So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?
1 Corinthians 15:54-55
Tonks had laid her head on his bare chest. The sensuous delicate euphoria of the anxiolytic potion had started to ebb. Remus felt a gorgeous stillness spreading in its wake. Her breath tickled his skin. Her fingers traced looping designs on the white, scarred inside of his arm. He had not felt comfortable in this way since over a year ago, before Sirius had gone through the veil: not in Charlie's musty bed at the Burrow nor curled around Tonks in her mold-smelling room at Christmas. Certainly not on his pallet of animal pelts and newspapers when he was underground. The inn's lumpy bed and its scratchy sheets seemed to cradle his body just exactly right.
"D'you think there might really be a god up there somewhere," mused Tonks. "Like, some old bloke who looks like Dumbledore?"
Remus stroked her blush-pink hair for a moment before he answered: "Are you asking if I believe in a god, or in a god who looks like Dumbledore?"
"Either, I suppose."
"Well, it's no to both, actually."
"Oh, so you just wanted to be a pedantic prat about it."
"You know that I'm a pedantic prat whether I want to be or not."
Tonks smiled sleepily and nuzzled his skin with her nose.
"It's nice to think about, though," she said, and she pressed a kiss into the hollow above his collarbone. "Somebody looking after us, seeing that we get justice, that we get what we deserve after we die."
Remus stopped stroking her and was quiet. He knew Tonks would not agree with his ideas about what he deserved.
After a long while he said, "My mum believed in God."
Tonks took so long to speak he thought she must be workshopping a your mum joke, but she only asked, "Did it help her?"
Remus considered it. "Not in the end."
"Did she want you to believe?"
"She didn't push it."
"Why didn't you, though?"
Remus took a moment to think of how to say it delicately.
"If you were me," he sighed. "Would you believe there was someone looking after you who was interested in justice?"
She was silent for a while, fingers still drawing their loops, toes rubbing lazily against his calf.
"Pedantic, self-pitying prat," she said, so softly she might have been mumbling in her sleep. "Anyway, I'm looking after you."
The reflexive horror he should have felt was distant and faint, smothered under soft piles of contentment.
In a few minutes, he was asleep in her arms like a little boy.
Tonks woke with a feeling of glassy calm. Pale pink hair on the pillow all around her. The cool gray light of morning and Remus's deep, soft snores.
When his eyes finally fluttered open, Tonks brushed his fringe back from his forehead and laid her palm on his cheek. He smiled, crinkles forming around his sleepy blue eyes. He tilted his face down and kissed her, ever so softly, his tongue just passing between her parted lips. She threaded her fingers into his silver-shot hair, curled them into a fist, and held him close.
Abruptly, he stiffened in her arms, pulled back, and his face had fallen. He turned onto his back and looked up at the ceiling.
"Hey," whispered Tonks. "It's going to be okay. I'll be right by your side."
He didn't say anything, and a crease appeared between his eyebrows.
"It's going to be okay," she said again.
With a hoarse little groan of stiffness, he sat up and got out of bed. It took him a minute to shake his wand out of the bedcovers, avoiding her eyes all the while.
When he shut himself in the bathroom, she let out a harsh sigh. The shower hissed on. She laid there for a while listening.
It always seemed like one step forward and two back with him. She'd thought they'd broken through something last night.
You can't break through who he is, she thought. The fear goes all the way down to the bottom.
To her surprise, she still felt saturated with calm. She rose from bed slowly, enjoying the slide of the sheets across her legs, relishing the slight burn of her first stretch, smiling at the bit of dark underarm hair she caught sight of in the mirror on the back of the door. She could have morphed it away, but she didn't. Her pinkish hair was matted against her head and she combed through it with her fingersas she walked up to the mirror.
She wondered if she should change it back to brown for the funeral. She shook the thought off right away: Dumbledore wouldn't have asked her to do that and neither would Remus. More importantly, she didn't want to.
Behind the door, the shower pattered on and on.
She thought about Remus in there, scouring himself red, grief pouring off him and pooling at his feet. She thought about Ginny Weasley wheezing at the kitchen table at the big brown cow's eyes Tonks had made. She thought about her dad's proud face when she changed her hair to match his slice of cantaloupe.
She thought about Dumbledore, his face mild and kind even as she burned with hating him, sitting behind his desk and giving her nothing but the empty promise that the man he'd sent into harm's way had not been harmed.
She thought about all the many long nights she'd spent wondering if she'd know somehow the moment Remus died. If she'd wake up knowing it, or feel a sick lurch in her stomach while she sat high above the earth on her broom.
She leaned close to the mirror and morphed her lips berry pink, like she used to every morning. Green shimmer on her eyelids, then gold. She liked the gold. She liked her eyes: they stared steadily back at her, warm and open and without fear. She thought of all the nightmares, rages, terrors and despairs that had thundered behind them all the last year. Her eyes, still alive and beautiful and alive to beauty, were a tribute to it all and to her survival of it. She squeezed them closed, pushing against herself from the inside out, pushing a new self into the world.
When she opened them, she was perfectly, vividly her own. She felt no surprise. She did not lean in to examine the shade of her hair. Whatever it was, it was right. It was hers: her riotous celebration of herself and everything she had lived through and everyone who had loved her through it.
The shower creaked to a stop.
It was a brutally fine day.
Hogsmeade was a zoo. They popped into place amongst a crush of bodies in dress robes. Tonks immediately lost her footing on the cobblestones and almost knocked over a wizard in a bearskin hat, but Remus's hand steadied her.
He had walked a few steps behind her all the way up and down the grassy hills and past the wards that enrobed Kilnaricroy: so that they didn't have to talk and so she didn't see him looking. He couldn't stop looking. She was so radiantly his Tonks that it wrung his heart like a tea towel, drops of grief and love and terrible hope trickling down inside him.
He had wondered if she'd done it because she was angry with him. When he'd gaped and stammered at her, still damp and wrapped in his towel, she had only smiled softly and knelt to lace up her boots.
She had grasped his hand in hers before they'd apparated. Her gaze challenged him not to let go.
When Hagrid carried the swaddled body down the aisle, Remus felt his heart borne along with it and laid down on the slab. Impossible that such a man was reduced to a pile of still limbs in purple velvet.
The man who'd gracefully, courteously barged past Remus's parents and sat cross-legged on the floor and asked, with such kindness, if he'd like to come to school and learn magic with other children. They'd played with Remus's chipped old gobstones and when Remus, terrified, had scored a point on him, a gobstone had squirted the old man right in the eye. He'd covered his face and howled as if in terrible pain for just a moment while Remus's heart sank all the way through the floor and into the ground - then he had winked, drawn the smelly fluid from his face with his wand, and transfigured it into a giddiness of flittering white butterflies, which tickled Remus under the arms and chin. His dad's face had been like white stone. A future he'd never dared imagine had suddenly unrolled before him, wide and bright.
He remembered the summery night in his fifth year when Dumbledore had sat on the side of his bed in the cold white light of the Hospital Wing and told him that the boy - the boy who would become Snape, traitorous coward and murderer - had not been harmed. That Remus's soul was intact and he'd not be parted from his only friends. That Remus's sorrow and shame was the good in him, outlasting and overcoming the curse in his blood.
And years later, long after Remus had consigned himself to losing the war of attrition that poverty and loneliness waged upon him every day, when the Headmaster had come knocking at his half-collapsed country squat on the River Swale and offered him work: work that wasn't slicing 3 AM shawarma into takeaway boxes or peeling condoms off of hotel floors. Work that wouldn't fill him both with the dread of having to do it and the terror of losing it soon, that wouldn't sit upon his chest in the night with all the pulverizing weight of his wasted talent.
Tonks's thumb stroked his knuckles in a slow rhythm.
He thought about waking up on his first day as a professor. Warm under the covers. Yellow light streaming in the window. Squares of it on the stone floor, moving with a languid slowness both imperceptible and obvious. He'd watched it, his thoughts a honey drip of sleepy pleasure, thick with the decadence of a soft warm bed that was his, just for him, until the light had touched the tips of his shoes and he'd suddenly remembered why he was there. He'd leapt out of bed, his heart going like he'd been doused in cold water, and been fifteen minutes late for his very first class. And how grateful and astonished he'd been to walk in late, hair still stuck against his face on one side, and see all those bright young faces swivel toward him: his students, his purpose.
And when he'd lost that work too, in his negligence and stupidity, Dumbledore had given him yet another chance at a purpose: to fight for a world that could be better, someday, even to a thing like him.
That such a man could die and then putrefy and turn to dust seemed preposterous, an audacious lie. The clay of the earth should tremble to receive such a man. Every worm and beetle that would worry the flesh should quake.
Remus owed him a debt that was beyond honor, beyond duty: that called to him like Lily and James had called from within him to kill in revenge, like the moon called his flesh into its fanged, furious revolt.
His mission was the only thing he had to pay.
The Mermen were singing. The uncanny melody wrapped around his grief and squeezed. Beside him, Tonks wore a dreamy look, eyes half-closed as if in pleasure. Remus couldn't fathom it. He couldn't fathom any of it.
Remus hadn't spotted Poppy in the funeral crowd, so he left Tonks to catch up with the other Aurors and walked across the grounds to the Hospital Wing. He had to stop and take a breath at the door, girding himself.
Bill's bed was neat and white as if he'd never bled cursed blood all over it. Most of the other beds were hidden by screens, and the rustling from behind the white cloth told him they were filled. A young witch in white robes dithered back and forth at the end of the long ward.
Remus cleared his throat softly as he approached so not to startle her.
"Good afternoon," he said. "I've come to see Madam Pomfrey?"
"You and half the student body," muttered the witch. "She'll be back any minute, hopefully..." She turned away from him to rummage in a cabinet. "Rowena's toes, we're already out of Mandrake Restorative... nearly through the Wiggenweld and Dittany as well... might not last the night at this rate..."
She seemed to be mumbling more to herself than to Remus, so he merely smiled grimly and leaned against a cabinet to wait. He'd once felt so at home here, but today the sun-filled ward covered him in an oppressive dread.
Poppy hurried in shortly thereafter, white skirts sussurating around her.
"Remus, my dear boy - oh, you look dreadful, have you been eating? Sleeping?" She came right up and clapped a hand to his shoulder, squeezing.
"Yes, yes, I'm all right," he demurred, still embarassed by her fussing after all these years, so he deflected: "How is the family? Aja still away with Healers without Borders?"
"Oh, no, she's been home three months now. Driving me up the wall. Made the whole garden shed into her woodworking shop," said Poppy distastefully.
"Woodworking sounds... useful?" tried Remus.
"Oh, sure, do you know how many useful things she's made?"
Remus raised his eyebrows expectantly.
"Not a one," finished Poppy. Remus smiled and ducked his head. Poppy turned to her apothecary cabinets and pulled open a drawer. Frowning, she turned to the other witch in white.
"Daniela, have you seen the Skele-Gro? I'd hidden some away -"
"Er, yes - I did find some - almost ran out on those two Hufflepuffs who Sticking Charmed their hands and feet together - well, that was my fault really, none of my unsticking charms worked so I had to vanish their hands and start from scratch - but I did find it..."
Remus could see the greenish vein at Poppy's temple start to twitch. "And... where did you leave it?"
"Well - like I was saying - I used up the full bottle on the hands and feet, so when the firstie who lost his finger to the snapping turtle and his friend who lost his finger trying to get it back came in I had to dig around for more. Who let all these firsties down by the lake unsupervised, anyway?"
"There's a funeral on down there," said Remus gravely.
"Oh - right. Anyway I finally found some in a drawer next to a Draught of Peace and a note from somebody named Regence. Used the lot."
The vein began to pulse a little faster, and Remus politely accepted his Draught of Peace and took his leave before Poppy's assistant could find out what that meant.
When he rejoined the sparse crowd lingering on the grounds, Tonks was standing close to Alastor Moody and Kingsley Shacklebolt. He could see as he approached that she was speaking quickly with an intense expression on her face - and when Kingsley caught sight of him walking up he gave him an austere nod. Tonks turned around and regarded Remus with a look he couldn't understand: like barely-repressed fury.
"Remus," said Kingsley, his expression neutral. With a tight smile at Tonks, he turned and rejoined Rufus Scrimgeour and his entourage.
Moody leaned close to speak into Tonks's ear, his magical eye trained right on Remus. She nodded resolutely.
"Lupin," Moody said brusquely. "Look after yourself."
"Constant vigilance," Remus said solemnly. Tonks's expression soured even more. "Good to see you, Alastor."
Moody grunted in acknowledgement and, with an indecipherable look at Tonks, hobbled off toward the castle.
Tonks stared Remus down for a long time, before shoving his old cardigan into his arms.
"I've summoned our stuff already. Let's go," she muttered, and took off down the path back to Hogsmeade. Remus had to jog a bit to catch up. She didn't wait nor take his hand when they passed the apparition boundary, just kept her back to him and disapparated with a crack.
When he popped into being on the rolling pasture, she was already walking up the hill. She slashed her wand with more force than strictly necessary to lift the anti-law-enforcement jinx.
"Tonks," Remus said, catching her arm to stop her. "What's happened?"
"I spoke with Kingsley," she drawled, her eyes narrowed to slits. With her brilliant pink hair she looked even fiercer, somehow, in her anger.
"Yes?"
"He doesn't know a thing about any dossier on a muggle cult."
Remus felt the press of frustration in his chest. "Oh, did you feel you needed to check my references?"
"He's a member of the Order! And you told me he was your contact! And anyway, I had to explain why I'll be out of the Auror office so he could cover for me. He's been telling Scrimgeour I had scrofungulus. You're lucky I got excused for the next few days and didn't have to report back for the all-hands meeting tonight."
"Lucky," echoed Remus dryly.
Tonks's wand hand twitched as if she wanted to curse him. "You've got to be fucking joking, mate. You'd be dead in your bed at the Shrike & Marten right now if it wasn't for me. Is that what you wanted? Are you still trying to die for the cause and I'm just in your way?"
Remus said nothing. Tonks continued, voice raised, flecks of saliva springing from her mouth as she spoke: "I suppose now you've got your Skele-Gro you're going to try to shake me off again, is that right? A couple of shags and a couple of potions and now you've finished with me?"
Remus stiffened. "You know that's not how it is."
"How is it then? Did Dumbledore assign you this mission or not?"
"Not... not exactly," stammered Remus. He realized his hands were raised defensively and he jammed them in his pockets. "We discussed it, it was in the planning stages, I was given some preliminary information and asked if I would accept the mission. It's why I was at the castle the day - the day it happened. I assume Dumbledore had planned to follow up with Kingsley before he..." Remus trailed off, looking at the ground.
"So you thought you'd just run off on this half-baked plan, infiltrate a cult, piece of piss, and if you die in the attempt, so much the better, is that right? Anything to get away from me. Any reckless, stupid thing. But I'm the one who's impulsive."
"I'm not trying to die," Remus assured her slowly. "I'm - I wanted to do this. For Dumbledore. I wanted to... to continue his work, to do something for him, after my last mission -" Remus was mortified at the squeeze in his throat and swallowed to force it down. "- fell apart."
Tonks's posture relaxed slightly and she adjusted her hand around her wand as if she'd just realized how tightly she was gripping it.
"I heard about that," she said evenly. "It sounded like there wasn't much you could have -"
"There was much I could have done," Remus cut across her sharply. "I failed to do it."
Tonks tilted her head back and blinked at the sky. He was pinched by the thought that she was trying to summon some words of comfort for him, but when she spoke again at last, her voice was so steady it was almost cold. All she said was: "Well, let's not let it happen again, shall we?"
She changed her hair back to mousy brown and stomped off toward town.
That Tonks. Always in a mess, of her own making or someone else's. Often a bit of both. Moody didn't envy Lupin the bollocking he was about to receive. Lupin was a good bloke, smart and dependable and kept his wits - Moody had hoped he'd be a good influence on her but it seemed it had gone the other way round. Bit stupid to try to run a mission so disorganised and in the state Lupin was clearly in, but stupider things happen in war, and in grief.
A few of the other Order members - Mundungus, Dedalus, Emmeline - had pondered aloud that they didn't understand what Tonks could see in such a man as Lupin. A decent bloke but ill, shabby, miserable and haunted. Not to mention his bloody monthlies. Seemed like a lot of work and trouble to weigh down such a young woman.
But Moody understood. When Tonks was in her first term at the academy, he'd expected her to wash. She'd been hauled in front of him week after week for some misdemeanor or other: levitating all the old petrol drums and tyres in the obstacle course so everyone could finish quick and huddle for a fag after. Charming all the maps in the Mission Planning classroom to display a petition demanding vegetarian options in the Cadets' mess. Innumerable and fantastical dress code violations. But then she'd started getting collared for hexing the same senior classmate over and over - almost daily, for over a week. Moody thought he knew what it was and when she'd been frog-marched into a chair in front of his desk yet again with a face like a manticore chewing a billywig he'd gone ahead and asked her.
"Well, Cadet Tonks, anything to say for yourself?"
"No, Sir."
Uncharacteristic in both brevity and respectfulness. He'd pressed on: "This Cadet Whitcomb. He do something to you to deserve all these hexings?"
Whitcomb was a posh gobshite, everybody knew, and Moody had been itching for a reason to knock him down a peg. But Tonks had just glowered at him, a muscle in her jaw going. Unlike her not to try to furiously state her case.
Moody bit the bludger - he hated dealing with female recruits: "Well, if he's tried to grab you or summat -"
Tonks had cut right across him, her voice quavering with repressed rage.
"Respectfully, Auror Moody, I hexed that bloody rude toff for going in on... on another Cadet. I'm not gonna blab who though I'm sure you already know. He's muggleborn and he's got a brother that's ill and Whitcomb -" (she spat the name) "- keeps calling his brother a spastic and telling him if he were a real wizard he'd have fixed his brother's spine so he wouldn't be pissing himself and dying in hospital now. And - with all due respect, of course - I'm gonna keep hexing him every day and making a nice arseprint in this chair every evening until they throw me out of here if it teaches him not to be a pigheaded prick, because the Academy sure as fuck isn't going to." She'd squared her shoulders, looked as dignified as a kid with hair the colour of a traffic cone could manage and finished, "Sir."
And that was when Tonks had become Moody's special project, though she hadn't known it at the moment. Because that was what an Auror was supposed to be: someone for whom power was not the primal satisfaction of the stamping boot nor the seduction of the gleaming badge, but a solemn and consuming responsibility.
He'd seen the wan, tired smiles that would pass between them when Lupin was a wreck of sweat and shakes after the full moon. He'd seen, with his magical eye, her fingers interlock with Lupin's under the table when Fenrir Greyback's name would pass across an Order meeting. And the lost look on Lupin when she did, as if this kind of touch was a language he didn't speak.
Moody understood that for all her knee-jerk sass and brassiness, all her hard-won Auror's steel, Tonks's keenest instinct was simply to help.
The Minister smelled of scotch already. He didn't sway or scramble words - seemed quite his charming self - but Tonks could see in his face that he was drunk. He'd been counseling a sallow old woman in a teastained housecoat, both of them perched on barstools with George wiping glasses nearby and trying to look like he wasn't listening when Remus and Tonks had come down the stairs.
It was a warm afternoon and the midges were out in odious shimmering clouds. When they'd stepped outside the Minister had pulled his black leather book from inside his jacket and spread a muffling charm over the three of them. Remus had followed up with an insect-repelling charm and a biteproof shield charm for them all; Tonks found it odd and a bit rude that the Minister hadn't done it himself, but she didn't say anything.
"This is quite a rare opportunity," the Minister told them as they walked down the vacant high street. "I certainly didn't expect you to get so far so soon." He winked at Tonks. "The Elder does have a weakness for young ladies."
Tonks chuckled uncomfortably. When the three of them stepped off the kerb to cross the street, Remus casually shuffled himself to the other side of Tonks so that he was between her and the Minister.
"You may find his ways with Sister Dymphna... unsavory. I wouldn't recommend mentioning it. The Sister is a true believer and though she is quite a sweet girl, I believe her to be beyond saving."
Wondering what in bloody fuck that meant, Tonks frowned and tried to catch Remus's eye. He was looking down the street, eyes narrowed, concentrating. The Minister went on: "I can see you've already hidden your wands in your sleeves. You'll want to keep them there in front of Sister Dymphna and any kitchen help. She is a muggle, truly. Some don't believe it -" The Minister side-eyed Remus. "- but she is. Grew up right here in town. She's a tremendous asset. The Elder protects her... quite jealously."
"What does she do? How is she an asset?" Asked Tonks impatiently.
"She sees things," said the Minister simply.
"Divination?" asked Remus.
"Not in the traditional sense. I've never seen her use a crystal ball, tea leaves, chicken bones. She uses the Ancient Runes but not like - like you or I might. The sight comes from within her, somehow. The Elder has his theories..." the Minister paused to look past Remus at Tonks. "And I have mine."
"Never heard of a real muggle Seer before," said Tonks. "Shouldn't be possible, should it?"
The Minister smiled a slow smile. "All things are possible to him who believeth." He seemed to savor his own erudition for a moment before continuing. "The Elder may insist that you sit for a reading with Sister Dymphna. I suggest you prepare yourselves for that, he's done it before to suss out... oh, nonbelief, impurity of motive..."
"Yes, how do we get around it?" Remus sounded annoyed.
"Oh, you won't. If he asks, you'll have to do it. As I said:" That slow smile again, which had begun to seem carnivorous. "Prepare yourself."
A sotovoci charm crackled to life in Tonks's ear and Remus's worried whisper hissed: we can't allow her to read us. She'll know.
Tonks remembered how Remus had told her of all the subterfuge he'd employed to keep Professor Trelawney away: scheduling conflicts, migraines, a fake allergy to tea that kept him out of the staff lounge all year, and, on more than one occasion, simply hiding behind something. Privately, Tonks didn't think he'd needed worry so much: Professor Trelawney had once gripped her hand and predicted, in front of all her sixth-year classmates, that she was never going to find a boy who wanted to kiss her if she kept on fooling with her hair and her nose and so on. Which might have been chilling to hear if Tonks hadn't been sat at that very moment trying not to squirm on the soreness Brantley Geitdier had left between her thighs before breakfast - but of course she hadn't mentioned that to Remus.
Might be all right, she said slowly.She is a muggle after all.
She might still see, Tonks. This could be catastrophic -
Haven't you been undercover for the last year? Don't you know how to play it cool by now?
Remus sighed so obviously that the Minister looked over at him and cocked an eyebrow. Remus gave him a quick smile and looked straight ahead.
We'll sort it out, whispered Tonks, forcing herself to keep her tone gentle. We've got this far, we can't just give up now.
Remus was quiet for a long time. The Minister led them up the hill toward the old stone church. Tonks could see that a tree had grown up inside it, thrusting its branches out through the window holes and the open roof.
If she discovers what I am, went Remus's tremulous whisper in her ear, it'll be finished - the Elder won't do business with me, won't have anything to do with me.
Well I guess it's a good job you've brought your partner, Tonks told him, and then she squeezed her wand inside her sleeve and finished the whisper charm with a muted hiss.
Runes were carved into the dirt of the path to the gaping empty doorway of the church. Tonks didn't understand them. She snuck a glance at Remus: he was looking down at them too, his brow creased in thought.
"My friends," said Minister, turning and spreading his arms before the entryway, addressing Tonks and Remus like an audience. Carried on the boom of his showman's voice was the stinging scent of liquor. "Tonight you will dine with the finest mind in five generations, a mind whose discoveries will change the course of human history. Humble yourselves -" The Minister looked pointedly at Tonks "- and lay your prejudices, your preconceptions, your old world's outdated principles down at your feet. They'll not serve you here. However -" He looked from Tonks to Remus. In a convivial lilt: "- you will be served a delectable roast of beef with horseradish. Come."
He turned on his heel with a slight flourish and walked through the doorway. The air there seemed to shiver as he passed through. Remus looked over at her, just for an instant, before he stepped forward. She could see his pulse beating in his neck. She groped for something she could whisper that might put him at ease, but before the words came he had already gone through the door.