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The cacophony of people insisting she fancied him had finally drowned out the voice of doubt. It had helped that she’d started being really obvious about it. Or, at least, so obvious he couldn’t avoid noticing.
The unfortunate thing was, knowing didn’t help. It just meant he’d had to look himself in the eye and admit it.
He was filled with longing.
It was a constant ache in his chest.
He woke up every morning missing her.
Not because she’d ever been there in the morning, not because they’d ever done more than share their amusement over something nonsensical… but because while they hadn’t, while it was all unsaid, all unknown, all unspoken… while he’d been able to pretend that his feelings were not reciprocated, it had been safe.
But how would he find the strength to say no to her? She filled his head and his dreams and his heart, and sometimes it felt like she filled his lungs, as though every breath was hers and it was ridiculous and for the first time, he understood why James had been so… lovelorn.
He’d not been brave enough to talk to her. Opted for cowardice and avoidance.
Couldn’t even face Sirius. Couldn’t stand being raked down over this, not when it hurt so much.
He had run himself a hot bath, and played mesmerizingly beautiful records, and let his mind rest on the music until he was wrinkled and run through with sound and the anguish was a dull, heavy ache instead of cruciatus.
He had thought that perhaps he might read before bed… he found himself sitting in his bedroom, in an armchair by the fire, a finger between the pages of a book of poems, gazing into the middle distance, adrift on the echo of the music from the bath, every exhalation pulling him closer to acceptance…
Things that can never be, never can be…
The knocking startled him, and the bedroom door was open before he could respond.
“You idiot!”
She swung the door shut with one booted foot, and stood ablaze with irritation before him, wielding the piece of parchment like a wand.
His whole body expanded with relief. It was fleeting. A moment’s comfort. Gone, as he remembered…
…I feel I owe you an explanation: I am afraid I have grown too fond of you, despite my best efforts to avoid such things. As several people have now seen fit to suggest that perhaps you may not be entirely indifferent to me, it seems the only available course of action is to change mission partners. I do apologise, it has been a privilege to work alongside you…
He had tried to be kind. Kind but final.
“Nymphadora.”
“Don’t you Nymphadora me, mister, this is the biggest load of bollocks I’ve ever read,”
He blinked. It had taken much to tell her how he felt. He had supposed that if she replied at all it would be in writing, her loopy scrawl on parchment, that he would see her handwriting and have something to keep, even if the words were cutting, even if she thought him pathetic, even if she didn’t feel…
“I can only apologise…”
She made an annoyed tch sound, scrunched up the parchment and threw it at him. It hit him square in the chest and landed on his lap. She tore off her coat, kicked off her boots and left them where they landed. Her turquoise hair was red at the roots. It gave her a vengeful demon look that contradicted her surprisingly boring pyjamas. Grey jumper advertising Ogden’s fire whisky. Navy check flannelette trousers. Fluffy socks, one maroon, one dark blue with a pattern of stars. Remus couldn’t help cataloguing the colours. He felt there was nothing helpful he could say.
He’d said all he could bring himself to say in the letter.
“You’re such a jerk.” She cast him another look of loathing and climbed into his bed.
He hated that he loved it. Her insults were always… so normal. Like he wasn’t a monster. Like he wasn’t prematurely aged. Like they were equals, and she wasn’t afraid of him, and she wasn’t awed by him, and she wasn’t impressed by him… like they were on the same page and could say anything…
“You know I’m right about this,” he said quietly, closing his eyes against the vision of her punching his pillow to plump it. She was in his bed. In his bed.
“Oh no,” Her voice had a tremor of rage in it, “You don’t get to pretend to be all pious and self-sacrificing and noble and wise and shit, what you just did was a total dick move, Remus, and I am pissed off, so do not go all polite and reasonable, I’m telling you I don’t buy it!” She glared at him, and when he didn’t respond, she pulled off her left sock, the one with stars, balled it up and threw it at him.
She really had excellent aim.
He knew an impulse to accuse her of childishness, but that might drive her away… which was what needed to happen, so he closed his eyes again, braced to say something, to hurt her a little, just to push her away and keep her safe-
“You think you’re so grown up with your responsibilities, and your struggles, and your secret missions, but you’re nothing but a scared little boy, Remus Lupin, and you know it, and I know it, and that is why you sent me that stupid letter,”
He met her gaze this time. He needed to work out what to say. How to make her understand that whatever else was true, lycanthropy was a truth that could not be denied or dismissed.
“Either you sent it knowing that I’d come straight round and give you an earful, in which case you’re a bastard for being so fucking manipulative or you’re an idiot, and you actually believe everything you wrote, in which case you’re just breaking my heart because you don’t understand that there is nothing you could do or be that would make me love you less. Stop staring at me in the mournful fucking way and come to bed!”
His intense dislike of personal conflict combined with her increasingly thunderous expression propelled him out of his seat. He had intended to sit on the edge of the bed, or perhaps to slide between the covers keeping neatly to the side (why? what had possessed him? He should stay away….), but as soon as he was close enough she had her hands on his arms, gently but firmly pulling him into the middle of the bed, curling around him, slipping under his arm to put her head on his shoulder, wedging a leg between his, wrapping him up in a fierce embrace. He felt…
…loved.
He blinked against the unexpected prickle of tears.
“Nox,” She flicked the light off without loosening her grip on him. It was… quite tight actually. He let his arm curve around her back and rubbed her shoulder gently.
“Nymphadora-”
“Don’t call me that,” she said, and it sounded higher than usual.
“Tonks-”
The little hiccoughing breath twisted his heart.
“D-don’t call me that either,” her voice had a wobble in it.
He wasn’t entirely sure how to proceed. In the dark. With her clinging to him like a limpet.
“You scared me,” this time her voice was a whisper.
“That wasn’t my intention,”
“I know.”
Her fingers were digging into him quite painfully.
“It’s not just the danger, it’s the social stigma, I-”
“Respect me enough to let me make my own choices, Remus!”
He lay in the dark, trapped by her limbs and her words, and the heartbeat of possibility.
“I can’t,”
“Can’t respect me?”
“No, it’s not… Unless you are- what I am- you can’t know, not really, not in the fullest sense of it… and so it’s not that I don’t respect you, it’s that I know that you can’t know, not really, the extent of the risk you’re taking. But I do, and I could never forgive myself if-”
“Would you still love me?” She cut in, blunt, demanding. “If I were a werewolf, would you still love me?”
It was a trap.
He could feel the tension in her body, taut and bound. She was waiting. But it was distracting, being this close, even though it was a bit uncomfortable, even though it wasn’t remotely romantic, or gentle, or lustful or anything really, other than tense, and desperate and stuck.
“Remus. I don’t want to be a werewolf. But you do realise that if your main objection is that I could become a werewolf… If I became one, that objection goes away.”
Ice water. He felt it in his spine. A surge of ice.
“Don’t.”
“I won’t. Obviously, I’m not going out to get myself bitten, but my point is, you want to piss away something good because I might get hurt. Well, I might get hurt anyway, I am off stalking Death Eaters half the time, though chances are I’ll trip over my own feet and smash my skull open on the stairs, so that whole argument is just bollocks. Remus, you’re not scared it’ll be bad, you’re scared it’ll be good.”
Remus had a horrible sensation in his chest. A sort of wrenching, churning feeling, a little like he might vomit, a little like he couldn’t breathe, a little like she’d just ripped his heart out and was holding it aloft to point out that he still had one and it could be destroyed.
He closed his eyes and focussed on far away. The sounds of cellos, and the surge of the sea against the dark cliffs, and the gentle spray of rain, and the feeling of his hands in his coat pockets, and the chill through his damp boots, and the clouds gathering out at sea.
And he stayed there.
Outlining every rock. Every slick blade of grass. The rushing of the waves. The sensation of his ears, of moisture in his hair, what it felt like to wipe a hand across his face and discover his eyebrows were wet… that feeling of safety, of being entirely alone, somewhere no-one else would go, somewhere wild and free and safe…
He knew she was saying something but it wasn’t possible to go back. Not yet. Not to argue about the impossible.
He stood on the clifftop in his mind and felt the howl of the wind through his coat, and the creak of his left knee. He kept the music playing in his mind, the swell of the orchestra, double comfort, double escape…
The pressure was gone. She must’ve let go…
A surge of grief. Soaring, tearing through his sternum, a cry lost on the wind on the cliff top…
But he could stay here, feel the loss, watch the storm break out at sea, feel that the sky was crying for him, feel that the thunder raged for him, and the lightning burnt, so that he could be quiet and gentle and alone on the clifftop, with the rain down the back of his collar, and the curdling shame shrunk down to a puddle in his gut that he could ignore while the wind howled…
Something was changing.
He whipped the storm up into a frenzy, billowing, roiling clouds, but it was all out at sea and the wind dropped away from where he stood…
He tried to summon up that sense of it again, of the wind in his hair, but it wouldn’t come. Something had changed.
Had she slipped out? While he was imagining the seascape, had she vanished? Was he alone in the comfort of his bed, lying on the wrong side of it, but nonetheless safe, and alone…?
No.
She was lying on her side, lying next to him, facing him solemnly in the dark. She’d shuffled away from him, a large gap between them now. All the fight seemed to be gone. She was breathing slowly, mimicking sleep, the slight shine of her eyes wide and serious.
“Are you back?” she asked quietly, gently, as though she knew, somehow, that he’d been gone.
“You’re still here,” he said, not wanting to answer.
A pause.
He felt the darkness of the room caverning around them, and the shadows dim and grey making shapes.
“I’d like to stay,” she said, and it sounded deliberately hushed, like whatever feelings she had she was washing over them with a thoughtful consideration. “I’d like to stay, but I’ll go if you’d prefer.”
Another pause.
“It seems like… it seems like you were maybe ok with sharing a bed. So, if I stay over this side… would that be ok? I won’t- I won’t touch you, I promise, I just… I’d like to stay, if that’s ok with you,”
He could feel the sheets. The slightly twisted rumpled feel. And it was colder at the foot of the bed. He rubbed his feet together, socks sliding.
She’d thrown a sock at him. Before.
“I’m sorry, Remus, I didn’t realise. Sleep well, ok?” And she was moving, sitting up, about to-
“Stay.” It had a slight unreality to it, his voice. As though forgotten in the back of a cupboard for forty years. “Please stay,”
As she settled back beneath the covers, he felt her relief as though it were his own. Or perhaps it was.
He lay in the dark, on the wrong side of the bed, and nothing happened.
He lay there for some time, and felt the creak in his knee, and his body equalising temperature, and his feet warming up, and his breath, and the quiet sounds of her breath and it should have been enough, it should have been more than enough, but…
It was…
A little disappointing.
She was there.
But.
She was.
Not really…
She wasn’t…
He found himself reaching for the dark shape of her hand on the pillow, wrapping his fingers around hers as they curled in response. The relief was definitely his this time. Something felt better. Like the strangle hold on his lungs had been released.
He felt safe, and… not alone.
He thought briefly about what it would be like to imagine her on the clifftop, but her delight at the wind and the rain was too much, and the sun burst in, and he had to leave, because the beauty and the safety of that place was in its isolation. The way she was… if she was there too long, he had a sense the weather would turn golden and there would be families picnicking and children turning handstands and dogs chasing rubber balls and probably there would be laughter, and he would have to leave and find some other place, because he didn’t belong in places with picnics and sunshine. So he let the thought dart in and out of his mind like a minnow, and stayed in the dark room, in the bed, with her hand in his hand, and let himself entertain the idea that he hadn’t lost her, not completely, and if he couldn’t be who he wanted to be with her, he could at least be this, nothing much, nothing drastic, just…
Her fingers kept shifting sleepily, squeezing his hand a little, running smooth against his skin, tracing knuckles, idle and warm.
He let himself be drawn into that. Into the sensation of her hand in his, her fingers, her wrist… the hand that was telling him something.
“What are you trying to tell me?” He whispered in the dark.
Silence, while her fingers traced across the base of his thumb.
“You can have as much love as you’re comfortable with,” she said eventually, “If you can’t ever… that’s ok. I’m not sure I could really, either, not without… This isn’t nothing, though. This is…” she squeezed his hand slightly, and let out a shaky breath, “I feel… better. When you’re around. Even when I’m mad at you, I just… It’s comforting. So this,” She lifted their entwined hands a little, “This is… Thank you. And sorry for yelling before. Bad day. Then, I got your letter, and I just, I lost my head a bit. Sorry.”
Remus turned this over in his mind.
“Do you want to talk about it? Your day?”
“Emphatically not,” she replied, stretching and shifting beside him, and settling into the bed.
The darkness swelled around them. Remus felt it had a gentle quality to it now. His hand felt very warm. He thought about shuffling over, wrapping her up in his arms… but that seemed like too much. Too… confusing.
Hand holding seemed fairly innocuous. People held hands all the time.
Low risk.
And besides…
She was bound to see sense in the morning…
*~*~*
It was a dream.
He knew this, because he’d had this dream before.
This was the dream where he was a wolf. A sort of doggy, live-at-home, family wolf. Not a werewolf. Nothing dangerous. Just a lounge-by-the-fire, gnaw-an-old-bone, dig-up-the-garden type of wolf. An imaginary one.
The kind with squeaky toys, and a ball to chase, and left-over lasagne, and belly rubs and walks in the wild where he could race about in the long grass and go plunging joyously into lakes… the kind where head massage was a daily feature, what with all the pats and strokes and scratching behind his ears… he could never see the people (person?) he lived with in the dream. It was only ever the feel of them, of being with them, leaping up onto the bed and curling up; being lavished with affection and approval; the simplicity of finding them if he was hurt or sad and letting them fuss and comfort him…
This was a particularly good head rub. It almost felt-
Remus twitched awake. Momentary panic allayed by a murmured reassurance and calm idleness of her fingers in his hair, lazily tracing shapes against his skull.
“Oh. Sorry.” Mortifying. As he disentangled himself, she gave a gurgling chuckle and twinkled at him.
“Remus? It’s ok.”
It was as though holding hands hadn’t been enough for his sleeping mind or body or whatever part of him made decisions in his sleep. He’d snoodled up around her, half on top of her, nose tucked in against her neck, and now here they were and it was morning and she was sleep crinkled and regarding him with a warm, affectionate amusement he felt he didn’t deserve.
“I know, I know,” she sighed, and this time her expression was tinged with reluctance, “I’m not going to push it, but… it was really nice to wake up without the heartbreak of missing you.”
She reached up and stroked his face, and there was a sadness now, he could see it, see that she was bracing herself, forcing herself to get up and leave and go away and-
Maybe he was still half-asleep. Or maybe was out of his mind. Or maybe it was the dream and the memory of how good it felt to be loved, how simple to be comforted… He couldn’t stand her sadness, not when he could do something about it.
So he kissed her. And she kissed him back, and somehow they were in a little golden bubble of contentment and he forgot how to think. Though that might have been because she was running her hands through his hair again…