‘Remus, listen to me!’ Nymphadora Tonks called, her voice breaking dangerously, at the retreating back of the former professor Remus J. Lupin. Tears stung her eyes and clung sharply to her cheeks as they fell, tearing at the hole that was ever growing inside of her. ‘Listen to me!’
He ignored her and kept walking, his patched and frayed robes billowing out behind him from the speed his long legs generated. The only sign he gave to show that he had heard anything at all was the smallest of winces at her tone, the slightest of pauses with one foot in the air. Despite this, he kept moving, so Tonks kept moving too. ‘Remus!’
Tonks broke into a sprint, her heavy footfalls echoing altogether too-loud in the deserted halls, but she didn’t care. The castle was already awake, so what did anyone care about a few extra thuds? Somehow, Remus managed to maintain a stiff stride and yet still keep himself at least twenty paces in front of her. Tonks started full-out running now, fighting to keep the racking sobs heaving within her chest from bursting forward and causing her to blubber like some teenager with a schoolgirl crush – which, Tonks thought bitterly, wouldn’t really change Remus’s views of her, so why bother?
Catching up to him at last, Tonks seized him by the shoulder and forced him around. Tears were freely streaming down her face, and she swallowed the lump that was steadily growing larger in her throat as she peered up into his face. It was a blank page, devoid of any and all emotion that might have given Tonks some kind of feeble hope. ‘Remus, just listen to me for a minute!’
‘We have nothing to discuss, Nymphadora,’ Remus replied crisply, his eyes hollow and empty; to any other, it would symbolize the loss that he felt from Dumbledore’s death, but Tonks knew better. He was locking himself away again, refusing to face anything that challenged his views on the world he believed he didn’t belong in, becoming distant and formal in the process. The warm amber colouring that usually made her heart skip a few beats now only shredded the hole in her soul even more. ‘I have already stated my feelings on the matter. There is nothing more to say.’
He made to shrug her off, to keep running away from her, but Tonks tightened her grip on his shoulder, struggling to keep her voice from rising to a hysterically and uncharacteristically high pitch.
‘No,’ Tonks said, intending it to come out as firm and final as Remus’s heart-wrenching words had, but instead coming out like the soft words of a frightened four-year-old – more age analogies that Tonks couldn’t handle right now. ‘No, Remus, just no. Stop wearing your eloquent speeches as a mask. Tell me what you feel.’
‘You already know how I feel,’ Remus responded coolly, but he stared determinedly at the wall behind her rather than in her eyes – icy blue, unchanging thanks to him and his frozen words. ‘Now, if you please, I would like to leave.’
‘Tell me this then,’ Tonks countered, her voice pleading and shaking with emotion. Don’t do this to me… You’re breaking me. Don’t do this, Remus! ‘Tell me that you don’t care for me at all. Just three little words, that’s all you need to say. Three little words, Remus, and I’ll leave you alone – you won’t have to worry about me annoying you anymore, I’ll go away and you can go back to doing whatever you did before we met. Three little words.’
‘I… Nymphadora, I… I don’t care.’ Remus’s eyes maintained their stony glare at the wall, and Tonks swallowed slowly. She wondered if she was really melting, if the world was really spinning that much. She swallowed again and took a deep breath, forcing the oxygen to go to her gasping brain. ‘I don’t care about you. I’m sorry, Nymphadora.’
‘Don’t call me Nymphadora,’ Tonks whispered fiercely. The hole had encompassed her, and she felt oddly detached from the world, as unfeeling as Remus’s expression. ‘You don’t have that right anymore. It’s Tonks to you. Good day, Mr Lupin.’
Tonks rounded the corner, not noticing her surroundings, not noticing anything; Remus’s indifferent expression remained plastered in her mind, his voice echoing in her mind with the quality of a ghost’s – distant and soft, fading away with each waking moment that Tonks tried to remember. She would hold true to her promise, that she was sure of; if he didn’t want to see her again, she would leave.
Something warm and decidedly human bumped into her. Tonks looked up and saw a mass of red hair, freckles, and the stocky build of Fred Weasley. She quickly wiped away the wetness on her cheeks with the back of her hand and sniffled, wondering without really caring how red her nose was.
‘Oh… sorry, Fred. ‘Scuse.’ Tonks tried to push past him, but he blocked her swiftly and so subtly that he might have only been trying and failing to push past her similarly. ‘Sorry.’
‘Not at all, dearest Tonks,’ Fred replied cheerily, shoving a small golden trinket – probably the latest of Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes products – into his pocket. He grinned broadly and offered her his forearm. Tonks froze, temporarily jolting herself out of her unfeeling bubble. What was going on? Dumbledore had just died, Fred’s own brother had been savaged by the most evil werewolf known to mankind and might never fully recover, and he was trying to seduce her? The world just loved to torture her, didn’t it? Maybe I’ll wake up and this’ll all have been a dream… maybe I’ll wake up and I’ll be with – But she couldn’t think the name. It was lousy, she knew, and this kind of immaturity would only serve to delay the healing of the hole, but she didn’t care. ‘Care to join me for a walk?’
The bubble was back, flickering suddenly into life at the thought of him.
‘Sure,’ Tonks muttered, taking Fred’s arm and attempted to dry her face again. Her feet dragged themselves, dreading each step that took her, Tonks realised with a shock, back in the direction towards Remus, creating a striking contrast to Fred’s springy gait. The idea of a conspiracy to set them up crossed her mind, something she would once have embraced as a chance to win Remus over, but now she merely felt anxious at another encounter with him. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll have left already. Tonks almost smiled. If wishes were gold…
They curved around the bend that separated her from Remus far too soon – was the hallway really that short? Was her normal pace of walking really that fast? Was it really necessary for Fred to pull her along that quickly? It seemed like she had barely taken Fred’s arm when she felt the breath whoosh out of her at the sight of the familiar tattered robes and lined visage.
‘So, Tonks,’ Fred said, in a suddenly cheery voice that instantly made Tonks suspicious. His face was a much better alternative to what lie before her, however, so she turned her head to face him in an attempt to block Remus’s approaching figure. ‘How have you been lately?’
‘Fine,’ she responded in what she originally intended to be a clipped tone, but which came out rather strangled. ‘I’ve been absolutely fantastic.’
Fred’s deviously large grin widened at her response. ‘Brilliant.’
He removed his arm from hers and slipped his hand into his pocket rather conspicuously. Tonks opened her mouth to remind him that she was an Auror and perfectly capable of disarming him with less than a moment’s notice, but never got there. At that exact moment, Fred shoved her harshly forward. She painfully crashed straight into a startled Remus and was about to pull away, flushing, when a twin – in the confusion of the moment, she wasn’t quite sure which one – whipped a shining chain around their necks.
‘What –‘ Tonks started… and the world disappeared around her.
Everything was… was it spinning? Everything was moving in an impossibly fast manner; people were rushing by her – students, teachers, Death Eaters? It was all a blur. She felt as if she was on a backwards roller coaster, hurtling into oblivion. She tried to wrench her head from where it was resting on Remus’s chest, but an enormous pressure was pushing against the back of her neck, forcing her to remain in the awkward (if rather comfortable) position.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, everything stopped. The tension on her neck evaporated, and she felt herself thrown backwards. Tonks landed sharply on her bottom on the hard stone floor and swore loudly. She stood up and looked around her; apart from Remus, the corridor was completely deserted. Remus was looking around them, rotating silently on the spot and frowning as if he wasn’t seeing things perfectly.
‘Remus, what’s going –‘ Remus made a motion for her to be quiet.
‘Something’s not right here,’ he whispered, so softly that Tonks had to lean in to hear what he was saying. ‘This hallway should be filled with people… the students should be awake… unless… we were knocked unconscious? But they wouldn’t just leave us here… if that was the case, we would be in the hospital… and that doesn’t explain the spinning, either…’
He froze suddenly as the sound of footsteps echoed from one end of the hallway. Remus grabbed Tonks’ arm and pulled her through a tapestry that she couldn’t remember being there before. She made to ask him once again what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks was happening, but he shushed her again, putting his eye up to a miniscule tear in the tapestry. Tonks found a similar rip and squinted through it; a motley group of boys had appeared around the corner. Why they were such a cause of alarm to Remus was a complete mystery to her, but, if there was anything she had learned from hours upon hours of guard duty with him, it was that he was often right.
‘I can’t believe Dumbledore still hasn’t found us a Defense teacher… isn’t he supposed to have these things figured out in, oh, I dunno… June?’
‘Dumbledore?’ Tonks mouthed, extremely confused, at Remus, but he wasn’t looking at her; he was still staring intently at the boys with an odd expression on his face. Tonks took this as a signal to stare back through her own little peephole and examine the boys.
There didn’t seem to be anything special about, well, any of them. Two of them had black hair; one with glasses whose face looked oddly reminiscent of someone, although Tonks couldn’t quite place his face at the moment. The other had an elegantly relaxed expression on his face, which would have been haughty had he not burst into laughter a few seconds afterwards. His countenance, too, tugged at her memory, but the harder she tried to remember how she knew him, the more it slipped away. Another boy, the one who had first spoken, was looking at the first two with reverence glowing on his pudgy face through his straw-colored hair. The final boy caused Tonks to whip her head around and double-check that Remus was still behind the tapestry with her and had not secretly slipped out into the hallway with the boys; the resemblance between the two was startling. The boy’s hair was the exact same shade of brown, save the streaks of grey, and his eyes, even at this distance, appeared a glowing amber. The only difference was that Remus’s face was older and more lined, with traces of a few more scars than marked the boy’s.
They rounded the corner and disappeared, but Tonks and Remus stood like statues for a few more seconds until their conversation finally faded before emerging.
‘Remus, answer me now,’ Tonks said the moment they stepped out from under the tapestry, in what she hoped was a commanding voice. ‘What is going on? Who were those boys? Why did they scare you so much? If they were only students, why were we hiding from them? We have every right to be here! And where did that tapestry come from?’
‘Tonks, before I answer – and I will answer, I promise you,’ he said in a strained voice, answering Tonks’ unasked question, ‘I want you to promise me something yourself.’ Tonks nodded, knowing, but definitely not wanting to tell him, that she would keep any promise he asked of her. ‘Promise me… that, no matter what, you won’t go off on your own. Promise me that you’ll stay with me for as long as we are… here.’
Tonks’ eyes widened with the implications of his words. He couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he meant? After all, a mere fifteen minutes ago, he had confessed that he didn’t care one iota about her. Really, how drastic of an opinion change could one have?
‘Do you really mean it?’ she asked softly, hardly daring to believe it. Any hopes that had started to bubble up in Tonks’ chest were doused instantly, however, when an alarmed expression overtook Remus’s face.
‘Tonks, that’s not what I meant… I meant… well, I don’t want you getting lost, especially if we’re where I think we are,’ he hastily elaborated. Tonks bit the inside of her cheek to refrain from sighing; it nothing but foolish optimism that had given her that hope, and she was stupid to wish differently. She took a deep breath and shoved her feelings sharply out of the way.
‘Right… of course… so…’ She cleared her throat abashedly. ‘Yeah. Stick with you. Got it. Anything else?’
‘As to your questions…’ Remus ran a weary hand through his hair. ‘All that I have are theories… well, from what I saw just now and something I suspected a short while ago, they may be more than theories, but… I think we’re in the past.’
Tonks’ mouth fell open. She made several attempts to close it, searching for the right words, but all that seemed capable of coming out was the phrase, ‘oh sweet Merlin.’
‘It’s just a theory,’ Remus followed quickly, and, if it hadn’t been for their ‘predicament,’ Tonks would have been delighted that he cared what she thought. ‘Yet I taught here for a year, and I never saw a single set of boys that looked exactly like that – like we did.’
If it had been physically possible, Tonks’ eyes would have popped straight out of their sockets. Fortunately, without the presence of several illegal hexes, it wasn’t, and she got by with looking like half-mad fish gulping for air.
‘That was you?’ she burst out. The image of the teenager, who she wouldn’t have pegged as being older than eighteen at most, flashed in her mind again, her brain speed-aging it until a carbon-copy of the man standing before her loomed inside her imagination.
Remus nodded. ‘It’s the only explanation that makes sense, unless someone managed to obtain the hairs of myself and three others who are either dead or – who are dead and make Polyjuice Potion, which is highly unlikely, or Hogwarts is host to four extremely talented Metamorphmagi other than yourself that no one ever knew about.’
Something that had been nagging at the corner of her memory slipped into place. Tonks gasped. ‘The chain, the one that Fred – or George, or whoever – had… it was a –‘
‘Year-Increment Time-Turner,’ Remus breathed with sudden realization. ‘Of course. But the question is, how did they get a hold of one? They’ve been banned since a year after their invention in 1978 because of their tendency to vanish nine times out of ten after the first use and leave the user stranded in a foreign time, potentially damaging the past or future beyond repair.’
A thought struck Tonks with all of the subtlety of a lightning bolt. Her hands flew up to her neck and, not finding what they were frantically searching for, fumbled around in the neck of her black Auror robes.
‘It’s gone,’ Tonks moaned. Her fingers continued to grope fruitlessly in all of the pockets, looking for something she knew they wouldn’t find. ‘The – the Time-Turner… I don’t believe it… nine times out of ten and we had to be part of the ninety percent…’
Grasping her train of thought quickly, Remus padded down the front of his own robes, but no glittering chain appeared from within the patched folds.
‘It’s gone,’ Tonks repeated, this time more to herself than to her unwilling companion. ‘We’re in Hogwarts and you’re a teenager and it’s gone.’
Her body started shaking, and it took a moment for Tonks to realize that the spasms that racked her were of uproarious laughter. ‘Well, isn’t this abso-bloody-lutely perfect? It’s gone.’
A panicked look appeared in Remus’s eyes, and he started what looked to be an automatic step towards her to console her, but then seemed to think better of it. He slowly retracted his arm from where it had been about to rub her back soothingly.
‘It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll just… have to find another Time-Turner somewhere. It can’t be that hard, I’m sure, and then we’ll be safely back home and everything will be perfect like it was,’ Remus said in a comforting tone. Tonks’ laughter echoed even louder at this; perfect. Right. Because her life back in the nineties was just peachy.
‘There’s bound to be someone here that I – that we – remember who we can trust,’ Remus continued, unaware that Tonks was still in hysterics. ‘The Weasleys – or McGonagall – or… or Dumbledore –‘
Tonks’ mind latched onto one word, and her eyes connected with Remus’s fiercely. Her giggle-fit ceased instantly, every fiber of her being now dedicated to one goal.
‘Dumbledore.’