Chapter Text
"Legilimency lessons," Albus insists. "From Professor Snape," he adds, with just the slightest glint of mischief in his blue eyes. "It's essential if you hope to be of use to the Order, my dear."
Tonks is twenty-three years old, and like most youth of twenty-three, she is more than ready to die for the first good cause that comes knocking at her door. So she agrees quickly, and with only the faintest trace of reluctance in her wide brown eyes.
Not a week later Tonks finds herself back in Snape's classroom, though she's always thought of it as more of a windowless lair than a classroom, really. In that respect, it hasn't changed a bit, though the desks and cauldrons have been cleared away for the evening.
Snape stands with his back to her, writing at the chalk board with short jerky motions, his greasy hair quivering with the effort. When he does not look up or move in any way to acknowledge her, Tonks walks up to stand close by his side.
"Wotcher."
"You're late." he says
Tonks looks at her watch. 7:03 pm.
She shrugs at him, not quite apologetically and his scowl deepens. Gazing into that wan frowning face Tonks decides that professor Snape looks about exactly the same as he did when she'd last seen him at her graduation. That is to say, he looks rather like a vampire. That had been the rumor swirling around the Puff common room in her day.
Tonks had mentioned the rumor once to Charlie Weasley and he'd laughed and said Snape was worse than any vampire. Charlie, who always did have a talent for spinning yarns, said that drinking blood was much too clean and respectable for the likes of Professor Severus Snape.
"No," Charlie insisted, and his nose wrinkled as he gave her his signature, wicked Weasley smile. "Snape eats spider's eggs and frog's legs."
"Kneazle brains?" Tonks had suggested.
"Definitely. And the wings of freshly caught billywigs."
Stifling a smile at this memory, Tonks sneaks a quick glance at Snape's crooked teeth, as if she'll spy a spider's leg or a billywig's wing tucked between one of his molars and an overlarge canine. She finds no such thing, though she does notice a smudge of black ink on the end of his long hooked nose.
How very unvampiric of him.
"Is there something amusing?"
"Oh, no, it's just such a pleasure to be here," she says, and for a moment she almost means it.
Snape looks back at her from beneath furrowed eyebrows. "Miss Tonks... No, it's Nymphadora, isn't it? I am glad you find it a pleasure to—."
"It's Tonks," she says, cutting him off. "Don't call me Nymphadora."
Snape turns his gaze back to the blackboard and continues as if she had not spoken. "I am glad you find it a pleasure. I myself do not wish to be here any longer than necessary, do you understand?" Snape cuts his eyes to her for just a moment before resuming. "I expect you to learn the material with the utmost acuity. Or, at least, a minimum of your usual foolishness, indolence, and careless bungling. Do not waste my time."
Ignoring this, rather as she would ignore a petulant child, Tonks conjures a desk and plonks her bum down in the seat. When she stretches her legs out, her jeans rise to reveal several inches of her red and yellow socks, socks which clash magnificently with her orange high-top sneakers.
Tonks raises her head to see Snape rolling the chalk between his fingers. His dark eyes are both expectant and scornful.
:"Why I wouldn't dream of wasting your time." Tonks says, with faux innocence on her face.
Snape huffs under his breath softly, "Very well, then. Be quiet and listen." For a moment, he composes himself. Older now, she finds herself fascinated at the way his posture stiffens and the muscles of his face still as if he is donning a mask. In the moment the lecture begins he is transformed.
“The mark of a great wizard," Snape says silkily, "is their virtuosity in the twin arts of occlumency and legilimency; for to master these powers is to have learned to discipline that thing that is most core to your very self." With a slight curl of his lip, Snape adds, "I expect you will find occlumency exceptionally difficult given your personal deficiencies. You are as emotionally and mentally chaotic and changeable as you are physically mercurial. Your use of your magical powers will continue to be as clumsy, and erratic as you are until the day that you learn to exercise mental discipline.”
Tonks looks up into his face in sudden interest. "How do you know that?"
"That you are clumsy? Or that you are erratic?"
"That my metamorphmagi powers come from some kind of unique mental characteristics. I mean, I'm not even sure that's true."
"I don't believe I ever implied that. I'm afraid young people are almost never as mysterious or as interesting as they think themselves to be, metamorphmagi not excluded." Snape takes a step closer towards the desk and leans down until the spot of ink on his nose is inches from her forehead. "I am not Professor Trelawney and there will be no more navel-gazing during these lessons. The source of your inadequacies is not interesting to me. I am only interested in whether you can overcome them."
In a soft, almost dangerous voice, Snape whispers, "I will attempt to penetrate your mind. We will see how well you resist."
Before he can raise his wand Tonks closes her eyes and blurts out, "Wait! You can't just push your way in there with no warmup at all."
An ugly flush suffuses Snape's sallow face, and Tonks feels her own ears burning.
She stumbles on, "I mean, isn't there, like, a way to ease in? Or we could do, er, slowly? I'm just trying to say—"
"Be quiet." Snape hisses. "If you don't want me in your mind, then stop me."
The next moment, Snape's sarcastic face has disappeared from her field of vision, and Tonks is falling.
The first thing she finds in the fathomless tunnel is her mother, Andromeda. She is standing in their kitchen, licking cake batter from a spatula and smiling at her with kind brown eyes. Before she can smile back, Tonks feels a sensation like she is tumbling backwards, and her mother has gone, replaced by a vision of herself at age eleven. She is waving her wand for the first time, ash with a unicorn hair core, seven and a half inches long. Then she is tumbling again: falling, and falling, from memory to memory.
When the spinning finally ceases, it is all too sudden, as if she were standing in an elevator that had hit the ground floor with a whump and her stomach had gone whump along with it. As her vision clears, she eyes Snape's unhappy face. His look is disdainful.
"You did not try. Admit it."
She nods at him thoughtfully, pulling a strand of curly purple hair behind her ear. There's an odd crackling feeling daancing over the surface of her skin from being close to him after he'd been inside her mind. She shudders, then shrugs her shoulders to shake off the jitters. He takes the shrug as a confession. Rubbing his fingers together in annoyance, he says sharply, "Stop wasting my time Nymphadora."
"Tonks," she mumbles under her breath even as he places his hand on the desk and leans over her again to re-enter her mind.
They continue that way, making attempt after fruitless attempt. The sense of repeated violation is unpleasant, but Tonks is relieved that all the memories he finds are happy. She has a delightful time visiting the day she'd learned to swim, the time her best friend had gifted her a pet turtle, and her fourth birthday party. Snape turns out to be less pleased about the string of lovely memories.
"I know what the matter with you is," he tells her in a hushed voice, after a particularly ecstatic memory. "You are enjoying the chance to visit your past far too much. This is not the chance to meet your inner child, to take long ambling walks down memory lane. You are wasting my time."
"Well," she says slowly, "Can you really blame me for having a nice childhood?"
***
Apparently he could. Exactly one week later, Tonks returns to his office to find him leaning over his pensieve, his hooked nose hovering centimeters from the swirling silver pool. He looks up quickly, as if startled, and clears the pensieve away.
"You're early," he says. And she gives him the same half-apologetic shrug as last time.
Straightening up, he strides towards her, and the calculating look on his face sparks a feeling of dread somewhere deep in her gut.
"We will be trying a different tack today. I refuse to embark on any other sentimental ambles down memory lane with you. No more cakes and candles; puppies and days at the beach. I am going to seek out memories that you’d prefer I not see." With a raise of one eyebrow he adds, You need motivation to try much harder than you have been.”
This isn't pleasant news, but Tonks has given up arguing with him over his methods. So, she sets her jaw, raises her head, and allows his black eyes to meet her dark brown ones. His presence inside her mind is immediate, and with it comes the familiar jumble of amorphous shapes. Then Tonks finds herself in a more recent memory.
Tonks is standing before her mirror practicing her male transformations. She is clad in men’s trousers and nothing else. As the memory starts she is a willowy teenage boy, all big eyes and fluffy hair. In front of her own watching eyes she makes her body wider and longer, transforming into a gorilla-like man with long, round-muscled arms, a bottle-shaped chest, and a great mustache. In front of the mirror, she flexes her arms appreciatively.
Stomach aching with embarrassment as she watches this scene, Tonks struggles to push Snape out. Then, with a thrill of panic, she realizes that if Snape stays in this memory any longer he is going to see her change back to herself... and will have a full view of her, in her birthday suit, before the mirror. In unthinking desperation she slashes her wand at him and spells,
“Protego.”
Snape staggers. His wand flies upward away from her. Her mind is teeming with memories that are not hers.
A youthful Madame Pomfrey puts a hand on the shoulder of a crying boy. A grim-faced teen stands in a filthy bathroom, hacking through his lank hair with a pair of shears. A young man stares at his distorted face as it is reflected back at him from the breast of a suit of armor in the Hogwarts great hall.
The scene settles and she is in a dimly lit room. A hatchet faced man has cornered a small dark-haired boy. He raises his hand as if to slap the boy and child makes a hoarse cawing noise of fear.
A strained voice from behind Tonks says, “Do not hit my son.”
Snape's father turns to the woman, a vicious look on his face. “Your son is he? Well he certainly bears no evidence I bore him.”
The little woman's face is set in hard lines. "I suppose we have the gods to thank for that," she says, in a voice just above the audible.
Now, Tonks is shrieking because the hook-nosed man has pushed the thin little woman against the wall, his forearm pressed against her throat, a look of mad rage on his face. Tonks can hear screaming from beside her and she realizes it is coming from the child.
And she has been thrust again from his mind.
“Enough” cries Snape. The blood has drained from his face and he is shaking. “Get out of here” he chokes. There is something in the angle of his mouth, the shape of his frown, that makes him look almost demented to Tonks. Then he is roaring, “Get out!”
Tonks flinches and there is a crash as he slams his fist into the jars on the shelves. Several jars fall to the ground and shatter, slimy water pouring out in an ugly slick across the stone floor. Snape grabs another one and raises his hand as if to throw it.
Rising to her full height, Tonks rushes towards him. “Stop!," She raises her hand at him, watches him freeze as she shouts again, "Stop it you bastard!"
Frozen in surprise, his arm still extended, Snape looks at her with what might be a trace of guilt in his eyes. Tonks takes the opportunity to grab his wrist, clenching tight to the hand that still clutches a jar of quivering eyeballs. She finds herself somewhere between furious and something else as she looks at his shocked face. The silence stretches out between them, and she feels the hot dampness of blood trickling from his torn knuckles into her palm.
“You’re not really like that,” she says quietly, "Not really." She gently prizes open the fingers of his damaged hand, and Snape does not resist. Taking the jar in her own hand, Tonks places it back on the damaged shelf without turning away from him.
Snape remains rooted in place; the twitching at his temple the only proof he has not turned to marble.
Tonks loosens her grip, a tendril of something sad trickling like icy water into her stomach. Slowly, almost tenderly, she brings his arm down and towards her so that she can clasp it in both of hers. She feels the slick of his blood across her own fingers, and from the point of their contact she feels the warm swell of his magic brushing up against hers.
Looking him in his glittering dark eyes she tells him, “I’m not going to run from here and pretend I didn’t just see that.”
He is slow to reply. "I don't need your pity Tonks." His eyes, flat and cold, search her face.
Tonks considers this for a moment. "It's not pity," she says. "But I won't let you chase me from the room," Staring at him now, her eyes drawn again to the blotch of ink on the tip of his quivering nose, she wonders what it is exactly that she feels for him. Responsibility perhaps? She had discovered that the spiders Charlie spoke of were not stuck in Snape's teeth, but crawling around inside his head. Now that a few had crawled right out in front of her, she couldn't leave him in good conscience to deal with it alone, could she?
When he says nothing, Tonks turns to the mess Snape has made on the floor. "Reparo," she spells. The shards of glass move a little slowly for Tonks' liking, but do eventually reunite back into a jar. She crouches down and puts it back on his shelf. There’s nothing she can do for the contents, now spilt out on his floor. So she vanishes them with a flick of her wrist.
Snape is watching her, his shoulders hunched and drawn together protectively. The room is so quiet she can hear the soft plucking sound of his blood dripping to the stone floor. Tonks holds out her hand to him, and when he doesn't move, she reaches out a little farther and simply takes his limp hand again in hers. Holding it before her, she spells "Tergio" and watches the blood slick off, leaving the open slashes visible. Before the blood can well up and obscure his hand again, she traces her wand over his knuckles, scrunching her face up in concentration.
The slashed skin binds itself back together like a mouth closing, leaving only a seam of fresh pink skin visible. Snape takes his hand out of hers, an odd expression on his face. He folds his arms together across his chest.
"Alright. You've made your point," he says, letting out a long breath. "Let me alone now."
Hesitantly, Tonks makes for the door.