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October 1996
There was blood in Tonks' mouth.
They swirled it around their teeth before spitting it into the Hog's Head sink. Little shards of tooth met cracked porcelain: clink clink clink.
Another spit, more rusted red into the sink. The necessary parts of them melding with the limescale around the plug hole, their life's blood slipping down the drain. It was proof they were alive if nothing else.
That had been rather hard to come by recently — evidence that they were more than an imprint of the person Tonks had once been, that they too lived and breathed…and got the ever-loving shit kicked out of them in dimly lit alleyways by Death Eaters several times their size.
They prodded the hole at the back of their mouth gingerly with their tongue: four missing, fractured teeth, the remnants like shards of glass in their gums.
It could have been worse. When Dolohov's spell had connected with the side of their face, they were sure it had broken their jaw; their vision flashing white at the moment of impact, pain blossoming across their face. Broken teeth and a sink full of blood were easier to handle.
It might have been nicer if it had been worse.
Not drastically worse, not to the point of death, but to the point that someone other than themselves took notice. A couple of broken bones maybe, a nasty curse that took Healers a few days to figure out… a repeat of the Department Of Mysteries where Remus had sat beside their bedside for days at a time. Just enough to send some kind of flurry around the Order, not enough that they'd miss the Ministry's Halloween Party. Something to assuage the guilt beneath their skin.
Would they have told him? Would Remus even care if they had, or would he shrug it, them, off as simply not his business anymore and carry on the way he always had? Tonks didn't know. They hated not knowing.
Fuck, look at them. Wishing they were hurt more for sympathy. Despicable.
This whole thing was fixable.
If it had been 6 months ago, they'd have fixed it already without a foray into the most macabre thoughts first. But this wasn't 6 months ago, and Tonks was frightened of nothing the way they were frightened of the reflection in the mirror.
They had avoided it for weeks now. They'd keep their back to the sink in the mornings, averting their gaze from shop windows and puddles and the side of Molly Weasley's copper kettle — anything that might show them eyes they recognised out of a face they did not. Even now, they kept their head down, elbows braced against the sink, refusing to look up.
They'd have to look up.
Any Auror worth their salt, and the phrase made Tonks' stomach churn and the guilt bubble again, could regrow teeth in a heartbeat. Countless hours of study and training had seen to that. But to do it without looking was just asking for an unnecessary trip to St Mungo's with teeth growing at the back of their throat and an embarrassing story they'd never live down.
With a sigh that echoed around the bathroom and reverberated back through them, Tonks lifted their head.
It was worse than they had imagined, worse than the last time they had braved it, even. Back then, the heartbreak had been fresh. Tear tracks had glistened on their cheeks, and a wobble threatened their bottom lip, but it had been a promise that come the morning, with a little sleep, they would be alright.
Now the dust had settled. Months had passed and the morning had not done what it had promised.
There was very little left of them in the reflection.
The stranger in the mirror was sickly, with dark circles like bruises, pale skin and sunken eyes. There was a trail of blood down their chin, smeared across their lips.
But the worst thing was that this was undoubtedly her. This was Nymphadora in a way Tonks simply was not. Every part of themselves Tonks had tried to let go of was seeping through the cracks heartbreak had left behind, rising to the surface. They had buried Nymphadora out the back of the Herbology greenhouses one night in their 5th year when the notion of womanhood had floated around the dormitory and filled Tonks with such foreboding they had grabbed their shovel.
Very few people had been surprised. Only their mother mourned Nymphadora.
And here she was again, looking just as accusatory at Tonks as Tonks was at her, frustrated to have been dug out and thrust into the light but sticking around all the same. Tonks tried, once more, to change their appearance — lighten a fingernail, pinken some hair…
There was no change.
Tonks fixed their teeth with a jab of their wand, feeling bones regrow and shift the way they used to be able to do with ease. It was comforting and it was sickening. They wanted more of it. They wanted the control back.
With another spit, they turned their back on the reflection.
December 1996
The man in the bed behind them was snoring, one arm dangling over the edge as though to hold them, the sheet tangled around his waist. Below them, Tonks could make out the drunken revelry that was still going on. Christmas Eve was Aberforth's busiest night, it appeared. It was 2 in the morning, Christmas Day, and Tonks thought the world might be ending.
They sat, fully clothed, at the rickety wooden desk. The man, their latest victim they supposed, hadn't noticed. He'd been the first person they had spotted at the Leaky Cauldron that seemed willing to fuck the malaise out of them. They had ployed him with drinks, batted their eyelashes, and whispered all the filthy things they wanted him to do to them as they pushed him against the wall between the pub and Diagon Alley. He had all but salivated. He had been nice, really, but his hands had been too soft and his kissing hesitant and careful. It had not hurt the way Tonks wished it would.
It had not been enough to shake, from its foothold in Tonks' mind, the look on the woman's face as the Death Eater's curse came for her earlier that day. Nor the way the child had screamed upon finding his mother, his eyes falling on Tonks with as much blame as he could muster. Nor the way the reflection had mimicked the look back at them after it was all over.
It hadn't even made them forget about Remus.
The man snorted. There were flecks of grey in his brown hair, Tonks hadn't noticed. Or maybe they had. Maybe that had been the point.
Tonks despised him.
Tonks couldn't even remember his name.
"Wake up." Tonks dropped his clothes onto his chest in a bundle. "You need to leave."
"Huh?" The man awoke slowly. "What's —"
"You need to go."
The man dressed, grumpily. Tonks turned away. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No." They shook their head. There was a sour taste in their mouth and a black hole somewhere where their heart should be.
"Can I owl you?"
"No."
Only when the door to the room had closed, could Tonks breathe again.
Remus turned up the next night, the way they hoped and feared he would. They had considered, in the briefest moments before they had opened the door, not allowing him in. There were bits of them in this room that they didn't really want him to see, bits too private for even the most loving of glances. If he looked at this new sad version of them with the same sad, adoring look he had the night he had left…they'd be done for.
But, of course, they had let him in, because Tonks always would. And Remus had looked at them like that.
Tonks didn't know who pushed who onto the bed, only that they had dug their nails into Remus' back as he fucked them into the mattress, scraping away layers, blood under fingertips, feeling the way his desperate hands had left imprints on their thighs.
They told him, as he dragged his mouth down to them like a starved man, the way they had led the other man here the previous night, the things they let him do to them. In their words, the man became something else, that disappointed fuck turned life-altering, something to be jealous of even as Remus ate them out. They thought Remus might suspect they were lying, but it didn't stop the hungry kisses to their neck that they thought might be tinged with tears.
Good.
They thought they muttered a litany of 'I love you,' 'please don't stop' and 'please don't leave' into his shoulder, and he replied 'I'm sorry I love you.'
Oh, that had been the hurt they were looking for. The ache like a pressed bruise even as they came around him, that missing comma the worst thing they had ever heard.
Tonks watched Remus pull his clothes back on silently, tracing the damage the werewolf camp had done to him with their eyes. They thought about bringing out the old argument, reminding him that they loved the parts of him he tried to keep hidden from them, found something to adore in every broken, worn-down inch of him. But there was no need. He was looking at them sadly again.
"Why were you alone, today of all days?"
In response, they dragged him to the bathroom sink, to the accusatory person in the mirror. Remus slotted himself behind them, peering at them both in the reflection, his arms hovering above their waist like he was frightened to touch them now he couldn't blame carnal desire. They looked equally as broken, equally like they had left pieces of themselves somewhere and had yet to discover where. Hollow on the inside. He looked malnourished, his cheeks gaunt and facial hair overgrown. They looked exhausted, and just as much Nymphadora as they had the last time they checked.
"What am I supposed to be looking at?"
"That."
Remus' reply was a kiss to the temple.
He left shortly afterwards. He did not promise to be back. He did not say he loved them, but Tonks heard it in the look he gave them, halfway out the door. It infuriated them, that he would not say it when they obviously needed it, could not hear them over the screaming in his own head.
They shouldn't have let him in.
Still, Tonks cherished the bruises he had left on their skin. The only bits of themself that made any sense anymore.
February 1997
The bruises faded and things stopped making sense.
They tried to chase that feeling, flirting with strangers in muggle pubs, trying to find something to fill the gap: a friendly face as a distraction, or a crass one as something else entirely. If any of them noticed that Tonks' heart wasn't in it, it never stopped them — not until the bile rose in Tonks' throat at the thought of what they were about to do, and they pushed them away. They never took another person home after Christmas Eve. There seemed little point in sleeping with someone else if they couldn't tell Remus about it. Not if it wouldn't make him quake. He'd ruined that for them, really. It was almost a shame.
So they looked elsewhere for the tender bruises. They jumped into fights they had no place in, swapping trademark defence for attack attack attack. Frenzied, Hestia Jones had called it. Desperate, is what Tonks called it.
It felt slightly better to see some kind of physical manifestation of…whatever it was that had overtaken them. A few bumps and bruises to match their fractured ego. Which made them feel a little insane.
Worst still the ache didn't fade, no matter how many times they threw themselves into duels. It rested like a hollow chasm behind their breastbone. They went through days like a zombie, like they had already died and they were wearing around a desecrated corpse of themself and no one had had the decency to take them to the morgue yet…
Overly dramatic, they thought.
The type of metaphor that would have the Auror Office's designated counsellor scribbling away at her official-looking parchment (Tonks had managed to avoid her recently with some clever lies, and then spent the next 3 hours trying not to pathologise that themself. Some things were better left unsaid).
They urged themselves to get a grip. Everyone else spent lifetimes in the same skin they were born in, and none of them ever spoke about this. How it felt like a poorly made suit they could not take off, too small and too big in equal measure so as to make them feel lost and claustrophobic at the same time. It was just Tonks who couldn't handle it.
It had begun to make them sloppy, if they were being honest, in a way that had nothing to do with their usual clumsiness. They struggled to focus on Order missions and had to rely on a vile kind of blood lust in their veins (that frightened them when they were alone) to fuel them. Well, that and —
"That was the single sloppiest performance I have ever seen." Mad-Eye had ranted. "If you were as second slower, Dolohov would have —" He had paused and narrowed his eyes. Whatever he had seen on their face infuriated him. He took a step towards them. "Are you fucking drunk?"
Tonks hadn't been proud of the way they had bristled, but what else were they supposed to do? There was shame at the back of their throat and a hand itched toward their hip flask to wash it away.
Their sudden bravado, the flash of the angry 16-year-old kid they had once been, had not fooled the old Auror anymore than they had expected it to. He had summoned the flask from their pocket, emptying its contents onto the grass. Firewhiskey, the cheap kind that Sirius had one sworn could take the paint off the walls of the study in Grimmauld Place, puddled between them. Mad-Eye dropped the flask when he was done.
"You think this is a joke?" He had asked. Tonks had not been laughing. "Dulling your reactions, your intuition, your smarts? In these times? This is a monumentally stupid, selfish thing to do —" Tonks had only nodded as the rant picked up speed. Mad-Eye continued that way for over 10 minutes until the fire that sustained him had snuffed itself out.
"You need to buck up your ideas, kid."
"I know." Tonks' voice was croaky, they thought they might cry — here on the side of the road like a scolded child. They wished Mad-Eye would look away. Even the Dark Mark hanging low in the sky was watching. What would they do if Tonks cried?
They must have been a pitiful sight because Mad-Eye's gaze softened. Tonks wished the shouting was back. They knew where they stood with Mad-Eye's shouting. This sympathy was something new, strange. It made their eyes water.
"It doesn't help. The drink." Spoken with experience marking each word like a bullet wound. An olive branch extended over the whisky spilt between them.
"Then what does?"
"You find out, you tell me."
So that's what Tonks was attempting to do, stood in front of the bathroom mirror, locked in a silent tussle with the reflection. The person in front of them blinked, they scrunched their face up in concentration, they lifted their eyes skyward in prayer or plea. Yet through it all, they remained unchanged.
Even the smudge of mascara at the corner of their eye remained unchanged. It paired artfully with the remnant of a black eye from the week before. Intentional almost, like the type of thing Teenage Tonks, all sharp angles and cheap cigarettes, would think was pretty cool. The rest of them, however, Teenage Tonks would call a travesty.
Their hair was mousy brown as it had been for months. It had grown, a novelty Tonks hadn't gotten used to yet. It fell in waves down passed their shoulders and tickled their arms when they walked. The end threatened a curl, the hints of Black family genes as evident there as they were in the minutiae of their features. Inescapable, and whatnot.
When Tonks had been young, they had asked their father if their morphs would ever stop. It had been a bad week for them. Some of the kids at their wizarding primary school had discovered the word freak, and had tested how it felt on their tongues when used as a projectile. Tonks, with their ever-changing hair and a face they hadn't learnt full control of yet, was the most logical choice for target practice. They had spent the weekend attempting to be less freakish, resorting to their father when the freak was still there Sunday evening.
Ted had chuckled and knocked their chin with his fingers. Being a metamorphmagus was who they were, he had told them, and you couldn't just lose parts of yourself like that. He had followed it with some comment on being proud of who they were that Tonks presumed had been very helpful at the time (they'd stopped wishing to be normal, anyway) and had since been lost to the sands of time.
Tonks hadn't asked Ted what he thought about their current self, too scared that he'd concede he was wrong — that you can lose fragments of the self like other people lose loose knuts down the back of the couch.
How could they be something, and then not be something?
It wasn't fair.
It was the hair, they decided suddenly, that was the problem. It had been left to grow too long. With it gone, they could think clearly. They'd look more like Tonks again. They reached for their wand. In the other hand, they held a wad of lank hair.
With a slash, the chunk hit the bottom of the sink. It fell silently, weightlessly, but Tonks heard it like it was made of lead. The chord of finality it struck hit the frenzied desperate core of them. They did it again, watching hair pile up in the sink and covering the floor.
Again and again. Then again.
Sharp slash, shaking hands, laboured breaths.
If hair truly did hold memory, and Tonks couldn't place where they had heard it only that it had made them scoff at the time, then they were chipping away months at a time. Sirius' death. Their failures. The feel of Remus' lips against their neck and the way he had shattered the peace they'd both created with his insecurities. This body. This unchanging, battered body. The wrong of it, the static of it.
Chop. Chop. Chop.
The layers were messy, the lines uneven and jagged until the word butchered came to mind. Tonks didn't much care. They needed it gone, to cut away all the parts of Nymphadora they were stuck with until they could finally breathe again.
But when they stopped hacking… Nymphadora was still there.
Tonks' hair was short again. It lacked any of its usual flair and lay flat, limp, and awkward against their head, but it was shorter. So why hadn't the ache stopped? It was supposed to have stopped…
Tonks' fist connected hard with the mirror.
They picked bloodied shards of glass from their knuckles for hours.
April 1997
The problem with hair is that it grew back. In Tonks' case, it grew back incredibly quickly, like it was celebrating being let off its lead for the first time by growing in abundance. In just two months, it had grown back to below their chin. Their mother had floated the idea of a hairdresser by them with pain in her eyes, but Tonks had turned it down. No one but them was allowed to change their hair. It was the principle of the thing.
They had thought Remus' return, or dramatic exiling, from his mission underground with the werewolves, might give them a new lease on life. They had managed, that first day he had arrived back (bloodied, bruised, and frankly embarrassed but very much alive), a dark blonde. To anyone else, it was almost indistinguishable from what they had before, but Tonks knew the truth. They could feel it as a lightness in their shoulders and a tingle in their scalp.
It had lasted less than 12 hours.
It had become immediately clear that Remus had not given up his quest for the most dangerous missions. If anything his foray away had given him a newfound desire to spill his own blood in as many misguided directions as he could, and Tonks was supposed to sit by and watch and pretend they didn't feel responsible for it all. Far from jumping back into their relationship, he had taken to avoiding them as effectively as if they had contracted a very contagious disease (venereal or otherwise). He didn't even use them for sex, though Tonks thought they might have let him.
It was as miserable as it had been with him gone, except now Tonks had a front-row seat to the way Remus seemed to be imploding. Their hair turned back to mousy brown and stayed that way.
"I like your hair," Remus said, breaking a silence that hung heavy between them. They were stood in the depths of Knockturn Alley and their contact hadn't shown, another mission turned into a waste of their time. Remus spoke to the wall opposite without looking at them, his voice sad and quiet and infuriating.
"No. You don't." They replied. He didn't bother to argue. "We're done here, right?"
Remus had nodded. "Where are you going?" Tonks wondered if he had meant to say it, or if it, too, had slipped out against his will.
"I don't think that's really any of your business anymore, is it Remus?"
"No," He said. "I suppose not."
They left him there, in Knockturn Alley. Maybe he'd be sensible and return to the Burrow now the mission was done, or perhaps he wouldn't. Tonks didn't think their presence could do anything to stop whatever he'd decided on.
They hadn't planned it. They hadn't even thought about it really, until they stood here in the 24-hour Tesco with fluorescent lights that were too bright, and a tinny recording of the Spice Girls' Wannabe blaring too loud through the shop's poor-quality speakers. They'd planned to just escape the ache Remus' presence had wrought and instead stumbled upon a whole new one. Could the few passers-by pick up on this new kind of desperation in them, or was this an entirely internal affair? They didn't know what they were doing here.
Here was the toiletry aisle. More specifically, here was the five shelves of hair dye tucked between shampoo and body wash. Tonks didn't know what they were looking for — whether hair dye or a sign from the universe.
They skimmed over the blonde dyes and avoided the browns entirely — too close to what they already had, this mousy brown that hadn't been able to truly commit to any one colour (ironic, in its own miserable way). They needed something different. Something bold like they used to wear. The kind of colour that Remus had complimented and they believed him, not like tonight where the words accompanied melancholy, spoke in place of questions he hadn't asked. They needed the kind of colour that used to make people roll their eyes and go "Yeah, that's just Tonks." No one had done that for a while. These days people said their name like a forgone conclusion, someone already lost. It was entirely the wrong kind of attention than the one they were after.
A few nights ago, Tonks had sat up in bed in the Hogs Head, playing around with all the appearance-modifying transfiguration spells they had learnt at Hogwarts. They'd managed light purple hair that way (a mistake, it made them look even peakier) but it had faded come morning. Transfiguration like that had never been made to last. It's why enterprises and fortunes had been built on hair potions and make-up, after all. Tonks wanted something that would last.
Maybe a light turquoise would do? But it didn't feel quite them. Purple was out, obviously. So that just left a bold red. It would do in a pinch. They grabbed the box from the lowest shelf. Behind it, flipped upside down and sandwiched between two other colours like an afterthought, was a box of pink hair dye. The name on the box proudly read 'Bubblegum #82'.
Their palms began to sweat. This was it, the missing piece they had been waiting for. Hair dye and a sign from the universe. How was that for a turn of events? Tonks grabbed the box and hurried to the till, fumbling with muggle money as they handed it over. They crammed the dye into their coat pocket like it was a dirty little secret.
They headed upstairs to their room without a word, ignoring Aberforth, who mumbled something as they passed. It would have to wait; the dye was burning a hole in their pocket as they took the stairs two at a time.
Leaving muddy footprints on the worn carpet like evidence, they marched straight for the mirror. It had been fixed since their last encounter with it, though the odd crack was still visible up close if you knew where to look. That was the problem of fixing things with magic, it left the scars. It made the reflection look slightly distorted in places, or maybe that had just been their imagination.
They paid the person in the mirror no mind this time. It would be gone soon, replaced with something much more bearable — and this time they hadn't even had to drink for it. They slathered the hair dye on with the flimsy plastic gloves that came in the box. Tonks felt like a surgeon, sewing themselves back together one squirt of Bubblegum #82 at a time.
This had to work.
It was the only thing they could think as they waited the 30 minutes the instructions had told them to, pretending to flick through a copy of Witch Weekly (Molly had saved it for them because of the 3-page interview with the Weird Sisters in the middle) like the dye wouldn't work if it was being watched. Their hands shook so violently it rustled the pages.
In the end, they managed a respectable 26 minutes and now stood under the burning hot shower, rinsing it off. Red swirled down the plug hole again, smeared along the walls and down Tonks' body in streaks. They stayed like that long after the water had run clear, eyes tightly closed. When they finally found the courage to emerge, they dried themself off with an instant heating charm and braved the mirror…
It had worked.
It was neither as vibrant nor bold as Bubblegum #82 had claimed to be, but rather a muted shade of dark pink. It didn't shine the way the colour had when they did it, or even particularly stand out in the dingy bathroom— but for the first time in months, Tonks thought they might recognise the person in the reflection. For the first time in months, they stared back at themselves.
Powerless to fight the onslaught that rose from the back of their throat, they sunk to their knees, there in the frigid bathroom, and wept.
The next Order meeting had been full of surprise and raised eyebrows, and Tonks had revelled in the lot of them. Remus had seemed unable to keep his eyes off of them, though Tonks thought he didn't dare say anything again. If any of the Order had realised what Tonks had done, how fake it all was, they didn't say a word. Fleur Delacour had even managed a rather backhanded "That looks so much better." It barely mattered that it was all a lie…
The dye lasted all of two weeks before it faded for good. The box they had left beside the sink read 'semi-permanent'. In their desperation, Tonks had missed it.
The mirror became unrecognisable again, all mousy brown hair, apathetic eyes, and Nymphadora.
This time Tonks did not cry.
They didn't do anything at all.