June 24th, 1996

Nymphadora Tonks

Remus was standing beside the small round dining table. It was set, with food sat out for both of them. He looked uncomfortable, perhaps sad in anticipation of what they were about to discuss, and there were red marks covering his hands from scratching and digging his nails into them.

"Wotcher." She nodded, holding back her smile.

"Evening." He said bluntly. He turned to look at the floor, cleared his throat and moved to sit at the table, waiting for her to join him. He'd cooked some of the meat and vegetables she had frozen in her freezer, and the counters were meticulously clean—cleaner than Tonks had ever seen them. "I… I'm wasn't sure where to begin, so I thought… maybe to say thank you for letting me stay here." He gestured to the table.

"Is this a date?" Tonks blurted out as she settled in her seat. She hadn't meant it genuinely but he immediately became flustered.

"What? No! No, I'm—sorry," He cleared his throat. "I—"

She quickly grabbed his hand as he was balling his napkin up into a fist. As soon as she touched him, he relaxed. "I'm kidding," Tonks smiled. His shoulders started to relax and she wrapped her hands around his. "I shouldn't have said that."

He exhaled, and a smile started to creep up on him. "I spent half the day trying to come up with an explanation for myself and frankly, I… I think we need to talk."

She nodded and went to pick up her silverware. "I agree. However, you don't owe me any apology and you really didn't have to cook and clean for me."

"No, but I wanted to do it. I've been a burden on you these past few days and—"

Tonks set down her knife to grab a steaming green bean off her plate to throw it at him. "Stop that. No apologising and I'll have none of that burdensome conversation, alright?"

Remus looked surprised, picking the green bean off of his shirt. "Right. Well, I—" he turned to look at the door. "We were supposed to ask security questions."

"We were, weren't we?" Tonks cut off a piece of her steak. It was a bit freezer burned and a touch undercooked than how she'd usually have it, but she took a bite anyway. Her eyes glanced to the door, then back at him. "Do you think I'm a death eater?"

He pondered it, but she could tell he was taking account of his wand. "No. Do you think I'm one?" Remus seemed calm, but upon closer examination, she noticed something odd about him. There was something wrong with his eye. It was red and slightly swollen, like he'd taken a hit to the face, and it hadn't been there the last time she saw him.

"Hmm. I'm not supposed to take bribes from terrorists, so if you are, don't tell me until I'm done with my steak." Her wand was in her seat, pressed against her thigh. "What happened to your face?"

His fingertips touched his cheekbone and he winced. "Has it started to bruise? Right. I… took a bit of a fall earlier." The air was growing stale. Tonks set down her silverware and was chewing slowly, her wand growing heavier and heavier beside her. He looked guilty. "I was walking to that store at the end of the block and I slipped on the curb. Surely you of all people can relate." He tried to force a laugh.

"Remus, did something happen while I was gone?" Her fingers wrapped around her wand and she began to glance around the flat for any signs of a struggle or otherwise accident.

He straightened in his seat and set his hands flat on the table. "I fell. I promise, I—I wasn't looking where I was going." Tonks looked back to him. His teeth were clenched. He turned away and began cutting into his meat. "I don't mean to upset you."

"I'm not upset, I'm concerned." She said sternly. That was one of the first signs of polyjuice potion. The target, having been subdued in some way, might take physical damage that showed up on the consumer's form. Could werewolves be targeted by polyjuice? She was told that they could take it, so long as they were in human form, but was uncertain if he could be targeted by it himself.

Remus closed his eyes and pursued his lips. He sharply inhaled, trying to force out the words, "I went out this afternoon and I… had an encounter with… an old friend of mine."

"Do… the rest of your friends try to give you black eyes and I didn't get the message?"

"No," His mouth hung open for a moment and he stared at the table. "I don't think it's a good idea for me to stay here any longer, but that is not what I wanted to start this conversation with."

"Are you in danger?"

"If I thought for even a moment that this could affect you, I would tell you, but—"

"That's not what I asked."

There was another moment of silence.

"You're my friend, Remus. If you're in danger, you should tell me so that I can help you."

"I appreciate your concern, but…" Tonks didn't interrupt him that time. "I'm afraid this belongs to matters which do not concern you."

"You—" ass. Tonks bit her tongue. "You have every right to be upset with me after what I did at Grimmauld, but you don't get to sit here and act like I'm not allowed to be concerned for your wellbeing! Do you think I can't handle myself or something?"

"No—"

"Handle you? Is this about what I said? About how I'd—"

"No." Remus's voice was firmer and colour was rising to his cheeks. Out of anger or embarrassment she could not tell. Of all things, he returned to his dinner as if nothing had happened. "The full moon is in less than a week. I did not have plans made to deal with this and there's no hope that I could get my hands on any Wolfsbane and even if I could, it would do me no good. It's not safe for me to be here with you around and I believe that it would be best if I found somewhere else to go. I had met up with an old friend of mine to ask if I could stay with her and… well, she did not appreciate this due to the circumstances of our last meeting."
Tonks slowly leaned back in her seat. "Oh?" She waited for him to elaborate.

Remus looked more annoyed than anything else. "She's… an outsider and is extremely radical with her beliefs, along with a group of others. She suspects that I'm working for the Ministry. Or at least, that I must be a sympathizer with the people intent on burying werewolves because I'm more interested in assimilating than living in a cave somewhere. The last time we spoke, I had gone under order of Dumbledore himself. My friends are wizards, I've worked amongst them when I can manage to get a job, I support their businesses, and I take Wolfsbane. She does not like the fact that I let them leash me, in her words. I can't even say I fully blame her. But she's one of the few other werewolves I know. We met several years back, completely by chance, but Dumbledore wants me to keep an eye on her because she's a close contact to Greyback."
"So… she's catching on to you being a spy? Wouldn't that endanger you more?"
"No, not exactly a spy, more of a… apostate of sorts. She hasn't figured out all the details. She's agreed to help me and I could not tell you why. If I had to guess, she means to change my mind." He took a bite of food, and took quite a long time to chew, his eyebrows knitting together. "They're… feral. That's how they refer to themselves. But they're not all bad people. They're mostly desperate people who have been left to do bad things for their survival, and then there are the few who do bad things because they enjoy them. That line is blurry, but I believe, having met many of them, that the majority are those who would do good if they had the means to and they weren't being brainwashed by Greyback. But the Ministry doesn't really care about the semantics, they know that some of them are–or are harbouring–murderers, thieves, rapists, criminals of all kinds, and there's no distinction between those that make choices and survival. So you can imagine how that makes me look in her eyes."

The words were difficult to process. Remus, seemingly domesticated by their standards, was being watched by anti-Ministry radicals and was willingly taking himself to them during an extremely vulnerable time in order to gain their trust. All on Dumbledore's behalf, or at least advice. She was torn. In her own hypocritical way, she sympathized with anyone trying to distance themselves from the authority of the Ministry if cooperation meant oppression at best and arrest at worst. But on the other hand, she did not care for the idea of Remus putting himself in that position, and at least a little bit of that was lack of trust. She believed in him, in his dedication to the Order, but how far did that dedication go? She'd said and done things while under disguise that she certainly wouldn't have otherwise, but how long would it take before his mind began to corrupt?

"Are you going to be safe, transforming around other werewolves without your potion?" Tonks tried to stifle the waver in her voice.
"I've done it before, I'll do it again just fine. I might get a little bit beat up, but don't take that personally."
"They aren't going to kill you, are they?"

Remus shook his head. He had to ponder the question for a moment. "I wouldn't think so. They don't like to kill their own, not unless they have to, even possible traitors. It's how werewolves reproduce and if Greyback has any hope for creating some sort of great army, he must take all kinds."
"So they're just hoping to condition you to that sort of… 'pack mentality.' What do you really think of that?"
A smile cracked on his lips. "Don't worry. I'll be gone for a few days at most. I doubt I'll get much reconnaissance from them until I reestablish their trust, so it might mean making monthly visits. But it'll be safer for the both of us. I'm not going to… abandon all hope and earthly belongings to go run off in the woods."
"Hmm." She was sliding the food around her plate. A guilty part of her wanted to inquire more about the she-wolf that gave him the shiner. "We're taking Harry home next week. The day before the full moon. It was my idea; I brought it up to Mad-Eye. Thought maybe if that horrible aunt and uncle got a good look at all of us, maybe they'd go easy on him this summer. Poor kid's been through enough without them beating on him."
"That's very thoughtful of you. I'll make sure to be there then."
"Yeah, well, I happen to know a lot about shitty aunts." Tonks moved to swirling the water around her glass, thoughtfully. She stretched out in her seat and her legs bumped into his. He moved away from her. "Can we talk about what happened now?"
"Which part?"
"The part when I kissed you."
Remus nodded slowly. "I know why you did it. There's no need to apologise or explain yourself, really, we can move past it just fine."
She cocked her head. "Why did I do it then?"
Again, Remus had to ponder the question, taking long pensive bites. For a moment, Tonks wondered if he hadn't heard her speak. "Grief is a strange beast that takes a lot of forms," He started. "It changes our perception of people, of events. It's far from rational but it certainly doesn't feel like it when it has a hold on you. It clouds our judgement and makes everything more difficult, more painful."
"I'm still sorry, if I went too far," Tonks said. "Grief is no excuse for–"
"I was much the opposite, when Lily and James and Peter–as far as I knew–died," Remus interjected. "I couldn't stand to speak, couldn't bring myself to as much look at people for a while. Couldn't stand crowds, couldn't stand loud noises. I suppose I never got over it in a way, but it got better with time. You'll get better with time, too."
This answer surprised her. Pleasantly, but he still seemed to be censoring himself, his words filtering through his mouth like a well-rehearsed lie. She hadn't expected him to be so civil about the situation, even if it wasn't her preferred outcome. A small part of her hoped he might actually be angry, that he might raise his voice at her and let himself speak freely. An even smaller part hoped he might bare his neck again and make it a habit of theirs. "So you're not… angry with me?"
"Angry that I let you talk me into Grimmauld to begin with? Perhaps a bit. As far as the other things though, no. If anything, it was wrong of me to indulge you while you were crying."

That, Tonks found demeaning. "Do you really think of me like I'm a child?"
"I think that you were in an incredibly volatile state and you were not being rational," He interrupted. His gaze pierced through her. "You're hurt and you've been through quite a lot. I don't think you meant harm, I think you were overwhelmed and not thinking clearly."

"Not thinking clearly. Right. So you believe everything I said was a lie then?"
"Not a lie–"
"No, but you think I'm so fragile that you can just dismiss me entirely!" Tonks spat out, jumping to her feet. "I kissed you because I wanted to kiss you because I had hoped that for a moment I could feel something besides pain! Which is all I've been able to feel since Sirius died! And for your information, I'll have you know that I meant what I said when I said that I'd have chosen you if you weren't feeling so sorry for yourself! You are a perfectly decent human being whose wellbeing I care very much for and I can't stand the fact that you can't even give yourself the benefit of believing that you might not be as terrible as you think!"

Remus dropped his silverware on his plate, hiding his expression behind his napkin, but she could see that he was turning red again. "That's very kind of you, but–"
"But?! Merlin's beard, you have convinced yourself that self-flagellation is the only acceptable response to being complimented!" She didn't realise she was shouting at him and lowered her voice. "You're a good man. And I like you. You're my friend and I don't like that you are so condescending, like I can't even possibly think highly of you. And if you care that much, I kiss loads of people all the time and I don't think twice about it, so don't sit sound and try and make up excuses for me to rationalise that."
He stopped looking angry. He didn't look like anything at all. He began to nod, then stood up to clear his place at the table. As he was scraping his plate, he said, "Your hair changed."
Tonks reflexively grabbed a handful of her hair. "What?"
"When you kissed me, it turned this… blue colour. It hasn't done that since you hit your head, has it? It surprised me." He leaned against the counter. "And it turned red when you started shouting. I don't think you're a child, by the way, and I don't think you're fragile. I never meant to dismiss you. I didn't mean to dismiss you when you tried to kiss me, either, I was afraid that… I'm flattered that you trust me with your feelings and I'm glad that we can… put what happened aside and can move past it. But right now, I think we're both under too much stress and we ought to go to bed."
Tonks's shoulders slumped and she relaxed her fists. "Did my hair really change?" Remus nodded. "What kind of blue?"
"Sorry?"
"You said my hair turned blue. It… does that sometimes when… nevermind. Was it bright blue? Dark blue?"
Remus pondered, looking around the room for a second. "It was like a… dull blue. Denim blue. Almost grey."
Like your eyes. "Right." Tonks sighed. "One more thing–can you promise me something?"
"Most likely."
"Promise me you'll come back."
"After the full moon? Nymphadora, I'm not going to die–"
"No, I meant here. Here. Please don't… run off, alright? Don't go too far." She sniffled—she wasn't sure why, she wasn't even crying—and shifted uncomfortably.
Remus had to consider this. "It might be better for you if I wasn't—"

"The nightmares aren't as bad when I know someone else is here. Safer with two wands. Besides, you aren't a burden, really. It's nice to have someone make me dinner and rent in the area is ridiculous." She quickly added.

He gave her a small, shy smile. "Of course."

Tonks nodded in return. "Good. Good. I'm glad you're my friend and… thank you for making dinner. Thank you for…." Her voice trailed off and she waved her hand off.

He took her plate and the two spent the rest of the evening going back to dancing around one another, except this time, Tonks left her bedroom door cracked open, and she could have sworn she caught a glimpse of him looking up at her from his reading. He quickly returned to his reading.