T is for Tonks

Chapter 19 - You've got a face on.

"Dora." Remus whispered, looking at her as if she was some unexpected entity that had materialized in the door way. 

Guilt ripped at Tonks's stomach as she looked into the eyes of the man that she loved. The eyes are the windows of the soul. Those words rattled through her brain and she had never known then to have such relevance. She witnessed what looked like desolation in his eyes, as all of his walls and guards had been torn down by unstoppable forces. His emotions were raw and pulsing before her, and nothing had ever made her legs quiver like this before. 

She was the one who had demolished his last defense. Merlin, she thought she'd feel satisfied, but she didn't. Tonks felt like her heart was pounding in her chest so fast that she might pass out, just to give her cardiac muscles a break. Everything she had spent the last 24 hours bawling into her pillow over, felt irrelevant. 

Disgustingly, she had had the gall to blame Remus for her sadness. At the best of times, Tonks never liked to admit that she was wrong, but given the severity of the topic she felt like this time she had torn herself a new one. It made her feel as though she should be digging her own grave. Remus had every right to stab her in the back and tell her to go and lick her wounds somewhere else. 

God. She was an arse. 

The drawing room was sparsely littered with candles, not providing much light at all. The most illumination came from the fire which was also providing them both thermal protection. The spring was in full season in London. Tonks tended to take the more scenic walk to work, through St James' park where she admired the fledgling flowers under the rising run. It still got cold at night though, and Tonks still wore bed socks to sleep in. 

Turning her attention back to her other half, she looked at his face that was simply raw with emotion in a way that she had never seen before. One thing that she had learnt about Remus was that he tended to accept things at their face value. His belief's about his lycanthropy shaped his life to a T, and he allowed them to. He didn't try to change societies beliefs like Hermione was attempting to by starting SPEW. He accepted fact and didn't waste any time dreaming about the fiction. He didn't spend time dwelling over things that he believed he couldn't fix. 

Perhaps his emotion was a sign that he thought they could make a change, or perhaps make a compromise at the bare minimum. Tonks cleared her throat. "Can we sit down and talk?" Her voice was faint and ghostly in her ears. 

Remus extended his arm towards the armchair opposite his own, by the hearth. Wishing for a ounce of Gryffindor bravery but consequently feeling no more chivalrous, she took a seat. "Would you like to go first, Remus?" She asked, eloquently.

The look she received in return told her he'd sooner have a heart attack. Still, using every last milligram of his house legacy, Remus began. "I want to start by saying that I really missed you last night, I found it really difficult to sleep without you." 

Tonks grinned, rather unexpectedly. "Here here. I never want to sleep apart again."

"I spoke to Sirius, and he set me straight. He said that he thinks that I'm afraid of having children. I guess... I guess its true. I'm not opposed to having a child to look after. In fact, I think I would enjoy it rather a lot, judging by how much I loved teaching at Hogwarts. But I'm frightened of the uncertainty. Primarily, I don't know what will happen to you if you were to carry my offspring. Should the fetus be a lycanthrope, there would be nothing stopping it from tearing you apart from inside out, every full moon. I don't know if carrying a baby that has werewolf blood in its veins would cause you any harmful affects. I was forced to choose between having a baby and loosing you, I would always choose you, Nymphadora."

"Secondly, you have no idea about the discrimination I go through when I'm outside of the confines of this god-awful house. My parents didn't want anyone to know about the monster I was, so much so, they didn't enroll me into Hogwarts. When Professor Dumbledore appeared on my doorstep with my Hogwarts letter, it was as if Christmas had arrived early. My father didn't want to me to go, he feared I would be bullied into madness. It was only the measures put into place by Albus which convinced him to let me go. When I actually arrived at Hogwarts, I couldn't tell anyone. Not even my two best friends. When they figured out about my condition, I was so scared that they were going to disown me, or kick me out of the dormitory because they didn't want to sleep near someone like me. I was incredibly lucky that they took the news as well as they did. Even now, nobody wants to employ a man who turns into a werewolf once a month and could potentially kill them. Once again, Albus risked it all for me to be able to return to Hogwarts and teach again. I think Severus Snape was close to having an aneurysm when he saw me walk through the gates again."