Tonks' rented one-bedroom studio in Hogsmeade had the slovenly vibe that one should probably expect from a lovelorn twenty-something Auror who patrolled Hogwarts at odd hours and who openly copped to being "crap at household-y spells." Her black Radiohead shirt and filmy, fluorescent green brassiere curled around each other at the edge of the bed like a pair of cats. A copper-bottomed pan soaped itself half-heartedly in the sink.

Remus found it oddly comforting.

Her mess reminded him of the last (and maybe the only) indolent moment of his life – the summer after sixth year, which he and his three best friends had spent getting stoned and listening to obscure records and refining obscure spellwork in Sirius' catastrophically untidy bedroom in Godric's Hollow. That was the last moment when any of them were remotely carefree. Everything changed in seventh year; it all went serious, and it never changed back.

That was the thing about dark turns of events: they never seemed to un-turn. There was no light turn of events just around the corner. There were just more and more dark turns around darker corners, until you got so deep into the labyrinth of dark turns that the monster ate you. Or you became the monster and ate everyone else. Remus felt he could go either way on that last point.

Grey morning light staggered drunkenly through the grimy window, illuminating Tonks' pale, sleeping face.

Last night, after Dumbledore's funeral, she had taken Remus' hand and dragged him back here, and he had let her. He didn't have the will left to refuse her. They had collapsed into bed, skipped dinner, and fallen asleep, hardly speaking at all. Their nerves were raw, and their grief was fierce. And what was there to say? That a great man was dead, and nobody knew for certain why?

Well, Remus knew a little of why. He knew it had been Snape. And – because somehow everything was just a little bit Remus' fault – Remus suspected that he himself had nudged Snape down that path when they were boys. Couldn't he have stuck up for Severus when James and Sirius vented their adolescent vitriol at him? Couldn't Remus have prevented this twenty years ago if he hadn't been such an abysmal coward?

So there was that to think about, along with everything else.

Tonks breathed softly in and out, her nose whistling. Remus pressed his forehead against hers. Even with her mousy hair, she had that high-cheekbones, long-legs beauty common to the Black family. She also had a button-y nose and a small, puckered mouth like a geisha in a Japanese woodblock print. Contradictory. Not unlike the way she often began a sentence with "wotcher" and ended it with some spectacularly complex, Auror-y observation about patterns or probability.

A fabulous bird indeed, James would have said.

A fabulous bird.

And here she was, his very own Little Red Riding Hood, in bed with the wolf and totally untroubled by it. The better to disappoint you with, my dear.

Her eyes were still puffy from yesterday's weeping.

He wondered if she had expected him to sleep with her. He hadn't, of course. Celibacy was the best policy for the semi-responsible werewolf, and he had held tightly to it. Even when Tonks had fallen asleep next to him on the sofa at Grimmauld Place over a year ago, with her hand on his thigh, he had resisted the impulse to reciprocate. Her trust and casual intimacy were so blindingly lovely it hurt to think about them.

Perhaps her ears were burning, because she stirred and opened her eyes.

"Wotcher," she croaked.

"I thought I'd make tea," Remus said.

"Do," she said. "Sugar's in the breadbox."

"Budge over. I don't want to crush you."

"You can't. I'm uncrushable."

But she did budge over, and Remus scooted out of bed and found his wand. He started the kettle going and poked around in her cupboard. More twenty-something nonsense. Crisps and Jaffa cakes and Tequila. If they were going to get a decent breakfast, they were going to have to leave the house.

Tonks uncurled her long, leggy body and padded across to Remus.

"Tadasana," she said, folding her hands and standing perfectly straight. "That's the first part, yeah? Of a sun salutation?"

He pushed his greying fringe out of his eyes. "You have a very long memory."

She shrugged. "Have to. Part of the job description. Do you still do this every morning?"

"Usually."

"Show me how again."

He walked her through the basic sequence – bending forward, stretching out, tenting up – and she followed astutely. They both bent back into downward dog.

"Does this help? After your transformations, I mean. Oops!" She had knocked over a ceramic cat perched on the windowsill.

"Sometimes."

It was alright for her to ask him this sort of question. As a Metamorphmagus, she knew what it was to change form – though of course her transformations were willing. Or usually willing. She had been known to turn her hair blue mid-hiccup. Until this year, when she seemed unable to transform at all. Crippled, he knew, by her unrequited affection. Well, not so much unrequited as painstakingly withheld for her own good.

He stood up again, and she copied him.

"Namaste," she said, grinning.

"Same to you," he said, pouring hot water into a couple of chipped mugs. She tucked a dried-out-looking teabag into each one and swirled them around with her wand. Leaning in closer, she kissed Remus on the cheek. Again, with that soft, puckering geisha mouth.

"I'm glad you stayed," she said.

He knew what she was doing. She was flirting. She was good at it, too. His heart beat faster, even though he begged it not to. He tried a little yoga breathing to slow it down. In. Out. Let go. Let go of all attachments. It did not do for a werewolf to have attachments. Even if he very much wanted them.

"Do you know about the secret passage under this building?" he asked, turning his body away from her.

"There's a secret passage?" she asked. "How do you know that?"

"I used to run with a pretty rough crowd," he said.

She poked him affectionately in the shoulder. "And where does it lead, this mysterious passage?"

"What, deny an Auror a chance to solve a mystery?"

She smiled. He sipped his tea. A mystery would be an excellent distraction. From grief, from flirtation, from all of it.

…

As it turned out, Tonks deduced the origin and destination of the secret passage inside of thirty minutes. (Honeydukes to Hogwarts. Ten points to Hufflepuff. Never challenge an Auror to a guessing game.) Meanwhile, they dressed, stopped at the shop on the corner, bought eggs and potatoes and ketchup, and knocked up an eclectic if inelegant breakfast in her kitchen.

Here was the truth about grieving: it didn't much matter what you ate. It was better if it was awful.

Remus cast a self-scrubbing charm – somewhat more precise than hers had been – at the dishes.

He realized too late that the morning's easy conversation had lulled him into a false sense of security, because Tonks chose that moment to resume her campaign.

"Have you thought about what I said?" she asked.

He could have pretended not to know what she was talking about, but that routine was getting pretty stale. He knew she referred to her outburst in the hospital wing a few days ago.

Remus made his most schoolmaster-y face and met her eyes. Merlin, she was pretty. "I have."

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "And?"

Stop dawdling in the forest, Little Red.

"You know my position."

"And you know that I don't care." She gave him a fierce look that could have given Bellatrix a run for her money. Except for the water edging up her eyelids, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.

He sighed and sat down at her tiny kitchen table. She sat across from him and pressed her knees against his. "Did you know that I used to live with Harry's parents?" he asked.

"No," she said, humoring him and leaning back in her chair, "I didn't."

"This was a million years ago, after we left school. For a very short time. Couldn't have asked for better flatmates. They were–" he stopped himself slipping into that dark labyrinth just in time to finish the sentence – "they were funny. Used to leave little messages all over the house for each other, and for me. On the bathroom mirror, in between the pages of books, that sort of thing. And you could always tell when they were, well, in bed together, because of the laughter. There was always this crescendo of laughter."

She smiled. "Very sweet," she said.

He nodded. "So it went on like that for a few weeks. They even tried locking me in the study during a full moon, but it went badly. I think the wolf could smell them. I think he – I – knew they were there and tried that much harder to break down the door. So James had to transform. He was an Animagus, like Sirius. I don't know if you knew."

"Sirius said."

"Ah. Alright. Well, you can see where this is going, I'm sure. It is impractical to keep a werewolf as a pet."

"Don't say it like that." She nudged his knee with hers. "I hate when you do that."

He continued, undeterred. "James was like you. Optimistic. I told him I couldn't stay anymore, and he came up with all sorts of schemes for how we would make it work. If we just took this precaution here, had this backup there. But then they found out about Harry. Those contraceptive charms aren't foolproof, you know. And that was when I got my druthers and left."

She frowned at him.

"My point is, Nymphadora, there comes a point when you can no longer say 'I don't care.' There comes a point when you will care. When there are people other than yourself involved. Imagine if I had bitten Harry, on top of everything else he's had to deal with. And besides, you may be able to change your hair around, but you can't turn into anything large enough or nonhuman enough to handle a werewolf in an emergency. That alone ought to be enough to deter you."

"It doesn't," she said.

He sighed. "I know." He bunched up a handful of the striped orange curtains and looked out the grungy window. "I spent so much time here in the village when I was at school. This almost feels like home."

"You're changing the subject," she said.

"Well, that was the 'nuclear option,' as the Muggles say. I can't warn you any more sternly than that."

She leaned forward and kissed him on the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes. "No more excuses, then," she said.

...

The moon was waxing, and he was more knackered than he cared to admit, and he took a nap in her bed around noon. Or, more accurately, he offered to leave and she chivvied him into bed as if he were a fussy five-year-old. She then perched on the bed, cross-legged, and read aloud to him – first some Restoration-era metaphysical poetry that they agreed was too much to endure right now, and then a book of wizarding children's rhymes. Some of these rhymes, Remus noted, had a naughty double entendre for any grownups within earshot. She laughed at these – a cute, snuffling laugh.

He sprawled beneath her cheerful patchwork quilt, blinking heavily at the ceiling. Shavasana. Corpse pose. Some practitioners of yoga see it as practice for death. Others see it merely as deep relaxation.

He fell into an odd waking dream. He could still sort of hear her, and the ridiculous rhymes, but he had one foot in his unconscious.

He stood waist-deep in the wreckage of his old life, while the flotsam of dashed hopes and lost friends bobbed around him. He surveyed the debris, and remembered – Sirius, gone. Lily and James, gone. Peter, long since mutinied and given them all up for dead. And finally, Dumbledore, his patron and idol and friend, gone.

At long last, he said goodbye to them. A real goodbye, releasing them from his white-knuckled grip on their memory. It took more than a little yoga breathing for that. In. Out. Let them go. Tide in, tide out.

He turned and looked up at the empty, moonlit beach. And there was Tonks, radiant and neon pink, stretching out her hand to him.

She was calling him back from the boundary between life and death.

He sloshed through the cold salt water, up the pebbly shore, and took her warm hand. She was alive. She was here.

He woke, and blinked.

She was still here.

And her hair was slowly turning pink.