A/N: For those of you who put me on alert for "Now, Let's Not Be Hasty", I'm sorry. No crackfic here. No Figwit, even. But try it anyway.

This story is intended as a birthday present for my dear friend Michelle, who ships Remus/Tonks with a vigour I find rather disturbing. I am a Remus/Sirius shipper, myself, but I confess that I have learned how much fun Remus and Tonks are to write for. And exploring Patronus and Animagus issues has been quite interesting as well.

Erm, so I don't own these characters and all the rest of it. No harm, no money, no foul.

—

Nymphadora Tonks was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bad student in Defence Against the Dark Arts. On the contrary, it was one of the only things that came to her easily. During her first year, she watched her classmates struggle to Disarm one another, which they rarely accomplished before losing a considerate amount of sweat (and, occasionally, some of the proverbial blood and tears as well). Expelliarmus seemed to have a place already marked out for it in Tonks' mind, the same mind that was so stubborn when it came to Transfiguring matches into needles, or Charming objects to scuttle across the table away from her.

Tonks tried all these things, and tried them again, and tried them to the point to where she became better at them than many of her classmates who were much more talented, yet far less driven to get them right. But acquiring the knowledge was like shoving square pegs into round holes—possible but painful—and so Tonks was not accustomed to being the star student in any class. She still remembers the first time she Disarmed her classroom partner successfully, immediately, before anyone else in her year had been able to manage it. She looked down at Bill Weasley's wand in her hand, and suddenly she knew the feeling of falling and flying at the same time.

It was the same feeling she had when marks were posted at the end of every year. By her second year, she had her own ritual for the order in which she would look at them. Transfiguration first, always; it was invariably her worst mark, and she thought it best to get that one out of the way. She knew that her lack of attention to detail exasperated Professor McGonagall to no end, but she simply could not help it: for Tonks, it was such an easy task to change her own matter that she could not imagine why other objects and materials did not yield so easily to her will, and balked at the prospect of pressuring them further. She moved from there to Potions, then to Astronomy, and then to Charms and Herbology. She barely bothered to look at her mark in History of Magic, though she always managed to do reasonably well. Finally she glanced, almost casually, as though it was not important, at the Defence marks. Every year (it became a joke by her third year, and talk of her future as an Auror had already started by her fourth) the name Nymphadora Tonks topped the list. Every year, after gazing at the list, Tonks felt, somehow, that the other marks could not possibly matter.

—

It was not until her sixth year that Tonks' Defence mark dropped her from the top of the list to seventh place. No one was doing terribly well with the new spells they had been given to master for N.E.W.T. level, but Tonks had managed to keep her head more or less above water until the last lesson of the term.

Expecto patronum.

It was fine the first time. They all said it together (with feeling, Professor Tofty insisted), but not a single wand tip in the room had even the faintest wisp of silver forthcoming, though Tonks caught a few of the students glancing at her, as if sure she would manage to achieve it on the first try.

Expecto patronum!

Like most of the N.E.W.T. level spells, it was difficult to practise—doing so in a safe classroom was ridiculously unrealistic, yet facing an actual dementor with the spell would have been downright dangerous. But they kept on with it, day after day for two, three, four weeks at a time. By the second week, four students had achieved a corporeal Patronus, and Tonks was not among them. By the third week, nearly half the class had managed it, while Tonks' wand was still sputtering silver vapour.

"If you don't mind my asking, Nymphadora," Professor Tofty inquired once (Tonks shuddered), "what memory have you chosen?"

"Loads of memories," Tonks said, which was true; she had difficulty focusing on any one memory for a significant amount of time. She found that memories changed when you concentrated on them too hard, much like the length of her hair or the shape of her nose. She would think of a particularly hilarious night spent laughing with a few of her friends in Ravenclaw, but as she focused on the memory harder, she would recall the fight she had had with one of them the morning after, or the way the Potions essay that had been due the next week had distracted her. Sometimes she would recall an especially good prank she had played, but the memory of the punishment that had followed tended to dull the excitement and happiness she felt at the recollection. And the only thought that made her consistently happy—the pleasure of her achievement in Defence—was rapidly becoming tainted by her inability to maintain that success.

The worst part was that everyone had a suggestion.

Think of the time we played darts with that portrait of Grandma Black.

Think of the year that Ravenclaw won the Quidditch Cup and the House Cup, one after the other.

Think of the night you met Stubby Boardman in the Leaky Cauldron, and he bought you a glass of firewhisky after you Metamorphed into his lead guitarist.

Think of the noise Snape made when you put frogspawn under his desk and he fell smack on his arse.

Think of the last boy you snogged in the Forbidden Forest.

Tonks was not fond of this last helpful hint. Unlike the others, it failed to bring even the slightest smile to her face. Tonks was not in the habit of snogging, either in the Forbidden Forest or anywhere else. And although she knew that many of her friends were using their snogging partners of the moment as Patronus inspirations (it had backfired in some cases—Alicia Prewett's eagle-shaped Patronus had failed to make an appearance since she had broken up with Rupert Bones), she was not able to follow suit.

"Plenty of boys are interested, Nymphadora," her mother, Andromeda, lectured her every summer holiday.

"So long as I Metamorph into the girl they actually fancy, you mean," Tonks retorted, who had never been asked out when not pretending to be someone else. In truth, she was not too concerned about finding true love before her seventh year was out. Prospective Aurors rarely settled down before finishing their training. But in Defence classes, Tonks had taken to examining her classmates' expressions right before they recited the spell (expecto bloody patronum, she muttered under her breath). She knew, without admitting it even to herself, that none of her happy memories could inspire in her the same level of bliss she saw on their faces.