sun&moon (Harry Potter: Remus/Tonks, G)

[mako_lies]

Title: sun&moon
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Remus, Tonks
Rating: General
Content Notes: Tonks is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. Set in an AU somewhere between OOTP and HBP. 

Prompt: 02 July, ‘Remus and Tonks go to the beach'

Freezing ink-black waters ram the craggy British Columbian coast. His winter breath rises as pale mist, luminous under the waxing gibbous Moon. Remus waits, in the still mostly-dark. Times slides against him and against him as the tide does the shore.

Tonks should have arrived by now.

Dumbledore refused to give Remus any specifics on the mission, just that Tonks’s talents were invaluable. His task was to retrieve them and ensure nobody followed them back to Headquarters. Invaluable, he muses, like as not code for dangerous. Remus burrows deeper into his threadbare jumper, a yellow one that’s a bit much for hiding but all he has clean. Remus feels the familiar creeping Moontouch in his chest.

“Wotcher, Remus,” comes their deep husky voice, pitched soft over the chatty waves.

He turns—a long cascade of blonde hair braided over a waif-like shoulder, more height than they typically wear, a short-sleeved green dress robe flattering of this tall slender figure, blue eyes like foreign moonbeams, soft near symmetrical features in a feminine face.

The Dark Mark mugs a grin, illuminated on their bleach-white skin.

“Tardy as ever,” he gently admonishes, inhaling deep—beneath the old seaweed and salt: cigar smoke and aged whiskey and a miasma of cologne and perfumes, but beneath all that din—sunlight and ozone. It’s Tonks, alright.

“Afterparty was killer. Lots of brown-nosing, gossip. Who shagged who, who murdered what, all that,” they say, as the Dark Mark melts away as the jagged edges of glass do between surf and sand.

Their features slough off next with a brilliant noseblinding burst of ozone. Remus expects their usual form: pink hair, heart face, pixie nose, wide smile fixed as their cheekbones. Instead, blonde blooms out black. Their hair is shaved at the sides, swoopy and long at the top, with artistic tousled fringe. Their face is regally sharp, with high cheekbones and a pronounced nose. Slanted grey eyes alight. Olive skin. A small frowning mouth—

They look like—Sirius. Before.

They look like—Bellatrix. Before.

Like a smudged version of the child the two might have had, in a version of all this where Sirius hadn’t run. Tonks’s smile sings sharp. Familiar and not. Their smile is half-gentle rather than crazy or sardonic. They sit on the freezing rocks, breath wispy as smoke. Sirius—Remus closes his eyes. Scent cannot often lie. Sunlight and ozone, rather than blood and acacia.

“Was Greyback there? Did you see him?” Remus yakuza squats beside them, his trousers groaning with strain—they’re more patch than not, these days.

“Naw, can’t say I had the pleasure,” they say, with an easy shrug of broad shoulders. Their dress robes pull tight over top muscle. “Party was all abuzz about him, though. Be nice to know what he’s been up to. Heard rumors about his—they call them his Kids. Bloody vile, that one. You’re sure I couldn’t—”

Remus rubs his chilled hands together for the illusion of heat. His Kids. The Moon spins ugly in his chest. “You couldn’t fool him, no.” Is there a kind way to tell Tonks they stink so heavily of wild magic Remus thinks even Muggles could smell it?

No matter the skin they build, Tonks cannot unravel themself.

Tonks grimaces. Dark circles hang heavy under their eyes. He hasn’t ever seen them look tired. There’s something Kind around the eyes. Something that reminds him of Ted. Is this it, then? Is this Tonks’s secretive TrueFace?

He finds his voice, from somewhere the Moon cannot steal. “You can’t fool me, whatever your skin says. Somehow, I doubt my nose is strong as his.”

Their slate gaze casts over the inky ocean. “…That explains why you’re always the one to fetch me. Know when it’s really me.”

Anybody could pretend to be Tonks. That’s why he’s here, in this desolate coast in British Columbia in the sea of night. Ensure it’s Tonks before they return to the Order. They glance back at Remus, elegant eyebrows knitting together. Tonks is smaller than he’s used to. Their usual form has more height. A stockier frame, rather than this slim but fit one. The green dress robes a puddle at their ankles, too long by far.

Why this face?

Remus has to unstick his voice, shake it free of the grit and the rocks and the moonsickness. He examines their nearly familiar face. “…You miss him.”

Tonks takes time to answer, rubbing over and over where the Mark had been with long-fingered hands. “Mum always said he was Innocent. She’d go off sometimes, to visit. Before he was—well, the way he was, y’know? Dad never let me go with,” Tonks digs their bitten ragged nails into their arm. “Part of why I became an Auror, yeah? Protect people what didn’t deserve it from getting shipped out to Azkaban. Prove to them what I could do. Y’know, Remus, I was the first openly metamorphmagus to join up?”

Their gaze is fixed still on the churning tides. The islands, off in the distance, silent and foreboding. Tonks’s face is open, uncertain, young, unguarded. More honest, than he’s accustomed to.

“I didn’t, actually. I would have expected there to be more. You’re quite talented. It’s a useful skill, to be anyone.”

Tonks shakes their head, fringe flopping in their face like a deep shadow. “I can’t. I can’t be anyone. I’m only just me. People always—they always want to know who—what I am. What I really am. But they’re all me. I’m me. Whichever face I’ve got on.” They look back at him. Familiar and unknown. Echoes of an older face, yet somehow just theirs too. “Remus, you’re always you, even when you’re—” Their husky voice clicks to a stop.

Remus feels the Moon yowling out his marrow. The Transformation, the Wolf, is closing in. Circling. Him and Tonks—they’re not the same. Tonks can build and build and build themself into whatever suits or doesn’t. Remus—breaks and breaks and breaks. His transformation worked out on his failed flesh, unraveling, unforgiving.

Wolfsbane or no, his change written into his form with agony.

“Even when I’m a werewolf,” he finishes for them, voice rasping hard over the words. “I know which version is preferable. And yourself, Tonks? This is your preference?”

Tonks jerks, a hand crashing out for his. He grasps their hand. Their skin is warm and calloused. Cold seeps out his hand at the contact. “No,” they say, low and dark, “I don’t prefer this face.”

“Because it’s yours?”

“They’re all mine. But this one, it’s too close. It has… history.”

Somewhere there is a teachable moment. About finding comfort in your own skin. But what is a skin that allows for, that forces such transformation? Remus isn’t the one to teach this lesson, and Tonks isn’t the one to learn it. He swipes his thumb over their bony knuckles, gone crooked from fighting.

Usually, their hands are perfect and smooth. Remus prefers this, maybe, if he is permitted a preference.

“Shall we?” Remus offers, as the Moons slinks up yet higher.

Tonks nods, slow, with a sigh that’s nearly lost under the din of the sea. Their features part ways for their pink ones, the ones the Order knows and loves. The transformation hits his nose brilliant as a summer day.

A secret hangs between them. A secret face, like the dark side of the Moon. “I miss him too,” Tonks says, just before they apparate.

The two stand, hand in hand, outside Grimmauld Place, before they part to find their way in, to be greeted, as ever, by screams.

 

Tonks has a report to make, and Remus—has his own Transformation to anticipate.