Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Rating: Kid-Friendly, Lupin/Tonks
Summary: Remus Lupin never saw it coming. Neither did Tonks.
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Dance With The Devil In The Pale Moonlight
Before
He’d been old enough, barely, to remember. He remembered that his mother was worried and that his father was angry, but they both kissed him good-night with smiles on their faces. He remembered the sudden draft over top of his tiny bed as the window slid open and the werewolf moved into his room. After that, the memories faded into screaming.
Before the wolfsbane potion, before the Marauders, it was bad. He remembered every one of his changes, the splitting of bone and the howl of his blood through his veins, as clearly as he remembered the faces of his mother and father. He thought that nothing could ever make him so separate from his body, render him so very much a prisoner in his own flesh.
And then he met Nymphadora Tonks.
It was different, obviously, but it was also startlingly similar. She would look at him and his heart would pound, as though it and all of his insides were about to burst out of his body. It terrified him and he avoided her. He told himself that he was crazy, imaginative, egotistical to think that she was doing it on purpose. Nothing worked.
She became more determined and he became more determined to set her straight, to get her out before she got herself in trouble. He tried logic, age and the Ministry, he tried warnings, even let her watch him change once, and nothing changed her mind. She would smile that smile that drove him crazy and fight back with her own logic.
The night Bill Weasley was attacked, he kissed her in the hallway outside the Hufflepuff common room. She’d been talking, reiterating really, about how Bill and Fleur didn’t care so they shouldn’t either and he was rapidly losing ground and the only thing he could think to do was kiss her. In hindsight, it had been a very good decision.
It had also been a very bad one. The Ministry tracked them, Bellatrix was a constant threat, they had no real home...and he had never been happier. After she told him about the baby, he worried incessantly again. After Harry had reminded him of what it meant to be a parent, the irony and cruelty of that was not lost on him, he stopped. He let the Order run without him for a while, they understood, and concentrated on his wife, on his love.
Teddy Lupin was born under a full moon, his mother yelling to the darkness and his father chained up in the basement, howling. But when the sun came up and everything returned to normal again, Tonks placed Teddy’s in her husband’s arms and the baby’s hair flashed to blue, a colour Andromeda told them Tonks had turned when she was happy, and all was well.
Battles had still to be fought, of course, and they would fight because it was the right thing to do. Teddy meant that it wasn’t easy, but then, it never really was.
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After
“I can smell him on you.”
The voice that snarled at her through the horrid sounds of the battle was scarcely human. Tonks wiped her brow and set her back to the wall as Moody had shown her all those years ago. She scanned the corridor for the speaker.
“He was so little when I bit him.” The speaker continued. She knew who it was now and she gripped her wand tighter in her hands. “His father should never have crossed me.”
Tonks sidled up against one of the suits of armour. The spell McGonagall had placed on it had worn off, but it shielded her on one side, made it harder to attack and easier to defend. Moody had taught her that too.
“You smell like him, you know. But you smell like something else too.” Tonks held her breath and finally identified the direction the sound was coming from. Down the corridor, Lavender Brown was sending stunning spells to the floor in the hall below her and hadn’t noticed that Tonks’ battle with Dolohov had come to an end. “Your smell changes, girl. With every emotion you feel.”
Tonks let out her breath. She’d been worried he’d smell Teddy but their metamorphic scents must have blended rendering her son undetectable to the child-loving monster she was about to fight.
“I wanted to have another taste of him, you know.” Greyback said, stepping into the light. “I wanted to see if he’d improved at all with age.”
“He has.” Tonks replied, trying to sound like her usual self. That last Death Eater hadn’t gone down easily.
“You know what I think?” Greyback drew out the wand he wasn’t supposed to carry and leveled it at her. “I think I’ll take you instead. And then maybe I’ll kip off down the hallway and try out that lovely girl while she’s stunning for her friends below.”
She glanced down the hall without thinking about it and it almost ended right there. He lunged at her and she threw up a shield just in time. He rammed it and it shimmered purple around him. His face contorted in a howl and he stuck the wand into the shield, shattering it to pieces on the floor.
“Recognize this?” He waved the wand through the air and Tonks bit back a scream.
“You didn’t. You said you didn’t.” Lupin had to be alive. She hadn’t found him yet.
“I didn’t, but he did.” Greyback gestured to the Death Eater, Dolohov she realized, in front of her. “Why else do you think he went down so fast? He was all tired out from killing your husband.”
“That is not true.”
The curses flew fast and thick then. Tonks was desperately tired, Dolohov had a particularly wicked sense of spellwork and had sapped her of a lot of her energy before she’d finished him, but she did not give up. She ducked a nasty splinching charm and it sent pieces of the suit of armour flying up and down the corridor. She took a step back towards Lavender and aimed another curse at the werewolf.
Snarling and howling with rage, Greyback backed up a few paces as her spell lit his hair on fire. Then he smiled and aimed the splinching curse at the wall of the corridor itself.
The falling rocks got Lavender’s attention and Tonks screamed at her to run. As the wall came crashing down, she aimed one last curse, not at the werewolf, she hadn’t the strength, but at his stolen wand.
Afterwards, Parvati would find two broken wands near the entrance to Gryffindor tower and Mr. Weasley would find one more broken body.