nymphadora tonks is back from the stars. (hufflepunk) wrote in reoccurrence, @ 2020-07-20 00:52:00 |
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Tonks was tired. Tonks was tired and tipsy, the alcohol that Smith had bought for her sloshing about her stomach and dancing about her head. Already, she was regretting her terrible planning, half dreading the weekend camping trip. Already, she wanted to sleep, to not have her hands covered in brochure ink, to not have to spend tomorrow morning wearing somebody else's face, to not have to keep fighting. It felt like she had had a lifetime of that. (Oh well. What was one more?) She glanced around the room. It looked more like a chaotic arts and crafts session than the beginning of a resistance movement. Fred was still working, but her hands stilled and mind drifted. Maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe the wine, but she exhaled and spoke, letting something honest and defeated crawl out. "This is kind of shit isn't it?" He looked up at her and perhaps it was her imagination, but Tonks thought she recognised something familiar in his expression, thought she had seen it on her own face when she studied her newly not-dead self in the mirror. "Yeah. It is. It's hard enough just on its own without the Ministry making it worse. But, hey they are. Sticking yourself back in. The things that have changed. The things that haven't when you expected them to," he replied. Tonks nodded. "And like you're expected to just catch up when everybody's moved on and has a life that takes your absence into account. That little space for you in the world was closed up because people had to move on but now you have to elbow your way back in." And then, almost as an afterthought, she added a sad little, "And my kid's all grown up," her eyes falling down to her blue fingers. "Yes, that is exactly it." Fred looked at her sadly. (Or, a sad look for Fred, anyway.) "Can't even imagine what it's like to try to be what he's dreamed you are." "He likes to mention all the stories that he's been told. Like he's trying to prove he knows us, that it's fine he never had us before. He doesn't have any memories with us so he clings to all those little details he's been told. Remembers this one story Mum had about me and mint chocolate ice cream and got really confused when I got strawberry, because he thought mint was my favourite and it doesn't fit with that picture in his head. Breaks my fucking heart." "Like you can sort of see the you shaped hole in his life and how it isn't exactly the right shape for you because it's been shaped by time and other people?" She nodded, smiled sadly. "Exactly." He nodded too. "I.. yeah. I get that, even if it's not totally the same. But look, y'know, he's still a kid. Plenty of time for him to be so used to you he's completely unimpressed by whatever ice cream you pick after you drop it on the ground." That smile warmed up some. "Yeah, you're right. It's a time thing and I've never been that patient." She laughed and then tilted her head to look at him. "And you? Not going too stir crazy here?" Fred hesitated longer than he normally did with his punchy, quick responses - looked down through the bare floor of the proto clubhouse like he was worried he might be being listened in on. "I'm going mental," he confided, and the unique sensation of saying something to someone he hadn't said to George yet made him feel a little ill. "I walked back in on something where- I mean, my sudden ex is shacked up with my twin and that's not even the awkward part." Tonks' forehead creased in concern and sympathy, looking just as sad for him. "I can't imagine." She had heard some of Angie's side of that triangle, mostly surrounding her own woes of parenthood and her decision to step more fully into Fig's life. But there was Fred too, that new dimension. She frowned a little deeper, wondering if she was missing something obvious. "What's the awkward part?" Fred screwed up his face, looking for the right words. "Ange is great and all but- look, she's a lot. Living with her in close quarters? Wouldn't be my choice. But you can't very well tell someone, nah, you can't come back to stay at the flat where your baby is, I'm not that big of an arse. I can't leave, that'd break Georgie's heart and besides, not like I've got anywhere to go." He shrugged, but his shoulders were stiff and tense through the whole movement. Tonks nodded understandingly. It was a tangle. All their lives were tangles now, knots needing time and some degree of struggle to straighten out. "Could you ask one of your brothers or sister to stay for a few days? Or Harry, he knows, right? Change of scene. Make out like you're giving them a break to be a couple, have their space together for a moment." She sighed. "I'd offer Grimmauld but there's the Regulus issue. I trust him, I think. But he's still a strange one." Definitely a strange one, that Regulus- Fred had seen him commenting here and there in the journals and couldn't make heads or tails of him. He gave Tonks a little smile of thanks for the consideration, but then shook his head. "Even that's- he wants some security up in here. Good idea, right? But he wants access to the one looking in on my desk, so he can keep checking I'm here. That's where he's at with this so far." Tonks sighed. "Yeah." It was a heavy yeah, indicating she could relate the same way he could understand her Teddy issues, even if the situations were different. "Has it gotten any better since you first came back?" Fred cast a brief glance down at ink splattered, freckle splotched arms. He understood where George was coming from, he did. He wanted George to feel secure about his presence. He knew George would never say he couldn't do something or go somewhere- but that undercurrent was stifling. "Maybe a little worse, since we started letting people know." The terrible part was that as much as watching him made her heart ache, that as much as hearing Teddy confuse the versions of her that existed in his head snapped it clean in half, there was nobody who could really, truly be found at fault. The Ministry, sure, and that was the reason for the sea of paper they were sitting in. But George's overprotectiveness, Angie's confusion, the way her mother kept staring at her, not willing to look away, Teddy's insistence that her and Remus should do proper mum and dad things. It was an awful and completely, utterly understandable mess. All of their anger and hurt had to be channelled elsewhere. They couldn't blame people for loving them. "I'm sorry." Tonks placed her hand over his briefly. She didn't have much else to offer but understanding, though had the feeling that might go a long way. Fred gave her a grateful look. As much as he loved George, and his family (neatly mentally excising Charlie) and Ange and Lee and even Fig for as little time as he'd known the tot, it frequently became all too clear that they didn't see things from where he was standing. And why would they? They'd never been dead. Just having someone get it- that was validation. That was why, besides its use as an organising space, he was putting in the work for the clubhouse- because they were a whole group of confused, abruptly disenfranchised people who needed the experience of people who got it besides the well meaning gestures of loved ones and the questionably intentioned gestures of Ministry officials and wardens and counsellors. "Cheers," he said, earnestly. And then, physically shaking it off like a wet dog, went on, "Right, let's get back to giving ourselves papercuts in the name of sticking it to the bastards, yeah?" Tonks gave him a small nod, a last, soft gesture of recognition, before smiling and letting the tension fall out of her shoulders too. "Please. As if I'd ever be so clumsy." |