17: Homecoming
Tonks couldn’t quite believe how little her childhood home had changed in twenty years. To her mind, it had been a mere four days since she had last stood in this quiet garden under the waxing moon, since she had kissed her little baby boy on the forehead and handed him to her pale and anxious mother, before turning and Apparating away to face her fate. And standing here now, staring at the tidy window-boxes, the neatly painted frames, and the patterned curtains that seemed almost to have been plucked straight from her mind’s eye, she found she could almost believe that if she knocked on the door, her mother would open it with baby Teddy sucking his little fist in her arms.
But Teddy was no baby now. He needed her help. Just as she needed her mum’s.
Not wanting to scare the life out of her mother, she had donned a set of nondescript robes and morphed herself into an equally nondescript looking Ministry worker before kissing Remus goodbye, wishing him luck, and Apparating on her way. She had formulated a rough sort of plan involving gaining admittance on the grounds of quizzing her about Teddy’s supposed misdeeds and then letting the morph drop once they were in private, but as it turned out, it was unnecessary. Her knock at the door had received no answer. Andromeda was still in Vienna.
That left Tonks in rather a quandary. She had no way of knowing whether her mother would be back that day “ from all she’d heard, the conference wasn’t due to finish until tomorrow. She assumed that her mum would be back as soon as she heard about Teddy, but then the alarming thought dawned that since ‘Andromeda Tonks’ had been present at the arrest and had told Victoire Weasley of her return, all those who might have contacted her had probably assumed that she already knew. Mum most likely knew nothing of what was going on.
Damn.
Trying to ignore the surge of guilt at this prospect, Tonks made a snap decision. Reaching for the house key labelled Gran’s that she had found in Teddy’s drawer, she slipped it into the lock and let herself inside.
Although the outside had seemed to have been preserved almost by conscious effort, the inside of the house showed the evolution of time in a way that Tonks found both encouraging and unsettling. New paper covered the walls of the hallway, changed from her childhood mustard yellow to patterned forest green. The old golden carpet that had told the stories of her numerous childhood accidents, of mud trampled in so many times that not even her mother’s best Scourgify could remove the stains, had disappeared as well, though the old hall table and gilt-edged mirror were reassuringly familiar. A quick glance to her left showed the same pattern of change in the dining room “ new decoration surrounded well-known old furniture, although the dining room chairs had been re-covered and the plants had been replaced. The lounge to her right was utterly changed “ the battered old three-piece suite that she had bounced on and ripped the cushions from to make her forts, in order to repel the evil armies of Daddyness, had apparently finally succumbed after years of abuse and been consigned to oblivion, replaced by a more durable model. Although her mother’s favourite delicate side tables remained, as did the inset bookshelves, the fireplace had been Transfigured into a new design, and even the sideboard and dresser were new. Next door down the corridor, the little ground floor bedroom they had always used for guests appeared to have been converted into her mother’s study, but the kitchen, jutting out into the garden as it always had, had been replaced completely apart from the sizable fireplace at one end. A quick glance into the garden told her that the pond remained and that the trees had grown by quite some margin, including the gnarled old oak in which she had built her tree house “ at least once her father had covered the ground beneath in a wide assortment of cushioning charms. A hint of plank between the leaves implied that the old wreck she had left up there had apparently been restored for the use of her son.
Her heart positively ached when she moved upstairs and peered into her parents’ “ her mother’s bedroom. Here at least, time really had stood still. Not a stick of furniture, not a picture, not even the bedspread had changed since she had last stood here. The only thing that was not as it had been was the large picture frame propped up upon the bedside table that had been her father’s. From within, Dad’s face laughed with silent joy as he threw and caught his giggling baby daughter in his arms.
Her old bedroom had apparently been given over to Teddy, although it was now little more than a storage facility for clothes and toys that he had long outgrown. The bathroom too was different, although the familiar and vast glass cabinet where her mother had kept the necessary array of healing potions remained.
Tonks had no idea how long she spent wandering around the house and garden, drinking in and absorbing the changes one by one, smiling at the memories evoked by this or that piece of familiarity, frowning as she acknowledged silently just how much of what had still made this place feel her home had gone. It was like coming back to an old home that had been bought by someone else, or visiting someone who had purchased a heap of her family’s old furniture. It was the house in which she’d been raised, in which she’d laughed and played with her parents, acted out suitably teenage strops, and studied for her Auror qualifications until she had finally moved out aged twenty to share a flat with a friend. But somehow, it wasn’t. Not anymore.
Twenty years. It was so long.
She had accepted the changes to the home she had shared with Remus. After all, she had known it barely a year and so much of it was his past, his history, and perhaps seeing it altered so had been what had made him so ready to acknowledge the magnitude of time they had lost. But it was here, now, seeing the changes wrought on her history by twenty years passed in the blink of an eye that it truly hit her hard. Twenty years was how long she had lived here. Twenty years worth of her memories and more echoed through these rooms. And there had been so much laughter, so many tears, so many triumphs and accidents, the extraordinary and the everyday, so much living, so much of her life… And the same had passed again, for her mum and Teddy within these walls. They’d had their laughs and sorrows here, as many as she had, and the house had changed to reflect those days and crowd her memories away.
And the new memories “ memories of her mother and her son “ weren’t hers to share in.
The weight of the years she had lost seemed to crash down upon her all at once. As she entered the lounge once more, she sat down heavily in one of the new but well-worn armchairs. Had Teddy made his forts from their cushions to ward off the armies of Granness? Had he fallen and tumbled here, knocked delicate tables flying and tripped over his shoelaces? Had he spilt his ice cream on the rug and watched his grandmother’s eyebrow rise pointedly at the sight of the mess? Had he wrangled with her about this or that hair colour, but ended the dispute with an impromptu hug and a grin just as she had?
She’d missed so much.
To her left, the bookcase inset into a hollow in the wall was strewn with picture frames. One by one, she reached up from her seated position and lifted them down, looking them over, remembering, yearning at the sight of her family laid bare; her parents’ wedding picture, two young, fresh-faced teenagers barely days out of Hogwarts, arm in arm in her Grandma Tonks’ back garden; a young Sirius in his school robes, laughing, with his arm slung around the shoulders of his older cousin; a tiny baby with a red face and ever-changing hair cuddled in her pale but beaming mother’s arms, her dad crouched down beside them; herself as a toddler, in the ruins of one of her cushion forts as the forces of Daddyness pinned her ruthlessly to the rug and tickled her without mercy; a beaming green-haired girl lurking in a tatty tree-house; herself again, this time scarlet-haired as she ripped into a pile of Christmas presents with an expression of utmost glee, her mother watching from behind and laughing in silent merriment. She clearly remembered the day her dad had taken the picture of her in her Hogwarts uniform, holding her wand with the Hogwarts Express in the background “ gods, in spite of the smile she was wearing she’d been so scared and she’d run back to hug her mum and dad so many times that she’d almost missed the train. The next shelf seemed to move into the next phase of her life “ she was wearing her Auror robes and happily holding the certification that marked the completion of her training, as Mum and Dad stood proudly on either side. Her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary photo stood beside it, and the last picture Dad had taken of them all with Grandma Tonks before she died. And then, oh then, her own wedding photo as she stood comfortable and beaming in the circle of Remus’ arms. And the next picture… herself with her father, dressed up neatly in his best as he gave her away…
No, she still wasn’t ready for that yet. She shifted her gaze to the picture of herself looking exhausted but radiant as she clasped a red-faced and rainbow-haired bundle of her own.
No, she wasn’t ready for that yet either.
But it was the next shelf that caught her eye. For on the next shelf, arrayed out in bright colours were all the memories she’d missed; green-haired Teddy as a toddler running around the garden; blue-haired Teddy grinning as he mounted the toy broom Harry had just handed him; red-haired Teddy in the tree house, just as she had once been; black-haired Teddy with Harry and her mum at Christmas, and then Teddy, turquoise-haired and standing on Platform Nine and Three Quarters with his grandmother…
Her son. And of his childhood she had nothing but someone else’s photos…
She stared at the final picture for a long time, lost in a confusing blend of her own memories of her dad’s warm arms as he hugged her a final time before shooing her onto the train and her own attempts to visualise Teddy beyond the confines of the picture. Had he run back for one final hug from his Gran? Had he taken a cat, an owl or a toad along? Had he made friends on the train, or had that come later, when he had joined his Ravenclaw housemates?
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that she heard the rush of rising flames, saw a glow of green out of the corner of her eye. Some part of her heard the footsteps moving in the kitchen and then down the hall. But her conscious brain did not react until she heard the gasp of shock and the crash of a small trunk falling to the floor.
“What…? Who are you? What do you think you’re doing in my house? How did you…?”
Tonks shot to her feet without thinking, the picture dropping from her hand almost guiltily as she scrambled to compose herself, to scrape together her pre-planned story about questioning to ease the blow before it came. But as Andromeda’s eyes fixed upon her, widened, stared, as the blood drained from her cheeks and her wand hand, half extended, began to tremble, Tonks knew the truth without even having to look.
At some point in her long, nostalgic wanderings, her disguise had melted away.
So much for softening the shock.
She allowed herself a brief, self-indulgent moment to stare. Mum was older, of course, her long brown hair now threaded with streaks of silver that matched her deep grey eyes, her face slightly more lined, but her clothes, in spite of a trip through the Floo, were as immaculate as ever. Her wedding ring still glistened on one finger, and Tonks could just see the edge of the pendant she’d always worn, containing locks of hair from her husband and daughter, peeking out of the collar of her robes.
And she was shaking like a leaf.
Her mum never shook. Never.
“Mum.” The word was soft, almost a whisper, but Andromeda flinched away from it as though someone had struck her a physical blow. “Mum, it’s me.”
Andromeda’s lips scrunched together as though she’d tasted something foul. Her eyebrows knitted fiercely together.
“Who are you?” she exclaimed, her voice trembling, and it was all Tonks could do not to rush forwards, to hold her, to take her in her arms and hug her mum until she understood that this was all for real. “And how dare you come into my house and wear that face?”
Tonks tried to smile. “Well, it’s my face, Mum. It seemed like a good idea to bring it with me. I can change it if you want but…”
Mum drew herself up, her gaze so intense Tonks was surprised it didn’t ignite the furniture. “Don’t you dare make light of what you’re doing! You come into my house wearing the face of my dead daughter and then you have the nerve to joke about it?”
Tonks was not sure what she’d expected to happen when she showed up out of the blue to tell her mother she hadn’t died twenty years ago after all, but she could tell by the look on her mum’s face that the situation was deteriorating rapidly.
She raised her hands in front of her. “Mum, please. I know this must be confusing for you. But I promise you, this is for real and if you’d just lower your wand and take a seat, I’ll explain everything…”
“I don’t want your explanations!” The shriek that issued from her mum’s mouth all but knocked her backwards. “I don’t want to hear your lies! I just want you out of my house! Now get out! Get out or do I have to make you go?”
“Mum!”
“SHUT UP!”
The magical blow came from nowhere, hurling her backwards into the chair and knocking her sprawling into the poker stand by the fireplace with an echoing crash. Fighting the pain that surged through her knees and arm, Tonks scrambled for her own wand as she raised one desperate hand in an effort to ward off further blows.
“Mum!” she cried out, almost pleadingly. “Put the wand down!”
“Don’t call me that!”
The second blow missed her by inches as she dived aside, but the delicate table with its ornate vase was not so fortunate. Her arm caught against the wood as she tumbled and sent the ornament flying to the ground to smash emphatically into pieces.
Tonks did the only thing she could think of. Diving behind the arm of the settee, she took cover.
“Mum!” she shouted desperately. “Please!”
“Stop it!” This cry at least was not punctuated by an attack. A tremulous note had crept into her mother’s tone, an edge of hurt, of despair that tinged the corners of the raging anger. “You cruel… You evil…” She flung the words across the room. “Is this some Rita Skeeter ploy to finally get that story of the Blacks she’s always badgering me about? Is this Rudolph Spragg getting his sick revenge because I came to the conference and heckled his speech?”
Tonks closed her eyes. Of course Mum wasn’t going to just believe that her dead daughter had strolled back into her living room. Of course she would think it a hoax or a trick. But how on earth was she supposed to calm her down enough to convince her that it wasn’t?
“Mum, no!” she called out with as much sincerity as she could muster when crouched below the arm of a settee. “It’s not revenge and it’s not a ploy! I’m alive! It’s really me!” She hesitated before forcing herself to say the hated name. “I’m Nympha…”
“NO!” Andromeda’s voice was a roar, choked with pain, desolation, anguish and fury, tearing at her daughter’s heart. “No, no, no! I don’t know who you are or why you’re playing this sick game but I want you out of this house right now! Nymphadora is dead! You are not my daughter!”
Tonks could feel tears prickling suddenly in the corners of her eyes “ hormones, bloody hormones! “ and angrily she forced them back, forced herself to concentrate, to try to focus, but all she could think was that her own mother was screaming and crying and throwing spells and it was all her fault. And she had no idea what she could do to put it right…
And then, thank you Merlin, the cavalry arrived.
“Andromeda! Wait! Andromeda!”
At the sound of Harry’s voice, Tonks risked a glance over the settee’s arm. Harry, a filled out and mature Harry dressed in Auror robes and radiating silent authority, stood braced in the doorway, his own wand drawn, but his hands were raised in a placatory fashion as he stared at the trembling Andromeda with wary understanding. Fresh footsteps sounded in the hall behind him, but a quick wave of his hand held his companions back, just out of sight. It didn’t take much thought to realise why. If Andromeda was reacting this badly to one supposedly dead person in her sitting room, how would she cope with two?
Her mother’s features were contorted now with a potent mix of revived grief, bewilderment and fury “ in a brief, horrible flash of thought that she quickly thrust away, Tonks found herself reminded of Bellatrix’s maddened expression. Her wand hand, still shaking madly, was pointed in no particular direction.
“Harry,” she gasped out almost desperately. “You have to arrest her, Harry, she’s broken into my house and she’s pretending, she’s pretending to be…”
The sentence dissolved into a sob. Harry’s face flickered with sympathy, but he held his wary stance in the doorway as his eyes flicked over to Tonks’ place of concealment. He flashed her a brief but sincere smile before turning back to face her mother.
“Andromeda,” he said softly. “Andromeda, it’s all right.”
“It’s not all right!” Tonks knew her mum well enough to realise that only stubbornness and shock were keeping the tears from flowing. “My daughter! My Nymphadora! She’s mocking my loss! She’s…”
“She’s not.” The sentence was soft, but it stilled Andromeda’s protests immediately. “Andromeda, I understand. Believe me. I know exactly how you feel, how confused you are, how you can’t quite bring yourself to believe what your eyes are seeing. You’re searching around for another explanation because it’s impossible, it can’t be true and you’re too scared of what’ll happen if you let yourself hope…”
“Harry.” Her mother’s voice was a whisper now, almost a plea, as something indefinable sparked behind her eyes. “It can’t be…”
“It can.” Harry was smiling now, soft and cautious. “I’ve just had the same experience. But if you know about Teddy and what’s happened, you must see how this can make sense. When it happened to us, when he came to us after Teddy’s arrest… Andromeda, he answered every question we put to him and he knows… he knows things that only he could know. And since he’s real, to me that says Tonks is real too.”
“He?” Andromeda croaked the word out.
Harry turned and quietly beckoned. And then, slowly, carefully, rather nervously, Remus stepped into the doorway behind him. Cautiously, he smiled.
“Hello, Andromeda,” he said.
The noise that came from her mother’s throat was best described as a strangulated gasp. The wand dropped from her fingertips and landed with a thud on the rug as she staggered backwards, slumping like a broken puppet into the chair Tonks herself had vacated only a minute before. Her breath surged out in tiny, desperate whimpers as her eyes stared disbelievingly, flicking from Remus to Tonks and back again before finally settling on her daughter with an intensity so sharp it almost stung her skin.
“But it can’t be…” she whispered to herself. “It’s impossible. You’re dead. I identified the body. I buried you. So how can you be here…? How can you both…? And you haven’t changed, you haven’t aged…”
“Mum.” Her mother didn’t flinch back from the name this time, which Tonks could only regard as progress. Carefully, she rose to her feet and moved out of her hiding place, crossing the room step by cautious step to where her mother sat, staring searchingly, almost desperately into her face. “Mum, we’ll explain everything, I promise. But it’s like Harry said. This is real. And if you want to be sure, you can ask me anything.” Her own breathing was shallow now, and rapid. “There are so many things that are just ours, Mum, so many things that only got shared between you, me and Dad. Test me. Let me show you.” The damned tears were back, welling in the corners of her eyes. “Let me prove that I really am your little girl.”
Andromeda’s gaze was oddly blank, in spite of its drilling nature. “Very well. That awful rag doll your Uncle Bernard bought you when you were eight that you hated so much “ what did you do with it?”
Tonks couldn’t help the slight flush that stained her cheeks. “I put it in my toy catapult and flung it out of my bedroom window into the pond. And then when it didn’t sink, I gave it to next-door’s dog as a chew toy. And you and Dad made me promise not to tell anyone about it so Uncle Bernard wouldn’t be offended.”
The corners of her mother’s mouth twitched but her serious expression remained. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Remus fighting a chuckle and resolved to thump him thoroughly later. The fact that his mother had died before they’d met, and that she’d met his father only once before he had passed away early in their dreadful year apart, had meant he’d always had the advantage when it came to the revelation of embarrassing childhood stories. Dad had been happy to provide his son-in-law with tales of her antics once he accepted the idea of their marriage and her pregnancy, by way of warning him what to expect when his own child was born. She had always considered it most unfair…
But her mother was speaking once more. “Where did your father always sit at the dining room table?”
Tonks swallowed hard as she was swamped by memories of her dad leaning back in his chair, making bad jokes, complimenting Mum on the food and allowing himself to indulge in brief food fights with his daughter while Mum smiled and pretended not to be looking…
“Nearest the window,” she replied, trying to keep her voice from breaking. “With me on his left and you on his right, near the door. And he slept on the left side of your bed too, as you look from the landing.”
Andromeda’s lips quivered at the additional information but she still, somehow, she held her tight features in check.
“What kind of animal did your Grandma Tonks keep in her back garden?”
That was too easy. “Rabbits, hundreds of them. Her neighbours always used to complain. And Uncle Bernard always claimed he couldn’t visit her very often because he was allergic, even though Dad thought he was talking crap.”
There was something fragile, uncertain, almost tentative in Andromeda’s gaze now. “Your Grandma allowed you to name the four little white ones that were born on your birthday. What did you call them?”
Tonks couldn’t help but smile. “Eeny, Meeny, Miny and Mo.”
The questions abruptly came thick and fast, fired at her with a bizarre combination of aggression and hope.
“Name three things your father refused to eat.”
“Sausages, peas and eggs. I hate the latter two myself.”
“What colour were the curtains in your bedroom before you went to Hogwarts?”
“A weird kind of mauve with swirly purple bits.”
“What happened to them?”
“I tried to fix a split hem without your help and accidentally set them on fire.”
“What did you draw me doing on the Mother’s Day card your dad helped you make for me when you were seven?”
“Giving me a cuddle.”
“How many days notice did you give me for your wedding to Remus?”
“Two. Which is about as many as we gave ourselves.”
Her mother was shaking again, but the rage was gone, the grief dispelled, replaced by a frantic, almost desperate yearning. Her eyes locked with her daughter’s and froze her in place.
“The last time I saw you,” she whispered softly, her voice carrying intensely in spite of the lack of volume. “On the night you went to Hogwarts, you kissed Teddy on the forehead as you left. What colour did his hair turn?”
Tonks could barely breathe, her mind swamped by the image of her little baby boy, just able to smile as he looked up at her and instinctively, almost accidentally changing his hair to match her own…
“Pink.” The word slipped out almost unbidden. “He matched it to mine “ the first time he’d done it on purpose. And mine was bubblegum pink.”
It was as though something inside her mother broke, a barricade against emotion rupturing like a broken dam within her eyes. Tonks had barely realised her mother was moving until her gloriously familiar arms flung around her daughter’s body, grasping her so hard it was almost painful, and then she was holding her too, embracing her with all her strength, her mummy, her mum. Sobs shook her body, although whether they were Mum’s or hers, she simply couldn’t tell. Mum’s wonderful, reassuring smell engulfed her as she buried her face into the long, silky hair, listening as her mother whispered her name in disbelief and reverence, barely able to believe herself that this was finally happening, that she had her mother back again and everything would be all right.
It took a long time before either woman was calm enough to let the other go. But finally, they had broken their teary hold and settled, holding each other’s hands, on the settee. Ably aided by Remus, Tonks had explained to her mum exactly how Teddy had come to haul them from the past into their now, and the trouble it had led him into as a consequence. Andromeda had confessed she had known nothing of Teddy’s predicament and Penny’s accident until she had received an inexplicable message via a fairly exhausted owl from Ginny whilst in Vienna “ since Harry’s wife had used the name alone and not an address, the owl, instead of the short trip expected, had flown all the way across the Continent in search of its recipient. Eager for news, she travelled back at once, but on attempting to connect to Harry’s fire for her final trip, she’d found it in use “ Hermione theorised that she had been unfortunate enough to call just as they had been returning from the Ministry. Out of impatience, she’d then tried Ron and Hermione’s, empty of course, before finally catching a bewildered Molly Weasley, who seemed unable to understand how she could be arriving straight from Vienna when her granddaughter claimed to have spoken to her at Teddy’s house a couple of days before. Bewildered, and a little alarmed at the prospect of an impostor pretending to be her, she’d headed home with impersonators on her mind, only to find a woman wearing her daughter’s face in her front room…
Tonks had apologised profusely, both for the shock and the misunderstanding that had followed from her choice of disguise.
“You were the first person who came to mind,” she confessed as both Harry and Ron allowed themselves a snigger “ clearly they had heard Victoire’s tale of the erratic Mrs Tonks she’d met. “I’ll explain everything to Victoire as soon as this is all cleared up. And it never occurred to me that my pretending would mean you wouldn’t find out what was going on…”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Andromeda’s hands closed over her daughter’s and squeezed, smiling in spite of the puffy redness of her post-tears face. “Nothing matters but the fact I have you back and making sure Teddy is safe. I love you both dearly and I’m not willing to accept one in trade for the other, whether he committed the crime or not.”
Tonks indulged herself in another brief hug with her mum. “I know how you feel.”
“That’s the problem, though.” Hermione was fingering the notes she’d spread all over the limited space offered by one of the delicate little tables. “What are we going to do now? What can we do to help Teddy and keep you both safe?” She gestured to both Tonks and Remus, who’d settled to her right. “That’s the crux of it, really. Do we reveal the truth?”
“Can we?” Ron looked uncertain. “I mean, that’d be it, wouldn’t it? That’d prove Teddy really had gone and messed about in the past. He’d be straight to Azkaban.”
Remus leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “But it would also prove that nothing’s changed. We’re alive but history is unaltered “ Teddy made sure of that. Our presence proves that Teddy didn’t actually affect history at all.”
Hermione was shaking her head. “I don’t think Sproule will see it like that “ the prosecutor,” she added when both Tonks and Remus fixed her with a blank look. “And it still doesn’t change what happened to Penny…”
The arguments, idea and words began to flow and bend but Tonks could no longer listen, could not join in and treat her son’s predicament as an academic debate on temporal and legal semantics. Instead, she leant back, allowing herself the childish indulgence of resting her head on her mother’s shoulder. Mum glanced down at her and her smile was one of joy, of love, of impossible, disbelieving happiness, as though such a glorious happening would not, could not be allowed. And Tonks could not escape at that moment, a single thought; whatever plan was chosen, whatever fate decided, she would find a way to give Teddy back what she was feeling now.
Whatever happened, she would bring her baby home.