Fic: Another Shade of Violet

Title: Another Shade of Violet
Author: happiestwhen
Challenge: Prompt #2 (Character Study: Tonks) of the Transformations Challenge.
Rating: R
Genre: Angst/Drama
Warnings: implications of character death
Summary: If one can become anyone, is there even such a thing as self?
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by J.K. Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Author's Notes: Thank you to my two wonderfully supportive beta-readers, noticeably and sunblossoms, and to ridicu_liz, for just being amazing. ♥
Affiliation: Ravenclaw

~~~

Tonks hates the way the firelight reflects off her pale cheeks and makes them glow, so she gives herself wrinkles. The wise, old woman (who is neither old, nor wise) sits back in the armchair and tucks her feet up under herself as the dying embers shadow her now-calloused skin just the way she likes. The ridges on her skin make her feel like canvas, like a painting, and the firelight is the paint.

She shifts again, kicking her feet up onto the armrest, her features seeming misaligned, her world-weary lips contrasting with young, light eyes. She leans back, though, not caring, because no one else is around. She doesn’t have to put on a pretty face, and hers are all just masks anyway.

She likes to think that she looks a bit like one of her great grandmothers, or maybe grandfathers. She wonders if the gender matters. She just feels old, like this, and it’s a nice feeling, to know one’s mortality but have it be merely passing sensation. She can change back at any time. Tonks imagines that if she tried hard enough, she could shift her physical appearance back further and further in time until she is just an infant. She isn’t sure why this is important but she keeps it as a thought in the back of her mind. It is reassuring.

Before she goes to bed, she morphs into a little girl, no more than eight or nine. She finds this helps with the nightmares, to have her hair curling down her back in golden ringlets and her legs short enough again to curl them into herself. She doesn’t tell anyone this, and as soon as she wakes up in the morning, the first thing she does is change back to what has become her ‘normal’ self. It is by no means normal, and it isn’t her self either. She isn’t sure what to call it but it’s something people recognize – the jutting strands of violet hair and the wide eyes standing out amidst the other features of her face. She isn’t sure that this is her, or if she’s happy with it, but it’s who she has become and maybe no one is ever really happy with who they become.

Once, Tonks woke up in the middle of the night after a nightmare, and when she looked down at her body, she found that she’d given herself a cock. And it was hard. She was thirteen at the time and had been absolutely terrified. It was just a dream, her mother had explained, and it meant nothing. But she can’t help but think about it still, although now her sexual explorations have branched out and become more voluntary. She can be anyone during sex, during any time or activity, actually. It’s funny how she doesn’t take advantage of the talent though. She’s usually just Nymphadora, with violet hair and pale skin and breasts that are neither small nor large and legs that could be longer if she set her mind to it.

Her creativity only shines in dreams.

Sometimes she wakes up not even realizing who she is, but knowing instinctively that she is not the same person she was when she fell asleep the night before. She wonders if her mind plays tricks on her when she sleeps. She once woke up from a dream about Remus and, when she looked at herself in the mirror, found her hair red and her eyes green. It’s strange because she never remembers her dreams as being particularly sexual.

The other members of the Order consider her abilities a great talent. They send her on raids and missions where she disguises herself as a Death Eater, a Muggle, an aristocratic housewife. She wouldn’t mind, but the transformations always leave her feet feeling heavier, and her grip on her wand unsteady. Her new hands don’t recognize the feel of the wood, and the flick and swish is less assured. Even her voice changes, and that is the worst. She hates hearing someone who is not herself speak spells that she knows are coming from her own mind. She’s learned the words but they sound wrong when said in a different voice, with the cadence of a different tongue. Perhaps she never had a voice to call her own.

She is a skilled Auror; anyone can recognize that. She fights boldly and enthusiastically. Even when the spells are caught in her unfamiliar throat like foreign syllables, she manages to speak them clearly and her wand almost never misses its target. When she’s not fighting, though, she is immeasurably careless, knocking things over and breaking dishes with thoughtless magic.

Maybe she’s so clumsy because she’s never become comfortable in this body that is somehow not quite hers.

When Tonks was a child, she would leaf through her mother’s wizarding tabloids, staring in fascination at the advertisements, watching the colors change and the people move. There was one figure that stood out amidst the others. It was a pretty young witch with purple hair and a pale, heart-shaped face. Tonks looked at the picture for hours, memorizing the curves and lines, the way the hands folded and the mouth curled. That evening, Andromeda found her daughter sleeping with the tabloid clutched possessively to her chest, hair changed to dark magenta.

Even when her mother woke her up and scolded her, telling her that violet wasn’t a ‘proper’ color, Tonks refused to change back, staring Andromeda down with newly defiant eyes. Andromeda tried to remember what her daughter had looked like as an infant, and wondered why, in that split-second, she couldn’t recall if her eyes had been blue or brown.

These days, Tonks is quiet, keeping her voice low and hollow, because that feels appropriate, and forcing her hair into muted colors, straight strands that fall mournfully to her shoulders. When she runs errands to Diagon Alley, no one recognizes her, and once-friends give her foreign, confused looks. She feels like a shadow, eyes darkened to black like the obsidian pebbles she remembers seeing one afternoon while out with her father. Her eyes are all dilation, colorless like dark slits in parchment, and they don’t twinkle like they used to. People would see her if her eyes were the same. Now she’s changed everything and she looks strange, not even human.

She wonders if Metamorphmagi should be classified as humans. Maybe they’re no more than parasites. She plagiarizes faces and smiles. She steals identities that she can’t keep. They can’t be permanent because they are all the wrong size and shape.

Running rugged, leathery fingers through her graying hair, Tonks makes a decision.

She casts a charm to put out the fire and rises from the chair. Her brow furrows as she concentrates hard. It doesn’t take long. Soon the wrinkles on her skin are gone and she feels the adam’s apple at her throat bob when she swallows. She doesn’t need to look in the mirror to know what she’s done.

Tonks will go on the raid tonight by herself, because there isn’t a raid organized for tonight. She will apparate to Malfoy Manor, knowing full well that there will be Death Eaters there. She will fade into the backdrop of reality like the picture in the wizarding tabloid. Sometimes she wonders if that’s all she is, anyway. She is a diversion, a laugh, a half-smile, a figure that might be likened to the Cheshire cat, had she the mischief or wise words.

Tonks tells herself that this is foolish, that this is giving up, that the catch in her throat of foreign breath is not worth this. She still has herself, and surely everyone questions their identity now and then. She is still Tonks. But that only makes her gone already.

When she passes the mirror on her way to the door, her green eyes flash brighter than they ever have before. She supposes this is because, right now, they aren’t hidden behind overlarge glasses.

She blinks, wondering what it would be like to look like this every day. If she really wanted to, she could wait and find out. But she only needs this tonight.

Not everyone has the chance to die a hero’s death.

~~~