The Mirror

Nymphadora Tonks sighed and flopped heavily down on the sagging excuse for a bed. Looking around the dingy room, she almost laughed. She'd never been big on luxury, but even she had never let a hippogriff into her bedroom.

She sighed. For the past few days, Buckbeak had been making a noise that sounded suspiciously like crying. No one seemed to know what was going to happen to the fugitive hippogriff now.

Tonks looked over into the cracked mirror that hung crookedly on the wall. Her own face did not stare back at her.

Oh, it was close, of course. She had adopted these features as her own so steadily and for so long that maintaining them was less of an effort than letting her own natural features show was.

She closed her eyes, frowned for a moment, and then looked at herself in the mirror.

This was how she really looked, she supposed. Her nose had a longer bridge than it usually did, and her lips were a bit thinner. Her dark blue eyes hadn't changed, but the spiky hair above them had gone from pink to black.

Tonks tried to look at herself objectively, and was startled to see just how much she resembled Sirius. Shaken a bit by the resemblance, she began idly changing bits of her features to distract herself. She gave herself Snape's long beaky nose and Lupin's grey eyes, and just for a lark, added a scar to her forehead -- in the shape of a smiley face.

Certain things were harder for her to do than others, she mused as she gave herself bright purple cat's ears. She could give herself the occasional animal feature -- but she could never make herself really look like a cat. And it was easier for her to change her entire body structure than it was for her to assume and hold a man's features.

Sighing, Tonks kicked back on the bed and stared up at the patterns of dirt, mold, and water damage on the ceiling. She screwed up her face as she gave herself a long straight nose and narrow eyes. Her chin squared itself off and her jawline lengthened, even as her hair grew long and straight and her eyebrows developed a slight downward slant.

The twinges that always accompanied the rearrangement of her features faded away, and she got up and looked into the mirror.

Sirius Black grinned back at her.

"Wotcher, cos," Tonks said with a half-hearted attempt at cheerfulness. The apparition in the mirror winked at her, but his lopsided grin faltered and disappeared. Tonks sighed as Sirius stared solemnly at her from the mirror, the tips of his hair beginning to fade to an absurd shade of pink.

She stood up and absently ruffled a hand through her rapidly-shortening hair, which was returning to its usual fluorescent shade with alarming speed. With one final glance at the mirror, Tonks walked out of the room, her face automatically altering itself into a cheerful young woman's grin as she left.