The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix Part Three

CXX: The Night of Falling Stars

"Now remember I am under no illusions what so ever that this is a nice place or anything of that sort," Nymphadora Tonks was walking backwards up a very narrow staircase, watching Remus as he took the steps so slowly that it allowed her to be able to walk backwards up the rickety thing without tripping. She had to pause between each step for several seconds while he drew a breath and forced his knees to bend up to the next step. "I mean, if it was a nice place, maybe we'd have an elevator up or something of the sort."

Remus winced and put his weight on the bannister. "How many flights up are you?"

"Third floor."

"Excellent. Only three more to go."

"That's the spirit," Tonks answered.

They made it up slowly but surely, Tonks rattling off various warnings and disclaimers about the apartment they were climbing towards, her voice echoing in the stairwell as she talked without hardly taking a breath. Remus was to remember that her roommate was a muggle, and all the things that go with being around a muggle, and Remus was to call her muggle room mate Spark because that was what the girl preferred being called, and Tonks wasn't really certain she remembered Spark's real first name anyway (but it might have been Kathy-I-Think?). She apologized for about the twentieth time that all she was going to have available to eat up there was tinned soup from the popty-ping and reckoned perhaps they ought to have got take away to bring back but she hadn't thought of that until now. She wondered if they ought to risk disapparating to the top, since Remus's knees were awful, but Remus shook his head and assured her it was fine, his knees were fine, the soup would be fine, and he would'nt forget not to do weird wizard-werewolf shit in front of Spark not to worry because everything would be fine.

Tonks dug through her pocket and turned up a little bronze-color key, which she held up, proud of herself, and turned to unlock the door.

"Where does Spark think you work?" Remus asked, realizing that surely this muggle flatmate must have no idea of Tonks's real job.

Tonks paused, then looked back at Remus, a twinkle in her eye. "I'm a perfume clerk at Fortnum & Mason's." Remus blinked in disbelief. "And a damn good'un at that," she added, grinning.

"I have questions," Remus said.

Tonks smirked and pushed open the door of the flat before he could pose a single one of them.

The flat was just as shit as Tonks had built it up to be. It was small and an odd assortment of things had been crammed into it. Remus was reminded of an article he read about the mixing of waters with different salinity - the waters simply didn't mix, so much so that it was possible around melting glaciers in the North Atlantic to see pockets of water from melting low-saline ice caps refusing to mix in with denser waters, giving a funny appearance as though there were the two different color waters. The flat was a mixing point of Tonks's bright, sunny disposition and her hot pink, bright yellow, lime green, and varying shades of neon belongings coming to meet the darker objects that belonged to her emo-goth-era flatmate, Spark. Chaos reigned and things seemed to have simply landed in spaces and remained where they ended up haphazardly. But the place was lived in, and it had zero expectations or grand illusions of trying to impress anybody - it was what it was, and it gave no fucks what anyone from outside of it thought about it, and overall Remus reckoned that was precisely why it felt like Tonks.

A blood-red couch in the living room aligned itself with a muggle telly, upon which sat a black-haired girl who wore a plaid button-up shirt and torn black jeans with Doc Marten boots, eating a bowl of soup from the promised charity shop china bowls, watching what appeared to be a documentary on alien crop circles. Her hair was up in two knots, violently pinned in place with what looked like four black knitting needles. She had on more eyeliner than Sirius Black had ever dreamed of smudging on his eyes - possibly in all the years he'd worn eye liner combined he'd never used as much as she had on her eyes now, Remus thought - and she'd shaded in her eyelids with black as well. Her eyes were violet.