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She hadn’t known Lily Potter…
That red-haired girl who smiled so widely in photographs that wrinkles appeared on the edges of her eyes. The woman said to have kindness stitched into her heart, with a sharp wit to match it. Tonks had been too young to know her—or her husband, James Potter—but she knew enough about them.
Everyone had heard of them, of course. They were legend…woven into the myth of The Boy Who Lived like a fairytale. Hogwarts sweethearts to their very core. Without the Potters, there would have been no Harry Potter. To the wider world, they were sacrificed for the greater good.
Tragic martyrs, while their son somehow vanquished the Dark Lord.
But to those in the Order of the Phoenix, Lily and James Potter had been real. Real people with real friends and real family… And the kind of emotional impact that lived long after they were gone.
Dumbledore had once said they were the best sort of parents—fun, adventurous, and utterly devoted. The kind who would have filled a house with six children and still had room for more. He hadn’t spoken of them with the cool, measured detachment he usually reserved for the fallen. No, there had been a softness in his voice then, the sort of fondness reserved for those long-missed.
He’d told Molly as much one evening—Almost years ago now, in the Burrow’s kitchen while stew bubbled gently on the hob. He’d stirred his tea and said Harry reminded him of his mother more than anyone.
Harry is thoughtful. Definitely quick-tempered, but so much quicker to forgive. He looks out for the low wizard and defended them even when they didn’t deserve his defense.
Harry is loyal, like James, fiercely so. “But somehow,” Dumbledore had added with a quiet smile, “Harry has inherited James’s grudge against Slytherins…as though it had passed through the blood rather than upbringing.”
Molly hadn’t looked surprised.
“I didn’t know James Potter—not well,” she’d said, “but I remember him from Marlene McKinnon’s wedding. Loud. Opinionated. Merlin, he hated the war.”
“Hated the war,” Sirius had repeated, ticking off fingers. “Hated the Death Eaters. Hated anyone who used dark magic.”
“He would’ve hated that Snape ended up in the Order,” Remus had muttered darkly—and Tonks knew why.
Snape had cost Remus his job at Hogwarts. A dream stolen out from under him, with a single whispered word. She’d reached out then, gently rubbing his arm beneath the table, waiting for the colour to return to his face as the others continued reminiscing.
“James? Oh, he’d have been furious,” Sirius had said, rolling his eyes. “But Lily—she’s the one who’d have thrown a proper tantrum. Would’ve marched herself right into Dumbledore’s office and threaten to kill him.”
Beside her, Remus had chuckled at that—one of those rare, honest laughs that made him look younger. When Tonks glanced his way, she caught a glimpse of his wolfish smile—until Sirius kicked his feet up onto Remus’s lap and ruined it.
“What I wouldn’t give to see Lily’s reaction to Snape teaching Harry Occlumency,” Sirius had said next, voice curling into a laugh. “Oh, she’d have hexed him into next week.”
“No,” Remus had said at once. “Lily would’ve listened to Dumbledore. James would’ve hexed Snape before she did.”
“Lily Potter? Our Lily? Listen to a man?” Sirius had scoffed. “You’ve always put her on a pedestal, Moony. You and James. That woman never followed orders—just asked forgiveness after she’d done it her way.”
“She was friends with my brothers,” Molly had added, ladling stew into bowls. “Stubborn as they come. But she had a good heart. When Fabian and Gideon died, she sent my mother the most beautiful tea roses—charmed to last all year. Brought them round herself.” She’d paused then, blinking hard. “Still the loveliest roses I’ve ever seen.”
“Aye,” Moody had grunted from the corner, cradling his flask. “She was known for her Charms, yes—but it was her skill in Herbology and Potions that pulled our arses out of the fire more than once. Antidotes. Burn salves. Polyjuice without boomslang skin—eighteen bloody vials of it. I told Albus, ‘You lose her, and we’re done.’”
“How do you brew Polyjuice Potion without all the ingredients?” Tonks had asked, amazed.
“She substituted the boomslang skin with Animagus blood.” Sirius had winked at her. “Took it right out of my arm. And James’s leg. James made more fuss, though. Hated the sight of blood.”
Moody had chuckled, shaking his head. “Those two…” he’d said, gesturing vaguely as if Lily and James might stroll in at any moment, “were the only pair I ever saw mid-duel, looking like they were about two seconds away from tearing each other’s clothes off.”
Remus had visibly shuddered. “I’d forgotten that about them.”
Moody leaned in then, lowering his voice as though it were still some great secret. “First time I met Lily Potter, she was pressed against James in a Potions storeroom. I’d gone looking for powdered bicorn horn—found them instead. Tongues down each other’s throats… I couldn’t believe they’d been Head Boy and Head Girl.”
Tonks had felt Remus fidget knowingly beside her. “James only took that internship because he heard Lily would be there for the summer. His dad had to pull strings to get him in.”
“They swore up and down they were sorting ingredients for the department head,” Moody had grumbled, shaking his head. “Idiots got caught again a week later by the Minister of Magic at the time—her name is escaping me—but she got both of them written up.”
“Oh, they were insufferable sometimes,” Sirius had said with a grin. “So in sync. So bloody in love. You’d think they’d invented kissing the way they acted.” But then his voice had quietened into something tender edging in beneath the laughter. “They were trying for another kid before….you know. Lily wanted it so badly. She didn’t want Harry to be lonely….”
Of everyone in the Order who’d known the Potters, it was Sirius who missed Lily most.
Tonks had never doubted it.
She’d seen it in the way his expression softened when their orphaned son laughed—especially when Ginny Weasley was nearby. It was the same kind of unguarded, full-bellied laugh Sirius swore Lily had given James. The kind that was overly dramatic to flirt.
Sometimes she caught Sirius and Remus staring just a little too long at Harry’s eyes, or his crooked smile. She’d overheard Sirius slipping Lily’s name into conversation—not always when it was relevant, but because he needed to say it. To keep her near, even now.
“If Lily were here, she’d have sorted that burn properly,” he’d mutter. Or, “She had the neatest charm for mending seams—quicker than blinking.”
Even when he said, “She sang like a toad,” it was half-laughing, like the memory hurt him.
Remus had only really spoken of James Potter, Remus praised the man highly, and rather sparingly.
Once, he’d told Tonks that James reminded him of Bill Weasley: effortlessly cool, maddeningly gifted with a wand, the sort everyone assumed would grow up to be a Curse-Breaker or something equally daring. A photo of James Potter sat on Remus’s bedside table at home, one that Tonks often found herself staring at while she dressed. She could never quite understand how Harry could look so utterly like his father, and yet bear not a trace of Lily in his face.
“It’s the eyes,” Remus would murmur from bed. “And the smile.”
She’d heard the wistfulness in his voice. And just for a moment, she’d wondered how much Lily Potter had once meant to him.
But Sirius was already gone by then—there was no one left to ask—and Remus rarely spoke of Lily Potter. In truth, he spoke of Lily even less than he did of James.
And so, Tonks did not know Lily.
Not until now at least. But now Tonks was standing before Bellatrix Lestrange. Her aunt and, almost certainly, her executioner.
Aunt Bella’s eyes were wild, dark and glittering, and her smile was sharp and slanted…totally wrong. It was the same smile Tonks had once seen on her mother in old photographs. Not the woman Andromeda had become, but the girl she’d been before she fell in love with a Muggle-born and walked away from everything.
This was the evil version of her mother that might have been, had she chosen blood over love.
Tonks had chosen like her mother: love over blood.
After all, not just any woman would look at a werewolf and see someone to fall in love with. But Tonks looked at Remus and saw beyond the full moons. She’d ignored his tired eyes, and convinced the wise and funny older wizard to date her…marry her…have a kid with her.
But now Remus was gone.
He lay near her, no more than ten steps away, limp and still, the colour already fading from his skin. Just minutes ago, his hand had brushed hers, warm and steady. Now, the space between them felt infinite, a chasm that could not be crossed.
And Tonks stood there, suspended at the edge of it, trapped between two impossible pulls: run toward death… or run back to her son.
And she could feel it now, down to her bones—the ache Lily must have felt. Lily, who had stood in her cottage in the North, heart pounding, wandless and desperate, while death climbed the stairs with deliberate steps.
Did Lily know ? Did she truly know that if she stepped in front of the curse, her son would live? Did she understand the magic? The power of willing sacrifice?
Or had Lily Potter simply acted not only as a mother, but as a woman who could not fathom living in a world where James Potter no longer breathed?
And wasn’t Tonks just the same?
She loved her son, Teddy. Merlin knew it, she did. She loved the soft baby scent of his hair and the tiny weight of his fingers around hers. She loved the idea of watching him grow.
But her soul… her heart had chosen Remus Lupin long before it had ever known their son. She had fallen for Remus Lupin so completely, so irrevocably, that even her Patronus had changed to reflect Remus as a wolf.
Her magic was warped around him.
And now, in the ruins of Hogwarts, with smoke choking the air and screams echoing down broken corridors, Tonks understood. She understood Lily Potter’s decision despite not ever meeting her.
Tonks looked up just in time to see the flash of green erupt from Aunt Bella’s wand. It was over now, the fight, before it had even begun. She chose Remus, she would always choose Remus, in any lifetime.
She just hoped Teddy would forgive her.