The Aristocracy of Illusion

The beauty of Remus Lupin, Tonks decides, is in his frailty. He is not feminine – anything but that; she wouldn’t be interested if he was – but rather he is vulnerable, or appears to be. There is something in the gaunt, concave swoop of his cheek that speaks of sadness. There is something in the fine brown hair, fading quickly now to grey, that cannot be perceived as strong. He can fight (oh, yes, he can fight, she thinks, with his weight on her back and her face ground into the pillow) but he is not a fighter.

There is a scar on his left leg, high up on the thigh where no one can see, where the werewolf bit him. He does not speak of it, but the hairless white marks look like rot in the candlelight, wounds gaping and fetid. Now Tonks can’t see it. She’s happier not having to look at it, not having to think about the way he will change in a day or a week or a month. She never asks him whether it’s near his time; he simply disappears for a while. Where he goes is a mystery, not only to her but to everyone in Grimmauld Place.

It must be a trial, she thinks, to have a werewolf and a Metamorphmagus and a dead person in the house. He isn’t a ghost exactly, not the kind that lives anywhere but in your head, but he’s there and real and almost palpable. But just as she reaches far back into the recesses of her mind to quantify and remember and envision him, Lupin pulls back and pushes forward and sinks his werewolf teeth into her neck, and she tastes blood, not her own blood but Sirius’s. Sirius’s! It can’t be hers; where it fell on the pillow it’s red as a ruby or as a Gryffindor, and Metamorphmagi bleed blue.

“Remus.” He doesn’t look, wrapped up in himself for a moment. “Remus,” she nearly cries, not sure what to make of it. “If I knew you were going to be such a – oh just look!”

His grey eyes flutter open, but instead of amazement (it’s a miracle, she wishes he would say, are you Sirius? Are you – not a Metamorphmagus? Could love do this?) there is only a dull, painful bleakness. In another person she would have called it horror. “You bit your lip,” he says, and in a sudden motion moves. He walks out of the room naked, smelling of sex, not caring who sees. The door opens and shuts with the creaky finality that only the oldest houses possess. Tonks thinks it’s mocking her, for a moment, for everything that she is and everything she tries to be. It has seen more deaths and births of her family than she ever will.

The blood’s color was a trick of the light, of course. Her blood is blue. And her voice is not her cousin’s, and she is not her cousin.

Tonks rolls over a little painfully, feeling sore muscles stretch, and realizes that she can’t remember their lovemaking, or not much of it. Lupin does not belong to her, and though she can control every part of her body she cannot control him. And he is part of her, and that is not a feeling she’s accustomed to. It’s not a feeling she enjoys. She cannot control him. She cannot control herself around him.

She lies on the bed and feels her hair retract into her head, feels the masculine jaw retreat into something smaller and more pointed. Her breasts grow and the penis she affected retreats (it’s nothing, useless, just a prop; but then, Remus never minded that, or at least never said anything) until she is nothing but a small woman huddled in the centre of a rumpled, messy bed. Unlike Lupin, she is only attractive when she is animated. The visage she wears from day to day (pink hair, heart-shaped face, eyes with laugh lines around them) fades without her natural vivacity, but it fades gracelessly. Her sadness looks nothing like Lupin’s melancholy dance with aging and with loss; instead, she is like a child who hasn’t got their way, pouting and stumbling and turning red-faced with frustration. She cries. A minute later the door creaks open and her heart soars. Optimism is not my trademark for nothing, she thinks, and perhaps for once it’s true. But it’s only the house, delivering a final rebuke.

For ten centuries the Black family has punished their women who dream of being men. There are five heirs left now, all in the female line. Five heirs, and now they are all finished. Five heirs, and they do not even need husbands or brothers or fathers to learn that women are women, and men are men, and love is not the answer.