September 1993
The bracelet took me the better part of a week to get right, longer than I’d told Tonks it would when I’d first floated the idea back in August, though I suspected she wouldn’t mind the delay half as much as I minded admitting to it.
The trouble wasn’t the enchantment itself — balance and coordination charms were, as I’d told her, a real and reasonably well-documented category, nothing I was inventing whole from nothing.
The trouble was testing it properly without simply hexing Tonks off her own feet in my workshop every evening for a week, which struck me, even setting aside the obvious impracticality of it, as a genuinely poor way to treat someone I would like to get to know better.
I solved it, in the end, with a trick borrowed from my own storage ring work.
A witch or wizard’s magic carried something of its owner in it even separated from the body casting it — the storage rings didn’t need me thinking about extra space every time someone reached inside one, because the intent I’d fixed into the metal carried on doing the work alone.
If magic could hold a fixed intent that way, I reasoned, there was no obvious reason it couldn’t hold something rather less fixed — a living signature, changeable and specific to the person who’d given it, provided I built the right vessel to carry it.
I asked Tonks, the next time she came by, whether she’d be willing to pour a small measure of her own magic into a plain glass orb, no more complicated a request than filling a cup.
She obliged with visible curiosity, watching the orb take on a faint, restless shimmer that seemed to shift color at the edges without ever quite settling, which struck me as entirely fitting given whose magic it now held.
“What’s this actually for?”
“A stand-in for you, more or less.
If I fit this into something that can move — a mannequin, say — the orb ought to lend it something of your own magical signature.
Including, I suspect, whatever makes your coordination misbehave in the first place.
I can test the charm against that all week without needing you to fall down my stairs in person.”
“That’s either brilliant or deeply strange, and I genuinely can’t decide which.”
“I’m told those two categories overlap rather a lot in my line of work.”
I built the mannequin over the following two days — a simple wooden frame, jointed properly at every limb, animated by a basic locomotion charm just sturdy enough to let it walk, turn, and climb the workshop’s short flight of stairs on a loop.
I fitted Tonks’s orb into its chest like a small glowing heart, and watched, the first time I set it walking, with a fascination I hadn’t quite expected to feel toward a piece of enchanted furniture.
It moved beautifully for the first hour.
Genuinely beautifully — steady, sure-footed, climbing the stairs and descending them again without so much as a wobble, better coordinated than I’d have guessed a wooden frame with no proper legs to speak of had any right to be.
I sat there taking notes, feeling rather pleased with myself, right up until the hour mark, when the mannequin missed the third stair entirely and folded down the rest of the flight in a heap of wooden limbs that would have been considerably funnier if it hadn’t told me exactly what I already suspected.
Whatever governed Tonks’s balance wasn’t a constant flaw.
It was something that built, slowly, the longer her magic tried to hold one settled shape — as though the coordination charm and her own shifting nature were in a quiet, ongoing tug of war that the charm simply lost after enough time had passed.
I rebuilt the mannequin’s charm three more times that week, adjusting the anchor a little differently each attempt, and got the same pattern back nearly every time — an hour, sometimes closer to two, of perfect movement, and then a sudden, total collapse, as if the magic had simply run out of patience all at once rather than degrading gradually the way I’d expected.
It was the fourth failure, oddly, that finally showed me the actual shape of the problem.
I’d stopped assuming Tonks’s body was a fixed thing the charm needed to hold steady, and started building the anchor to re-calibrate itself continuously instead — checking in with her ever-shifting signature every few seconds rather than locking onto one snapshot of it and trusting that snapshot to still be accurate an hour on.
The mannequin, rebuilt a fifth time with that correction folded in, walked the stairs on its loop through the whole of that evening without a single stumble.
I let it run through the night out of sheer stubborn thoroughness, checking on it twice more before I finally went to bed myself, and found it still walking steadily the next morning, having covered — by my rough count of the loop’s length — considerably more ground without incident than Tonks herself likely covered in an ordinary week.
By early afternoon it had been walking a clean half a day without so much as a hitch, and I finally switched it off satisfied, for the first time since I’d started, that I had something worth putting on an actual person rather than a piece of animated furniture.
I built the real bracelet that evening, plain steel, nothing that would catch on robes or draw a second look, and wrote to Tonks the moment it was finished.
Tonks,
It’s ready.
Bracelet, plain steel — I’d like you to test it properly when you have a real half hour, not a rushed one between shifts.
One thing I want to say honestly before you try it: keep practicing without it too.
I don’t want this becoming a crutch you can’t function without — better it sits as a genuine improvement on top of skill you’re building yourself, not a replacement for building it.
Short version: I think it’s the shifting itself.
Your body never quite settles on one shape long enough for your own instincts to fully trust where your limbs are, even when you’re not actively changing anything.
Most people’s coordination runs on assumptions they never have to think about.
I suspect yours never gets to make those assumptions in the first place, which would explain rather a lot about stairs.
Come by whenever you’re free.
I’ll be here.
— Marcus
She didn’t send a reply owl.
She turned up in person two days later, mid-afternoon, hair a bright and cheerful yellow that I was fairly sure meant something specific even if I hadn’t worked out what yet, and announced her arrival by nearly walking straight into the door before she’d actually opened it.
“In my defense,” she said, catching the frame and grinning at me like the whole thing had been deliberate, “that door is unreasonably heavy for a shop this size.”
“The door has been exactly that heavy since July.”
“Yes, well.
Consistency’s a comfort, I suppose.” She crossed to the counter, already holding her wrist out expectantly.
“Go on, then.
I’ve got forty minutes and I intend to spend at least thirty of them being smug about not falling over.”
I fastened the bracelet myself, the clasp small enough that I suspected she’d have fumbled it twice trying to manage it one-handed, and stepped back to let her test it.
She walked the length of the shop, deliberately unsteady in a way that told me she’d practiced this particular experiment before on purpose, over the storage ring display, past the holsters, one heel coming down at an angle that should have sent her straight into a shelf of monocles.
It didn’t.
Something in the bracelet caught the wrongness of the step and corrected it, smooth and unhurried, before her balance had properly finished failing.
She stopped, stood very still for a second, and turned back to me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her before — something under the usual chaos, quieter and more startled than I’d expected.
“That’s — Marcus, that’s actually — I didn’t even feel it catch me.
It just didn’t let me fall in the first place.”
“That was rather the idea.
I ran it against a rather patient wooden stand-in for most of a week before I trusted it on you, for what it’s worth.
It walked a clean half day without a single stumble before I let myself believe it was ready.”
“You built me a little wooden Tonks and made it walk up and down your stairs for a day.”
“In essence, yes.”
“That’s the strangest and most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me, and I include the flowers in that assessment.” She flexed her wrist, turning it in the light with the same open delight she’d shown the holster back in August, and then, more seriously: “Your theory.
About the shifting.
Where’d that even come from?”
“Mostly from the mannequin refusing to hold steady past an hour, no matter how I built the first few versions.
I think you spend more energy than you realize just keeping track of yourself.
I don’t think yours ever fully gets that luxury, even when you’re holding one shape on purpose.
It would explain why you’re brilliant under real pressure and disastrous the moment nothing’s actually demanding your attention.”
She was quiet a moment, turning that over with more weight than I’d expected the observation to carry.
“Nobody’s ever put it that way before.
Everyone just says clumsy, like it’s a character flaw I could fix if I tried harder.” Her hair shifted, briefly, toward something warmer than yellow.
“That’s — thank you, actually.
For thinking about it properly instead of just handing me a trinket and calling it done.”
“I don’t really know how to do the other kind,” I said, and meant it.
She laughed, the sound loosening something in the room that I hadn’t quite noticed had gone tight.
“No, I don’t suppose you do.” She glanced toward the door, then back at me, with the particular deliberate air of someone building up to something.
“Speaking of things I keep meaning to get round to — I believe I owe you a coffee.
Properly not-between-shifts, like you asked.”
“I remember the terms.”
“I’m actually free this weekend.
Properly free, both days, which almost never happens.” She said it lightly, but there was a genuine question underneath the ease of it, the same careful hope I’d caught once before and hadn’t let myself examine too closely at the time.
I found, considering it, that I didn’t want coffee.
Coffee had been the safe offer, back in August, the low-stakes version of a thing I hadn’t been entirely sure I was allowed to want yet.
A weekend with nothing chasing either of us felt like it deserved better than a rushed cup between errands.
“Would you let me take you to dinner instead?” I said.
“Proper dinner.
Somewhere I actually book a table, rather than wherever’s nearest and open.”
Her hair went through pink so fast I almost missed the yellow underneath it entirely, and her mouth curved into something considerably less composed than her usual grin.
“That’s a significant upgrade from coffee, Hale.”
“You’ve had a significant week.
Bracelet, dementors, whatever’s actually going on with Black’s file that nobody will tell you properly.
I thought you might have earned better than instant coffee in a shop doorway.”
“Saturday, then,” she said, before I’d finished the thought, and then, quieter, like she was surprising herself with how much she meant it: “I’d like that.
Properly like that, not just being polite about it.”
“Saturday,” I agreed.
“I’ll work out the details and let you know where and when.”
She left ten minutes later, considerably more careful about the door on her way out than she had been coming in, though I suspected that had less to do with the bracelet than with not wanting to ruin an exit she’d clearly decided had gone rather well.
I stood at the counter a while after the bell had stopped ringing, turning over a weekend I hadn’t had any particular plans for until about twenty minutes ago, and found I minded that a good deal less than I probably should have let myself admit.
Comment it and let me know.