The Shape of Me

The more I think about it, the more I'm sure that it all started with Sully.

No matter how rare an occurrence, the Ministry of Magic never overlooks that birth of a Metamorphmagus. Well, perhaps the birth isn't what catches their attention, but as soon as a child begins to show their abilities, the Ministry is somehow alerted and they contact the child's parents to arrange the child's education. Not the general schooling that all young witches and wizards take part in, but a special curriculum for natural shape-shifters such as myself. After all, changing form is not something that comes easily, even to one gifted with the ability. But more importantly, the young changeling's morality must be groomed from the very beginning, because the temptations inherent in the ability to change one's face are great.

At eight years old, I started seeing a crusty old tutor named Ms. Teadle, who began schooling me in morals and ethics. By that time I already had a rough control over my abilities, though I was prohibited from using them during these lessons. Of course, I always felt smug that the face I typically wore was not my own; I had worn that one so long that I wondered sometimes if even my parents knew it to be a mask. Even so, it was very difficult to sit through a session without altering so much as my ears- they specifically made me wear my hair up to prevent such distractions. It did help teach some control, at that, though I give credit for most of that work to Sully.

I didn't meet him until I had been seeing Ms. Teadle for almost six months. One day a man showed up at the door of our room, entering without knocking; after a few quiet words exchanged with my tutor, Ms. Teadle told me a brief goodbye and I was left with the stranger.

He was wholly unremarkable in appearance; perhaps in his fifties with graying brown hair and a face creased with a fine tracing of lines. Hazy blue eyes studied me dispassionately- I was always struck by how little he gave away with his eyes. You could never read them. Tall and lean as a greyhound, he loomed over me, staring at me with those impassive eyes until I was ready to crawl under my chair. It actually startled me when he spoke.

"Good afternoon, Miss Tonks," he said, in a deep voice with a queer, flat accent. I later learned that it was an American accent, although he was actually Canadian. "My name is Jonathan Sullivan, and I will be your instructor from now on. It is fortuitous for you that I am living in London at the moment and have consented to work with the Ministry in schooling you in the full and proper uses of your abilities."

I suppose that I assumed that if the Ministry had sent him to teach me, then likely he wasn't going to hurt me; that'll all I can figure, or else I never would have asked him what I did, not that it was that big a question. But at that age, Sully was quite terribly imposing.

"Why am I any better off with you teaching me than Ms. Teadle?" I demanded, secretly thinking that anyone would be a nice relief from the old lady's constant drone about honesty and openness, and 'proper faces in proper places'. Meh, I'll hear that singsong till I'm in the grave!

"I'm another Metamorphmagus," he answered me, and I gaped like a fool.

"No you're not," I protested. "The Ministry says I'm the only one, or else they'd..." I trailed off, staring stupidly at him as he nodded and picked up the sentence.

"Or else they'd have them teaching you. As I said, it is fortuitous that I am living here currently. Now, in addition to continuing your ethics lessons, I will help you refine your natural morphing abilities. And as this is our first introduction as Metamorphmagi, let us be open with one another- this is my true face. Please show me your own."

Almost without thinking, I told him, "This is my real face." Soft, honey colored hair, just like mum's, in a pageboy cut, dark brown eyes and a face like a china doll. I always insisted it was my own face, nevermind what Ms. Teadle had taught me about honesty. This was one little lie that hurt no one, and if I was consistent it would become true enough. But he just shook his head, continuing to stare till I thought my skin would crawl off of me.

"No, it isn't. There's not a Metamorphmagus I've ever heard of that wore his or her own face as a child. Very few do even as adults. Now, please show me your proper face."

That he was somehow sure of my deception, as well as the comment about the proper face made me angry- stupid, I know, but I was only eight and no one had ever questioned my appearance or my explanation before. I decided in that instant that I would show him any face but that one- after all, it was my face. Mine alone, and if I didn't like it much I also knew that I wasn't required to share it.

So I squinched my eyes up, concentrating hard on the image I held in my mind. My hair darkened and straightened, becoming lank and a dull mousy brown. The doll's face melted into a pudgy-cheeked, uninteresting oval but I left my eyes the same dark brown. Learning to change my eye color had been hard- let him think that I hadn't puzzled that out just yet.

He remained impassive as he watched me shift before him, and when I was done he cleared his throat. "No, Miss Tonks, that is not it either. Please save me the trouble, and reveal your natural face."

How did he know? I couldn't understand it at the time, although now I realize that it must have been almost comical for him to watch my pathetic attempts to hide from him. Sure, I could shift well enough to pass for another person to most people, but he was a Metamorphmagus, and one of the first things that he taught me was to observe other people. By watching the way others move, how their skin stretches over their joints, where fat collects itself on their bodies, by observing any and every thing we can about how different people look and move, we learn how to better assume a new face. He had been doing it for decades, whereas I only knew that I could fool people with my masks; therefore the faces I kept showing him that day must have appeared as caricatures.

We went through that routine several times; I would invent a new face, he would patiently wait while I let the old face melt into the new, then he would calmly tell me it was wrong and to do it again. If he grew tired of it I couldn't tell, but finally he said to me, "Miss Tonks, I understand that you have been seeing your tutor for nearly six months now, but if this is typical of your behavior I must assume that you haven't paid a bit of attention. I will ask you one more time to reveal your face, and if you still insist on playing this game then I will have no choice but to make you show me."

I scowled at him- yes, I know, I was quite the brat then. All of that shifting- more than I normally would do- had made me cranky, and more than a little worn out. But of course, I didn't reveal my real face to him; rather I gave him one of the best masks from my repertoire: Marlene Bones, one of my playmates. I could mimic her well enough to take in her own mother, as well as my mum. It didn't fool him for one instant.

Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out a small brown glass bottle and what looked like a little disc but turned out to be a collapsible tin cup. He poured a finger of liquid from the bottle into the cup, and handed it to me.

"Drink it," he told me, and there was something in his tone that made me do it immediately, without thinking at all. Oh, I know, and Moody nearly blew his top when I told him this story- I had to keep reminding him that I was eight, for Merlin's sake, and much more trusting then than I am now. Plus, I hadn't had an old, wild-eyed madman shrieking 'constant vigilance!' at me day and night for months on end, which does tend to make one more suspicious.

Anyway, I drank it up, and within moments I could feel the mask slipping away from me no matter how hard I tried to cling to it. Marlene's red hair darkened to a brown that was nearly black, and her heart-shaped face rounded slightly as mine came into view. Marlene and I actually looked quite a bit alike, except for different coloring, which was why I had such luck in impersonating her at that age. My features were a little sharper than hers, and while her eyes were the soft, velvety brown that I usually wore, my own bluish-gray eyes were soon glaring at him in fury. I had never heard of any potion that could force a Metamorphmagus into their true form, but here I was, all four quivering feet of me, silently raging at the stranger who had taken my mask away.

Sully never reacted to my anger for an instant, though he probably knew the degree of my emotions better than I did than day. He let me throw him deadly looks while he studied the figure now before him with the same scrutiny he had given the illusory bodies I had shown him before. Finally he gave a perfunctory nod. "Yes, that is more what I thought. Don't try to fool me about your form, Miss Tonks; until you have been shifting faces for years without a second thought, you haven't the remotest chance of lying to me."

Being eight and an insufferable brat as well, I bridled at that comment. Of course I could fool him; I was the only Metamorphmagus born in Britain in 70 years! It's embarrassing now to remember that- I was horrid! What I didn't count on was the potion that he had given me causing me to blurt out, "I can trick you if I want to!"

He chuckled dryly. "I suppose that you do. Want to, that is. But since the Veritaserum in the NullMorph Potion can't differentiate between true statements and those that the speaker believes to be true, let me educate you as to the difference. This is how one shifts faces."

The next moment, my mother was standing in the room.

I can hardly explain the difference in what he did and what I was doing at the time; I resembled the face I wanted to wear, while he became the face, or it became him. There was never a flicker of Jonathan Sullivan present, only whomever he was impersonating, real or imagined. I had known my mother all of my life, and Sully for less than half an hour, but when he morphed into the image of Andromeda Tonks I thought that my mother had surely Apparated into the classroom to protest old Ms. Teadle's dismissal. "Mum..." I started to wail, but the apparition of my mother turned her head toward me and fixed me with a stare that pinned me where I sat. Slowly, my mother's bright blue eyes clouded, finally resting on the same shade as the new tutor's.

"I'm rather impressed that you have already learned that trick," she commented in Sully's deep voice. "It was also very clever for you to try and hide that fact from me; it took a couple of changes before I noticed that your eye color was wrong for you. You've got some potential; I must be getting old to take so long to pick up on a trick like that. This is your fair warning that I'm now aware of both your abilities and your brain, and I will be taking them into account in the future. If you pay attention, work hard at what I will teach you and resist the temptation to slow your studies by lying or otherwise deceiving me, then I can help you to achieve great control over your shape-shifting. If you don't, you will probably not be allowed into any Wizarding school, nor any Muggle ones, if I don't misjudge the mindset of the Ministry of Magic here. So I would recommend that you apply yourself."

"I don't want to work with you!" I shouted at him, rather shaken by his appearance as my mother as well as still being very angry. I hadn't meant to say it, of course, but the NullMorph is nearly half Veritaserum, and practically any response that formed in my head came out before I had any thought of censoring it.

He let my mother's face slide away then, to my immediate relief, and smiled slightly at me for the first time. "Now why would you want to? I'm older than you, smarter than you, and much better at changing my face than you. I'm in a position of authority over you, I've already made it clear that I won't brook any nonsense from you, and I've also shown that I can tell when you aren't being honest with me. I can't imagine why you would be the least bit happy that I am going to continue your education up until the time that you are deemed fit to enter the Wizarding schools, if that happens. However, I expect that both of us will get used to this arrangement after a while, and the sooner it happens, the sooner that I can get on with my task of training you to become a responsible Metamorphmagus in your society."

"'Proper faces in proper places'" I wheezed, and he frowned in disgust.

"Not still drilling that are they? Merlin's beard and toes, no wonder you are bored silly with the whole routine. It's very lucky indeed that I was around to help you out, kid. There's meaning behind those words, even if the Ministry curriculum has damn near squeezed all the juice out of them. You'll see," he added with a solemn wink, and to my amazement I felt almost like smiling back at him. I didn't, but the feeling I had toward him was much more charitable than I had expected. "Now go on; put your favorite face back on, and get home. I'll see you next week, and the real work will begin."

Confused, angry, and yet part of me thinking that I might possibly like this new tutor, I silently collected my book and quills, letting my mask slide back into place as I did so. Without looking back at him I headed for the door, but as I was opening it he spoke again.

"It was very nice to meet you, Miss Tonks. You should show your real face more often."

I was eight. I kept on going, and even slammed the door. And that was how I met Sully.

~*~*~

I met Mum downstairs and she Flooed us home, but not once did I say anything about Sully or his perfect impersonation of her until we were home. I was seated at the kitchen table while she prepared dinner, and Dad still had yet to get home from work when I casually said, "Ms Teadle isn't teaching me anymore."

Mum turned around from the pot she had been stirring to face me. "Already?" she asked, which rather shocked me, as I had expected to upset her serenity a bit with the announcement. She was back to stirring the soup before I could answer her, and a sense of betrayal began to steal over me.

"You knew?" I asked, not bothering to conceal the disgust I was feeling at her treachery. Yes, yes, I was a melodramatic child, and I had been thinking of myself as extra special for a little too long, truth be told. "You knew, and you never told me?"

She stopped again, glancing at me over her shoulder. "Sweetheart, I knew that the Ministry had located another Metamorphmagus, and I even met Mr. Sullivan briefly, but I had no idea that he had accepted the job. No one notified me, or else I would have let you know. Aren't you glad that you have someone who knows how to do what you do as your teacher, rather than a normal witch or wizard?"

"No. Mum, he looked like you today!"

"Did he? That was nice of him- did he do a good job?"

"I don't like him," I whined, eliciting a sharp look from my mother.

"I think that Mr. Sullivan may be exactly what you need, Nymphadora. And I think that it is just grand that another Metamorphmagus is both available and willing to work with you to make the most of your talents. Now go and set the table, dear. Your father will be home soon, and dinner is almost done."

Mum's always been like that: sensible, unflappable, now-go-and-set-the-table,-dear. I suppose that it comes from growing up with such a horrible family- I try not to look at the family photo albums if I can avoid it. They are always screaming about something or other, it's absolutely beastly! I can only imagine that Mum developed that impervious manner of hers because of all the dysfunction surrounding her while she grew up. Good preparation for me, I suppose- Sirius used to joke about that with her. I can still remember...

Well, that's another story, really. Or this one, but not yet. Sirius was still around then, only not so often, as the War with You-Know-Who was reaching a fever pitch. Mum's serenity extended even to that, as far as an eight-year old could see, at any rate. Looking back, I think that it was more of denial mixed with a tacit understanding that in some way, her life was forfeit anyway. It is my personal belief that, during the first War with Voldemort, Andromeda Black-Tonks awoke every morning with the assurance that she would not live to see the sunset, for she lived through that period of my youth with an astounding fervor, matched only by her utter, unshakable insistence on normality. Absolutely conflicting beliefs? Sure. Welcome to my family.

Anyway, I flounced off to set the table, furious with my mother for her cruel callousness, with Sully for being so frightfully knowing, and with the Ministry for allowing such an obvious child-hating bully to harass a sensitive, gifted young girl.

Do stop laughing, or I'll have to injure you.

I was eight; how many times do I have to say it? Everything was blown up to ten times its real size, but only where it wasn't blown up twenty times. At that moment, it was the worst type of betrayal that I could imagine, though thankfully the moment passed rather quickly the next morning, when I discovered that the very worst betrayal was Marlene having a sleepover and not inviting me.

That one didn't last long, either.