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“FUCK,” bellowed Tonks.
“Get her on the table,” said Remus’ voice tightly.
“She’s bleeding everywhere.” That was Sirius. He was carrying her in his arms.
“FUCK,” she yelled again.
“Fuck,” agreed Sirius, his voice threading with panic.
She knew there was a warm wetness between them.
“Move aside, Mr. Black.” That was Flitwick, looking small and grave and worried as Sirius thunked her hips onto the table. Flitwick still called them all by their last names.
Tonks realized she couldn’t hold up her own weight with her abs as her head hit the table with a sound like someone had dropped a cantaloupe. She saw stars.
“Careful,” chided Flitwick.
She could feel her shirt being ripped back by someone’s spell. She had loved this shirt. Vintage. Her mum’s from the seventies. Or was it the sixties? A real Water Bugs original. And now she couldn’t even repair it, with the nasty curse that had rent the fabric apart.
Flitwick was poking at her skin.
“We should get Poppy.” Remus again. He was close with Madame Pomfrey. She had cared for him in his transformations.
“She’s busy at school,” argued Sirius. “By the time you apparate into Hogsmeade and run there –“ He didn’t finish, and Tonks felt her eyes flick to Flitwick, trying not to panic. It would be too late.
“Healing is a charm,” Flitwick said in a tight, squeaky voice. “And we can’t afford to pull Poppy here. If that woman at the school finds out we are diverting resources to the Order… Minerva and Severus are watching her right now. But I can do what I can to patch Ms. Tonks up. Keep her skin together.”
“Keep her from dying?” Remus was very white. He had taken this personally because Tonks had jumped in front of him.
Flitwick was tart: “No one is dying.”
Tonks felt warm wetness sluice over her hands. She thought for a moment it was relief, and then she realized she was trying to hold the gash in her side closed.
“Move your hands, please.”
But her hands wouldn’t move. She didn’t know how to move them. Her body was rigid.
Remus was there instantly. He was used to rigid muscles, and he dragged her hands away, up over her head, passing one to Sirius to hold. She gripped onto both of them, gasping, feeling her lungs pressing against her ribs as Flitwick held her skin together; his hands were bright red. His wand was between his teeth.
“I need a hand.”
Sirius volunteered, holding one half of her skin so Flitwick could grip his wand.
“This will-“ started Flitwick, but didn’t finish in the pandemonium that followed.
Tonks screamed as her flesh began burning back together. Her legs twisted and cramped up, her spine flew up off the table. She left nail marks in Remus’ wrist. Sirius used an elbow on her other hand to hold her down.
“HOLD HER STILL!” Flitwick was yelling.
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” It was Bill Weasley. His team had come back from their mission. They had gone out in groups of four; one veteran, one new recruit per team. She had been the new recruit.
“Filius!” It was Professor Sprout, who had been paired with Bill Weasley, his brother Charlie, and that foreigner girl – Fleur Delacour.
“Hold her still,” Flitwick said again, and Tonks realized she had blacked out a moment; her vision was swimming. Her hands were bright red, leaving smears in her upside down vision on Remus’ oatmeal colored sweater. Sirius’ black shirt was blacker in the middle. Her own long wisps of pink hair was stuck under one of his armpits.
Time was moving strangely. Bill and Charlie were holding her legs down. She liked Charlie – always had – and yet she was trying as hard as she could to kick him in the face as she started screaming again, but not a movie theater scream; not for haunted houses. She was yelling hoarsely, grunting. Slamming her head into the table. The stupid table in the basement of this stupid house that her stupid cousin had –
A floating blonde head was moving forward in her upside down vision. Tonks felt she was staring at a large, glittering bird. It was sort of silvery, but with thick pouting lips like those in the magazines and Tonks felt her own ordinarily thin lips snap shut on the yell.
She wouldn’t give this stupid girl the satisfaction. She was younger than Tonks. Tonks was twenty-four. Turning twenty-five in April. Charlie’s age. Bill was twenty-seven. But she…she was only nineteen. And for a brief flash, she looked nineteen. She looked scared and confused, and Tonks slumped in the grip of her cousin and his boyfriend (“just friends,” they protested, and quietly everyone disbelieved them).
“All finished,” said Flitwick. “It’ll leave a scar.”
“Cool,” said Tonks, panting at the ceiling.
Charlie, Sirius, and Bill laughed.
“Get her some water,” said Professor Sprout.
The sleek thing – was she a mink? She seemed like something sleek like that. Like a ridiculously beautiful slick thing. A white ermine, Tonks decided. That would be her patronus. Something that would hiss angrily if cornered. She brought the glass from the tap. It was dirty, but a whispered, wandless spell swirled the glass and suddenly the water and glass were sparkling. A beautiful, rare bit of magic.
“Help me up,” and Tonks didn’t recognize her own voice. It was hoarse and brittle with screaming.
Strong forearms pulled hard on her shoulders. She let Remus and Sirius lever her up.
“Thanks,” she panted. Her stomach ached, and when she looked down at the skin, it had a white, burned looking scar. She knew if she concentrated, it would disappear, swallowed up. But only if she kept her concentration, like sucking her stomach in. She shook her head in wonder.
“Lucky that curse didn’t pierce any organs,” tutted Sprout.
“It did. A kidney,” said Flitwick, and Tonks saw he looked as grey as she felt. “It probably looks much like the outside.”
“It’s okay,” Tonks panted. “Thanks.” She glanced up over her shoulder to Sirius, who was standing, arms crossed across his stained black shirt. “And thanks.”
“Course.” Sirius grinned with half his face. “Do you know what your mother would do to me if I had let you die?”
They both laughed weakly.
Tonks looked at her stomach again and realize rather dully she was wearing the ripped Water Bugs shirt like a vest, her capelet still marginally fastened around her shoulders, the edges dipped in her blood. Her bra was old and pink. She was embarrassed. She wore the thing under white clothes. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that was supposed to be seen in public.
As if on cue, the glittering thing that was certainly too lovely to be a human girl came forward with a dishtowel.
“May I?” she asked, her English heavily accented.
Tonks nodded, too tired to speak, and she – Fleur, Tonks had to remind herself – tucked the dishtowel into the straps of her bra so it covered her a bit. A modicum of decency.
“Where are the others?” Bill Weasley was asking loudly. “Why is no one else here?”
“We caught trouble,” said Remus tiredly. “I don’t know what the others caught. We had to get out fast.”
“We have to go back out,” Charlie, this time. He looked determined.
Flitwick stood up, still looking wan.
“No, Filius, stay,” Sprout protested.
“He’s our best dueler,” Sirius argued. “Even half dead, we need him.”
“Thank you Mr. Black,” said Flitwick, with a little smile of his own. “But I’m hardly half dead.”
“Are you sure?” Bill asked him seriously.
“We need to leave someone with Tonks.”
There was an awkward pause where no one looked at Fleur, who looked angry.
“Why should I ‘ave to stay?”
“You’re the junior member,” Tonks heard herself saying, grinning when all eyes spun towards her. “The one to leave first.”
“Not true,” said Remus loyally, patting her arm. “You saved my life.”
“You fought very well,” squeaked Flitwick.
“But you have to stay put,” finished Sirius.
“And…well…you’re very young,” Charlie finished to Fleur awkwardly.
“I was a Triwizard Champion!” Fleur shot back angrily.
“And this isn’t a tournament,” said Bill, just as angrily. “Stay with Tonks.”
“Yes sir,” sneered Fleur, and Bill looked confused, like his better nature was warring with attraction or temper or desire or –
“She doesn’t have to,” Tonks said quickly. “I’m fine. Look at me. I’m fine.”
But evidently looking at her was a mistake, because all seven of them fell quiet, and Tonks blushed. She knew her hair had flickered back to mouse brown. Her eyes also brown and no longer sparkling. She hadn’t been concentrating. She clearly looked a huge mess.
“I will stay,” Fleur said finally, unwillingly, into the brittle tension as Charlie checked his watch, clearly doing the mental math of how long they had left the two other groups fighting.
No one thanked her. No one even said anything other than Bill, who seemed to be in charge without thinking, Sprout talking to Flitwick in low voices.
“In two marks. First ours, and then yours. Three and three.” There was three sharp cracks at the same time, and Charlie, Bill, and Sprout were gone. Then a split second and another three, with Flitwicks’ as the faintest, the most experienced, and Remus, Sirius, and the Charms professor vanished too, leaving only the two women staring at one another across the dingy kitchen.
Tonks realized she was still sitting on the table, and she slid off of it while Fleur said:
“No..eet is too dangerous…stay,” ineffectually as Tonks stood up, woozy. She staggered, and Fleur rushed forwards.
“Eet is fine now. You are fine?” More a question than a statement, and Tonks looked over her shoulder at the kitchen table, the dishes broken on the floor where they had been swept by Remus’ impatient hands, the long streaks of drying blood.
“We should clean up,” Tonks said, breathing rather harder than she meant to. Her insides felt burned. Which, she supposed, they were.
“’Ere. You stand ‘ere and I shall do zee cleaning,” Fleur said, leaning Tonks against a counter and letting her take her weight on her leaning legs.
Fleur pulled out an icy white wand. Birch wood. Of course, Tonks thought irritated. As showy as the rest of her.
She observed Fleur from under her eyebrows, pretending to be taking off the rest of her capelet and shirt as a way to mask the scrutiny. Fleur was easily scrubbing the table, the repaired dishes reassembling themselves and filtering into the sink to be cleaned instead of back into their places. She magically pulled new dishes from the cabinets, setting them in fancier place settings than Tonks thought Sirius might ever bother with, using the old family silver goblets, napkins wrapping around silverware, laying themselves over stacked salad plates as the twelve places were set, the chairs being tucked into place instead of scattered around the room.
Tonks was terrible at these kinds of household magics, at cleaning and brightening, organizing. All the things her mother was quite good at. She felt a pang of embarrassment, though her mother wasn’t here to see. Instead, Tonks trained her eyes on Fleur, observing her even as Fleur turned around to look at her.
She had a long sheet of silvery blonde hair, a flat, heart shaped face with a small chin, thick lips, a soft nose. She looked like a princess from a fairy story, with dark blue eyes and long brown eyelashes. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and yet Tonks knew without a doubt she was lovelier in her natural face than Tonks had ever been, whichever face she wore. She had perfectly sculpted soft brown eyebrows and bronze, smooth skin that seemed too dark close up to match her coloring, a lovely honey glow that made Tonks feel peaky and mole spotted and pasty and cross and altogether too British.
“I think I’m just going to go home,” she told Fleur after a long moment.
“But ze others?” frowned Fleur. “Zey will want to find you.”
“They can find me,” yawned Tonks, suddenly tired.
“Zen I will go too,” said Fleur decisively.
Tonks frowned. This wasn’t what she had meant. “No,” she said. “I’ll just –“
“Eet is too dangerous to apparate,” said Fleur seriously. “With injuries such as yours. On ze eenside.”
“I’ll take the floo. It’s just a short trip. And I just want more clothes. And my own bed. And it’s so filthy here I don’t want to –“
“No,” said Fleur flatly. “I will not allow zat.”
“Allow it?” said Tonks, angrily astonished. “You can’t tell me what to do!”
“I am not telling.”
“Yes you are.”
“Yes I am.”
And Tonks paused, flummoxed, until she saw the curl of the smile around Fleur’s haughty mouth, and she blew out a strand of hair from her face in exasperation.
“I will get you clothes,” said Fleur.
Tonks had a horrifying thought of Fleur actually seeing the trainwreck of her apartment. Of trying to pick up the still clean clothes from their specific spot on the floor by the foot of her bed where she put on pajamas.
“No, it’s okay.”
“You are in a…comment dites-vous?” Fleur gestured.
“A dish towel,” said Tonks sourly.
“Yes. Zat.”
Tonks groaned, feeling like a sulky child as she shuffled her feet and then looked up at the stairs leading up from the basement kitchen. She didn’t want to sit in the kitchen of the house. Technically the whole house was Order headquarters. And she wanted to lay down. But the beds the Weasleys and Harry had stayed in – even the overnight guest beds – were up three or four flights of very long stairs.
“Sit.”
“What?” Tonks turned to see Fleur having pulled out a chair from the table, facing its battered old wood at the foot of the stairs.
“Sit,” she gestured impatiently.
Tonks sat. Immediately the chair began to float, and Fleur conducted her up the stairs beside her without a word, without a mocking glance or anything else.
They stopped on the second floor, three flights up. It was where Sirius and Regulus’ childhood bedrooms had been. Now they were crammed with two or three cots a piece for visitors and leftover from the Weasleys’ stay. Tonks took a bed gratefully. These, at least, were clean. Not originally part of the house. Brought in.
“Stay,” Fleur said severely, turning on the spot. She disapparated with a loud crack that proved she was still very new at it.
Tonks had to reflect that she was being treated rather like a dog, sitting and staying and being walked about. But she was too tired and in too much pain to much care. She settled against the pillows and combed her jaw length hair with her fingers. If only it was long and pretty like Fleur’s, and as she pulled the tangles out, she realized it was growing.
“Stop that,” she told herself, going slightly pink in the dim afternoon light of the small window. It would be mortifying for Fleur to come back and for Tonks to be wearing her features.
Fleur was back quickly, and Tonks realized only when she threw a bag on the foot of the bed she had never told Fleur where she lived. She looked in the bag, embarrassed. They were obviously Fleur’s clothes.
“These are too nice,” she tried to protest. “I’m all dirty and bloody and-“
A flick of Fleur’s wand, and Tonks realized her hair smelled like strawberries and mango. Like a fruity stupid tropical drink mixed with a white wine.
“Thanks,” she said, much too sourly for how she smelled.
“Hold up your ‘ands,” Fleur instructed, bunching the shirt up, and Tonks did so, embarrassed, as Fleur leaned close to her to pull her hands patiently through the long cashmere sleeves of a sweater that doubtlessly cost more than Tonks’ rent.
The shirt settled down, slipping over newly healed skin in a way that made Tonks want to hiss at the feel of it, the friction, and yet maybe it was the breath being stolen by the inches heating between her and Fleur.
Tonks dropped her eyes, embarrassed and vaguely ashamed. She liked witches and wizards. She didn’t advertise it much, outside her earrings and her loud hair. She was not actually very experienced; Hogwarts had been…well a boyfriend. Sixth year. A girl kissed her in seventh. Mainly Hogwarts had been Charlie, laughing at her. Mainly Charlie, being confused himself.
And auror training; she had been one of the youngest there. She had slept with one person. A woman. Once. And then she had avoided her. And then she had a one night stand in the Leaky Cauldron, because she felt like she should. In her twenties. Right?
She was embarrassingly under experienced, but Fleur was so beautiful, she would have been an idiot not to notice. Tonks hated that she still felt young and awkward, though Fleur was younger than she was. But nothing about Fleur screamed awkwardness or inexperience. She was probably much, much better at all of it than Tonks. Hadn’t she heard somewhere that Fleur was part Veela? A kind of magical creature that seduced without trying. Fleur didn’t even feel it.
She didn’t even notice.
Tonks felt her cheeks heating, and she pulled her head back, turning her own chin away, feeling ungainly and plain and embarrassingly mousy. But Fleur did not let her turn her face; her fingers were cold against Tonks’ flushed cheeks, and Tonks jumped – jumped right into Fleur’s waiting lips, her parted mouth, her hesitant sapphire eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Tonks mumbled at once, as soon as they broke apart. “I didn’t mean-“
“Why are you sorry?” Fleur seemed genuinely confused. “You did not like eet?”
“No, I mean, I didn’t mean to-“ Tonks began, and then frowned. “What?”
“I wanted to kiss you. Bill ‘as been saying I need to make more friends.”
“Oh.” Friends. Perhaps kissing another beautiful girl on the mouth was a French custom. Tonks felt her face probably matched her suddenly magenta hair.
“And I like you, Neemfadohra,” and she butchered Tonks’ name so badly she had to laugh.
“It’s Tonks.”
“Yes. Very well. Tonks.”
“But…you’re so young,” Tonks said awkwardly.
“Five years isn’t so much,” Fleur said honestly.
Tonks shrugged awkwardly. “I…I mean…you don’t…”
“’ave to?” guessed Fleur shrewdly, her blue eyes flickering. “You theenk because you were wounded I must fall for you?”
“Fall?” said Tonks faintly.
“I like you,” repeated Fleur impatiently.
Tonks didn’t know where to look, she had never, never blushed so hard. “I…I like you too,” she mumbled at last.
There was a huge series of cracks! From downstairs.
“’Ze others. Zey ‘ave returned. I should go to see.”
“Okay,” said Tonks faintly, still blushing.
“Zat sweater is nice on you,” said Fleur coolly surveying her. “Suits your coloring.”
Tonks blushed harder. It was a champagne color more suited to Fleur’s bronzed skin than her own pale one. “Thanks,” she said anyway.
“I will come back,” Fleur said, appraising her face.
“Okay. I’m fine.”
Fleur smiled mischievously. “Yes,” she said triumphantly; a person being quick-witted in a second language. “You are.”