Occlumency in Azkaban

Chapter 3: The Big Lie

London, for all its pretensions and aspirations to grandeur, would always be a crude and jangling city to Tonks; growing up there had cured her of the tourist’s impulse to see it, really see it, as something other than everyday. There were nice parts of it, that was true, but those nice parts would forever be merely rich neighborhoods for Tonks (or, worse, out-of-towners’ havens, where the cameras and loud T-shirts and North American accents abounded). Grimmauld Place, in her mind, was not part of London; it was entirely separate, a hidey hole disassociated with the raw rhythm of thousands of people living and working side-by-side.

When Snape told her they were going to London, the night after she saw the blood on his hands, her first thoughts were of her family, and then of the little park where she had played as soon as she could keep her face steady and not scare the Muggles. But this was not the London he was taking her to. At first, it seemed to be merely the quaint, touristy part of Kensington near St. Jude’s church. They circled over the townhouses as Snape decided where to land - for they had evidently been given strict orders to bring only one broom between them, and not to Apparate - and Tonks nearly choked him to death when his feet touched ground and hers didn’t.

“Couldn’t you have made yourself a little taller?” he asked, irritably.

“I thought you said it might be best for me to play up the family resemblance,” she replied, irked. The Blacks were not especially tall. She did, however, concentrate on lengthening her legs by an inch or two. It was easier to keep up with his long stride that way.

Their Disillusionment charms did not quite last until they reached their destination, which was a brick house Tonks thought she recognized. She searched her mind, but couldn’t place it, she thought. It was a nagging feeling more than a real memory, as though there was something not quite important but very interesting about the house, if only she could remember it. She ignored the nagging feeling. “It will do me no good, anyway,” she muttered.

“The resemblance might do you good, and that is all that matters - that it could possibly help,” Snape said, obviously still irritated and assuming that her comment had been directed at him. He evidently was put off by the fact that Muggles were glancing their way, quickly and sidewise, as though they had seen something funny out of the corner of their eye. Well, it’s not my fault we’re dressed like this, like the Ku Klux Klan inverted, she thought, and then realized that that was likely the inspiration for the black robes and hoods and white masks. Klansmen going to sweep the porch. The broom was likely the place the Disillusionment would fade from first.

For a moment, she wondered what the Muggles saw: Two people dressed in regular black clothing? Nobody at all? A cleaning crew, housekeepers just finished with one of the houses, off to their lorry and the next job? But the door was opening, possibly by aid of house-elf, and they were admitted.

“The wind is southerly,” Snape said, in a conversational tone. It must have been a password, because one color in the patterned carpet began to glow. They followed it upwards, up the stairs and around a corner to a small room that could have been a bedroom. There was no closet - the house was too old, and it would have been a wardrobe - but the window provided a view of the cathedral across the street, and despite the fact that the room now held only two chairs, nothing could cover the worn spots in the carpeting where furniture once had been.

“Stay calm,” he whispered to her, his voice not menacing for once. It was an odd sort of reassurance, but he was trying to reassure her, all the same. “You will not see the Dark Lord on your first visit here, and I am the only Legilimens among the Death Eaters, apart from him.”

But when he seated himself, his eyes were distant, and if he had been anyone else, Tonks would have thought it a worried expression.

She turned her focus inward for a moment and found her appearance slipping, pressed her concentration down, and sat quickly on a chair. Her routine was automatic, counting prime numbers as high as she could, focusing inward on her body, trying to calm herself; it worked well enough, but left her feeling as though she had no mind left to think with. She wasn’t used to the form she was in, and she nearly slipped as she sat down, surprised at how low the chair seemed. Tonks decided not to move for the rest of the visit, she thought wryly. Snape sat in another chair, leaving the third open for whoever would come. He looked strange and uncomfortable in the bulky, untailored robes, his mask off; she supposed he had been told to leave it as a gesture of trust.

The door opened quite suddenly, but it startled neither of them; they were too on edge for that. The person who entered was fully masked and hooded, but from the set of their shoulders and the way they walked, they were female. She - for Tonks was now sure it was a she; after all, who could know the human body better than a Metamorphmagus? - seated herself in the chair, legs apart like a man, and carefully flipped her wand around in each hand. She handled it like someone who knew it inside and out, like someone in complete control. If the circumstances were different, someone might have thought her to be a baton-thrower in a Muggle parade. As it was, her surety was menacing, suggestive of someone who has had a long time to practice, a long time to think, a long time to prepare for anything that might come their way.

“Little Nymphadora,” she said. “My, my... all grown up, with bark and bite, bite, bite.”

A spider ran, hesitatingly, across the floor. It stood out against the pale carpet. The entire room was pale, in fact, contrasting with the black of Tonks’s and Snape’s hair and the deeper black of their robes.

“Take off your mask and hood,” said the woman. When Tonks hesitated, she shouted. “NOW.” Quicker than seemed possible, her wand shot out and sent a jet of green light towards the spider. It died, quickly and quietly. “Obedience is a virtue.”

Tonks removed her mask and hood without further quibbling.

The interrogator stood and paced around Tonks’s chair slowly, taking her time. She passed so close to the skin of Tonks’s neck that it made the flesh stand up in goose pimples, so very close. A pale hand, ungloved, caressed Tonks’s cheek. It might have been a beautiful hand, once, small and soft and white with no work and no sun; now it was twisted and calloused, still white but ungodly strong. It carried the scent of cloves.

“Aunt Bella -” Tonks gasped, before she could stop herself. She knew that scent; it was associated in her mind with something comforting and warm. Where did she know it from? How did she know it, and know that it belonged with her aunt, when that aunt had never deigned to see her - except once, in the fighting at the Department of Mysteries?

“Little Dora,” came the reply. “I rather like that conceit of your face - and I knew my efforts would bear fruit! Don’t change!” The last was in response to Tonks’s reflexive movement, shrinking into the smaller person she normally was. “I do like it, little girl -” and she removed her hood and mask. It was immediately obvious why she liked it. Tonks saw the guise she had created in the mirror of her aunt, so closely matched that she must have been influenced by those short glimpses she caught during the battle. But if her aunt was a mirror it was a flawed one. Where Tonks had full cheeks and a rather fleshy, well-rounded body, Bellatrix was lean and stringy, resembling her cousin Sirius more than either of her sisters. The intense dark eyes shone insanely, widely, in Bellatrix’s face.

“Manic,” Tonks thought she heard Snape whisper under his breath, but it could have been just the breeze rattling the window.

Bellatrix smiled and muttered things that were mostly comprehensible: “Little, little Dora, I knew you’d be back, little Dora, like little boy Harry, not so little now...”

It was only when the long, scraggly fingernails actually scraped Tonks’s brow and reached within centimeters of her eye that Snape intervened. "Bellatrix. I am aware that this is a most tender reunion with your long-lost niece. However, I must ask how much longer it will take?"

"Oh, oh, oh, no time at all," she muttered. "No time... We were just to make first contact, that's all. You'll find your orders by owl; go if you like."

"Excellent," he replied. "Then if you could give us -?"

"Oh yes." She produced a small suede sack from one of her sleeves; she must have applied some kind of a charm to make space for it. "Here, you know how to arrange them for her. You shan't have your privacy for long, little Dora, one in every room!"

"Thank you. Then we shall take our leave, if you please."

Tonks followed Snape past her Aunt Bellatrix, thinking though it was a test of her willpower, Tonks refused to look back into those mad, mad eyes. He knew this house well; he was surefooted as he walked down the stairs and around to the tiny garden. They cast their Disillusionment charms without discussion. In fact, they had both mounted and nearly took flight before Tonks noticed the most fascinating thing about the garden: what she had taken for rubbish piles were actually piles of belongings that must have come from the former owners. They hovered for a second to allow the broom to adjust to the extra weight. She looked downwards and saw a smashed rocking chair, the remains of an old-fashioned wood stove, a kitschy metal sign with "Welcome to our happy home" written in flaky paint on it. The nagging feeling was back stronger than ever.

"We aren't going back to Hogwarts straightaway," Snape said as they climbed above the rooftops. "You are about to land in Charing Cross Road on a broomstick - not a feat I'd like to do terribly often but we must all take risks for the cause."

"Charing Cross Road?"

"We are under certain pretenses, and I would not like to test them," he replied curtly. "I hope you dressed as I asked you. We are going to an establishment called Earnest's." It took her a few moments to understand what he was saying, but then the conversation with Dumbledore came back to her. He had said that in order to sustain Snape's lies they'd have to be close to each other for awhile -

She had no intention of thinking about that particular statement too much, Tonks narrated to herself, because if she did things would undoubtedly get quite awkward. She thought of herself as merely an actress in a fabulous play, one with sets that were three-dimensional and beautifully made and with other actors and actresses who played their parts to perfection.

Earnest's was a popular restaurant rather far down Diagon Alley, in the section of the street that catered more to adults than youth. Nearby there was a large Gladrags and a swanky members-only building called The Withers Club, several shops selling more restricted ingredients (though they looked nothing like as seedy as those on Knockturn Alley) and one dealing in dragonhide and nothing but dragonhide. Snape and Tonks removed their Death Eater robes and put them and the leather pouch in a satchel Snape had brought, then removed their Disillusionment charms once they were safely inside the Leaky Cauldron; then they walked as quickly as possible to the restaurant. Neither of them particularly wanted to be seen wandering the streets together.

Unfortunately - and they both knew this, despite the fact that they walked quickly and far apart - Snape had chosen Earnest's simply because it was the place to see and be seen. Nobody would know who Tonks was, of course, unless they overheard her name, but someone would surely see Snape having a candlelit dinner with a mystery woman. Word would get out.

Not for the first time, she cursed Dumbledore and Snape and the Portkey and everything else in the world, because of course this wasn't the only way that they could have explained her sudden interest in the Death Eaters. It was merely the way that the Headmaster found most convenient. He was probably up in his tower laughing, right then, about how ridiculous they would be feeling.
"Call me Dora," she said loudly as they were seated. "We needn't be formal."

Snape caught what she was doing immediately, naturally enough, and almost scowled - but there was no way he was going to get out of his own less-than-common moniker. "Severus for me, then," he replied, and smiled in a sickly way.

When they were seated, he cast a charm against eavesdroppers, opened the satchel and pulled out a tiny carved cat. "This is one of the artifacts Bellatrix gave you. They're intended to allow the Dark Lord to spy in your room," he said, as though she couldn't have guessed. Rather than putting it back in its pouch, though, he set it casually on the table, canceled the charm he had just cast and sat back.

"So what have you been working on lately?" she asked. "I know you don't tell me half of your work, even since I was reassigned." She could almost feel the ears prick up around her; there was someone she knew, a girl who had been in her class at Hogwarts, across the room. That was one person who would be able to guess who Dora was, who might already have guessed just from her voice.

"Oh, no," he replied. Suddenly his voice was different, perhaps less stiff, perhaps a little louder. Whatever the exact change, it made him seem more approachable, more open and friendly. "You won't get me on that topic. Is it really so hard for you to grasp that the summer, for a schoolteacher, is made to be composed entirely of pleasurable pursuits?"

The game was on. Tonks found herself sparring against each carefully phrased remark and coming off rather the loser; neither of them were actually flirtatious, but they were dangerously close to the mark. At first she responded as repressively as possible, fighting against the candlelight and the atmosphere; she couldn't fight for long. There was something heady about sitting in the most popular wizarding restaurant in Britain in a slinky dress, about being the center of attention (while nobody in the room went so far as to stare, the general interest in her was pronounced), about facing off against that deep, wonderful voice. It almost didn't matter who the voice belonged to.

Tonks knew that she was playing a part, reveled in it, she thought, as Snape reached for the check. "Oh, do let me pay my share. I don't like being indebted to anyone," she said, grabbing it before he could.

"I insist," he murmured, peeling her hand away from the tray and ever-so-slowly raising it to his lips. "Just this once."

"All right." She felt the blush rising in her cheeks and nearly heard the rest of the restaurant gasp - greasy, slimy, horrid Snape! And he was greasy and slimy and horrid and there was nothing to recommend him; nobody could deny that.

But it's terribly hard to resist when you're supposed to be swept off your feet anyway, as an undercover operation. And I've never had anybody kiss my hand before.

Even with this justification, she remained red-faced until after they had gotten back to Hogwarts, until after he had followed her silently into her room to place the charmed knickknacks. It wasn't until after he had finished, stood stiffly at her door and informed her that her performance at the restaurant had been "satisfactory," that she finally relaxed.