Fic: Faces (Tonks, G)

[roh-wyn.livejournal.com]

Title: Faces
Author: roh_wyn
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Prompt: 101–Why couldn't she have two lives, or why couldn't she be satisfied in one place?—Nella Larsen.
Summary: She wears too many faces to know which one is really hers.

Tonks looked down at the parchment she had been scribbling on for the past hour. It was barely legible, now that it was covered in struck out sentences, ink spots and random doodles she had made in the margins as her attention wandered.

“Why do you want to be an Auror?” It was question number fourteen on the Ministry of Magic’s application form for the Auror training program, and Tonks was having all sorts of trouble answering it. It was odd that, of all things, this, a question on a piece of parchment, would be the thing to defeat her.

What made this so difficult anyway? It was not that she had never thought about it before, of course. She had wanted to be an Auror for as long as she could remember. But to somehow crystallize a lifelong desire into just a few sentences was proving to be extremely complicated. For one, she was not sure that just a few sentences would be enough. For another, she was just beginning to see that answering this question honestly meant answering other questions about herself.

The first and foremost of those questions was also the most obvious one. Who was she?

Nymphadora Tonks. Daughter of Ted Tonks and Andromeda Black. That was her first identity, and it was a thing unto itself, for she was the product of the wizarding world’s most unusual match. Andromeda was an extraordinary witch, even by the exacting standards of her family (if not for her errant mind and fickle heart, as Auntie Narcissa always said), and in spite of her marriage to Ted, she remained as Black as possible, chasing perfection and grace with a seriousness of purpose that would have made even Walburga Black proud.

For Ted Tonks, on the other hand, being a wizard was completely incidental, and he remained resolutely and unabashedly as Muggle as possible. He watched football instead of Quidditch, insisting on seeing his Muggle friends and relatives regularly, and continued to tell the sort of jokes that got wizards kicked out of The Three Broomsticks. It was a source of eternal disappointment to Andromeda that her daughter had turned out more Tonks than Black.

Nymphadora Tonks. Relative of Sirius Black. Somehow, over the years, Sirius Black had become part of her identity, even though she had never met the man. When she was just old enough to understand, her mother had explained to her about cousin Sirius and the terrible thing he had done. It was listening to the stories about Sirius’s heinous crime that had first put the thought of becoming an Auror into her head. The details were always a bit patchy, but the gist was that Sirius was the sort of person who betrayed his friends and his kin, the sort of person you could not possibly trust, the sort of person who needed to be locked away in Azkaban. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of people in the world willing to remind her that she was related to this sort of person, and therefore, by association, she was just that sort of person as well.

Nymphadora Tonks. Student at Hogwarts. Her years at school had been the most difficult years of her life so far. She had been happy to get away from home, to experience a new sort of freedom, to perhaps rebel a little and forge a new identity. But as hard as she tried, there was no getting away from things like her parents’ legacy as runaways, the seemingly endless stories about Sirius Black. These things had followed her to Hogwarts, and become the things people whispered about her in the dark corners of the Hufflepuff common room. She had survived it all with wit and determination, and had somehow, inexplicably, and perhaps by accident, discovered a brand new identity. She was an extraordinarily good witch.

These identities, as daughter, relative, student, had helped mold her, but they did not define her. That was a completely different identity, one that was uniquely hers. Nymphadora Tonks. Metamorphmagus. Freak.

She sighed. This, then, was the crux of the problem. It was hard to know who you really were, when it was so easy to be a different you every day, even every hour. She had worn so many faces over the course of her life that she could not say which one was actually her own. Every new morph, every painstakingly collected hair color and nose shape became a brand new identity, a chance for Tonks to be something other than daughter, relative and witch.

The ability to be whatever or whoever she wanted to be should have come as a comfort to her. After all, it was the easiest way to dispense with the awkwardness and uncertainty of being young. But Tonks was clever enough to know that every new face was also a disguise, a way for the real Tonks to hide in someone else’s body. And she had done this for so long that she was convinced the world would never accept her as a person with just one face, even her own face.

Tonks could not be satisfied with just one face, but she hoped to find a single identity that could wear her many faces at once, and still somehow be just her own face. That identity would have to be one that supplemented her existing identities without replacing them, a face she could where with pride and in public, rather than a face used as a disguise to hide from the world.

It struck her suddenly that this was the answer she was looking for. Being an Auror would be a new identity, certainly, but it would encompass all her other identities as well, and not diminish any of them in the process.

She scrunched up the old marked-up piece of parchment and started afresh, putting quill to paper with a renewed burst of enthusiasm.

Nymphadora Tonks. Auror. It was the only face she would ever have to wear again.