Disclaimer: Not Jo Rowling. Don't own Potter.
A/N: Am oh so very happy to have written something. This can be taken as a companion of sorts to With Distinction. Tonk's PoV, no spoilers, implied Remus/Tonks
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For My Dear Lenore, without whom, my head and heart would implode
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It's foolish, but it's hers.
Almost ridiculously absurd, really because not once in her twenty-six years has she ever had the burning desire to murder, destroy, or hate anything, especially not, oh, muggle borns and their families—unless her mum's been hiding some disturbing baby stories on that matter. But how ever inane her fear is, it is still there, buried beneath pink hair and a quirked grin, working its way through her with a sort of vigor until at long last she's certain the world will see it, spelled out in bright fluorescent shades across her forehead.
And that in itself is stupid, but she can't really help it from time to time. It's simply grown into the type of fear that demands attention, now more than ever, with the war raging and both sides hitched on the cusp of something so eerily final.
It was the same fear she had seen so clearly in her cousin, and every now and then in her own mother, the fear that some things go further than choice, go as deep as the magic in their beings. She knows Remus sees it in her, if not her fear of it than the constant possibility for uncertainty, a long chain of 'maybes' that all lead back to a maiden name.
It is the fear that she tries to stamp out viciously whenever she's on a job for the Order or for the Ministry. Something she battles time and again—I will be different, I will be better—as she tries to shake off an enemy that for all intent and purpose should not even be hers.
Yet the evidence is all there, undeniable, a houseful of dark, grim things that simply warn of wickedness (sometimes she can't help but think that's what drove Sirius mad in the end—the inescapable reminders of what they all were before their names were scorched off the tapestry. And does it make her mad if she has recurring dreams about old lady Black sewing her name, in gleaming silver, onto the tapestry, as a rite of passage, an acceptation on their part, something she's never actually wanted from her mum's side of the family, and that when she wakes Remus always has that look as though he knows exactly what it is she dreamed about).
She stands in front of the mirror, her true self which looks nothing like Tonks and too much like Nymphadora. She sees black hair and grey eyes, high cheekbones and that mouth, that mouth that looks as though it was made for the sole purpose of sneering or something equally displeasing. She looks into the mirror and sees the beauty that was once her aunt's before Azkaban stole it away, sees the traditional Black features spied in countless of moving sepia pictures, and its almost as though her face is a Black victory against her father's blood or any commoner who would dare threaten the purity of the Blacks. She stares and can't help but wonder if they won at more than just her appearance.
She looks and sees too close a resemblance for comfort.
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End
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