Werewolves Are Not Popular Dinner Guests

Werewolves Are Not Popular Dinner Guests

Part the Last:

In Which a Young Woman Rethinks the Direction of Her Life and the Wolf Grapples with Chronic Unemployment and Nonexistent Rent

Tonks had been derailed from her search for Prudence Katherine by her boss. Since Remus and Edmund Dawlish had had historically very little to say to each other, Remus had wandered off in another direction entirely.

Tonks, meanwhile, was pondering if indeed she had been correct in her choice of career. After studying closely the two of the more senior members of the profession, she wondered if maybe she should have thought over the decision a little more.

First there was Moody. One look at Mad-Eye made you question whether you wanted to spend time in the same room with him, much less share an occupation. And while he treated you with a touching bit of protectiveness when you got to know him (or if you enrolled in the same secret society as him, as it were,) to most people he had about all the likability of a rabid hyena, which didn't exactly serve as a recruitment tool for his (former) profession.

Still, at least rabid hyenas got the blood pumping. Edmund Dawlish was adulthood's answer to Professor Binns. But while listening to Professor Binns was like placing your ear next to a vacuum, listening to Dawlish was like listening to a whole choir of them screaming their arses off.

While Dawlish told her and several other people who were too polite or simply too pounded into a deep stupor to find an excuse to wander off to the refreshment table about a wizard from Italy they suspected of Dark activity (a man they had been tracking for months previous to that despite the fact that meanwhile Lucius Malfoy had gone prancing around the Ministry unchecked, thought Tonks in the midst of her deep stupor), the back of her head was going numb.

Andromeda did not like hair that Tonks termed "creatively dyed," and thus had imprisoned her daughter in the house for the entire afternoon, first making her turn her hair to a "proper" color, then styling it by twisting it around evil-looking chopsticks that are meant for hair. Chopsticks, Tonks decided, are only meant to be entwined in Chinese takeaway. Never hair. It was just ungodly, that's what it was. Anything else was just torture, which explained why the back her head felt like someone had stuck long pins in it because, well, someone had. This was how those poor little girls in China used to feel, Tonks thought. The ones that had to bind their feet until they're all deformed and could fit into those tiny little shoes. Poor kids. Poor Tonks.

Remus, she decided, had better be having a bloody awful time. He had left her there, after all, just because he was not at the mercy of monotonous middle-aged men. Sighing, Nymphadora Tonks wished to have the freedom of an unemployed werewolf. And that her hair wasn't so damn boring. She'd have to work on that...

~

Later:

"Nymphadora, where's Remus?"

"I don't know, Mum. I lost track of him right after I talked to you." She scanned the heads sitting down at the table in the dining room. "Perhaps he's lost. For a werewolf, he's got a crap sense of direction."

"Nymphadora! Don't say that out loud!"

"What? You mean werew--"

"Shh! Just because you like to be flippant about it doesn't mean you should yell it to the entire room."

Tonks rolled her eyes. Whenever she was around her mother, she was always inexplicably too loud. "I'm not yelling it. Everyone already knows, in any case."

Andromeda eyed her daughter warily. "I don't think it's the sort of thing that should be discussed in public."

Tonks sighed. "Mum, it's nice that you like to think the best of everyone and all, but you've got to accept that not everyone thinks as well of Remus as you do. Some are the type that think...you know, that he can tell what they had for breakfast by sniffing their collars."

Andromeda's eyes widened. "He can?"

"Well, no, not unless the person in question is a particularly sloppy eater, but the point is people think he can, and it drives him nuts."

Then, much to Tonks' surprise, Andromeda raised an eyebrow. "He's told you this?"

"We-ell, not in so many words, no. But I can tell it does. I mean, he's a person, not a bloody bloodhound. And if people don't treat you like a person, like you're some awful hybrid of the two, well, then, no wonder Remus is probably in the library right now looking at Dad's books. Can you really blame him?"

Andromeda looked rather shocked. "I, well--"

Sensing she was treading in the murky gray water that accompany these sorts of issues, Tonks added hastily, "Never mind, Mum, forget I said anything. He'll turn up when he gets hungry." Tonks paused. "You see, there, I just made another inadvertent bloodhound comparison. I'm getting just as bad." She shook her head and sat down, and thus was not able to see Remus entering the dining room accompanied by a small girl in a party dress.

"It's my father who named me," Prudence Katherine was telling him as they sat down.

"Oh?"

"Yes. He likes the Beatles, you see."

"Oh."

Prudence Katherine's face was round and chubby, rather like her mother's, with a mouth that was given naturally given to pouting, which was what it did now.

"It's a rather odd choice in names," said Remus. "Would you like some potatoes? I mean, given the variety. There's Rita. Or Lucy. Or Michelle. Even Penny, I suppose, if you wanted to be--oh no, am I upsetting you?"

"No," said P.K. in a long-suffering voice, "except maybe they should've just named me 'Walrus' and stopped all the arguing. And I don't like green beans." She pushed the dish away.

"It's not that bad." Remus took the green beans from her. "Believe me, I've seen worse."

"People say that all the time," said Prudence. "They say they've met people with worse names, but I've never met them."

"What about Tonks?"

"You mean Nymphadora? I've always wondered why she goes by Tonks. It's so boyish. What about her?"

"Well, she's got nothing but 'Nymphadora' and her, as you say, rather boyish surname to fall back on, doesn't she?"

P.K. rolled her eyes, indicating that however bad someone else's problems were, they were nowhere near as bad as hers. She was a curious child, self-centered and full of herself, but at the same time very precocious and quite nosy.

"What do you do?" she asked.

"I used to be a teacher."

"Why aren't you anymore?"

"Personal problems." That sounded better than 'problems of a canine nature.'

"So what do you now?"

"I'm...chronically unemployed."

She peered at him as if he was a rare type of bird not seen very often. "Really? Mum says the unemployed are a bunch of lazy bums."

"Are you sure you don't want any of these beans? They're quite good." She shook her head emphatically and was quiet for a while. Finally, she asked another question. "It was Tonks who invited you here?"

"Yes."

"Are you her boyfriend?"

"Goodness no, I just live in her dead cousin's house."

She wrinkled her nose at him. "Why would you do that?"

"Well, the place itself is quite decrepit, but the rent is very cheap. In fact, it's nonexistent. It was an important consideration, me being chronically unemployed and all."

"Why don't you just get a job?"

"Personal problems. You're too young to care, really."

Prudence Katherine dropped her fork on her plate with a clatter. "You know, I hate when people assume I'm too young. I'm not. My teachers even tell me I'm very smart. I get the best marks in the class. I'm unique too because my mum's a witch but I go to Muggle school. It's 'cos my dad's a Muggle. It's really rare, though." She smiled slyly. "The Oblivators have had to come in ten times when I slipped something about magic."

"Ten times? What did you say?"

"Just little things about the Floo and my parents and stuff like that."

"Ten times, though! You don't think that's a little excessive?"

"The Ministry does wish Mum and Dad would just give it up and take me out of the Muggle school, but I always insist. Besides, they're just honest accidents. Usually." She waggled her eyebrows at him conspiratorially.

Remus stared at her. "You mean you've had people purposely Oblivated? But why?"

She shrugged. "It was just Tommy Bradford, and he deserved it, believe me. If you knew him you'd agree."

"Do your parents--I mean, do they know?" he asked, not realizing what a stupid question it was until too late.

She snorted. "Yeah, sure. Hi Mum." Her mother had just appeared behind her chair.

She looked at her daughter, then looked at Remus, and then looked disapproving. "P.K., where's your father?"

"He got called away," said Remus, "by his office. It was quite urgent and he didn't have time to find you, so he asked me to watch P.K. to make sure she didn't get into...er, trouble."

"I don't why he worries so much about that," P.K. said, annoyed again.

"I couldn't imagine why either," said Remus.

~

"I know this is going to sound a little callous," said Tonks after dinner, "but you really were an awful dinner guest."

"How so?"

"You ditched me, for one thing. Left me with Dawlish. Minus big points for that. What's worse, you ditched me to spend time with Satan incarnate--"

"Hey now, now that is callous. And besides, it wasn't really intentional. I mean, I started talking to her father. He's a--"

"Doormat. Good Lord, these things hurt," said Tonks as she tried very hard to pull one of the chopsticks out of her hair. All she had succeeded in was moving it around so it stuck straight up out of the complicated hairstyle her mother had put in hours earlier. She looked rather, Remus thought, like she had a mast. He thought of pointing this out to her, but then decided she didn't look in the mood.

"Well, yes, I suppose you could say he's a doormat. I was going to say a Muggle. He's a very nice fellow, anyway. But he gets this call and it's very urgent, and he can't find P.K.'s mother, of course, so I told him that I'd make sure she didn't put poison in people's drinks or whatever it is you think that she does when nobody's around." He stared out the window for a second. "I didn't say those words exactly, obviously."

"I figured." She leaned over and opened the window to let in the breeze coming off the lake.

"You see," she went on a few minutes later when the silence had passed over into "just plain embarrassing" territory, "it was just a rather disappointing evening. I told Percy Weasley how well his family's doing, and although most of it's a bit of a lie I enjoyed watching him look uncomfortable. The red ears really go well with his hair."

Remus grinned a little bit.

"I mean, obviously the Weasleys are fine in the sense that they're all not dead, but they're all sort of..."

"On the 'Mortal Peril' side of things," Remus finished for her.

"Exactly..." she leaned her head out the window, closing her eyes. Remus saw that in the midst of the dismal-colored, somewhat un-Tonks like brown of her hair there was a strand of hot pink on the underside of her head. He grinned a bit more.

THE END