foxes and red deer and a striped wildcat. A skeletal old man in a black apron: long stringy hair, cheeks and eyes dark and hollow in the low warm light, wiping and wiping a rag across the bar. Two others with their backs to the door, swaying on barstools, pudgy in windbreakers and flat caps.

A conversation in low tones from somewhere unseen: two male voices, too faint to make out words. Puzzlingly, an occasional sound like sobbing.

Remus could feel Tonks twisting her wand inside her sleeve as they approached the bar.

"Hello, Sir, I'd like to inquire about rooms for the night," said Remus to the barman, smiling mildly. The barman kept wiping for a long moment, his jaw working as if he was sucking on something.

Just get us one room! It's better if we're a couple! Less suspicious! insisted a charmed whisper from Tonks in his ear. Remus laid both hands on the bar, his smile still mild but his teeth pressed together tightly behind it.

"Two rooms, please," he said firmly. He heard the hiss of air Tonks let out between her lips beside him.

The barman eyed each of them for a long time, his gaze running down Tonks in a way that made Remus' gut squirm uncomfortably. He could feel the eyes of the two men at the bar on him from the side. Finally the wizened old publican stooped to pull a huge leatherbound ledger from underneath and thumped it on the bar.

"I.D.," he grunted.

Remus stiffened slightly. He had muggle identification with him, a cheap fake from in back of newsagent in Croydon, for his endless succession of short-lived muggle jobs - but he knew Tonks wouldn't. He gripped his wand tightly: he despised using confundus charms on muggles, and he'd have to do it on all three of the men around the bar. And out the corner of his eye he could see Tonks looking at him with intensity now, and he knew she knew what he was thinking about doing and a hot flush of shame rose in his neck and cheeks. And none of this would be happening if she'd just let him leave, if she'd just forgotten him like he'd told her to, if he hadn't let it get so far, so far out of his grasp, if he hadn't become so addicted to her laugh and her touch and her eyes when she was listening to him, if he hadn't stupidly, childishly, selfishly indulged in the folly of loving and being loved by her, as if a thing like him -

"Alphard! I'd hoped you'd make it out to our little slice of Heaven after all!" boomed a man's voice from behind them. The barkeeper's face cracked into a wrinkly smile. Tonks whipped around, all her Auror's reflexes in play, and Remus followed.

The Minister - who Remus recognized from the Ministry file photo Dumbledore had shown him - stood in his black suit, grinning guilelessly, with a hand outstetched. Remus grasped it and shook it firmly, his heart still pounding. He opened his mouth to speak but faltered.

The Minister smoothly filled the gap. "I wasn't expecting you after I heard about..." His eyes darted toward George so quickly it was almost imperceptible. "...your father's passing. My condolences. He was a brilliant man."

In his peripheral vision Remus saw Tonks's eyes shift over to him. A lump rose in his throat and he cleared it softly. "Thank you. He would have wanted me to be here."

The Minister turned his warm smile on Tonks. "Lovely to meet you, my dear, you must be - Mr. Alphard's...?" He raised his eyebrows.

"My business partner," Remus said hoarsely.

"Ah." The Minister took Tonks' hand to grasp it delicately, but she gripped it hard and shook it like Remus had.

"Wotcher. Jane Taylor," she said steadily, smiling and meeting The Minister's eyes.

Remus' stomach made a strange flutter, like a laugh dying before it was born.

Speaking across Remus' shoulder to the innkeeper, the minister said, "George, these two stay on me, drink on me, breakfast, anything they like, guests of honor. My good friend Mr. Miles Alphard and his business partner Ms. Taylor are in town for the Church meeting tomorrow."

"Of course, Minister," said the old man, with a reverent hush in his voice. He closed the ledger and clinked two keys on top of the bar.

The Minister clapped a hand to Remus' shoulder, and suddenly Remus could smell the sweet spice of drink on his breath. "Would you join me out back for a smoke, Miles? Much to catch up on." He winked at Tonks.

"Darling, make yourself at home, have yourself a pint, whisky, Bailey's with a scoop of ice cream, chocolate sauce, whatever your heart desires. George, take care of the young lady." The minister tapped the bar and pointed at the barman, then turned to the two men sitting nearby.

"Don't you two stare, boys." He leaned toward Tonks and stage-whispered: "Don't mind them, don't see many beautiful ladies round this place."

To Remus' surprise, Tonks actually chuckled a bit at this, dipping her head and swaying slightly on the spot in a way that was dismayingly familiar.

The Minister turned and weaved between tables toward the dim back of the tavern. He stopped and leaned into one of the wood-walled booths, speaking quietly to someone unseen. Remus handed Tonks the plastic shopping bag with the pan in it.

"Would you...?" he said, nodding toward the keys on the bar.

"Can't I...?" Tonks pointed toward the back door through which the Minister had just slipped.

"No."

Remus turned and followed the Minister without looking back.

There was a folk belief that killing a fae brought bad luck. Peter Yiu in Tonks's fifth-year Care of Magical Creatures actually had an old edition of the textbook from his older brother that claimed as much, which was a good laugh for everybody when he read it out loud one afternoon when they'd all met up in the courtyard to revise for O.W.L.s. It had actually said that the fae had an unusually complex social structure and a relatively sophisticated system of tonal communication, mainly in frequencies too high to be heard by humans, and if a person was foolish enough to wrong one the word would spread through the population and small miseries would begin to visit upon the poor witch or wizard. No wonder they'd stricken that bollocks from the latest editions. Anyone who'd ever plucked a Coastal Lowland Sprite or a Brownbellied Marsh Urisk from a low-hanging branch and stuck it up to sparkle faintly on their Christmas tree knew those things were fucking gormless. They'd barely try to struggle against a sticking charm and would just hang there until they died and got thrown away.

Tonks used her wand to neatly, bloodlessly sever the forearm of the Inland Seelie Fae, then vanished the flesh from it and dropped it in the pan. A plume of yellowish smoke rose, smelling of pinesap. It wasn't that she didn't feel a bit sorry for having to kill the thing, in the same way she felt a bit sorry for the pig whose ham she'd eaten on her sandwich.

Remus was a right sap about these things, though, bless him, so she vanished the body along with the leftover spider legs and the gummy cranebill blossoms.

The potion was only good for a few days' time, meant to keep an Auror on their feet long enough to get out of a bind and into a hospital. It would buy them enough time to wrap things up here and get back to London to get Remus mended properly. And then what? Would he let her take him home and mend the things the Healers couldn't touch? Or would he leave her again to the dizzying perpetual seasickness of waiting to see his name in the Daily Prophet, dead or caught by those pricks at Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures?

He had admitted to her once that when they first started fooling around he was scared to touch her because if she changed her mind or decided she didn't like it she could have him strung up by MLE like it was nothing, his word against an Auror's. She'd scoffed and told him that's not true, there's due process and solicitors and anyway how could he think she'd do such a thing? He told her he didn't think so anymore, now that he really knew her. Then he'd been quiet and looked at her bedroom ceiling for a long time before softly telling her that legal rights and solicitors don't matter much for a werewolf. He'd known too many kind, peaceful, honest werewolves who'd been killed in ostensible self-defense by Magical Law Enforcement during a routine registry check, or mysteriously died in custody after being arrested for theft or vagrancy. Tonks had been uncomfortable, unsure whether she even believed him, and quickly put it out of her mind. She loved him but back then she had hated thinking about all the cruelties and sadnesses and unfairnesses he'd been through before they met.

While he was away, though, it was practically all she could think about. His quiet confession that no place in the world was truly safe for him had repeated in her mind until she could hardly hear anything else. She'd thought of all the ways his mission in hiding with the werewolves could go left. Now along with starvation and loneliness and cold, torture under Greyback's wandpoint, the horror of waking up naked and shaking after the full moon with someone's flesh and hair in his mouth, she'd had to endure the thought that she might come to work one morning to Savage and Dawlish guffawing around the coffeepot with some wanker from Magical Creatures about the scruffy old werewolf who'd gotten himself apprehended and topped himself in his cage somehow while still under a body-bind hex. And how she'd always wonder what those last moments were like. Terror and pain and a boot on his neck. The grit of a cement floor against scar she loved to kiss on his brow.

The pinesap smell was becoming licoricey and her attention snapped back to the cauldron. She took a deep breath and blew the thoughts away. She'd keep him from that. Her love would keep him from that. She'd make him understand that it could.

Quiet night. But a barkeep shouldn't say quiet, should he? Puts a jinx on things. But a slow night, not many punters. Old Duncan came in crying again looking for the Minister. Found him, of course, and they got a few down: Tennent's for Duncan and some of the good Glenmorangie for the Minister, of course. He was always saying: George, you speak the language of whisky. Then sometimes he'd laugh and say don't speak a word m'self but it's lovely on the ear. Good laugh, the Minister. Good of him to lend an ear and a kind word to the likes of Duncan, and all the mardy folk who washed up in here. He was a good man and George always tried to serve him a good dram. When The Minister was in a jolly mood it'd be something Speyside, Glenlivet or Balvenie, light and clean with a hint of pear and butter. Days like this when Duncan would plonk in blubbering about poor Vera and how shoveling sheep shit don't stimulate her posh old Ladies' College mind and she's gonna leave him any day: those were for briny, peaty Islay stuff, bracing and tonic on the palate. Lagavulin or Ardbeg.

Got a 1955 Ardbeg in last year, just for the Minister and the Elder. He said they had it with lamb chops and tatties and it was divine. Sister Dymphna even deigned to drink a sip or two and the Elder, said the Minister with a wink and a nudge, liked that very much. George wasn't half chuffed, of course. Little Sister Dymphna, drinking his whisky with the Elder. By Seraphina, that was a right honor.

Anyhow, was a quiet night til them two came in, looking a bit shifty if he's honest. But any friend of the Minister was a friend of George's, he had always said it. The girl was a bit of all right. Run a comb through her and a bit of lipstick and she'd do for a poke. The Minister seemed to think so. The older bloke with her, though, business partner indeed. Bristled like a narky cat soon as the Minister turned his charms on her. She was eating it up, twisting in her shoes like a schoolkid. The Minister was a handsome man, not that George was one to notice. Plenty of girls round here would've scratched her eyes out to get that kind of attention. She wasn't happy not to be invited out for a fag and stomped up to the rooms and then Morris and Logan and George could all hear her banging and thumping about up there through the ceiling. The man went up later, looking a bit green around the gills, and after that it went quiet. A strange couple. Odd that they got two rooms.

Like always, Tonks took forever to answer the door. Remus was starting to feel delicate and feverish, with sparks of pain in his joints and a hacksaw advancing and retracting across his side with every breath. His face was flushed hot and and his hands, arms, and shoulders were freezing. He imagined Tonks' elfin face lit by the glow of a conjured fire and her dark eyes reflecting the shimmery surface of the potion. When she'd walked in front of the neon sign at the market today it had lit her hair up red and she had almost looked like herself again, for an instant. It had filled him with a painful, bottomless need.

Tonks cracked the door just enough to peep at him with one eye. How pathetic he must look, he thought, arms folded protectively over his chest, rubbing his hands up and down the cold flesh of his upper arms.

"It's ready," she said. Her face betrayed nothing to him as she stepped into the hallway, holding a steaming mug, and gestured with her chin toward his room.

Inside, when he reached for the mug, she drew it back before he could grasp it.

"What was that shit about your father?" she demanded.

Remus's hand hung in midair. "After Dumbledore was killed he was expecting the mission to be aborted," he explained. "Like I said - a miscommunication." He winced at the condescension he heard in his own voice.

"Tell me what he said." Tonks still held the mug out of reach.

Remus rubbed his sweating brow with the tips of his fingers and thumb. "There's a church service tomorrow. It's an outdoor show, a kind of a festival, in honor of - something. Didn't quite catch it. I've permission to attend."

"We," Tonks corrected. Remus shook his head vigorously.

"No, you're not a part of this, you're not invited -"

"Did the Minister say I'm not invited?"

"No, but I -"

"Be strange to rock up to town with a woman and then leave her at the inn, won't it?"

"Tonks, I've told you, I'm not putting you -"

"You're not putting me in anything," she interrupted. "I'm your partner. I chose to be here."

She held out the mug, looking apologetic.

Remus took it and drank the milky-pink chalk-tasting liquid. She watched him, standing at an awkward distance in front of the fireplace, which crackled with magical flame.

"You'll feel the new rib growing in over the next hour," she explained briskly. "Might be a bit prickly. After that you've got three to five days before that one breaks down and you'll need real Skele-Gro."

"Three to five days," he repeated dutifully, but she seemed to take it as a knock on her brewing skills.

"It's battlefield medicine," she shot back. "I'm working with what I've got. And you're welcome, by the way, for slipping about in the mud finding all the stuff for this. Silly me for thinking you'd fancy not being dead of sepsis."

Remus froze for a moment with the mug in his hand. "Thank you, Tonks," he said softly. He swallowed down the dregs of the potion and, touching his wand to his chest, vanished the temporary rib. The sawing pleuritic pain up and down his side intensified.

"Did you make a pain-relief potion as well?" he rasped.

Tonks flopped her arms against her sides exasperatedly. "You didn't ask for one!"

"Well, we did talk about it."

"Yeah, but you didn't say you were still hurting. You took your little muggle pills and shut up about it."

Remus rubbed a hand over his forehead, too tired and ill to keep arguing. "Fair enough," he breathed, and turned away from her to fish in his jumper pocket for the bottle of paracetamol. He shook two more into his mouth and capped it again.

When he turned around again she still hadn't left. She glanced over at the door and then back at him.

"This is stupid," she said in a sulky mumble. "But I am a little bit scared of being scythed and made into a sausage."

Remus raised an eyebrow. "I thought I heard you were an Auror or something." The corners of his lips twitched.

She stuck two fingers up at him and sneered.

"Fuck off. Can't you just be lookout while I take a shower, you git?" she huffed impatiently. "All the muggle horror films have somebody getting it in the shower." She pantomimed stabbing her wand over and over into her neck, sticking out her tongue and rolling back her eyes like she was dead.

Remus sighed shakily. The pins-and-needles had already begun where his rib was regrowing but the pain when he breathed was still sharp.

"Fine," he said. "But I am looking out from bed. Just lock the door when you finish."

Tonks was already pulling back the mildewed shower curtain.

Carefully, Remus eased himself under the stale-smelling sheets. He was afraid to try undressing, and too hot in the stuffy room but too knackered to care. It felt like it had been weeks since he'd gotten to lie down. The pain in his side was changing from a rhythmic stabbing to an uncomfortable gnaw, like a worm eating its way under his skin. Somehow, to the faint drumming and splashing of her shower, he dipped beneath the surface of a febrile sleep haunted with close and vivid dreamlike images of her wet skin, glossy hair in runnels down her neck, the fine pearls of water beading on her parted lips.

When she came out, wrapped in a towel, she must not have realized she'd woken him.

"Some lookout you are," she mumbled, and unwrapped herself and sat on the end of his bed to dry herself in front of the fireplace.

He glanced at her and quickly squeezed his eyes shut. Filthy, snapped the whisper inside him.A dirty old man, an animal -

- and it was right, and the wolf in him made the glimpse of her naked back play on a loop behind his eyelids.

She had a long scabbing scratch down the back of her arm. She was so thin these days and he could see all the little knobs of her spine. The zig-zag of moles above her hip looked vaguely like Casseopeia and she must have been picking at the bottom one of them again because it was red. Her skin looked so smooth and warm in the firelight. Back at Number 12, when the orange drawing room firelight had fallen on her with her pink hair she had looked like the sunrise. It had been almost seven months since she'd last touched him. Since anyone had touched him. She smelled of lavender. And the baking-bread smell she carried close to her scalp. His fingertips twitched slightly against the sheets. He wanted to touch her so badly it almost itched. There's the wolf, said his inner whisper. Bestial cravings. Disgusting.

Vividly, jarringly, he thought of yesterday's electric-green killing curse passing just by his arm, the heat of it charring and curling the fabric of his sleeve, and striking the Death Eater Gibbon in the chest. The stunned face falling. Tonks screaming his name from somewhere behind, slowed and echoey as in a dream. Castle stone showering down around him.

Here in his room, she hummed softly to herself as she dried between her toes.

He turned over away from her onto his side, wincing as he rolled onto his materialising rib, and drew the covers up around his neck. He could tell, somehow, that she was looking at him now. Stop thinking about it. Go to sleep. Shut it and go to sleep. You can't touch her and she shouldn't allow you to. He wouldn't. He wouldn't. He would not.