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Aug. 26th, 2007 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helsinkibabyTitle: The Recruitment
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: None, though mentions Charlie/Tonks, and very slight Remus/Tonks
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3946
Spoilers: None really.
Notes: This just popped into my head and wouldn’t leave
“Wotcher Tonks.”
The very familiar voice made Tonks look up sharply from her parchment and jump to her feet. The combined effect of this, of course, was that her falling quill smeared the last line she’d written, that her elbow somehow managed to come into contact with the bottle of ink just beside the parchment, knocking it to the floor. Ink spread all over the parchment and the floor, dark as the blush that spread over her cheeks, a blush that wasn’t alleviated by the laugh that came from her visitor.
“Some things never change I see,” he said, a wide smile spreading across his face as he pointed his wand at the spreading stain on the floor. “Scourgify.” Instantly the carpet was clean. Coming around to stand beside Tonks, he pointed his wand at the broken ink jar. “Reparo.” A third incantation refilled it with ink and he placed it on the desk beside the ruined parchment that was, with a flick of his wand, suddenly not ruined at all.
“Show-off,” muttered Tonks, crossing her arms across her chest, trying not to grin at him.
“Jealous,” he retorted. “You’d think you of all people would have mastered those spells at this stage of your life…you a respected Auror and all…”
His eyes sparkled with mischief, and against her will, Tonks could feel a smile spreading across her face. “I’m amazed the dragons haven’t eaten you,” she told him, and Charlie Weasley laughed out loud.
“They’re better trained than that,” he informed her. “And I thought you were too… I come all the way from Romania and this is the best welcome I get?”
“Git,” Tonks said, but she hugged him anyway, grinning as his strong arms went around her, laughing in surprise when they lifted her off her feet. When she was standing in front of him again, she looked up at him curiously. “So what brings you to the Ministry?”
Charlie shrugged. “I was home on a visit for a few days… thought I’d stop in, see some friends…” It was a perfectly good reason, but there was something about Charlie’s demeanour, something about his tone, that set Tonks’s radar on high alert. She couldn’t say quite what it was, but she had a pretty good idea that anyone who didn’t know Charlie Weasley as well as she did wouldn’t have noticed it. “Had to see for myself that you really made it as an Auror…”
“I can hex you and make you forget I did it you know,” she told him archly, and Charlie laughed out loud at that.
“Yeah… I remember that Bat Bogey Hex you did on Ignatius Goyle…”
“He deserved it.” The memory of exactly what Ignatius Goyle had said about her father still made her angry, even years later, and it had been worth every minute spent in detention in Snape’s dungeon to see him lying on the ground, dark flapping shapes covering his face. “What? He did!”
She’d come back to reality to see Charlie looking at her thoughtfully, and there was a look on his face that she would forever associate with him having successfully predicted what would come up on their Care of Magical Creatures OWL. “You won’t get any argument from me Dora,” he told her quietly, more quietly, she thought, than the moment deserved. “Tell you what,” Charlie continued, “It’s late, you must be starving… why don’t you come to the Burrow for dinner? I know Mum’d love to see you…”
Tonks closed her eyes. “Did you tell your mum you were coming to see me?” Because if he had, there was no way that she could refuse – Molly Weasley was not a woman to say no to.
“I may have mentioned it,” was all Charlie said, and that was enough.
“Let’s go then,” Tonks said, surrendering herself to the inevitable. “As I matter of fact, I could do with a decent meal…”
>*<*>*<
“Tonks! Dear Tonks!” No sooner had Tonks emerged out of the Burrow’s fireplace than Molly had embraced her tightly. “So lovely to see you again… my goodness, you look thin… have you been eating properly dear?”
Charlie, who had spent the walk from Tonks’s office to the fireplaces in the lobby of the Ministry teasing her about her lack of cooking ability, guffawed; one look from Tonks – a look mirrored by his mother – had him looking down at his shoes. “Sorry,” he muttered, and Molly instantly turned her gaze back to Tonks.
“Anyway, enough of this chatter,” she said, seemingly heedless of the fact that Tonks had yet to say a thing. “Let’s get into the kitchen and get you all fed…”
“This is very kind of you Molly…” If Tonks thought she would get any more out, she was sadly mistaken.
“Oh it’s no trouble dear, no trouble at all… I’m sure Charlie’s not been eating properly either… the food’s just not the same out there…”
She shook her head, evidently distraught at the deficiencies of Romanian cooking, and Tonks shot a knowing look at Charlie, who to her eyes at least didn’t show any signs of malnourishment.
“You need to find some nice young witch to look after you Charlie,” she told him, and he rolled his eyes.
“Good job I didn’t stick with you then, eh? We’d both starve…”
Tonks laughed, though she thought she caught Molly giving both of them a look, and found herself hoping that she was wrong. Molly had gone through Tonks’s first year of Auror training hoping that she and Charlie would get back together again; she really didn’t want to get Molly’s hopes up again. She looked at Molly, then to Charlie with a raised eyebrow, hoping he’d get her hint, and Charlie just rolled his eyes and shook his head, Weasley-speak for “Ignore her.”
Trying to do just that, Tonks let herself get dragged towards the kitchen, looking all around her as she did so, refamiliarising herself with her surroundings, surprised at how it all looked the same. Quite a bit quieter than she remembered it though, though that wouldn’t be lasting for much longer. “You must be enjoying your last few days of silence,” Tonks said to Molly, receiving a distracted look in return.
“What dear?”
“The silence… before the kids come back from Hogwarts?”
“Oh yes, it’ll be lovely to have them back here again… house isn’t the same when it’s quiet…” Which was nothing like the response Tonks was expecting, strange by Molly’s usual standards of attentiveness. She looked back at Charlie, whose face was completely neutral, as if nothing was amiss, and by the time she looked back towards Molly, they were in the kitchen, and Tonks smiled to see Arthur Weasley standing there, still clad in his travelling cloak.
“Wotcher Arthur,” she said, grinning, and he turned, a smile splitting his face.
“Tonks… how nice to see you… been too long, too long!” Walking towards her, he embraced her, then released her, holding her at arms length. “You look wonderful dear… Auror life obviously agrees with you.”
“See Mum?” Charlie couldn’t resist needling his mother. “Dad doesn’t think Tonks is too thin…”
“He’s a man,” was Molly’s somewhat waspish response, and father and son exchanged a significant glance and a shake of the head.
“Tonks, I don’t think you’ve met our other guest?” Arthur turned towards the table, gesturing with the arm that wasn’t around Tonks’s shoulders, and Tonks saw, with some surprise, that there was a man sitting at the table, observing the scene with a somewhat bemused expression on his face. Arthur made the requisite introductions, even though, as far as Tonks was concerned, they weren’t needed. “Nymphadora Tonks, this is Remus Lupin… Remus, this is Nymphadora Tonks…”
Lupin stood up, extending his hand towards her. “A pleasure,” he said, his expression now faintly wary, and Tonks could guess why. Having had his picture all over The Daily Prophet last summer, Rita Skeeter’s poison pen exposing him as a werewolf who had been teaching at Hogwarts, Lupin probably wasn’t assured of too many dinner invitations, let alone of too many friendly introductions.
“Likewise,” she said, shaking his hand firmly, perhaps too firmly judging by the way his eyes widened in surprise. “And it’s Tonks.”
“Excuse me?” He didn’t understand, and Arthur hastily moved to explain.
“Nymphadora doesn’t like using her full name…”
“And yet people will insist on doing it…” Charlie added, his freckled face most amused, and only growing more so when Tonks glared at him. “I’m surprised you haven’t hexed Dad yet…”
In truth, she’d considered it, but she was sure the good manners her mother had endeavoured to teach her would be against hexing your host when you’d been invited to dinner. Perhaps the truth showed on her face though, because Charlie and Arthur took one look at her and began to laugh, and a smile even touched Lupin’s tired face.
“Well then,” he said, “I will be sure to remember that.”
“That’s enough of that…” Molly said, all business now. “Charlie, will you help me set the table please… and Arthur, haven’t I told you not to stand around gas-bagging with your travelling clothes on… honestly, Tonks will think we’ve forgotten our manners since she was last here…”
“I can help Molly…” Tonks offered.
“Oh… no…that’s…” Molly’s ready smile faltered for the first time since Tonks had arrived, then just as suddenly reappeared, looking a lot less genuine. “You’re a guest dear! You just sit down there… there you go…” A flick of her wand and a chair moved itself out from the table, the noise of which almost, but not quite, covered Charlie’s snicker.
Knowing what Molly and Charlie were thinking, Tonks obediently sat down, smiling somewhat embarrassedly at Lupin. “I would have thought that, as a guest of Molly’s, you’d know better than to offer help,” he observed, and Tonks shrugged.
“I used to help all the time,” she told him, leaving out the fact that, back in the day, she’d been thought of as family. “Of course, things had a habit of getting broken then…”
“Ah, I see.”
He looked down at the table then, and across to the other corner of the room. Following his gaze, Tonks was surprised to see a large black dog lying down, head up and staring right at her. “You got a dog Molly?” she called back, and much to her surprise, Molly promptly lost her grip on the dish she was holding, dinner being saved only by Charlie’s quick “Wingardium Leviosa!”
“Oh, no dear,” Molly replied, looking flustered, looking from Charlie to Lupin to the dog and back to Tonks again. “Just… looking after him for a while… now, let’s get dinner on the table…”
Tonks tried to catch Charlie’s eye, because just like earlier at her office, there was something about the whole scenario that just wasn’t ringing true to her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. He refused to meet her eyes though, and if she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was doing it on purpose. “Merlin’s beard, I’m turning into Mad-Eye Moody,” she found herself thinking, and resolved to put the idea out of her mind.
Still though, all through dinner, it was as if something was niggling at the back of her mind, as if the four others at the table were in on some secret, knew something, that she didn’t. And through it all, no matter what the topic of conversation was, that big black dog in the corner never took his eyes off her.
It was quite unnerving.
“That was fantastic Molly,” Tonks said when she’d eaten second and third helpings of both stew and apple pie. “Thank you.”
“Indeed,” agreed Lupin. “Most appreciated Molly.”
Molly smiled, pleased at their approval. “Well, as long as you enjoyed it… are you sure you wouldn’t like some more?”
Tonks was fairly sure she wouldn’t have to eat for another two days, and politely waved away any further servings, Lupin doing the same. Molly nodded again, and with a neat flick of her wand, the dishes left the table, soaring towards the sink and stacking themselves neatly beside it. “I’ll wash them later,” Molly said, and Tonks could only shake her head.
“How do you do that?” she wondered, and Charlie rolled his eyes.
“Definitely a good job…” he murmured, but got no further, because his father cleared his throat.
“Tonks… it really has been lovely to have you here again… we’ve missed you here.” He glanced over at Charlie, who was assiduously studying his joined hands. “However… I must… that is… we… must confess that we’ve lured you here under somewhat false pretences.”
Torn between the desire to shout “I knew it!” and ask for more details, Tonks bit her tongue.
“Well, not totally false…” Molly interjected. “I’ve often asked Charlie… but anyway…” Her voice trailed off as Lupin and Arthur sat up straight in their chairs. In the corner, the dog sat up too, ears raised, looking from one to the other, and a strange notion came over Tonks…He understands what we’re saying…
“The reason we asked you here, Tonks,” Arthur said, “Is that we’re sure you’ve heard rumours over the last few days… about what happened at Hogwarts, during the last Triwizard task.”
Tonks nodded slowly. “Cedric Diggory died,” she said, and even though she hadn’t known him, Hufflepuff loyalty made her sad anyway. “And Harry Potter told everyone that he’d been… well, that he’d been killed by You-Know-Who… that He was back.” She didn’t miss the looks that were exchanged between the other four. “Fudge wants it buried,” she added. “So naturally, everyone’s talking about it.” Still, no word from the others, and that little niggle that she’d been feeling all evening was stronger than ever. “What does this…”
“Harry was telling the truth.” It was Lupin who spoke, and his calm tones were somehow more confident than they had been when they’d been talking about Auror work and dragons and tales of the twins’ latest activities. “Cedric Diggory was murdered by Lord Voldemort… he has indeed returned.”
If someone had turned a bucket of cold water over Tonks at that moment – and she’d had the experience, thank you very much, knew what it was like – she could not have been more stunned.
“What…” she gasped after a long moment where she could not find her voice. “How…”
Because it couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t be true. You-Know-Who had been banished thirteen years before, defeated by Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived… and yes, there have been rumours, but surely they were only rumours, put about by those who had served him, those who wanted to frighten others…
But she was sitting in the kitchen of the Burrow, and Molly and Arthur Weasley were telling her these things, and Charlie …
As if her thoughts summoned him, Charlie was at her side, silently placing a glass of Firewhisky in front of her. She gave him a look that she hoped conveyed her gratitude and downed it in one. She took it as a measure of how serious things were that, as she choked and spluttered and he returned to his chair, he didn’t even make a joke.
“But… how…”
“Voldemort had helpers… faithful Death Eaters doing his bidding. Barty Crouch Junior… who, as we thought, did not die in Azkaban.” Lupin was doing all the talking now, Molly and Arthur side by side, clutching one another’s hands, looking between him and Tonks as if they were spectators at a Quidditch match. “It’s a long story… but all you need to know is that he escaped, and posed for the last year as Mad-Eye Moody, teaching at Hogwarts. All year, he engineered things so that he could bring Harry to Voldemort… and a few nights ago, he succeeded. With help, I might add, from another faithful servant.”
Here, he paused, dropped his gaze, looking faintly sick, and when no-one spoke, indeed when none of the Weasleys would meet her eyes, Tonks realised who it must have been. A faithful Death Eater…someone who had been on the run for nearly two years…
“Sirius Black.”
Her voice sounded strained even to her own ears, and Lupin’s head jerked up. Whatever colour had been there had long since leached out of it as he told his tale, but now two pale spots of red reappeared on his cheekbones. “No,” he said softly, shaking his head. “Peter Pettigrew.”
For a second, Tonks was sure she’d heard him wrong. “No,” she said, shaking her head, looking to Molly to Arthur to Charlie then back to Lupin. “No… Peter Pettigrew is dead… Sirius Black killed him when You-Know-Who vanished…”
In the corner, the dog growled, breaking the silence that fell when her voice trailed off, and Tonks’s gaze flew to him. Then she felt her jaw drop in horror, because the dog was growing larger, was transforming, wasn’t in fact a dog at all…
The dog was Sirius Black.
She let out a scream, leaping to her feet, the chair she was sitting on skidding backwards, falling sideways and clattering to the floor. Her hand moved instinctively for her wand, and she was pointing it at the fugitive before she realised that not only was no-one else reacting with surprise, but that no-one was looking at Sirius.
They were all looking at her.
“It’s ok…Tonks, it’s ok…” It was Charlie who spoke, Charlie who was her friend, Charlie who had brought her here, Charlie who was the one person on this earth she knew she could trust implicitly. “He’s on our side…Tonks, I promise you….”
Slowly, very slowly, she lowered her wand, but remained standing, even when Arthur flicked his wand and set her chair upright again. “You’re an Animagus?” she managed to croak. “But we didn’t… you never…”
Beside her, Lupin sighed. “To fully understand the story, you need to go back further than Voldemort’s downfall… back to my own school days. Though first, perhaps you’d like some more Firewhisky?”
Tonks looked at him, and for no reason that she could articulate, his words, his demeanour, something in his eyes, made her relax. “Just leave the bloody bottle,” she muttered, and to her surprise, he laughed.
It was a nice sound.
Which was not, she hastily admonished herself, something that she should be thinking about at a time like this.
Only when she had another Firewhisky in front of her – and true to her word, Charlie left the bottle beside her – did Lupin speak again. “You know what I am.” It was statement, not question, and she nodded. “When I was at Hogwarts, I had three friends who were very dear to me… James Potter… Sirius Black… and Peter Pettigrew. They noticed that I was sick every month… always at the full moon. And rather than have me endure my transformations alone… they studied to become Animagi. And they succeeded. We never told anyone… it was our secret. Just as, when James and Lily were forced to go into hiding, they chose a Secret Keeper, someone they trusted.”
This part of the story, Tonks knew. “Sirius Black.”
“No.” Sirius’s voice made Tonks jump. “They were going to pick me… I convinced them to pick Pettigrew… the one that everyone would least suspect.” His bitterness was palpable, and suddenly, the tale that she’d known all her life, the one that had been revised a couple of years ago, shifted in Tonks’s head, and she saw how it all worked.
“And he betrayed them… framed you… and…” Here her logic failed her, but only for a moment. “He was an Animagus, he lived in hiding!”
“Well reasoned.” Lupin sounded impressed, and when she tore her gaze from Sirius, she saw that he looked it as well. “And might I add … no offence to your family Molly, Arthur… you believed it faster than Harry and his friends.”
“Yeah, well, that’ll be the Firewhisky,” Tonks told him, taking another gulp. Lupin chuckled, shaking his head in amusement, and in that moment, he looked as if years had been taken off him.
“Pettigrew found his way here… to our family.” Now it was Arthur’s turn to look as if he’d swallowed Gurdyroots; beside him, Tonks could see Charlie gazing at her with a look that she couldn’t quite read. “Disguised as a rat… Percy’s rat.”
“Scabbers?” Tonks’s grip tightened on the glass, and when she saw Molly gulping, she forced herself to relax. “Scabbers was Peter Pettigrew?”
“You might have seen the family photograph that adorned the front page of the Prophet, when they were all in Egypt? I saw it… I recognised him… and I knew that he was going back to where Harry was… and I knew I had to stop him…” Sirius’s gaze was haggard, haunted. “I wanted to kill him… instead, he escaped… little bastard…”
“And helped Voldemort to return.” Another gulp of Firewhisky did nothing to banish the chill in Tonks’s stomach as everyone around the table nodded. “So why am I here? Why are you telling me all this?”
Another look from Lupin to Arthur, and once again, the former looked impressed. “Because Fudge is refusing to admit that Voldemort is back. He refuses to accept it. And perhaps the fact that Dumbledore is the one going around telling people…”
“Perhaps?” Tonks snorted, but Lupin continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
“In the last war… Dumbledore founded a resistance movement… The Order of the Phoenix. When Harry came back and told him what he’d seen, he reformed the Order within the hour. All of us are members…”
“Bill too,” interjected Charlie.
“Mundungus Fletcher, Arabella Figg, Sturgis Podmore… Kingsley Shacklebolt, Emmeline Vance, Hestia Jones…” Lupin reeled off a list of names, some familiar to Tonks, some not. “We need as many people as we can get… especially people who work in the Ministry… because Voldemort will be recruiting there too.” He leaned forwards now, looking intently at Tonks, looking into her eyes. “Will you join us?”
Her answer was on the tip of her tongue, but first, she looked around the table, from the earnest, serious Lupin, to the darkly handsome Sirius, to the three wide-eyed, red-haired faces that she’d known for years. “He’s back?” she asked, begging them to tell her that this was all some elaborate hoax, knowing that they wouldn’t. “He’s really back?”
Molly and Arthur looked at one another, Molly stricken, Arthur pale, but it was Charlie who spoke. “Dora… have you ever known me to lie?”
Despite the nature of the moment, despite the fact that he used the name that only three people had ever called her, Tonks smiled. “Your mother’s sitting right here and you want me to answer that honestly?”
Lupin and Sirius both laughed, Arthur grinned, and Molly looked from Charlie to Tonks as if she wanted more details as soon as possible, especially when Charlie ignored everything but Tonks, saying simply, “Fair enough… but have you ever known me to lie to you?”
Tonks didn’t even have to think about that answer, but she held his gaze for a long moment anyway.
Taking a deep breath, her eyes moved from Charlie, to Molly and Arthur, to Sirius, finally resting on Lupin. She nodded once, and she was sure she saw him breathe a sigh of relief. She expected him to say something, instead he just reached over and poured a glass of Firewhisky for her, magically producing four others and filling them too. Standing, he held up his glass, pointing it in Tonks’s direction.
“Welcome to the Order of the Phoenix.”
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: None, though mentions Charlie/Tonks, and very slight Remus/Tonks
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3946
Spoilers: None really.
Notes: This just popped into my head and wouldn’t leave
“Wotcher Tonks.”
The very familiar voice made Tonks look up sharply from her parchment and jump to her feet. The combined effect of this, of course, was that her falling quill smeared the last line she’d written, that her elbow somehow managed to come into contact with the bottle of ink just beside the parchment, knocking it to the floor. Ink spread all over the parchment and the floor, dark as the blush that spread over her cheeks, a blush that wasn’t alleviated by the laugh that came from her visitor.
“Some things never change I see,” he said, a wide smile spreading across his face as he pointed his wand at the spreading stain on the floor. “Scourgify.” Instantly the carpet was clean. Coming around to stand beside Tonks, he pointed his wand at the broken ink jar. “Reparo.” A third incantation refilled it with ink and he placed it on the desk beside the ruined parchment that was, with a flick of his wand, suddenly not ruined at all.
“Show-off,” muttered Tonks, crossing her arms across her chest, trying not to grin at him.
“Jealous,” he retorted. “You’d think you of all people would have mastered those spells at this stage of your life…you a respected Auror and all…”
His eyes sparkled with mischief, and against her will, Tonks could feel a smile spreading across her face. “I’m amazed the dragons haven’t eaten you,” she told him, and Charlie Weasley laughed out loud.
“They’re better trained than that,” he informed her. “And I thought you were too… I come all the way from Romania and this is the best welcome I get?”
“Git,” Tonks said, but she hugged him anyway, grinning as his strong arms went around her, laughing in surprise when they lifted her off her feet. When she was standing in front of him again, she looked up at him curiously. “So what brings you to the Ministry?”
Charlie shrugged. “I was home on a visit for a few days… thought I’d stop in, see some friends…” It was a perfectly good reason, but there was something about Charlie’s demeanour, something about his tone, that set Tonks’s radar on high alert. She couldn’t say quite what it was, but she had a pretty good idea that anyone who didn’t know Charlie Weasley as well as she did wouldn’t have noticed it. “Had to see for myself that you really made it as an Auror…”
“I can hex you and make you forget I did it you know,” she told him archly, and Charlie laughed out loud at that.
“Yeah… I remember that Bat Bogey Hex you did on Ignatius Goyle…”
“He deserved it.” The memory of exactly what Ignatius Goyle had said about her father still made her angry, even years later, and it had been worth every minute spent in detention in Snape’s dungeon to see him lying on the ground, dark flapping shapes covering his face. “What? He did!”
She’d come back to reality to see Charlie looking at her thoughtfully, and there was a look on his face that she would forever associate with him having successfully predicted what would come up on their Care of Magical Creatures OWL. “You won’t get any argument from me Dora,” he told her quietly, more quietly, she thought, than the moment deserved. “Tell you what,” Charlie continued, “It’s late, you must be starving… why don’t you come to the Burrow for dinner? I know Mum’d love to see you…”
Tonks closed her eyes. “Did you tell your mum you were coming to see me?” Because if he had, there was no way that she could refuse – Molly Weasley was not a woman to say no to.
“I may have mentioned it,” was all Charlie said, and that was enough.
“Let’s go then,” Tonks said, surrendering herself to the inevitable. “As I matter of fact, I could do with a decent meal…”
>*<*>*<
“Tonks! Dear Tonks!” No sooner had Tonks emerged out of the Burrow’s fireplace than Molly had embraced her tightly. “So lovely to see you again… my goodness, you look thin… have you been eating properly dear?”
Charlie, who had spent the walk from Tonks’s office to the fireplaces in the lobby of the Ministry teasing her about her lack of cooking ability, guffawed; one look from Tonks – a look mirrored by his mother – had him looking down at his shoes. “Sorry,” he muttered, and Molly instantly turned her gaze back to Tonks.
“Anyway, enough of this chatter,” she said, seemingly heedless of the fact that Tonks had yet to say a thing. “Let’s get into the kitchen and get you all fed…”
“This is very kind of you Molly…” If Tonks thought she would get any more out, she was sadly mistaken.
“Oh it’s no trouble dear, no trouble at all… I’m sure Charlie’s not been eating properly either… the food’s just not the same out there…”
She shook her head, evidently distraught at the deficiencies of Romanian cooking, and Tonks shot a knowing look at Charlie, who to her eyes at least didn’t show any signs of malnourishment.
“You need to find some nice young witch to look after you Charlie,” she told him, and he rolled his eyes.
“Good job I didn’t stick with you then, eh? We’d both starve…”
Tonks laughed, though she thought she caught Molly giving both of them a look, and found herself hoping that she was wrong. Molly had gone through Tonks’s first year of Auror training hoping that she and Charlie would get back together again; she really didn’t want to get Molly’s hopes up again. She looked at Molly, then to Charlie with a raised eyebrow, hoping he’d get her hint, and Charlie just rolled his eyes and shook his head, Weasley-speak for “Ignore her.”
Trying to do just that, Tonks let herself get dragged towards the kitchen, looking all around her as she did so, refamiliarising herself with her surroundings, surprised at how it all looked the same. Quite a bit quieter than she remembered it though, though that wouldn’t be lasting for much longer. “You must be enjoying your last few days of silence,” Tonks said to Molly, receiving a distracted look in return.
“What dear?”
“The silence… before the kids come back from Hogwarts?”
“Oh yes, it’ll be lovely to have them back here again… house isn’t the same when it’s quiet…” Which was nothing like the response Tonks was expecting, strange by Molly’s usual standards of attentiveness. She looked back at Charlie, whose face was completely neutral, as if nothing was amiss, and by the time she looked back towards Molly, they were in the kitchen, and Tonks smiled to see Arthur Weasley standing there, still clad in his travelling cloak.
“Wotcher Arthur,” she said, grinning, and he turned, a smile splitting his face.
“Tonks… how nice to see you… been too long, too long!” Walking towards her, he embraced her, then released her, holding her at arms length. “You look wonderful dear… Auror life obviously agrees with you.”
“See Mum?” Charlie couldn’t resist needling his mother. “Dad doesn’t think Tonks is too thin…”
“He’s a man,” was Molly’s somewhat waspish response, and father and son exchanged a significant glance and a shake of the head.
“Tonks, I don’t think you’ve met our other guest?” Arthur turned towards the table, gesturing with the arm that wasn’t around Tonks’s shoulders, and Tonks saw, with some surprise, that there was a man sitting at the table, observing the scene with a somewhat bemused expression on his face. Arthur made the requisite introductions, even though, as far as Tonks was concerned, they weren’t needed. “Nymphadora Tonks, this is Remus Lupin… Remus, this is Nymphadora Tonks…”
Lupin stood up, extending his hand towards her. “A pleasure,” he said, his expression now faintly wary, and Tonks could guess why. Having had his picture all over The Daily Prophet last summer, Rita Skeeter’s poison pen exposing him as a werewolf who had been teaching at Hogwarts, Lupin probably wasn’t assured of too many dinner invitations, let alone of too many friendly introductions.
“Likewise,” she said, shaking his hand firmly, perhaps too firmly judging by the way his eyes widened in surprise. “And it’s Tonks.”
“Excuse me?” He didn’t understand, and Arthur hastily moved to explain.
“Nymphadora doesn’t like using her full name…”
“And yet people will insist on doing it…” Charlie added, his freckled face most amused, and only growing more so when Tonks glared at him. “I’m surprised you haven’t hexed Dad yet…”
In truth, she’d considered it, but she was sure the good manners her mother had endeavoured to teach her would be against hexing your host when you’d been invited to dinner. Perhaps the truth showed on her face though, because Charlie and Arthur took one look at her and began to laugh, and a smile even touched Lupin’s tired face.
“Well then,” he said, “I will be sure to remember that.”
“That’s enough of that…” Molly said, all business now. “Charlie, will you help me set the table please… and Arthur, haven’t I told you not to stand around gas-bagging with your travelling clothes on… honestly, Tonks will think we’ve forgotten our manners since she was last here…”
“I can help Molly…” Tonks offered.
“Oh… no…that’s…” Molly’s ready smile faltered for the first time since Tonks had arrived, then just as suddenly reappeared, looking a lot less genuine. “You’re a guest dear! You just sit down there… there you go…” A flick of her wand and a chair moved itself out from the table, the noise of which almost, but not quite, covered Charlie’s snicker.
Knowing what Molly and Charlie were thinking, Tonks obediently sat down, smiling somewhat embarrassedly at Lupin. “I would have thought that, as a guest of Molly’s, you’d know better than to offer help,” he observed, and Tonks shrugged.
“I used to help all the time,” she told him, leaving out the fact that, back in the day, she’d been thought of as family. “Of course, things had a habit of getting broken then…”
“Ah, I see.”
He looked down at the table then, and across to the other corner of the room. Following his gaze, Tonks was surprised to see a large black dog lying down, head up and staring right at her. “You got a dog Molly?” she called back, and much to her surprise, Molly promptly lost her grip on the dish she was holding, dinner being saved only by Charlie’s quick “Wingardium Leviosa!”
“Oh, no dear,” Molly replied, looking flustered, looking from Charlie to Lupin to the dog and back to Tonks again. “Just… looking after him for a while… now, let’s get dinner on the table…”
Tonks tried to catch Charlie’s eye, because just like earlier at her office, there was something about the whole scenario that just wasn’t ringing true to her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. He refused to meet her eyes though, and if she didn’t know better, she would have sworn he was doing it on purpose. “Merlin’s beard, I’m turning into Mad-Eye Moody,” she found herself thinking, and resolved to put the idea out of her mind.
Still though, all through dinner, it was as if something was niggling at the back of her mind, as if the four others at the table were in on some secret, knew something, that she didn’t. And through it all, no matter what the topic of conversation was, that big black dog in the corner never took his eyes off her.
It was quite unnerving.
“That was fantastic Molly,” Tonks said when she’d eaten second and third helpings of both stew and apple pie. “Thank you.”
“Indeed,” agreed Lupin. “Most appreciated Molly.”
Molly smiled, pleased at their approval. “Well, as long as you enjoyed it… are you sure you wouldn’t like some more?”
Tonks was fairly sure she wouldn’t have to eat for another two days, and politely waved away any further servings, Lupin doing the same. Molly nodded again, and with a neat flick of her wand, the dishes left the table, soaring towards the sink and stacking themselves neatly beside it. “I’ll wash them later,” Molly said, and Tonks could only shake her head.
“How do you do that?” she wondered, and Charlie rolled his eyes.
“Definitely a good job…” he murmured, but got no further, because his father cleared his throat.
“Tonks… it really has been lovely to have you here again… we’ve missed you here.” He glanced over at Charlie, who was assiduously studying his joined hands. “However… I must… that is… we… must confess that we’ve lured you here under somewhat false pretences.”
Torn between the desire to shout “I knew it!” and ask for more details, Tonks bit her tongue.
“Well, not totally false…” Molly interjected. “I’ve often asked Charlie… but anyway…” Her voice trailed off as Lupin and Arthur sat up straight in their chairs. In the corner, the dog sat up too, ears raised, looking from one to the other, and a strange notion came over Tonks…He understands what we’re saying…
“The reason we asked you here, Tonks,” Arthur said, “Is that we’re sure you’ve heard rumours over the last few days… about what happened at Hogwarts, during the last Triwizard task.”
Tonks nodded slowly. “Cedric Diggory died,” she said, and even though she hadn’t known him, Hufflepuff loyalty made her sad anyway. “And Harry Potter told everyone that he’d been… well, that he’d been killed by You-Know-Who… that He was back.” She didn’t miss the looks that were exchanged between the other four. “Fudge wants it buried,” she added. “So naturally, everyone’s talking about it.” Still, no word from the others, and that little niggle that she’d been feeling all evening was stronger than ever. “What does this…”
“Harry was telling the truth.” It was Lupin who spoke, and his calm tones were somehow more confident than they had been when they’d been talking about Auror work and dragons and tales of the twins’ latest activities. “Cedric Diggory was murdered by Lord Voldemort… he has indeed returned.”
If someone had turned a bucket of cold water over Tonks at that moment – and she’d had the experience, thank you very much, knew what it was like – she could not have been more stunned.
“What…” she gasped after a long moment where she could not find her voice. “How…”
Because it couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t be true. You-Know-Who had been banished thirteen years before, defeated by Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived… and yes, there have been rumours, but surely they were only rumours, put about by those who had served him, those who wanted to frighten others…
But she was sitting in the kitchen of the Burrow, and Molly and Arthur Weasley were telling her these things, and Charlie …
As if her thoughts summoned him, Charlie was at her side, silently placing a glass of Firewhisky in front of her. She gave him a look that she hoped conveyed her gratitude and downed it in one. She took it as a measure of how serious things were that, as she choked and spluttered and he returned to his chair, he didn’t even make a joke.
“But… how…”
“Voldemort had helpers… faithful Death Eaters doing his bidding. Barty Crouch Junior… who, as we thought, did not die in Azkaban.” Lupin was doing all the talking now, Molly and Arthur side by side, clutching one another’s hands, looking between him and Tonks as if they were spectators at a Quidditch match. “It’s a long story… but all you need to know is that he escaped, and posed for the last year as Mad-Eye Moody, teaching at Hogwarts. All year, he engineered things so that he could bring Harry to Voldemort… and a few nights ago, he succeeded. With help, I might add, from another faithful servant.”
Here, he paused, dropped his gaze, looking faintly sick, and when no-one spoke, indeed when none of the Weasleys would meet her eyes, Tonks realised who it must have been. A faithful Death Eater…someone who had been on the run for nearly two years…
“Sirius Black.”
Her voice sounded strained even to her own ears, and Lupin’s head jerked up. Whatever colour had been there had long since leached out of it as he told his tale, but now two pale spots of red reappeared on his cheekbones. “No,” he said softly, shaking his head. “Peter Pettigrew.”
For a second, Tonks was sure she’d heard him wrong. “No,” she said, shaking her head, looking to Molly to Arthur to Charlie then back to Lupin. “No… Peter Pettigrew is dead… Sirius Black killed him when You-Know-Who vanished…”
In the corner, the dog growled, breaking the silence that fell when her voice trailed off, and Tonks’s gaze flew to him. Then she felt her jaw drop in horror, because the dog was growing larger, was transforming, wasn’t in fact a dog at all…
The dog was Sirius Black.
She let out a scream, leaping to her feet, the chair she was sitting on skidding backwards, falling sideways and clattering to the floor. Her hand moved instinctively for her wand, and she was pointing it at the fugitive before she realised that not only was no-one else reacting with surprise, but that no-one was looking at Sirius.
They were all looking at her.
“It’s ok…Tonks, it’s ok…” It was Charlie who spoke, Charlie who was her friend, Charlie who had brought her here, Charlie who was the one person on this earth she knew she could trust implicitly. “He’s on our side…Tonks, I promise you….”
Slowly, very slowly, she lowered her wand, but remained standing, even when Arthur flicked his wand and set her chair upright again. “You’re an Animagus?” she managed to croak. “But we didn’t… you never…”
Beside her, Lupin sighed. “To fully understand the story, you need to go back further than Voldemort’s downfall… back to my own school days. Though first, perhaps you’d like some more Firewhisky?”
Tonks looked at him, and for no reason that she could articulate, his words, his demeanour, something in his eyes, made her relax. “Just leave the bloody bottle,” she muttered, and to her surprise, he laughed.
It was a nice sound.
Which was not, she hastily admonished herself, something that she should be thinking about at a time like this.
Only when she had another Firewhisky in front of her – and true to her word, Charlie left the bottle beside her – did Lupin speak again. “You know what I am.” It was statement, not question, and she nodded. “When I was at Hogwarts, I had three friends who were very dear to me… James Potter… Sirius Black… and Peter Pettigrew. They noticed that I was sick every month… always at the full moon. And rather than have me endure my transformations alone… they studied to become Animagi. And they succeeded. We never told anyone… it was our secret. Just as, when James and Lily were forced to go into hiding, they chose a Secret Keeper, someone they trusted.”
This part of the story, Tonks knew. “Sirius Black.”
“No.” Sirius’s voice made Tonks jump. “They were going to pick me… I convinced them to pick Pettigrew… the one that everyone would least suspect.” His bitterness was palpable, and suddenly, the tale that she’d known all her life, the one that had been revised a couple of years ago, shifted in Tonks’s head, and she saw how it all worked.
“And he betrayed them… framed you… and…” Here her logic failed her, but only for a moment. “He was an Animagus, he lived in hiding!”
“Well reasoned.” Lupin sounded impressed, and when she tore her gaze from Sirius, she saw that he looked it as well. “And might I add … no offence to your family Molly, Arthur… you believed it faster than Harry and his friends.”
“Yeah, well, that’ll be the Firewhisky,” Tonks told him, taking another gulp. Lupin chuckled, shaking his head in amusement, and in that moment, he looked as if years had been taken off him.
“Pettigrew found his way here… to our family.” Now it was Arthur’s turn to look as if he’d swallowed Gurdyroots; beside him, Tonks could see Charlie gazing at her with a look that she couldn’t quite read. “Disguised as a rat… Percy’s rat.”
“Scabbers?” Tonks’s grip tightened on the glass, and when she saw Molly gulping, she forced herself to relax. “Scabbers was Peter Pettigrew?”
“You might have seen the family photograph that adorned the front page of the Prophet, when they were all in Egypt? I saw it… I recognised him… and I knew that he was going back to where Harry was… and I knew I had to stop him…” Sirius’s gaze was haggard, haunted. “I wanted to kill him… instead, he escaped… little bastard…”
“And helped Voldemort to return.” Another gulp of Firewhisky did nothing to banish the chill in Tonks’s stomach as everyone around the table nodded. “So why am I here? Why are you telling me all this?”
Another look from Lupin to Arthur, and once again, the former looked impressed. “Because Fudge is refusing to admit that Voldemort is back. He refuses to accept it. And perhaps the fact that Dumbledore is the one going around telling people…”
“Perhaps?” Tonks snorted, but Lupin continued as if she hadn’t spoken.
“In the last war… Dumbledore founded a resistance movement… The Order of the Phoenix. When Harry came back and told him what he’d seen, he reformed the Order within the hour. All of us are members…”
“Bill too,” interjected Charlie.
“Mundungus Fletcher, Arabella Figg, Sturgis Podmore… Kingsley Shacklebolt, Emmeline Vance, Hestia Jones…” Lupin reeled off a list of names, some familiar to Tonks, some not. “We need as many people as we can get… especially people who work in the Ministry… because Voldemort will be recruiting there too.” He leaned forwards now, looking intently at Tonks, looking into her eyes. “Will you join us?”
Her answer was on the tip of her tongue, but first, she looked around the table, from the earnest, serious Lupin, to the darkly handsome Sirius, to the three wide-eyed, red-haired faces that she’d known for years. “He’s back?” she asked, begging them to tell her that this was all some elaborate hoax, knowing that they wouldn’t. “He’s really back?”
Molly and Arthur looked at one another, Molly stricken, Arthur pale, but it was Charlie who spoke. “Dora… have you ever known me to lie?”
Despite the nature of the moment, despite the fact that he used the name that only three people had ever called her, Tonks smiled. “Your mother’s sitting right here and you want me to answer that honestly?”
Lupin and Sirius both laughed, Arthur grinned, and Molly looked from Charlie to Tonks as if she wanted more details as soon as possible, especially when Charlie ignored everything but Tonks, saying simply, “Fair enough… but have you ever known me to lie to you?”
Tonks didn’t even have to think about that answer, but she held his gaze for a long moment anyway.
Taking a deep breath, her eyes moved from Charlie, to Molly and Arthur, to Sirius, finally resting on Lupin. She nodded once, and she was sure she saw him breathe a sigh of relief. She expected him to say something, instead he just reached over and poured a glass of Firewhisky for her, magically producing four others and filling them too. Standing, he held up his glass, pointing it in Tonks’s direction.
“Welcome to the Order of the Phoenix.”
