CW: sexual content.

When the rain had come down for days there had been no keeping the damp from his bed. Mold had grown in black clusters all over the newspaper and rags. He had shared his little spider-cave in a jumble of fallen boulders with another werewolf called Gideon, younger than him and filled with a restless, angry energy that had put Remus on edge. Gideon had lifted some muggle magazines from a shop on their last supply run and from the grunting and shuffling noises coming from his bed Remus had had an inkling what he was doing with them. Remus had kept his back to Gideon, curled on his side with his face close to the lichenous stone wall, trying to ignore the noises and go to sleep, but there behind his eyelids waited Tonks in the Bikini Kill t-shirt she'd slashed across the chest to show the tops of her bra. Tonks's foot secretly in his lap under the table at an Order meeting, wriggling. Tonks, Dora, Dora he was calling her by then, lying on her sofa and lifting her hips to thumb off her knickers, that wicked lopsided half-grin on her that he loved -

Remus had pressed his forehead against the rock and ground it back and forth until little lacerations stung him and the pain of it scrubbed her from his mind.

"Holy fuck."

Tonks caught herself on the back of an armchair. The first thing she'd seen when she'd walked in the room was the enormous portrait of Sister Dymphna and the Elder staring down at her and she'd immediately tripped on the edge of the rug. Their faces and Dymphna's pink dress seemed to glow against the dark background. "Creepy, eh?" she said, pointing at it.

Remus was standing stiffly in front of the tall bookcases, his face strangely gray. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor.

"All right, Lupin? You look like you've met a boggart."

"Yes. Er - yes. I'm all right." He stared at the floor for a moment, his jaw set tightly as if he was deciding whether to tell her the truth. He looked up at her and said quietly, "Dymphna was just here."

"Just now?"

Remus nodded.

Tonks frowned. "Weird. I just turned around in the basement a minute ago and she was gone." She came around the armchair, bashing her hip on a side table and almost upsetting a Tiffany lamp. She steadied the stained-glass shade with both hands and asked, "Did she tell you anything?"

Remus shrugged and she could see his fingers fidgeting inside his pockets. "Cryptic nonsense," he said after a moment.

Tonks snorted. "Yeah, she's been telling me the same all day. 'Don't eat this, don't drink that.' Like my fucking mum." She sidled up in front of him and rested her fingers delicately on his forearms. When he was uncomfortable like this he didn't always want to be touched. He didn't pull away, though. "She's quite good with her plants, though. It's a bit like potions, what she does." She smiled up at him; his face was still pale and he looked uncomfortable. "Where's the Minister?"

"Down at the Shrike & Marten. The Elder's out as well."

Tonks fingered the rolled-up cuff of Remus's shirtsleeve. "Are we alone, then?"

Remus looked up at the door through which Tonks had come. "Well, Dymphna's still about, somewhere."

Tonks slid her fingers around his wrist and tugged to pull his hand from his pocket. He resisted for a second before letting her. His fingers were clammy and cold.

"Missed you last night," she murmured. "Did you get my Patronus?"

Remus looked startled. "You sent me a Patronus last night?"

"Yeah. And this morning. Just to let you know where I was."

Remus pressed his lips together and looked up over Tonks's head, blinking rapidly. He still looked ill.

Tonks ran her fingers up his palm and along the smooth skin on the inside of his arm. "What is it?" Remus didn't answer, just kept blinking. "She did tell you something, didn't she?"

Remus gave her a small smile that was more like a grimace. "She told me I'm about to make an unforgivable mistake."

Tonks's upper lip curled. "What, again?"

She'd meant it to be funny but Remus immediately pulled his arm out of her grasp and turned away, facing the bookshelves and reaching out with one hand to lightly rest his fingertips against the spines of the books. Tonks felt the same slow sinking feeling in her core that she always did when she'd blurted out something that made him withdraw.

She ducked under his outstretched arm and slid herself between his body and the bookshelf, pretending to peruse the books. She swayed her hips to barely brush her bottom against him. He didn't pull away, but she could still feel the tension in his body that told her he might at any moment. She smiled back at him over her shoulder, then leaned more firmly against him.

"Anything good?" She tapped her index finger along the hard leather spines. Most of it looked like boring rubbish. She pulled one out, flipped to a random page and read aloud:

"On the morning of 3rd May, 1868, a married woman, Rosa Schlager, set out on the road to the village in the morning. As she did not return by 10 o'clock, her husband started out to fetch her. He found her a corpse, lying in a field, frightfully mutilated with numerous wounds -"

She felt Remus stiffen and draw a sharp breath behind her. She shut the book and crammed it back onto the shelf with distaste.

Remus stuck both hands in his pockets again.

In the narrow space between Remus's body and the bookcase, she turned to face him and gently laid both her hands on his chest.

"Do you want to know what Dymphna told me?"

He glanced up toward the portrait and while he looked away Tonks tried an old trick she'd been doing since her school days: she morphed her eyes subtly bigger and her lower lip subtly plumper. When Remus's gaze came back to her she knew right away that it had worked. His eyes were on her lips as she spoke and his head leaned down toward her as if to hear her better.

"She said I shouldn't trust you because you're a man," Tonks whispered, and her hands went down to toy with the hem of Remus's jumper. His body was swaying just slightly on the spot, as if he was vacillating between wanting to press against her and wanting to move away. "What do you think about that?"

Remus slowly brought his face so close to hers that her eyes fluttered closed with the expectation that he might kiss her, but instead he moved his lips to her ear.

"She's probably right," he said, ever so softly, and his mouth stayed there breathing into her hair and he didn't pull away. Tonks turned and nuzzled the side of her face against his; it felt so good to touch him again after thinking about him all day. His head tilted slightly and she knew without seeing it that he was looking at the portrait again.

Tonks took hold of both of his wrists and firmly pulled his hands from his pockets. He barely resisted this time. She slid along the bookcases, pulling him with her toward the frosted French doors that must have led to another room.

"Come on. Follow me," she commanded.

Remus's gaze on her was intense. When she turned to put her hands in the double doorknobs, he pressed his body along her back and wrapped his hands around her upper arms, stroking through her t-shirt with his thumbs. She pushed through the doors.

"Ooh, the game room," she lilted, and broke out of the grasp of his hands as she walked in. The room was dim, lit by a single green-glass banker's lamp, and the false eyes of all the mounted creatures glinted from the shadows. "I heard ladies aren't allowed in here," she said, winking at him over her shoulder.

"Oh, are you a lady?" said Remus archly, one corner of his mouth perking just a little. Tonks felt a tiny shiver of excitement: she loved that bare little smirk, and if she was teasing her she knew she had him.

"I was talking about you, mate." She sat back on the long leather

Chesterfield sofa, her arms spread cockily along the back cushions. She crossed her legs with a deliberate slowness and relish, rubbing ankle against calf. He never seemed to mind it when she implied that he was a bit of a girl; she suspected that he preferred it to being lustful or aggressive. She rather liked his slight effeminacy, but more than that, she liked teasing out the greed in him.

Arching her back, she morphed her tits bigger so they spilled a bit over the cups of her bra. There was a time when she'd have tried to do it without him noticing, but they were well past that now. He'd done so much squirming and grovelling when they were first together - Tonks, you know, you needn't do anything like that. You're - your body - I - but she could tell that he liked it. She liked that he liked it. She'd tried leaving them like that for a few weeks but they'd made it difficult to hold onto her broomstick and eventually she'd split a seam on her Auror robes.

She whipped off her shirt in one quick yank and dropped it down the back of the couch. His lips parted and he stared down at her with heavy eyelids. She reached back to unhook her bra, and as she did, his trance seemed to break and he looked up guiltily at the mounted leopard's head as if trying to decide if it could see him.

"It's just us and the animals," she purred.

He blinked and shook his head slightly. As she dropped her bra on the game room floor, he pulled his wand out of his pocket and muttered. She heard the click of the doors locking, but he didn't move toward her, only continued his solemn staring. The way she could feel his want was intoxicating.

She stared back, holding her breasts in her hands, her head tilted back, a challenge in her face. Remus seemed to spend so much of his life in the space between wanting something and having it. For Tonks it had never been a big space: there was the urge and then her body moved forward; the two things were almost one. For Remus, she'd learned, the space was cavernous. At times like this she could see him lost in it: looking, wanting, considering it, debating it, arguing with himself, telling himself no.

She intended to break the stalemate. She toed off one shoe, then the other. Pulling her wand out of her back pocket, she looped it over her head like a lasso, staring him down all the while, and her trousers and underwear vanished from her body and flumped in a crumpled pile at his feet like an offering. She rubbed one thigh against the other, squirming against the leather of the couch. Making him want her enough to break through the restraint that bound him was a tender, electric, torturous game.

He was still standing there, though his eyes no longer strayed from her body. His forehead was furrowed and his eyes were dark. She adored the searching depth of those eyes. She uncrossed her legs, parted them slightly, and slid her body into a low slouch on the sofa. Her first two fingers trailed down her belly and sank into the dark hair below, rubbing and then curving inside.

With a smouldering pleasure, she witnessed the slow death of his reservations in his halting gait as he walked toward her. She found this kind of power addictive: to lure him out of his mind and into his body, to grant him permissions he wouldn't afford himself. She reached up with her free hand to work on his belt buckle, but before she could touch him he sank to his knees. He laid his hands on her thighs and gently pushed them apart. A bubbling, giggly sigh escaped her. She brought a leg up and hooked it over his shoulder, rubbing insistently at his back with her foot. His eyes closed, his head bowed, his lips and tongue met and caressed her. She arched her back, her gaze unfixed through half-closed lids on the blind shining eyes of the dead leopard on the wall. Her hands were in his hair, stroking and mussing it. It had been so long. She'd had to teach him how to do this, how not to be so shy, how to give her enough pressure, enough time. He'd had no idea. The first few times he'd tried he'd gotten frustrated when his timid little licks wouldn't get her anywhere, started to despair and killed the mood for both of them.

But this time he did it right. Her mouth pulled into a smug smile when she realised that he remembered after all this time. Or perhaps there'd been someone else; the thought plucked a painful string in her chest, but the thought of him being lonesome for a year was worse. She blew them both away in a shivering breath and curled her fingers into fists to tug his hair and hold him to her. One of his hands groped up her body, thumbing over the curve of her belly, kneading one of her breasts, gripping and pulling her shoulder. The other held her hip, his fingers pressing into her flesh. Her body lashed like a whip when she came under his tongue. Her heels dug greedily into his back, her breath coming in raw gasps. When he raised his head again to beam at her his face was shiny with sweat and the wetness she'd left on him.

She released his messy hair and pulled his collar to bring him up to her. He kissed her eagerly, his body moving in that juddering way that told her how desperately he needed her. She could taste the salt and metal of herself on his pushing, investigating tongue. She wondered if he liked the taste. He'd never said and she'd never asked. It was one of the few qualities of her body she couldn't control.

Her hands delved where their bodies were pressed together and pushed at his midsection so she could get to his belt. He broke the kiss and winced, his face frozen in a pained expression, and she thought for a moment that he'd come too soon.

(That had happened the very first time they'd tried to sleep together. He'd been shaking with nerves when she'd climbed into his bed with him in her underwear. She'd grabbed his hand and pulled it between under the covers and locked it there between her thighs. His fingers had reticently stroked her through the cotton of her pants and he'd pulled away to look at her with an expression that was almost alarmed. You're very wet, he'd said, his voice quavering boyishly. She'd brought one knee up between his legs to gently press against him and at the same time she'd cupped his face in both her hands and murmured: for you. And with a startling train of hard shuddery breaths he had come in warm streaks up her thigh. He'd recoiled from her immediately and sat on the side of the bed with his head in his hands, apologizing, and it had been a long and arduous negotiation afterwards to get him to try again.)

She stopped pushing and gently rubbed his chest in a way she hoped was reassuring. But then he opened his eyes and murmured, "Not here. Later."

He got off of her with a hoarse groan and stood, leaving her cold and naked on the sofa with her legs apart and her muscles still trembling.

Almost penitently he summoned her clothes, passed them to her, and turned away while she dressed.

"Are you hungry?" he asked. His hands were back in his pockets.

She'd heard them from her room through the grille under the radiator. Actually, she'd heard the woman; the man had been quiet. Dymphna could not imagine how a man's touch could provoke such babbling insanity. If she had her way she'd never let anyone profane her sheets. Perhaps it was different for people like them: there was a vulgar pugnacity within the woman and a yielding gentleness within the man that Dymphna found topsy-turvy and strange. They seemed to circle and spar together like the lion and the snow leopard had done before one had killed the other.

(Dymphna had begged him - everyone had warned him - to keep them in separate pens. She knew when it was all over and the poor sweet leopard's blood was slick on the grass and its noble head was humiliated on the wall that he had wanted one to kill the other all along. She had fed the leopard from a bottle when it came here in its big wooden crate. She had held its big paws in her lap. All of the love had leaked from the bottom of her heart on the day that it died. All of it.)

But there was a curiously devout ardor between them too; she'd seen it at dinner in their fugitive glances. She'd felt it in the pounding heart of the woman: furious love that raged and battered like an animal in a cage. Righteous and defensive. Daring death itself to tame it. She'd felt it in the aching chest of the man: love like diving in a deep cold lake, the light from above pulling back until it is a stranger. Unknown pleasures in the bottomless dark below. The instinct to kick and the craving for the void.

Dymphna had no such love for anyone. Dymphna had no need of it. Dymphna loved one thing only (a strange, careful, secret love, a love that could hide and bide its time): a day that was soon but not soon enough, when man, woman, leopard and lion would all be forgotten; when her sheets would be clean and hers alone; and when the hole in her heart might stop its ceaseless bleeding and harden itself into a scar.

Tonks sat on the counter next to the stove while he cooked, giggling and stealing kisses. She'd declined a glass of wine but Remus sipped one over the hob, hoping it would settle the lingering twitch in his hips and the depraved racing of his heart. Remus liked cooking for her but he'd barely gotten to do it when they were together, living as he had as a guest in Sirius's house. In the refrigerator they'd found delicate baby courgettes and a wide stripey fillet of pinkish fish that he'd first thought was salmon, but now that he was cooking it smelled more like trout. She had always been amused and nonplussed when she'd watch him cook the muggle way. He'd started to tell her once that he'd worked in enough restaurant kitchens that he was better with a pan than a wand, but she'd screwed up her face in disgust and incredulously blurted, "Muggle restaurants?" so he'd changed the subject. Her parents had supported her through Auror academy and she'd never worked anything but her dream job. He didn't suppose she understood. After that he'd avoided talking about his muggle employment, and even lied about it for a while when he was juggling his Order duties and a night job. He'd lost that one before she'd even suspected he had it.

He put a lid on the sizzling fish and began to flip the little rounds of courgette with a spatula. He must have smiled a little at the nice crust of brown sear on their undersides, because she grinned at him and took his face in both her hands, stamping a hard kiss on his mouth. When she pulled away, she stroked his cheeks with her thumbs and with a sultry look she murmured, "Do you want to know something?"

He made a soft noise of assent and kept flipping. She leaned close again so that her lips were brushing his and in a husky voice she said, "Your face still smells like my fanny."

Then she cackled and let him go. Ridiculous as it was, he had to subtly adjust himself in his trousers when she looked away to filch a courgette from the pan. The movement sent a needle of pain piercing through his ribcage.

He set a place for her at the table and sat, but she picked up her food and perched herself on the tabletop right beside his plate, resting one of her bare feet on his thigh. His eyes went right to the shape of her hip and the place where the table flattened the curve of her bottom before he could stop himself. She had a lofty, masterful look on her as she ate, staring down at him, chewing behind a barely-supressed smile.

"Why didn't you cook for me more?" she scolded him, lisping through a big bite, her cheeks pouched out like a chipmunk. "It's so delicious, Remus."

He didn't know how to tell her without shattering the delicate sweetness of this moment: that most of the time they were together, Sirius had been feeding him because he could scarcely afford to feed himself. That even when he could have swung it he'd been convinced that she'd take a home-cooked meal as evidence that he was a boring, austere old stick-in-the-mud and the thought of her abandoning him for someone younger and more exciting had given him a sensation like suffocating. That he'd barely known what couples do together, or whether he and Tonks were even really a couple, and that he'd been so paralysed by the fear of doing something wrong that most of the time he'd done nothing at all and merely waited for her to come and demand something of him.

So he picked her foot up off his leg and kissed the bottom of it. She twisted on the table and made a squealing delighted sound and his heart thumped a double beat. Cooking and eating together, sitting at the table like some kind of husband and wife, was one of the soothing fantasies into which his mind had habitually retreated while he camped in the damp chill of a disused quarry with the other werewolves. He'd had a vast and varied collection of such escapes. Sexual ones, of course (Tonks materialising somehow at his filthy pallet in the night, her warm weight pinning his hips as she straddled him. Absconding like a coward and finding her at her flat and pushing her up against the blistered wallpaper, crushing his mouth against hers); nostalgic ones (Drunk and winded by laughter with Sirius and Tonks at Number 12's scarred kitchen table. Safe in his bed at school, soothed by the sawing breath of his sleeping friends); and strange uncategorisable ones, perplexing in their banality.

(He and Tonks on the picnic he'd once seen depicted on the package of a loaf of bread: gingham blanket, his head in her lap. Doing the shopping together, Tonks popping grapes in his mouth, bickering jovially over the ripeness of a cantaloupe. And cooking a meal for her while she sat on the counter sipping wine, or as she came home from a shift at the Ministry, kicking off her boots and bouncing over to kiss him as he stirred a sizzling pan)

He'd never had that kind of calm domesticity with anyone. Things Tonks would have considered normal, boring had been so rare in his life they'd become exotica, the stuff of his most absurd and desperate daydreams.

Tonks set her scraped plate down on the table and, in one swift motion, dropped herself into his lap, facing him, one leg on each side. She threaded her fingers into his still-wild hair, pulling him into a kiss, and it was so like a thing he'd furtively imagined in the freezing, starving night of the camp that something seemed to flip upside down inside him. He thought he might vomit. Cold pins pricked at his hairline and sweat emerged all over his skin. Involuntarily he jerked his head back, away from her half-closed eyes and open mouth. He had a terrifying urge to shove her off his lap and onto the floor, and yes, there's the real Lupin, whispered the horrid interior voice of the wolf.

"Remus?"

Tonks held his head steady in her hands. Her eyes were huge, searching his face. He found himself panting like he'd just been running. "Remus. What's happened? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he said reflexively. Her face screwed up incredulously. He took a few gulping breaths, trying to slow his battering heartbeat. His legs were going numb under her weight.

After a very long moment, he added, "My rib hurts."

She jumped off him and backed up against the table, standing over him with confusion all over her face. "What do you mean your rib hurts," she growled.

"I - it's hurting again," Remus said slowly, his hands going up automatically in a placating gesture. "I didn't... Poppy didn't have the Skele-Gro."

She blinked mutely at him for a few seconds, her mouth opening and closing. Then there was fury in her eyes.

"When in Helga's tits were you going to tell me this?" She gripped the edge of the table, knuckles white.

"I didn't - there just wasn't -"

"D'you think I'm stupid? You've just had your face up my minge and you're going to try to tell me there wasn't time? You didn't get the chance? Did it just slip your mind, this thing that's going to kill you in a couple days' time?" She wrapped her palm over her forehead, her expression unhinged in a way he'd never seen before. As if speaking to herself she mumbled: "One step forward, two steps back, that's all it ever is with you, isn't it?"

Remus pushed his chair back and stood, feeling at a disadvantage with her standing over him. "Tonks, I'm so sorry -"

"Oh, stuff your fucking sorry. Why wouldn't you tell me? Why in fuck would you sit on this instead of telling me so we could deal with it?"

He shook his head, his face burning. "I don't know."

"No, you don't get to squirm away. I want you to tell me why you didn't say anything."

Remus stared at her for a long time, his mind uncharacteristically blank, before words suddenly left him in a tiny runtish voice he detested: "You were already angry with me after you spoke with Kingsley. I couldn't bring myself to make it worse."

I didn't want you to think I was incompetent, he didn't say. He also didn't say: and then you were taking your clothes off and I couldn't think of anything else.

Tonks scoffed. "Too right, mate. Better to just curl up and politely die than have me shout at you."

Remus didn't say that that was almost true.

"I won't argue with you," he said evenly. "It was a mistake."

Tonks pressed her lips together as though she was holding something back. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and said it.

"I think Dymphna was right about you."

She turned and stormed out the back door into the bright afternoon. Remus started to clear the table with a numb automaticity but her voice from outside startled him and he went to stick his head out the kitchen door. She was yelling back to him over her shoulder as she stomped across the grounds toward the tree line. Remus followed after her, trying to catch what she was saying.

"- and something to keep the pain down. Meanwhile, take your muggle pills if you still have them. I don't fucking know." She threw up her hands exasperatedly as the shade of the woods swallowed her.

Remus stood there looking at the place where she'd disappeared into the woods. He still felt ill and trembly, but it was hard to tell now what combination of his bad rib, Tonks's barbs, and the disquieting intrusion of his life with the werewolves was to blame. He rummaged in his trouser pocket: he still had the paracetamol and half the vial of Draught of Peace. He swallowed the pills dry and pocketed the potion: he'd need it more later. He sat down cross-legged on the ground. Wildflowers had begun to poke their heads up through the grass and prickly purple thistles and yellow daisies were bright in the sunlight.

He'd have to keep himself together at least long enough to perform at the church service in the morning. After that, he could make an excuse to get Tonks to safety and sort out his rib. They'd gotten farther than he'd ever expected in such a short time, he told himself. With the intelligence they'd gathered they could pass the case to Magical Law Enforcement and -

- and leave the Elder to his talented little girls, hissed the voice inside him. Weakling. Craven and useless. Every day that man walks free is a new violence you could have stopped.

He uprooted a fistful of grass and crushed the blades between his thumb and fingers until they were tacky and their sharp smell stung his nose. In front of him, the lion's pen looked empty, but he knew it must be hiding in the shade of its concrete cave. Remus peered into the shadows, very dark in the bright afternoon sun, and thought he could see the bored switching movements of a long tail. Perhaps he was imagining it.

It's just us and the animals, said Tonks's voice in his head.

He drew his wand from his back pocket. He still needed to come up with something to impress the muggle congregation on stage the next morning. He tucked his wand into his sleeve the way it would have to be for his performance.

The Minister's spells, he'd realised, were straight from the fourth year Charms curriculum. He'd not been able to do anything more advanced because he hadn't finished his education. Remus closed his eyes, thinking about his last year in school. The warm heady pride at the lives that lay ahead of all his friends. The dousing cold realisation that none of it lay ahead for him. Everyone making plans. Everyone sneaking off to trysts and falling in love with each other. Everyone but him.

"Confringo," he muttered, and a spray of dust and rocks exploded at the top of the lion's cave. A low reverberating growl echoed from inside, but the lion did not emerge.

"Sorry," Remus called, and then immediately looked around in embarrassment to see if Tonks was around. She was still in the woods.

He raised his wand hand and cast Kufoudre, conjuring a slate-grey anvil-shaped cloud above him. Cold fat drops of rain spattered him and soaked the grass. A brilliant white streak of lightning discharged into the grass a few metres from where he sat, leaving a sunburst of scorch marks crawling away from its centre. He waved his hand to stop the rain and dissolve the cloud. That might work, and if they were inside he could make big bludger-sized hailstones fall as well. James had once rained out Peter's picnic date with Marcella Winterbottom that way, avenging Peter's unauthorised use of his broomstick to -

He had to stop that thought and the long slide down into the past to which it would give way.

Instead he thought of James when he was courting Lily. The weightless confidence. The gormless smile on him in his quiet moments when he was clearly thinking of her. Remus wondered with a slight jolt whether he'd ever looked that way thinking about Tonks. His thoughts of her, for all the raw vibrating thrill and cool yawning bliss and tender delicate longing they produced in him, were always mixed and tainted with guilt, fear, confusion and the terrifying vertigo of his otherness. And the voice telling him he shouldn't, he couldn't. And the voice telling him to run.

He plucked a thistle and cast a charm that James had done for Lily on her birthday the year before everything had fallen apart. She was already pregnant with Harry and puking every day and snapping at James and James's mum when they tried to help.

"Vitreflosa," he said to the thistle. It shivered between his fingers and then froze. Its purplish flower had turned to stone: a translucent, shining, faceted gem. He fingered the hard spikes of it, turning it back and forth so that it sparkled in the sun. He took the stem and wrapped it around his wrist, just like James had done with Lily. He plucked and added a daisy on each side, repeated the spell, and they trembled into twinkling yellow crystals.

With another tap of his wand hand, the stem braided itself into a brilliant silver chain round his wrist: a bracelet topped with three colorful, flower-shaped jewels. James's had been prettier, but he'd been practicing for weeks. Lily, he'd told Remus, had gone quiet and still and then burst into tears, sinking her face into James's shoulder. Later, when Remus had seen her, she'd held out her wrist and bade him look at the glittering trinket with a look of such love and excitement on her face that Remus's heart had felt sick with a mix of happiness and longing.

"Who's that for?" asked Tonks. Remus flinched. He hadn't heard her coming up beside him. She had leaves in her hair and a smudge of dirt across her forehead. Her pocket was stuffed with a chaotic spray of green stems.

"The muggles," Remus said. "At the service tomorrow. I've just been practicing." He tore the bracelet off his wrist and dropped it on the ground. With a wave of his hand he ended the spell and all the thistles shivered again, losing their shine.

Tonks blinked at him for a moment, her bottom lip twitching.

"It was very pretty," she said quietly.

Remus shrugged and picked at the grass. "They only last a few weeks. Then they rot and fall off."

"Where'd you learn to do that?"

"A friend." Remus didn't look at her. He could only imagine how angry she was with him.

She dropped to her knees beside him. She pulled the sheaf of stems from her pocket and laid them on the ground.

"Girlfriend?" she asked.

Remus couldn't keep from chuckling bitterly. When he looked up at her she was still looking at him like she expected him to answer.

"Please don't be cruel," he replied, and that despicable feeble pleading was in his voice again.

Tonks sat cross-legged next to him so that their knees were touching.

"I wasn't," she mumbled. After a moment: "You never talk about it."

"Did you find something for my - er, problem?" he asked, so quickly he almost interrupted her.

She let out a long, slow, controlled sigh. "Yeah," she said flatly. "For the pain and to keep you out of shock. That's all I can do."

"How long do I have?"

Tonks squinted at the sky, thinking. "A day or two. At most. The longer you wait, the more it'll hurt."

"Perhaps we'll be able to slip out after the service tomorrow and come back without arousing any suspicion."

"Pfft. If we don't end up in the waiting room for six hours. Last time I took a suspect into St Mungo's for a hex reversal it was an all-day affair."

Remus fidgeted with his wand in his sleeve, trying to fix it so it wouldn't slip out where his cuff buttoned. After a long moment he replied: "We ought to try. Don't you agree?"

He looked at Tonks and she met his eyes and nodded gravely.

"Maybe if you really blow them away on stage tomorrow it won't be a problem."

"Well, you're the star -" Tonks twirled her hair in her finger at this and rolled her eyes. "- but if you've any ideas I'm all ears."

One corner of Tonks's mouth perked up. Her eyes were suddenly bright. "How about a patronus?"

Remus shook his head. "I'm not showing them my patronus."

"Well, I could -"

"You shouldn't either."

Tonks narrowed her eyes at him. "How do you know it hasn't changed? Mine changed, why shouldn't yours? Maybe you've got my rabbit!"

Remus scrambled to his feet. Pain tore across his left side. "My patronus will never change." He tried to swallow but his mouth had gone dry. "It's the wolf. It's the curse. It won't ever - ever get better, or -"

Tonks sprang to her feet and grabbed hold of his sleeve.

"How do you know? You told me yourself that a - a change in life, a big emotional - whatever - can change a wizard's patronus. Haven't things changed? You're home, we're back together -" Remus blinked a few times at this. "- doesn't it feel different?"

Remus began to stammer his argument but she spoke over him.

"You told me you loved me. For the first time, it was - and you helped me change my hair - it's different now. I know it is. I can feel it."

She was looking up into his face with sparkling eyes, her hair a mess and still full of scraps of green and little twigs, and the ground felt as if it was tilting under his feet.

"Can't you feel it?" she whispered.

Her little fist tugged and worried at his sleeve, and god he still wanted her so badly, and there was hope in her face like he hadn't seen since before he left her, and he felt it too, he felt this simmering upwelling explosive hope, alien and terrifying and insane, and a surge of heedless wonder was rising in him, of the kind only she could ever inspire -

He closed his eyes. He almost lost his nerve immediately but her wringing hand on his sleeve made him plunge into his memory and do it:

Tonks's eyes alight in the shadows under the Vauxhall bridge where they perched in hiding amongst the geometric lace of steel beams. Their mission forgotten, for the moment, because he'd abandoned every scruple that fettered him to himself and kissed her for the third time. And she'd taken his hand and brought it to her stomach under her shirt, and it was the first time he'd touched someone like that in so long, so long, so long and then her hand was on him rubbing and he was clutching at her clothes and she moaned, breathily, just a little, into his mouth and the brand new idea of his touch giving her pleasure was so dizzying he almost pitched over and took them both down into the Thames.

"Expecto Patronum," he cried, and the bright quicksilver wisp erupted from his wand like it had been bottled up inside it all his life. And even in the warm orange light of late afternoon Tonks's face was lit with the glow of it and with her incomprehensible belief in him, and as they shot out across the trim lawn and the wildflowers Remus's heart felt like it would struggle from his chest and chase after it, and then they resolved into the four running paws and the whiskered snout and the perked ears and the predatory eyes of the wolf.

He squeezed his eyes shut and turned away from it. The lion growled from the dark of its cave. A deep rumble like thunder, like a warning.

Tonks let go of his sleeve and staggered back a few steps. When he opened his eyes to look at her he could see her eyes were glimmering with tears. The frolicking movements of the bright wolf reflected in them. He watched her watch it run across the lawn.

"It's all right," she said hoarsely. She couldn't seem to look away from the Patronus. "It's all right."

He shoved his wand back in his pocket, killing the silver wolf. Tonks turned away and he saw her quickly scrub her forearm across her face. Then she bent and snatched the cluster of plants she'd gathered off the ground and stuck them back in her pocket.

"Come on," she said with her back to him. "I'll fix up your rib."

She wrapped her arms around her stomach as she went through the back door. Remus's rib ached distantly but his whole body was cold and numb. His legs felt heavy, but he followed her inside.

Thanks to turanga4 for betaing!