Marauders - Always - Part One

The Top Secret Agent

"Nymphadora Tonks, top secret agent for the British Ministry for Magic, reportin' for duty!"

Tonks sat on the couch, staring at her bare toes. On the coffee table beside her, her train case stood open, a bottle of pink nail polish still dripping beside it. She'd already done her finger nails and now her toes were nearly dry and she was officially bored.

Sliding off the couch, she decided to go find out what she was protecting any ways - after all, Peter and Oni had said she couldn't let anyone else see what was hiding in Peter's room, not that she couldn't go see for herself. She snuck down the hallway to the rooms and pushed open the door, glancing back down the hall toward the living room. 

She'd mistaken Remus and Sirius's door for Peter's though, and she realized it the moment she looked in and saw Sirius's hot pink Please Return to Remus Lupin t-shirt laying on the floor. But honestly, she was instantly distracted from her original mission when she realized it was Sirius's room. This was much more interesting. She looked around, jaw dropped in awe as though she were walking into a shrine of some sort, her pink-painted toes sinking into a plush shag rug that lined the floor.

The room was an eclectic mess of things that seemed the perfect blend of her two favorite people in the world - Sirius and Remus's things were mingled together but so definitively different in style that it was easy to tell which of them had done which bits of the decorating and which things they had ceded to the other's tastes. For example, there were sensible curtains in the window, which were dark green and blocked the sunlight but hanging between them in the window itself was a bright glass parrot that sunlight came through, turning the walls and floor the colors of the stained glass filtering it. There were posters on the wall - mostly of different rock bands, including one of Freddie Mercury, who Tonks recognized from Sirius's album covers. There was also a giant poster from the tourism department of Costa Rica with a painted palm tree. Beside that was a framed photo of Remus and Sirius, standing in front of a unicorn on a beach. 

"Wow, cool," Tonks whispered, and she climbed up onto the bed, which was made - Remus's doing - to get a closer look at the photo and the unicorn. She was grinning at it and reached up to take it off the wall and have a closer look. Her fingers closed around the frame and she stared at it, balancing wobbily on the mattress.

"That was their wedding," said a voice and Tonks nearly jumped out of her skin with surprise, dropping the photo, which fell from her hand, bounced off the mattress, and landed with a crunch on the floor as the glass in the frame shattered. She fell on her bum and looked 'round to the door in fear, thinking she'd accidentally let one of the enemies she was supposed to be guarding against walk right in with her inattention to the front door.

But nobody was there.

She scrambled down and stuck her head out the door, peering either way down the hallway, wide eyed, her heart slamming in her chest.

"Hello?!" she asked, trying to keep her voice from trembling at all.

"Relax," the voice said. "I'm up here."

She looked up and around and her eyes landed on a drawing in another frame that sat on Sirius's nightstand. She blinked at it in surprise. She'd seen moving portraits before, of course - there were a few at home that her mother had taken when she'd left her family home. In fact, there was one she liked to talk to sometimes - it was of a man with grey eyes like hers, standing with a blonde man with shaggy hair in front of a castle with loads of lavender trees around them, holding up cups of gelato and smiling. The men in the portrait were always very kind to her and complimented her pink hair. But this portrait was different than those - it was more of a sketch than a painting like every other portrait Tonks had seen that talked were. He was younger, too, this boy in the drawing.