37: Moment of Truth “ Part Two
Combining magic spells and sheer physical effort, Remus and Tonks quickly set about scouring the wreckage of Zelia’s potions lab in search of any stray bottle of Wolfsbane that might have miraculously survived the devastation. By unspoken agreement, they instinctively divided the room, Tonks taking the right hand side and Remus moving to the left as they sifted through the broken glass and spilled potions. But Accio Wolfsbane had failed to produce results and, in spite of Tonks’ insistence that a bottle could perhaps be trapped somewhere and that searching was not a waste of time, to Remus, it already felt futile.
The moon was coming. They had ten minutes, perhaps less, before the inevitable shooting pains would course through his already shivering body and transform him utterly and without the illusive Wolfsbane, his mind would vanish with it. There was even less time before he would be forced to send Tonks on her way “ in spite of her protests, he knew that she had to be out of the building by moonrise, whether or not he was with her. But the moment he had seen the wreckage of the room he had known that the Wolfsbane was a hopeless cause. The sealed-off room at the foot of the lift shaft would at least provide him with an isolated and restricted spot in which to transform and with a few prudent silencing spells, there was even a chance he might avoid detection until help arrived the next morning.
It was a vain hope. But it was all he had left.
“Ow! Bugger!”
At Tonks’ quiet exclamation, Remus glanced quickly over to where the pale-faced Auror was staring irritably at her red-smeared finger.
“Tonks?” he ventured.
“I just cut myself.” Her voice sounded annoyed. “Bloody glass. I should have been more careful.”
You should. You really should.
Blood. There was blood. He could see it, trickling gently down as it wetted her skin and as his fevered pre-moon imagination took hold, it seemed that he could almost smell it too, a distant tang that whispered of prey, of hunger, of the overpowering need to sink his teeth against flesh beneath the light of the moon…
No! Focus!
“Don’t suck it.” The admonishment was sharp, sharper than he had intended as he snapped back against the surge of bloodlust that was tumbling through his mind and it instantly froze the almost instinctive rise of her finger lip-wards. “Cleanse the wound and seal it with your wand. Merlin only knows what’ll happen to you if some of this cocktail of potions gets into your blood or stomach.”
“Good point.” Tonks flashed him a half-hearted grin as she carefully wiped the enticing scarlet away on a corner of her robes instead. A moment later, a muttered spell had sealed the wound. “Mind you, it might have been fun. I’ve always wanted to be a three-headed fish or a striped giraffe.” Her eyes glittered playfully for a moment. “Mind you, if it turned out to be a really bizarre concoction, I might end up as Dolores Umbridge and that would just be freaky…”
But Remus barely heard her, swallowing hard as his instincts roared, his eyes fixing almost hungrily on the red smear on her robes. Blood, there was still blood…
Forget the blood! Human, you’re human, you’re human…
“Remus?”
In spite of the quietness of her voice, Remus nonetheless started violently at the sound of his name. His eyes snapped up to find her gazing at her, her features rich with a mixture of uncertainty, sympathy and concern. And he knew she understood.
“How long until moonrise?” she asked softly.
Not long enough. Remus at least managed to stabilise his voice before replying. “Maybe ten minutes. Maybe less.”
For a tantalising instant, she held his gaze before her eyes dropped back to the muddle of glass and potions at her feet. “Then we’d better hurry,” she stated almost matter-of-factly. “We don’t have much time.”
No. No, we don’t.
And I can’t let you waste what time you have.
For a moment, he could only stare at her. His eyes drank in the pale, smooth contours of her face, the unexpected lankness of her usually vibrant hair, her almost frantic movements as she rooted through the debris that surrounded her and he felt the last remote shred of his hope drain slowly away. For he knew what he was doing; he knew that his mind was fixing a final image, a last impression of the woman he loved, before facing the necessity of sending her out of his life forever. It was pointless, hopeless… Time had run out, for Wolfsbane, for them, and all they were doing now was delaying the inevitable. And he would not let her suffer for it.
I don’t have much time. But you…
I want you to have more time than this.
“You have to go.”
He had intended to speak the words softly but they blurted from his lips instead, echoing in the air, reverberating, repeating until they almost seemed to fill the room and press down upon its occupants. He saw her freeze, statue-like, for a moment before her head turned slowly upwards, her dark eyes flashing and features fierce, a sign, if he had ever needed one, that he was about to have a fight on his hands. But his resolve was steeled now, solid and immovable; she could scream and shout at him as much as she pleased but if he had to use the Imperius curse to get her out of the building before moonrise, he would.
I will not let you die because of me. However much you seem to want to.
“We’ve been through this.” Her voice, when it came, was low and dangerous. “I’m not leaving you, Remus.”
“Yes you are.” Remus was quite proud of the cool, matter-of-fact tone with which he responded as he rose slowly to his feet to face her. “We’re out of time, Tonks. We tried Accio and it failed. Do you really think there’s any Wolfsbane here to find?”
She too abandoned her crouch then, rising to her feet, slow and fluid, a gradual but determined ascent. Her expression was outright challenging. “Remus, we’ve barely even started looking…”
“And we don’t have time to finish.” Almost harshly, he intruded on her protest and cut away her words. “This room is the best I’m going to get for a transformation “ with the lift gone, the wolf will go nowhere and endanger no one.” He hardened his voice. “And that means I don’t need you here. So if you want to escape the Lockdown, you have to go now. I’ll be safe enough.”
“Safe?” Her voice cracked slightly as it rose. “Remus, look at this place! There’s glass everywhere! If you transform in here, you’ll cut yourself to ribbons!”
Remus was already shaking his head. “I’ll be fine. Once you’ve gone, I’ll have time to clean up a little…”
It was her turn to slap away his words. “We’ll clean it up faster together.”
He could feel the spiralling rise of helpless anger at her pig-headedness but he fought to damp it down, desperate not to reduce a reasoned argument to bickering once more. “I’m not going to let you die down here because of me.”
Her glare was hot and searing, unrelenting in intensity. “I think that’s my decision.”
Restraint was rapidly losing the fight. “You want to die?” he snapped harshly, observing her slight wince at his pointed rebuke. “For what, Tonks? For the sake of some twisted sense of loyalty? Out of stubbornness, maybe? That’s not good enough for me!”
Her fists clenched at her sides as she took half a step towards him. “You know why I’m staying.”
Oh Merlin, not now! Yes, fine, he loved Tonks dearly, but damn it all, she really needed to work on her priorities; her timing for these conversations was abominable to say the least.
Remus ignored her implications, determined to stick to his point and not get drawn in to yet another pointless, emotional debate. “You need to go,” he retorted bluntly. “You need to save yourself while you still can.” His eyes fixed on hers and held. “I mean it.”
“And what, you expect me to just abandon you?” She took another step, glass crushing beneath her feet with an ominous crunching sound, her eyes never breaking with his. “To leave you here to die or worse?”
His jaw clenched. Bloody hell, couldn’t she see? “I don’t have a choice. You do.”
Tonks’ heart-shaped face tightened grimly, ominously even as he realised an instant too late that he had given her a precious opening. “Yes, I do have a choice, Remus,” she replied quietly, her words shimmering with deliberately paced anger. “And I’ve made it. If you stay, I stay. Simple as that.”
Dammit, no! Go, bloody go, just go. How can you be so stubborn? How can you be so stupid?
“Just go, will you?” Frustration, rage, desperation “ they welled within him, rising uncontrollably and suddenly he was shouting, the dam bursting as anxiety and fury washed away his frantic calm. He strode forwards, glass shards smashing as he kicked them from his path “ it took all the strength he had not to grab here by the shoulders and shake her like a disobedient puppy. “Get out of here!” He drew a desperate, furious breath. “So help me, if you don’t go right now, I’m going to…”
“What?” She cut his words off sharply, thrusting her face belligerently up to his. “You’ll what, Remus? Throw me out? I’d love to see you try!”
It roared through his veins, a wolf’s lust, a wolf’s fury, screaming against the fragile human body from which it was soon to be freed. It burst into his mind’s eyes, urging, screeching at him to let it free, to rip, to tear, to slaughter…
“I’ll kill you!”
Kill you, kill you, kill you, kill you…
Treacherous echoes recycled his words until they were swallowed by silence. Her eyes burned his face with excruciating intensity.
“You’ll kill me.” Her voice, when it came, was icily flat. “Remus, for Merlin’s…”
“Stay here and I’ll kill you.” His words slapped hers away ruthlessly. “Oh, I won’t mean to. I won’t want to. But when that moon comes up, Tonks, what I want, what I mean doesn’t matter any more! I will kill you. I will eat you, alive if that’s how you happen to be!” He felt his voice rising as a vicious cocktail of bile and wolfish instinct waged war at the very thought of such a moment. “I won’t care who you are, I won’t care about how I feel; I will sink my teeth into your flesh and rip it into pieces, I will tear you into nothing more than a few raw chunks of meat and bone and I will stand over your scattered remains with your blood on my teeth and tongue and howl my joy at the moon!” His hand grasped her arm almost instinctively, biting into the fragile mass of skin as though to prove her peril. “You will die and I will enjoy it. I will revel in the taste, the kill and it doesn’t matter who you are, not once I’m in that body and sharing that mind! No…” He stared at her, her heart-shaped face staring up, her eyes unreadable as he slowly, tentatively withdrew his hand and freed her from his hold. “No,” he repeated softly, his voice ringing with sad truth. “Caring won’t come until the morning. Caring won’t come until I wake up tomorrow coated in blood and gore and surrounded by lifeless chunks of a body that used to be human. A body that used to be you.” He could feel his hands shaking as he fought a sudden desperate urge to touch his fingers to her upturned face. “And if I have enough of my own mind left to cling to, I will end my life there and then. I could never live knowing that I had so destroyed a life. Especially yours.”
His words trailed away into silence. He could feel her dark eyes raking his face as she stared at him but he could not meet them then, could not do anything but gaze blankly at the detritus at his feet.
You had to do it. She had to understand…
And then to his utter astonishment, she laughed.
It was an incredulous laugh, bitter and rife with disbelief but nonetheless it was enough to make Remus raise his head and gape at her. “You think this is funny?”
The laughter vanished instantly. “No. But I think you’re insane.”
“What?”
“You see I’ve just realised what this is.” Tonks allowed no further elaboration. “I’ve just realised what you think of me. You think that I…” She took several deep breaths, her eyes suddenly blazing. “So I’m stupid to you, Remus?” she snapped abruptly. “What, you think I’m so deluded as to think that big bad Lupin the wolf won’t hurt me? That I can stay here and stroke your furry muzzle without getting ripped to shreds by the fangs?” His sudden flush at her accusations seemed to fuel her rage. “Believe it or not, I do know the drill! I do know that werewolves aren’t house-pets! I’m not planning on sitting down here and watching you transform, you prat! I was going to wait at the top of the lift shaft to protect you! But if you think for one minute that I’m going to bugger off and leave you here for the Dementors to snack on, you’re even more delusional than you took me for!”
He gritted his teeth, fighting off a sudden urge to shout. Of course she wouldn’t have “ he wasn’t thinking straight. But still, it didn’t change the fact that... “You shouldn’t even do that. You should get out while you still…”
“I’m not leaving you.” Yet again, her voice cut him off. “And don’t you dare try and ask me again. It’s getting bloody repetitive.”
“Tonks…”
“No, Remus!” Her yell was suddenly wild. “No, I’m sick of it! I’m stick of you and your urges towards self-destruction! I’m stick of all the bloody sacrifice! For once in your life, will you try not to be the martyr?”
Incredulity rose powerfully. “Pardon?”
“You heard!” The retort was lashing. “Fine, you want to worry about me? Then worry about this! How the hell am I supposed to go on without you?”
“Rather better in one piece than in thousands!”
“I’m not that stupid! Remember?” Her voice was outright scathing. “What is it with you? I’m an Auror, Remus! Why do you have this ridiculous urge to protect me from dangers I know all about?”
“Because I love you!”
Love you, love you, love you, love you…
For the second time, the echo caught the words, spinning them gently away into silence. But this time, they seemed to linger rather longer.
Tonks stared at him. He stared at Tonks.
And then, slight but distinct, she smiled.
“About time,” she said at length, wearily, relived, mordant triumph rippling in her tone. “About bloody time.”
Remus closed his eyes. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest as exhilaration and horror flooded his body as one. I shouldn’t have said… “That is not a good thing, Tonks.”
The lilt of her voice was dangerous. “Oh?”
He chose not to open his eyes but he could just picture the venom of her expression. “You’re safer without me around.”
“This from a man who once saved my life.”
Remus sighed deeply, desperately, praying to any god or deity that might happen to care to instil a little sense into the woman he loved. “Loving me is dangerous. Being loved by me even more so.”
“What, afraid I’ll get a paper cut from your Valentine’s card?”
His eyes snapped open, meeting her defiant gaze passionately. “This is serious. Can’t you just understand? ” In spite of himself, his voice trembled as memories rose, a parade of faces loved and lost to fortune, time and war. “I’m too dangerous, Tonks. And if there’s one thing that life has taught me, it’s that people who love me get hurt.”
Tonks stared at him once more, her eyes widening suddenly as realisation flowed into them. And then, slowly, gently, she shook her head. “How selfish can you be?” she whispered softly.
Remus stared back. Needless to say, that was not quite the response he had expected. “What?”
Tonks’ gaze did not waver. “You’re being selfish, Remus.”
Remus outright glared. Why can’t she understand? “Didn’t you just finish telling me to stop being a martyr and start thinking about myself?”
“Very funny. I can hardly contain my hysteria.”
Remus chose to ignore her sarcasm. “I’m thinking of you. You deserve better.”
Her expression flared indignantly. “And who are you to decide what the hell is best for me?”
“You’re too young to throw your life away…”
“And you’re too young to throw away yours!” Once again, Tonks refused to allow Remus to finish his protest. “You’re not even that close to forty, Remus! You’ve probably got another good hundred years left in you yet! But do you know what I think?” She stiffened her jaw. “I think you’ve got so used to everything in your life going wrong that you’ve given up on being happy. And I love you too much to see that happen.” Tentatively, uncertainly, her fingers stretched out across the chasm between them and brushed the top of his hand.
“I love you too much,” she whispered again.
The silence that followed echoed and stretched across the room until it was all but deafening. His eyes met hers, and held.
The final barricades began to crumble into dust. He could feel himself weakening.
How could she feel that way about him? How could he let her feel that way when…
“No,” he whispered softly, a final desperate salvo of defence. “Gods, no. Please don’t. Please don’t feel that way.”
Tonks shrugged slightly, her smile rife with sorrow. “I can’t help it. Sorry.” She took a deep breath. “I love you, Remus,” she said simply. “And like it or not, you’re just going to have to accept that.”
He could feel his head shaking almost unconsciously. “I don’t think I can.”
Her eyes burned into him. “Why? And don’t give me the stock excuses this time. I want the truth.”
The truth. What the hell was the truth? Remus could hear his heart pounding in his ears, feel his hands shaking as he fought to catch his breath, exhausted by the effort of holding up the last ashes of the barricades within. Truth, she wanted. And there was a truth. A truth that lay beneath every reason, every doubt and deflection that he could concoct, the pure distillation of his feelings that lurked deep within his very core.
He had defended that truth until now. But the wind of weariness swept through his mind and brushed the last of his defences away.
She deserves to know. I owe her that.
“I’m scared,” he said.
He saw her eyes soften, saw her lips gently part.
“I trust you,” she replied.
Her words were soft and simple, drifting profoundly, but Remus was sure that she did not understand the truth of such a naïve statement.
He slowly shook his head. “But how can you when I can’t even trust myself? I have a wolf inside me and it’s strong, very strong. And like it or not, I’ve fed it that strength more than once…”
He felt her hand brush his. “You’ve always won before. You will again.”
“But I haven’t.”
He had to tell her. She believed him to be strong but he knew it wasn’t so, he knew the weakness of his mind that had plagued him all his life. She thought she knew him but how could she? The real him was a stark truth that few people had ever known; his father, his mother, Moody and Dumbledore “ they had all seen the price of his weakness. And Merlin, it hurt, but she deserved to know too, she deserved to see the truth of who “ of what “ he was.
He knew that she would be appalled. But at least she would leave him then and be safe.
“You don’t know me, Tonks,” he whispered almost desperately. “Not how you think you do.” He met her eyes, fearful of what he would fine but resigned to it all the same. “I’m a weak man.” He expelled the words hurriedly before they could stall on his lips, his greatest shame confessed for the first time in his life. “I’ve turned feral, Tonks. Mind, body and heart and it’s happened more than once. As long as I live, I’ll be a threat to everyone around me. It still calls me. And I can’t promise that one day I won’t call back.”