4: Til Death Do Us Part
“Where is he? Where is he?”
“Please, please, just… just calm down, okay? Put the wand down, we can reason this out…”
But Tonks was in no mood to calm down. She was in no mood for rationality, for reason, for common sense, for talk of any kind. She had been dragged out of the middle of the most important battle of her life, forced to abandon friends and colleagues to the tender mercies of goodness knew what, hauled through a mysterious vortex that had damn near pulled her to pieces, and the last she had heard of her husband was his voice screaming as his hand was yanked away from hers to face who knew what fate who knew where. And now he was missing, presumed…
Presumed...
His scream echoed horrifically through her mind. Remus could take pain. After years of transformations, he was shockingly used to it. So what could have been so bad that it made even a man with his high threshold for agony scream like that?
Remus. God, Remus…
So no. Not in the mood to calm down. What she was in fact was in the mood to hex to hell and back the next person who crossed her. And the mysterious young stranger who appeared to be the root cause of every one of these most recent troubles seemed to her a likely enough volunteer.
Especially considering she now had him backed against the wall with her wand pressed to his throat.
“Shut up!” Her harsh exclamation silenced his stuttering instantly. “Now I’m going to ask this one more time and if I don’t get a straight and honest answer, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born, understand? Now, for the last time of asking; who are you, where am I, where’s the battle gone and what the hell have you done with my husband?”
“I don’t know!” Brown eyes, so like Remus’ “ why so like Remus, who is this man? “ stared down at her, filled with such genuine upset that Tonks felt her wand hand faltering, felt her rage slipping as fear and horror scrambled over each other to grasp at her heart in its place. “I don’t know where he is, he should be here, he’s supposed to be here with us!”
“Then why isn’t he here with us?” She had intended the words as a furious shout, but somehow as they passed her lips they turned into a plea. “What’s happened to him?” Her wand hand was shaking now, her fury losing force as she stared into the young man’s face, saw her own horror, fear and confusion reflected in his features, and knew somehow without knowing that this wasn’t at all what he’d intended.
He was trying to help, somehow. I think he was trying to help…
But help with what?
Her wand dropped abruptly, almost unconsciously away. He moved away from the wall at once, one hand scraping through his hair in a gesture of apparent distress as he began to pace the small, smooth-walled chamber. “I didn’t mean for things to happen like this.” His eyes met hers and they were so sincere that she couldn’t find it in her heart to doubt him. “I had it all worked out, it should have worked and the potion was supposed to take care of the rest!” He seemed almost to be talking to himself now as he paced away from her, his eyes flicking almost wildly around the room. “I had a hold of him, but then he was gone, like something pulled him away…”
“You felt that too?” The words had slipped out of Tonks’ mouth before she could hold them back. “I had his hand, but it was like it was ripped out of mine...”
The young man was nodding now, one hand pressed across his lips. “Yes, yes and we were clear of the battle, it happened in the Portal but how could…”
His voice broke off. His eyes drifted to the strange, glowing gateway that dominated the small room, with its little hourglasses and embedded piece of parchment, the dark red light flickering and undulating in a curtain-like fashion that reminded Tonks uncomfortably of another room, another archway and a flickering veil behind which, she had been told, her cousin had vanished forever…
She stared at the Portal once more. She stared at the young man. Realisation was dawning across his face.
She darted forwards, rushing to his side. “What?”
He was shaking his head, slowly, deliberately. “It should have shut down,” he murmured. “When we came back through, the Portal should have shut down. But it hasn’t. It’s still active. And I think that means…” He broke off, swallowing hard. “I didn’t even know it was possible. But I think he must still be in there. Trapped inside the Portal itself.” He closed his eyes, wiping one hand across his mouth once more. “Maybe I triggered something when I broke the field, but why did we get through and not him? It doesn’t make any sense!”
Tonks was happy to second that notion. She hadn’t a clue what he was talking about other than the fact he seemed to believe that Remus was behind that curtain of light.
And that meant…
“No, wait! NO!”
But the young man’s cries were too slow, too late, for Tonks was already diving passed him, hurling herself forwards towards the flickering red, wand grasped firmly, hands extending to push the curtain of light aside…
“Oof!”
The impact was bruising, a sharp, percussive smack that reminded her for a ridiculous instant of the time she’d dived out of an overhanging tree into the lake at Hogwarts and ended up doing a much-mocked belly-flop against the water’s surface. For the second time in minutes she was flung painfully back against the floor, her already battered limbs shrieking in protest as she cringed and half-curled into a ball, her skin tingling with raw shock and pain.
Bloody hell! That light’s harder than it looks…
Hands touched her arm, her shoulder, tentative, soft and concerned. She opened her eyes to find a turquoise-crowned face staring at her with eyes still so shockingly like Remus’ that she almost gasped in pain.
“Are you all right?” he asked gently, wrapping one arm around her back as he levered her carefully up to a seated position. She nodded absently, staring down at her own hands, not trusting herself to look into those eyes and hold onto her composure.
“You can’t pass through the Portal like that.” There was something so reassuring about his voice, his manner “ it reminded her somehow of being a little girl curled in her parents’ arms after this or that little tumble or mishap. “You need an amulet like this one.” He extended one arm to reveal a leather arm holster into which was tucked a round golden symbol twice the size of a galleon, decorated with an hourglass pattern and with a small ruby set within its centre. The ruby had cracked down the middle and was smoking as though scorched by dragon-fire. “And as you can see…” His tone was rueful now but there was genuine pain flickering behind his words. “Mine’s had a little accident.”
She met his eyes now, unable to help herself, unable to hold back the upsurge of horror and despair that threatened to engulf her heart. “Then how do we get him out?”
The young man bowed his head, thick turquoise hair brushing across his brow. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
Tonks found her eyes drifting to where the curtain of red light danced within the Portal’s depths, to the place where, somehow, her husband was trapped, imprisoned and currently unreachable. She could feel her head starting to swim as the adrenalin of battle and her bizarre journey began to wear away, leaving her to face an aching, screaming body and a battered heart unaided. She felt a sudden, barely controllable urge to be sick.
What the hell is happening, how can this be real? Losing him in battle I was almost prepared for, but to lose him like this, I can’t do it, I can’t just sit here when I don’t even understand what on earth is going on…
Remus, please, please, come back to me. And you, you bloody thing, whatever you are, give him back, please him back…
Til death do us part, that’s how the Muggle vow goes, bonded for life amongst wizards. But we’re parted now and he can’t be dead, he just can’t be…
And then, before her eyes, the scarlet curtain rippled. Her young companion gasped.
The light was shifting, undulating, flickering like dying fire, like embers struggling to burn. A shadow surged against the frame, the silhouette of a person, a man; it seemed to shift and curl and writhe like smoky whispers. But before Tonks could even register the meaning of what she was seeing, the light flared, pulsed and then, with an almost tangible lurch, seemed to dissolve away, leaving nothing but the shadow, suddenly solidified, standing alone beneath the Portal’s arch.
It was Remus.
For a moment, just a moment, he lingered upright, silent, unmoving, unnaturally still. But then his body crumpled like a rag doll and he slumped down to the floor.
Remus!
They reached him at the same instant, she and the strange young man and shared the same look of horror as they realised he was shuddering, shaking uncontrollably, his fingers flexing, his limbs twitching, his breath surging in short, desperate gasps as though he’d lost the ability to properly inhale. Tonks caught his hand desperately, leaning over him, burying her face against the side of his head as she whispered to him, stroking his hair, frantically trying to reach him, reassure him that she was there, she was with him, he wasn’t alone...
“Remus, Remus it’s okay, I’m right here, you’re going to be fine… Don’t just sit there!” The last was addressed at the young man, who was staring down at Remus’ prone, shivering form with a kind of mute, oddly guilty horror. “Can’t you go find a Healer or something, he needs help!”
But the young man was shaking his head, though his eyes whispered a different story. “I can’t,” he whispered almost desperately. “If anyone finds out you’re here…” His eyes widened suddenly and he shot to his feet. “The potions lab! Wait here, I’ll go, I’ll see what I can find that might help! Though Merlin knows if the Felix Felicis is still working…”
Tonks barely acknowledged him as he dashed out of the room, her eyes fixed instead upon the still shuddering form of her husband. Her free hand stroked through his thick, greying hair once more as she stared down at his still battle-bloodied face, features contorted, eyes screwed shut, hands now clenched into painful fists around her fingers as his body began to curl almost instinctively into a foetal position.
She had seen him like this only once before, on the first full moon after Dumbledore’s death. It had been the first and only time he’d allowed her to watch his transformation.
And it hadn’t lasted this long, a dozen seconds at most before the horrifying changes had kicked in and ripped away the body of the man she loved to replace it with something monstrous. It was as though he was stuck, stuck in the moment before the change, trying to transform but not quite able…
But that can’t be right! The full moon’s still two days away!
Remus, what the hell is the matter with you?
“Remus, come back,” she whispered softly, anxiously, almost desperately. “Remus, please, you promised me, you promised on our baby’s life you’d never leave me again…”
His fingers flexed around her, loosening then tightening, but his hold was not the death grip it had been moments before. And then suddenly the shudders were passing, his breathing was slowing, normalising as his body relaxed abruptly against the floor, slumping into stillness. His eyelids flickered.
“Harry?” she heard him whisper, lips barely parting, the name barely more than an exhalation.
Her hand tightened around his. “Remus?” she said softly. “Remus, can you hear me?”
His eyelids flickered once more and then opened and thank Merlin, there were his eyes, in his face and staring up at her with a mixture of confusion, relief and pain.
“Dora?” he murmured in apparent bewilderment. “Dora…” One hand pulled away from hers, reaching up to brush her cheek and touch the tears she had not even realised she had begun to shed. “I thought…I thought you were gone… I thought I was… dead…” He shook his head, eyes squeezing shut as a wave of fresh pain rippled across his face and she touched the hand still resting on her cheek, pressing it against her skin. “But you’re here and I’m touching you…”
A slow smile began to spread across Tonks’ face. She could feel the fist that had grasped her heart slowly slipping away at the touch of her fingers on her face, at the feel of his eyes, so weary, so bemused but so real as they stared once more into hers.
He’s okay. He’s confused, he’s battered, but he’s okay. And we’re together. Thank the stars, we’re together…
“Well I suppose we could both be dead,” she offered in the best faux-casual voice she could muster whilst holding back a sudden surge of fresh tears. “But this is a pretty damned weird afterlife if you ask me.”
He blinked, eyes slipping away from her face as he drank in their surroundings for the first time. His brow furrowed instantly.
“Where are we?” he said, coupling the statement with a groan as pushed himself up onto his elbows; Tonks’ deliberate look of protest at this unnecessary effort was simply brushed aside. “This isn’t Hogwarts.”
“I know.” The shock and confusion of the last few minutes were wearing away rapidly at the solidly real and reasonably intact return of Remus; as her Auror-trained mind kicked in, Tonks followed his lead and took a proper look at their surroundings for the first time. A round chamber with unremarkable cream walls and two doors, one to her left where the young man had vanished a minute or two before, and one behind her which appeared to be locked. And then there was the archway through which they had apparently been - pulled? dragged? “ and in which Remus had until moments before been trapped, now sitting benign and silent without its glistening red light, the tiny hourglasses set into its frame gleaming in the dull light. And embedded in the wall behind it, unseen by her before while the curtain of red had glimmered, was a plain white tile set into the wall, on which were engraved, in heavy black letters, a time, a day, a month and a year.
The wrong time, day, month and year, to be precise.
20:49 - Monday 2nd July 2018.
2018? What in the name of Merlin’s scrawny backside is that all about?
“Tonks.” The tone of Remus’ voice was enough to tell her that her husband’s eyes were fixed upon the same spot as hers. “Why does that calendar appear to be under the impression that we are ridiculously close to celebrating our twenty-first wedding anniversary?”
She glanced across at his frowning face as she carefully pulled him up to a sitting position. “Is it a calendar? It looks more like someone’s carved a random date into the wall to me.” She squinted at the tile once more, fighting down a strange, plodding sense of doom that was rapidly setting up residence in her stomach. “I wonder if it’s meant to be when a prophecy comes true or something…”
Her voice tailed away. The engraved figures were shifting.
20:50
That’s not carved in.
Bloody hell.
It is a calendar. A calendar that seems to think it’s twenty years in the future…
Her eyes drifted almost unconsciously back to the now unmoving portal. Little hourglasses glinted at her mockingly.
Time-Turners.
No. No.
That couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be.
But one look into Remus’ face told her that he was thinking exactly the same thing.
It can’t be. It can’t. Why the hell would anyone even bother to drag two random people out of a battle and drop them twenty years into the future? Is this some sick Death Eater trick? Is dear Auntie Bellatrix laughing at me behind that locked door?
What is going on here?
“I think the luck potion’s still working a bit, I found everything I could… You’re awake!”
At the unexpected voice, Tonks jumped about a foot, head swinging round to her left. The young man was standing in the open doorway, awkwardly juggling handfuls of colourful potion vials. With a broad smile, he dumped the lot unceremoniously on the floor and rushed over to join them.
“I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed, brushing his turquoise hair out of his eyes as he dropped to his knees beside them, gazing at Remus with a mixture of guilt, happiness and outright relief. “I had no idea that anything like that was going to happen, I swear, I thought it would just be a straightforward pull and you’d both be here and fine…” He drew a long, deep breath. “How are you feeling? Are you okay?”
Remus was staring at the young man. His eyes were drifting across his face, over his colourful hair, past those so familiar eyes, and then they flicked, almost unnoticeably towards the engraved calendar. He blinked, hard.
“I think I’ll…live.” His tone was odd, confused, distracted and ever so slightly shocked. “Though I can’t say whether I should.” The young man’s eyes widened as Remus’ gaze buried with sudden intensity into his. “It was you, wasn’t it? You took my wand and grabbed my shoulder. You pulled us out of the battle…”
“Oh! Your wand!” Fumbling slightly, the young man pulled the offending item out of his sleeve and handed it to Remus almost nervously. “I’m really sorry about that, but you see I couldn’t take my own wand through and I needed to cast a spell to make sure everything was as it should be…”
“As it should be?” Tonks abruptly found her voice. “There is nothing here that’s as it should be! We were fighting for the sake of the wizarding world, for our son, for everything and you dragged us away and dumped us wherever the hell this is! Our friends are in danger, Harry Potter needs us and you made us leave! Who the hell do you think you are?” Her wand was twitching dangerously in her hand. “I’d ask if you were a Death Eater if I wasn’t sure that no Death Eater would be so dumb as to give Remus his wand back…”
“I’m not a Death Eater,” the young man stated hurriedly. “There are no Death Eaters, not any more.” He took a deep breath. “And don’t worry about the battle because it’s over now.”
“Over?” Tonks could feel her heart pounding against her ribcage. “Over? But…”
The young man was smiling now, soft and reassuring. “You won,” he said quietly. “Harry won. He survived. And Lord Voldemort is dead.”
“You-Know-Who…?” After the months of prohibition, Tonks couldn’t quite make herself say the name. “Dead?”
Her mind was whirling. That he could be dead, that it could be over… Oh she had wanted it, fought for it, dreamed of it, but somehow never quite believed it… And to be told like this, in this strange room, with this young stranger, not really knowing whether it was safe to believe, but desperately, desperately wanting to…
And she felt she should believe him. Could believe him. She felt like she knew him.
Family. He felt like family.
And if the calendar was telling the truth… Twenty years had passed.
Those eyes. That smile. That hair…
Twenty years… He’d be twenty years old.
A tiny face staring up into hers. A first smile…
No. No, it can’t be…
This is insane!
“I know you must be confused.” He sounded like her dad. His voice, Merlin, it was so similar and those eyes, so much like Remus’ that it had hurt her to look at them when she’d thought her husband gone… “But it’s okay, I promise. I can explain everything but…well. It’s going to take a little time…”
Tonks found herself struggling to breathe. In her mind’s eye, she pictured her baby, her little baby with hair that shifted with his moods, whom she’d held in her arms an hour, just an hour before. It couldn’t be. She couldn’t be looking at…
“Teddy! Teddy!”
It was as though someone had punched her in the gut. She felt winded, sick, bewildered, as she saw the young man’s head whip round and steal away the last of her denials. Next to her, Remus’ face was a frozen mask.
“Harry,” she heard the young man (she couldn’t think the name she’d heard, his name would make it real…) exclaim, shock and confusion flashing across his face. “What the hell is he doing here?”
Harry? Harry Potter?
“Teddy, I know you’re here!” Merlin, it was Harry, though his voice was different, older “ no, don’t think about it, don’t think that way, it can’t be so… “I know what you’re doing! Teddy!”
“Uh oh.” He was rising now, the young man with the turquoise hair, with her husband’s eyes and her baby’s smile, anxiety written large across his features. “Look, please, I know I’ve no right to ask anything of you, but please…just stay here. If he sees you, there’ll be hell to pay. For all of us. Stay here. Please.”
One last glance, his eyes wide and pleading. And then he turned and rushed from the room.
Every breath was almost more effort than she could face. Her eyes drifted towards her husband, pleading, begging him to dismiss the facts laid out before them and take her back to the world she knew.
But one look in his eyes told her he couldn’t.
“Remus…” she whispered, her voice tailing away. She couldn’t say it.
“I know.” His hand caught hers and squeezed it almost desperately. “Dora, I know. I think…” He swallowed hard, eyes holding her gaze as though clinging to a lifeline. “I think we just talked to our son.”