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It had been thirteen days and counting. Thirteen days between beginning surveillance on Thorfinn Rowle and Tonks' ongoing assistance with Sirius' project, conducted largely on the quiet without drawing the attention of the rest of the Order. Though Sirius had informed Remus of the details, outlining the framework of what he was doing, it was Tonks that he had turned to when it came to asking for help.
Asking for help wasn't something that any of them were good at; they were often too proud and too stubborn to admit that it was needed. It was the reason that they had all proven to be good for each other, in one way or another, because where one was overwrought, the other two were always able to pull them back from too dangerous an edge. In one another's respective company, they all felt less isolated. Even as part of the Order, each of them were set apart: Sirius confined to Grimmauld and a hunted convict, Tonks pulling double shifts between the Ministry and the Order, Remus moving between missions and ordinary life like a chameleon in much the same way. It had made an odd sort of sense that they would connect. But this time when Sirius had come to her, she hadn't comprehended why, not at first. It wasn't until Sirius showed her the nature of what he was working on that she understood more fully: she had what Remus lacked; direct traces of the Black bloodline in her veins. It wasn't preference that had brought Sirius to choose between them for this, but necessary logic. The Pensieve had been sealed with magic that meant no one from outside of the bloodline could access it. Disowned or not, she and Sirius still counted. Remus couldn't help, even if he was willing to do so, other than to watch their backs when he wasn't needed elsewhere.
The shades of water and memory in the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black's old marble Pensieve hadn't been clear or filled with glowing strands of blue, as was most common, but mingled in a multitude of colours, a confusion of many minds, polluted by a mess of broken and empty crystal vials. It wasn't until she had seen the way that it had shifted and moved that she had been able to fully process what she was seeing. Whomever had last used the Pensieve had done their best to sabotage it, or at least make it impossible to find specific memories in among the mass. That had been several nights ago, and since then there had been progress, albeit crushed in between their other responsibilities. First, there had been the painstaking extraction of the memories from the hollow basin, one by one, purging the sharp debris from it at the same time. Second, there had been the division of the memories into individual crystal vials. Finally, they had begun to peruse them, in order to determine what lay therein, and whether it could be of any assistance to their current situation. Those that had been deemed to be of potential use had been separated from the rest, labelled carefully and set aside.
Tonight, the stress was taking its toll on both of them; Tonks guarding Sirius' back while he sank into memory after memory, trading places and doing the same when he could endure nothing further, Remus needed to review Death Eater locations on the maps downstairs with Moody and therefore not immediately present. This was no Pensieve of one person's memories, already risky to traverse; it was a collection of multiple memories, some extorted and kept for the knowledge that they yielded, others deposited there so that freedom from the weight that they bore would be possible, more still obviously stolen without consent from their owners. Now, they searched for answers, ostensibly in the hope that they might find something more with which to assist the Order. Sirius, desperate to contribute something more than a house that he loathed; Tonks refusing to leave him to do it alone, now that she knew what it meant. After a few hours at it after she had finished duty, they had paused for a breather, one that they needed desperately, under the guise of reviewing what they'd obtained so far. Sirius was a sickly shade of white, dark circles spinning unevenly beneath his eyes, sat cross-legged on the floor with his back leaning against the wall, but he still managed a shaky grin when Tonks tossed him a packet of Honeydukes' finest and dropped down beside him, hair streaming over her shoulders in a shade of deep royal blue. "Thought Remus was the only one you shared chocolate with?" he teased.
"Oh, shut up and eat before I take it back," she said, rolling her eyes expressively and not a little fondly. Though Tonks was tired down to her bones, it relieved her that Sirius was still able to smile at all. Some of what they had been looking at varied between harrowing and touching; the effort of handling it was an emotional and mental drain. Though divided between two, it was evident that neither of them had been sleeping any better since the project began.
"Merlin. I must look like shit." Tonks noted, however, that he tore into the chocolate regardless, the sweetness and the taste a reminder that they were both flesh and blood, not ghostly things that existed only in the depths of a Pensieve. The thought made her shiver, made her cold in a way that had nothing to do with actual temperature and everything to do with the sudden consciousness of mortality. All that's left of some of these people is memories. "Sirius?"
"Mm?"
"Do you think what we're doing will make a difference?"
Grey eyes fastened on hers, and Tonks drew her legs up, folded her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees. "I mean, it's means to an end, but what do you think we're going to find in here?"
"I'm not sure," Sirius admitted after a long pause, voice faintly raspy with tiredness. "But someone did a damned good job of trying to hide something. Anyone who didn't have the sense to do what we did first would have been driven immediately mad on diving into that mass." He lifted a hand and ran it back through his hair, gripped tight, a mannerism that Tonks herself carried. Blood will tell, I guess. "There's no time in memories. If anyone had gone into that, who knows when they would have come out?" He hunched his shoulders, then spoke quietly. "Did you ever read a file on the McKinnon family, at the Ministry?"
Tonks' brows furrowed at the seeming disconnect between the conversation and the question that he asked, but she answered nonetheless. "Only very briefly. Voldemort dealt with them personally."
Sirius nodded tightly. "They were good people. Marlene was mine and Remus' age."
The fine clench of Sirius' jaw as he spoke of Marlene McKinnon was telling, as was the way he dropped his eyes to his hands. Tonks didn't need to question him, he spoke softly a moment later. "We had something, in a way." He looked up. "Never said anything. There were still other people. If we didn't talk about it, it was safer." A brief, bitter smile flickered over his face. "Except for when it wasn't." He rubbed at his eyes, as though he could wipe away the remembrance. "Gender didn't really matter to me, still doesn't. It was just about not being so goddamn alone, most of the time." There was a certain defiance to the choice of words, as though he'd forgotten who he was speaking to and had already begun building a case for himself, obviously used to people who didn't think the same way that he did. "It didn't bother her. It was one of the reasons we got on so well. Like calls to like, I suppose." Tonks caught Sirius' sideways glance at her lack of reaction, saw the defensiveness lessen and fade from his eyes as he realised that there would be no price exacted for his openness, no judgement from her, a question in his eyes that she nodded to by way of answer. Though no one could really offer safety to a man who knew that in reality, there were very few safe places left in the world, she could listen, understand rather better than he was probably aware of.
Shifting, Tonks rested against his shoulder, let the contact do the work of reassurance rather than offering meaningless platitudes. He cared about her, and she died, she thought. Nothing is enough. Eventually, Sirius spoke again. "I never got any real answers about what happened. There wasn't time to figure out who had been the cause, who had sold them out, because the next night, there was always something else. Something as bad, or worse. We were losing." He didn't need to say what he was thinking; Tonks could read it in the way that he tensed beside her. The coincidence of the McKinnons being murdered and the Potters being discovered was unlikely to have actually been a coincidence at all. "James and Lily were in hiding with Harry by then. The distance between the rest of us was growing. At some point we'd already stopped really trusting each other. The McKinnons' death just widened the gap further and faster." What he didn't say was something that Tonks already knew; that he still blamed himself for doubting Remus, suggesting the switch to Peter for the Secret Keeper responsibility when the risks increased and it seemed certain that Voldemort would go after him next.
"There are memories in there-" Sirius gestured towards the Pensieve, cold marble in the middle of the dark carpet, "-that don't belong. Whoever did this did it on purpose, hid them here, maybe to cover up something worse, I don't know yet. I don't want to know how they got there, but the ones who cared about those people deserve closure. If I have to watch to get answers for them, then I will. I've had twelve years with my own memories. There's nothing in other people's that will stop me now. It's worth the risk for us to work through it, piece by piece."
The determination in his voice, the real reasoning that they were sifting through so many memories open between them, a series of wounds that had opened in words, left Tonks searching for the right thing to say. Eventually, when she spoke, it was simple after all. "Then I'm with you for it. And you know that Remus is." At the sound of a noise on the landing, her lips quirked slightly. "I give it another fifteen minutes before he finally caves and comes to check on us instead of pacing outside now that Mad-Eye's let him away from the maps."
"Fifteen?" Sirius turned his head towards her, lifted an eyebrow and gave her an affectionate nudge in the side with his elbow. "A Sickle says it's five. We worry him, I think."
"Yeah?" she asked.
"I don't think Moony's quite sure if we're going to make the house explode or not in here between us. Does his head in that he can't help, I think, though he's not said much." The way that Sirius pursed his lips indicated that Remus wasn't the only one not pleased with the situation. Tonks nodded in agreement, then narrowed her eyes. "You did tell him the exact details of what we're doing anyway, didn't you?"
Sirius looked mildly affronted. "Of course I did, what do you take me for?" Then, a sly grin, an obvious defence mechanism, a return to type after having revealed so much at once. "The man would get it out of you anyway, with the amount the two of you stare after one another when you think the other isn't looking."
As it turned out, they were both wrong, because the door opened an instant after Sirius had spoken to reveal Remus. When he observed how worn out they obviously were, the way that they had sat on the floor, he drew both of them from the room, the door closed and locked behind them. His quiet insistence that they cease burning the candle at both ends and rest before he forcibly made them, ethics be damned, was more effective than any number of admonishments from others might have been. Overtired as they all were, sleep wasn't going to come easily any time soon, and they all knew it. Instead, they gathered in the lounge before the fire in a collective silence that no one else disrupted. Though none of them spoke much, there was a relief to hearing the small shifts of each other's movements, the physicality of clothing rustling and the way that the warmth of the flames lulled them into a faint haze of weary thought. In the quiet, Tonks considered Sirius' fierce determination, born of loss, and Remus' unyielding strength, formed from adversity, with both sadness and gratitude.
Two nights later, Thorfinn Rowle finally moved.