September 1993
I sent the owl asking for her address on the Thursday, feeling faintly ridiculous about it even as I wrote it –
I realize I’ve never actually asked where you live, which seems like an oversight for someone about to pick you up on Saturday .
I got back a note in Tonks’s cramped, energetic scrawl that read, in its entirety –
Ha!
Fair.
Ivy cottage, end of Church Lane, little lane off the main road, Bampton village in Devon.
You’ll know it by the gnome my dad refuses to get rid of.
Come at six.
Don’t be nervous, I promise I don’t bite.
Much.
●●
I was, in fact, nervous, in a way I hadn’t quite let myself examine until I was standing in a flower shop in Diagon Alley an hour before I needed to leave, staring at buckets of blooms with the specific paralysis of a man who understood enchantment theory considerably better than he understood floristry.
I settled, eventually, on a small bright bunch of freesias for Tonks — nothing too formal, nothing that looked like it was trying too hard — and a more restrained arrangement of white roses for her mother, because some instinct I couldn’t fully name told me that whatever I brought for Andromeda mattered more than whatever I brought for her daughter.
A bottle of decent red went into my bag for Ted, on the theory that no father would ever object to being handed good wine by the man taking his daughter out.
Bampton turned out to be smaller than Ottery St Catchpole, tucked into a fold of Devon countryside with a quiet, deliberate charm to it — the sort of village that had clearly organized itself, over generations, around not being noticed by anyone passing through who wasn’t supposed to be there.
I found the gnome exactly where promised, ugly and defiant in a bed of otherwise well-tended flowers, and knocked at six precisely.
Andromeda opened the door, and I understood immediately where Tonks got her directness, though the resemblance stopped at manner rather than appearance — Andromeda was dark where her daughter ran bright and changeable, composed in a way that felt deliberate rather than restrained.
Her eyes went over me once, quick and thorough, the particular assessment of a mother deciding in real time whether a stranger deserved the benefit of the doubt.
“You must be Marcus.” She took in the roses before I’d said a word, and something in her expression eased a fraction.
“Well.
That’s a good start.”
“Mrs.
Tonks.
Thank you for having me, even briefly.”
“Andromeda’s fine.
Come in, come in, don’t stand there letting the warm air out.” She called over her shoulder as she led me through, “Ted, he’s here, and he’s brought you wine, so try not to embarrass yourself.”
Ted turned out to be a broad, cheerful man reading the Prophet in an armchair that had clearly been shaped to his exact proportions over several decades, who took one look at the label on the bottle I handed him and made a sound of genuine appreciation.
“Now that’s a decent vintage.
You’ve done your research.”
“I asked the shopkeeper for something a father wouldn’t be insulted by.
He steered me toward that one.”
“Smart man.
Sit down a minute, we won’t keep you long — Dora’s still doing something upstairs that apparently takes considerably longer than either of us understand.” Ted said it with the easy fondness of a man who’d clearly had this exact conversation many times before.
“So.
Enchantment work, is it?
Dora mentioned the bracelet.
Bloody marvelous thing, that.”
“It seemed like a fair trade for however many times she’s rescued a stranger’s cat from a tree.”
Ted laughed properly at that, and Andromeda, arranging the roses in a vase with the same efficient focus her daughter brought to everything, glanced over with a look I couldn’t quite read — assessing, still, but warmer now, like she’d decided the flowers had bought me a little more room to prove myself in.
Tonks appeared a few minutes later in dark green robes, hair settled into a rich auburn that looked deliberately chosen rather than accidental, and the freesias earned me a grin bright enough that I felt it land somewhere just under my ribs.
“You didn’t have to do the whole flowers-for-everyone thing,” she said, taking hers and burying her nose in them anyway.
“I was informed it was the responsible way to meet a family for the first time.”
“Informed by whom, exactly?”
“General principle.
I have very few actual social precedents to draw on.”
That got a proper laugh out of Andromeda, which I decided to count as a win.
We didn’t stay long past that — Ted extracted a promise that I’d come back sometime to discuss enchantment theory “properly, over more of that wine,” and Andromeda saw us to the door with a look at her daughter that carried an entire silent conversation neither of them bothered translating for me — and then it was just the two of us in the cooling evening, and Tonks took my arm without asking, and we Apparated together into a quiet alley two streets back from a restaurant I’d spent rather longer choosing than I was willing to admit to her.
I’d found the place myself, in the end, after an embarrassing amount of wandering through Muggle London with a guidebook and no real confidence in my own judgment — a small modern British place off Charing Cross that did more with a short, careful menu than most restaurants managed with an enormous one.
Tonks ordered a wild mushroom tart to start and, when the mains came round, a properly indulgent beef Wellington that she declared “unreasonably good” within her first bite; I went for a pan-seared duck breast with a redcurrant reduction that turned out to be one of the better decisions I’d made all week. This story is hosted at g.com.
We split a bottle of wine slowly enough that neither of us felt it, mostly because we kept forgetting to drink in favor of talking.
She told me about Hogwarts in the particular fond, self-deprecating way of someone recounting years of chaos she wouldn’t actually trade for anything — Hufflepuff, three broken bones by second year, a Herbology teacher who’d banned her from the greenhouses for a full month after an incident involving Devil’s Snare she still swore wasn’t entirely her fault.
She asked, eventually, what my own school days had looked like, and I found the question harder to sidestep than I’d expected, sitting across from someone I was rapidly finding it more and more difficult to give only half the truth to.
“It’s a longer story than you’re probably expecting,” I said, turning my glass slowly.
“I’ve got all night.
Longer, if the wine holds out.”
So I told her, or told her a version careful enough to survive being true.
Both schools at once, I said — proper Muggle schooling straight through, and wizarding tutors alongside it in the evenings and holidays, my parents having decided early that I shouldn’t have to choose between the two worlds before I was old enough to understand what either one actually meant.
Ministry examiners had come to sit my magical assessments directly, the way they did for the handful of families who kept their children out of Hogwarts for one reason or another, rather than my ever setting foot in the castle myself.
“That’s not nothing, you know,” she said, watching me with real attention now.
“Most people who skip Hogwarts end up hopeless at half the practical stuff.
You clearly didn’t.”
“The tutors were good.
Thorough, at least, if not always warm about it.” I let that sit a moment before I said the harder part.
“My parents died when I was thirteen.
Both of them, the same night.
Car accident, on the Muggle side of things.”
Her hand found mine across the table without her seeming to decide to do it.
“Marcus.
I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago, now.
I’ve made my peace with most of it, as much as anyone does.” I turned my glass again, needing somewhere to put my hands.
“My mother had apparently thought ahead further than I ever gave her proper credit for at the time.
She’d arranged, in her will, for me to be treated as an adult under the law rather than made a ward of anyone — weekly check-ins with a Ministry-appointed solicitor instead of a guardian, enough independence to keep living in our own house and finish growing up somewhere that still felt like home rather than somewhere assigned to me.
It’s not a common arrangement.
I understand it took some genuine legal maneuvering on her part to set up properly, well before either of them died, as though she’d half-expected to need it.”
“That’s — I’ve honestly never heard of anyone doing that.
Most families don’t even think that far ahead about ordinary wills, let alone something like that.”
“She was careful, from what little I remember of her.
Both of them were, in their own ways.
They’d been saving for years, it turned out — enough set aside for proper schooling in either world, whichever I ended up choosing, though I don’t think either of them ever expected I might genuinely want both at once rather than picking one.”
“Did you?
Work, I mean.
In the Muggle world, before all this.”
“No, actually.
I finished my A-levels — the Muggle exams, the ones that matter for university and the like — and once those were done, I turned entirely toward the wizarding side of things.
Enchanting, specifically, which had already caught me by then in a way nothing else quite had.
I studied on my own, mostly, no formal program, and sat the Ministry’s Mastery examination directly once I judged myself ready for it.” I said it plainly, the same shape of truth I’d given Percy back in July, worn smooth now from repetition until it barely felt like careful phrasing at all.
“Once that was settled, I sold the house.
My parents’, I mean — I’d been keeping it, mostly out of sentiment I hadn’t been ready to let go of yet, but there didn’t seem much point holding onto an empty Muggle house once I’d properly decided where the rest of my life was heading.
Converted most of it to Galleons.
Bought the shop and the house both with what came of it.”
“Most of it,” she repeated, catching the phrasing with the same sharp attention she brought to everything.
“I kept a decent amount in an actual Muggle bank account.
Habit, mostly, and a bit of practicality — there are things that are simply easier to buy with pounds than Galleons, and I didn’t like the idea of being entirely cut off from that world just because I’d chosen to build my life in this one.
Old instinct from growing up in both, I suppose.
Keep a door open, even to a room you don’t visit often.”
She was quiet a moment, turning all of it over with real care rather than simple sympathy, and when she spoke again her voice had gone softer than the easy warmth of most of the evening.
“That’s a lot to have carried alone.
The parents, and the two schools, and being trusted with an adult’s whole life at thirteen because there wasn’t anyone left to hand it to instead.” She squeezed my hand once, grounding rather than pitying.
“I’m glad you told me.
“I don’t tell many people the whole shape of it.
It felt like it belonged in tonight, somehow.”
“I’ll take good care of it,” she said simply, and I believed her.
She told me about Auror training next, warming to the subject in a way that made her hands move faster than her words, describing duelling drills and tracking exercises and an instructor who apparently delighted in throwing unannounced curses at trainees from behind furniture.
“The physical stuff’s where I actually shine, believe it or not.
It’s the paperwork after that does me in.
And the stealth exercises.
Turns out being naturally clumsy is a genuine professional liability when the job occasionally requires not knocking over a bookshelf.”
“Would you ever consider helping me with something, in that case?” I asked, turning my glass slowly.
“I’ve been meaning to get more practice in on some of the combat work — proper opposition, not just theory out of a book.
I imagine sparring with an actual trainee Auror would improve my form rather more than practicing alone in an empty workshop.”
Her eyebrows went up, delighted.
“You’re asking me to hex you for fun.”
“I’m asking you to hex me constructively.”
“Oh, I like this plan enormously.” She grinned, hair going a shade warmer at the edges.
“Yes.
Obviously yes.
I’ll bring the good curses.”
●●
After the meal, we walked to a cinema I’d chosen specifically because the poster — a looming skeletal head, all teeth — had made her stop dead on the pavement a week earlier when we’d passed a similar one somewhere else, and demand to know what on earth it was advertising.
Jurassic Park turned out to be exactly the kind of film I’d hoped it would be for her: she gripped my arm hard enough to bruise during the kitchen scene, swore out loud twice in a way that earned us a look from the row behind, and left the theater afterward practically vibrating with the specific fervor of someone who’d just discovered a new favorite thing.
“They made that entirely with tricks,” she said, several times, as we walked out into the cool night air, an ice cream from a late-night vendor already melting faster than either of us was managing.
“No magic at all.
Muggles built that with cameras and models and I don’t even know what else, and it looked real, Marcus, it looked properly real —”
“Some of it was models.
Some of it was a kind of computer animation, from what I understand.”
“That’s mad.
That’s actually mad.
Dad’s Muggle-born, you know — grew up right in the middle of all that — and even he never took me to anything like this growing up.
I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us that I’d want to.
Mum still thinks the telly’s mostly nonsense, and I suppose I just never questioned that.” She took an enormous bite of her ice cream, thoughtful in a way that sat oddly against the sugar rush of five minutes earlier.
“This is the first time I’ve properly done a Muggle thing like this.
Felt like a whole world I just never bothered opening the door to.”
“I’m glad I could be the one holding it open, then.
Given how much of that world I apparently still carry around with me, it seems only right someone got some use out of it.”
“Sap,” she said, delighted, and bumped her shoulder against mine hard enough that I had to catch my footing, which struck me as fair payment for the sentiment.
We walked most of the way back toward the Apparition point slowly, in no particular hurry, trading theories about how the dinosaurs might actually have moved and arguing amiably over which scene had been the most ridiculous, until the ice cream was gone and the streets had gone properly quiet around us.
It was close to midnight by the time we found a dark enough corner, and she took my arm again, familiar now in a way it hadn’t quite been at the start of the evening, and we Apparated back to the gnome and the ivy and the porch light Andromeda had clearly left burning for exactly this purpose.
“Thank you,” Tonks said at the door, quieter than she’d been all evening, hair settling into something soft and rose-gold that I suspected she hadn’t chosen consciously at all.
“Properly thank you.
That was — I don’t think I’ve had an evening like that in longer than I want to admit.
And thank you for the rest of it too.
The parents, the schools, all of it.
I know that’s not an easy thing to hand someone over dinner.”
“It felt easier than I expected it to, with you asking.”
She hesitated a moment on the doorstep, some decision working itself out behind her eyes, and then leaned in and kissed my cheek, brief and warm and gone before I’d fully registered it happening.
“Goodnight, Marcus.”
“Goodnight, Tonks.”
I walked back to the Apparition point alone, considerably warmer than the night air accounted for, and went home to a workshop and a ledger and a life that had, without my quite noticing when it happened, become something worth looking forward to at the end of a long day.
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