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Nymphadora Tonks didn't go on shopping trips—she went on adventures.
When the cupboards were barer than the "Optimism Board" her mother had foisted off on her; when the pantry was so empty she could have hosted a party in it; when the fridge resembled a plastic-lined tundra more than a food receptacle (and, most importantly, when she was fresh out of other things to do), Tonks could no longer deny the necessity of embarking on such an adventure.
Thus it was that she forged a valiant campaign into the brisk October air, armed with her best bottomless bag (royal blue with lavender stripes) and her pockets full of cash, dressed to the hilt in her blindingly bright orange scarf, her split-pea-soup pea coat, and the cream-colored beanie her father's mother had knit her (by hand!) a few Christmases ago.
"Creative," "colorblind"—what was a few letters between friends?
She'd done her hair a nice icy pink today, a pale, pastel shade like cake frosting, and she drew in grateful lungfuls of tingling autumn air with every stride. It was grounding, pun half-intended, to hear the feeble crinkling of the leaves as she crushed them beneath the treads of her combat boots.
…the boots had been on sale. And she'd cheered them up with some truly divine neon pink laces.
Her breath misting in cheery puffs that dissipated quickly when exposed to the glorious, nose-nipping air, Tonks progressed to the supermarket, where she vacillated with gusto over a variety of potential purchases. Every time her mother called, Priority Number Two was Mission Eat Your Vegetables (Number Three was the Quest for Clean Laundry; Number One was Operation Get a Boyfriend as Fast as Romantically Possible, Preferably without Incurring a Restraining Order), but Tonks was ambivalent. A great many of these oddly-colored objects (she was one to talk) might well just be posing as produce—and did she really want to spend her hard-earned slave wages on vegetables with identity crises, whatever her mother said?
Maybe she'd save that decision until she suffered from noticeable Vitamin D deprivation.
Not, she mused as she moved along, that she'd probably notice noticeable Vitamin D deprivation. How did Vitamin D deprivation even manifest itself? It wasn't as though a big yellow D would appear on her forehead (er, was it?)—and that was probably the only way she'd detect anything amiss.
She peered through the faintly-frosted glass at some of the refrigerator items, then continued on to examine the eggs. She liked omelets and pancakes and French toast drowning in a Canadian maple syrup sea as well as the next girl, but did she need a whole carton? Would she make use of it?
Better question: would she actually get it all the way out to the street—let alone all the way home—without breaking every single egg?
She selected a carton, scrutinized its precious burden to ensure that none of the eggs were cracked (yet), found them mercifully whole (so far), tucked them into her shopping basket, and went straight for the ice cream.
You couldn't break ice cream. Additionally, in her experience, ice cream tended to function like emotional glue when you'd managed to break yourself.
Bread, chocolate milk… she'd forgotten to bring a list, presumably because she'd forgotten to write one in the first place. There were some little packets of raspberries that looked good… Ramen, canned soup, Hot Pockets…
So maybe she did live like an extremely colorful university student. There was nothing wrong with that, was there?
Other than the latent Vitamin D deprivation and the staggering sodium content of a great many of her purchases, that was.
Speaking of her purchases, she lugged them up to the checkout and paid in Muggle bills. Bless her father for teaching her the system; he must have somehow known she'd end up living like this one day. The idea of that sort of prescience in Ted Tonks didn't surprise her. Her father had always understood things, things most people couldn't see and could barely even intuit—he understood those things on a deep, gut-and-heart level, instinctively and instantaneously. She suspected that was part, if not much, of the reason her mother had married him—Andromeda sometimes didn't know what she thought, or wanted, or felt, and being understood was invaluable.
Torrid extramarital affairs with dubious vegetables aside.
Tonks toted her shopping bags down a dim, dank, wonderfully sketchy alleyway, looked both ways, looked both the other ways, and drew her wand.
"Homenum revelio," she murmured.
They'd learned the spell at the latest Order meeting, though it hadn't been very well explained what it was supposed to do. "Reveal human presence"—what did that even mean? Did glowing yellow Ds appear on people's foreheads, or what?
Tonks shrugged inwardly, cast a quick freezing charm on her three pints of chocolate fudge ripple (she always added "of doom" in her head; it just sounded right) and stuffed her acquisitions into her striped Extended bag, which obediently fit them all without growing any larger.
Her errand adventure took her to the department store next; she had been beginning to catch glimpses of her violently-turquoise toenails through her socks. Fortunately, the hosiery section yielded blue-and-green-spotted replacements, replacements with purple hearts, replacements with ducks, replacements with monster faces devouring her ankles, and replacements with a motif of curled gray puppies that looked very much like wolves.
Of course, that wasn't saying much—Tonks saw wolves virtually everywhere these days. The nature channel specials were definitively not helping.
Now possessed of sartorial reinforcements, Tonks popped (literally, if the onomatopoeia was anything to judge by) over to Hogsmeade for a few of the rather less-than-mainstream ingredients required for the cold remedy she was brewing at home. Strangely enough, those metallic Muggle cough syrups stuck in her throat and wouldn't budge, but viscous concoctions full of eels' livers and toads' eyes and various other things the RSPCA probably ought to be worried about went down easy.
Perhaps she had an ingrained genetic tendency to make things difficult for herself. It certainly seemed to be the case.
When she'd obtained the appropriate cups and teaspoons and pinches of her assorted unsavory ingredients, she stuck her windswept head through a nearby door for a Wotcher to the Weasley boys, who quite predictably insisted upon loading her down with a collection of new and untested ("But perfectly safe!" "…we think…") products and samples before they would let her leave.
It was Diagon Alley next, for some of the really obscure bits and pieces, and then, since she was already in the area, she stopped by the junk shop, too.
Tonks had always had something of an affinity for thrift stores. There were frequently gems to be found in their depths, and these gems were invariably surrounded by rocks of such bizarre shapes and persuasions that you could get more than a few good laughs out of the whole experience. Perhaps her favorite specimen was the floral-patterned vase she'd bought a few years back, which had spouted sage wisdom in iambic pentameter at entirely random intervals. It had woken her up in the middle of the night more than once with things like We lie best to ourselves and break our trust / Disdaining truth makes that self credulous, and it had been hell to explain to company why a bit of glassware was telling them to Brush thine teeth twice each day, dentists agree / Lest plaque and gingivitis ravage thee, but she still kind of regretted asking the thing if it knew any Shakespeare, because it had gone all jealous and clammed up after that.
The junk shop door jingled as she meandered in, wondering whether an offering of some silk flowers that sang old jazz or something might make the vase forgive her.
A stopped clock with a blank face and intricate iron hands distracted her from her search for flowers, and a tiny pewter cigarette lighter in the shape of a dragon—if you thumbed the crest on its back, the flame erupted from its mouth—diverted her after that. She held onto it; she had to buy it for Charlie; she could just imagine his face when he saw it… Thence she waded deeper and deeper in among the mounds of knickknacks and towers of crumbling encyclopedias, waiting for something else to catch her eye.
The regular proprietor was gone today, which was a good thing, since he always eyed her as though she was a rainbow-colored bull in a misguided china shop—which was, all things considered, a fairly accurate analogy, but that didn't make it any less insulting. In his place, perched on the stool behind the counter, was a boy with wide gray eyes, dressed in pale pajamas and twirling a slender finger in his curious white hair.
Then again, Tonks didn't really have much right to find anybody else's hair anything other than strikingly normal.
The bell sang merrily again, and, because she'd stupidly made a habit of it even when it was impossible, she looked up, hoping that the newcomer was a certain hazel-eyed, heaven-sent heartthrob she couldn't quite stop worshiping.
Uncannily, this time, it actually was.
She blinked.
"Wotcher, Remus," she (or what probably looked like her disembodied, beanie-clad head stranded atop a stack of books) managed to call.
Remus looked at her, startled, and smiled, slightly disarmed and somewhat sheepish, as if the frugality implicit in thrift-shop hopping was a sin.
Tonks could think of a few sinful things she'd like to do with and to Remus Lupin, but saving money wasn't one of them.
"Hello, Nymphadora," he said.
Tonks tried to get up to retort, slipped on the dusty tassels of the ratty Oriental rug beneath her (so much for combat boots; she'd be dead wearing those things into combat), tumbled to the floor…
…and landed on her bag.
Something crunched extraordinarily ominously.
"Are you all right?" Remus and the pale boy behind the counter asked in remarkable unison, the former coming forward to help her to her feet.
She accepted his hand, figuring that her blush could be attributed to the fall instead. Then she brushed herself off, bit her lip, and smiled ruefully.
"So," she said. "How's about them Cannons?"
"I believe they're tanking," he replied.
The statement just confirmed her suspicions that a real man could slip a terrible pun into a regular conversation without even breaking a sweat.
Tonks was fond of results. She imagined most people were, but most people weren't accustomed to being able to alter their entire outward aspects to satisfaction just by thinking intently.
Higher-ups praised her assiduousness and persistence when it came to Auror assignments, but really, it was based in a desperation to see things through. She liked finishing things, and understanding them, and feeling that her feet were firmly planted on level ground.
She and Remus had had a lovely chat, because they always had lovely chats, which was awful, because it meant that she could stand there, boots munching at the arches of her feet, with a perfectly valid excuse to gaze rapturously into his olive-honey-caramel eyes.
…maybe she was a little hungry. Was peckishness a crime?
The fact, though, that she would withstand hunger and carnivorous footwear alike in order to continue the conversation was what scared her. Remus was that important. She would rather be with him, be talking to him, be having a highly mundane conversation with this utterly un-mundane man, than attend to her own basic needs. That was frightening.
And the best part—for of course it got better—was that for all her unconcerned sacrifices, for all her rumbling stomachs and fallen arches, nothing happened. Eventually they realized how late it was, she bought the lighter for Charlie, they exited the store with a single jingle of the bell, and then they parted ways cordially on the sidewalk. That was it.
She wanted to grab Remus Lupin by the shoulders and shake him until he gave her closure—and might well have, if not for tacitly-recognized societal mores, which extended to not thrashing people in the middle of the street in broad daylight.
One of her would-be-busted-but-it-worked-some-days appliances sat innocently on the kitchen counter, where she set her bag to unload it, and song lyrics sprang unbidden from the well of her memory—Eve 6, to be precise.
Wanna put my tender
Heart in a blender
Watch it spin around to a beautiful oblivion
If only it were that easy. If only you could extract it with tongs (which was a bit like Tonks; clearly, it was destiny) and rip it to little pieces and shove them all down the garbage disposal. She'd be the first to sign up. She'd even write her real name on the list, if they wanted.
The self-help book market should take note—there were enough Change Your Outlook in 30 Days!es on the shelves. She liked her outlook just fine; it was the world that ought to be changed. No, what they needed were How to Dislocate from Your Feelings and Falling Out of Love in Seven Easy Steps.
Tonks plunged a hand into her bag—and then withdrew it covered in egg yolk.
She stared at her gleaming fingertips for a moment, and then she sat down at the table and cried until her neighbors probably thought she'd finally gone and lost it.
Remus hated coming back to his flat. It was always too cold, and too quiet, and it smelled like wet dog.
Admittedly, the latter two features were probably his fault, but the fact that the heater didn't work certainly wasn't. Nor was the fact that the malfunctioning contraption made a great deal of extremely unsettling banging noises at all hours.
The real problem, he realized as he let himself drop wearily onto the battered brown couch (which coughed up a bit of dust in protest), was that it was all too… gray. Gray like his hair; gray like his patched, faded jackets and the white shirts he'd washed too many times; gray like the circles under his eyes.
He was always so, so terrified that his monochrome would overwhelm her breathtaking Technicolor.
He thought sometimes that it was really very selfish of Sirius to have gone and died right when Remus needed him the most. He hated himself for thinking such a thing, but it wormed its way into his head and feasted on his cranial matter regardless of his misgivings. Some part of him said that it didn't make sense to treat someone differently just because they were dead, and that he would have told a living Sirius he was being a bastard, so what else should he think of a dead one?
Another part of him cringed and waved its hands to deny any acquaintance or association with the first part, and another section still was already moving on to the question of what in the blazing hell he was supposed to do without his wingman.
The truth of it… the truth of it was that he loved her, drastically, despite his best and most inspired attempts at staunch denial. He'd always thought it was a falling—that you'd be teetering on a craggy precipice above the sea, thinking Dear God that's a long way down, and then the wind would steal your footing, and you'd plummet into the waves.
And drown, presumably. He'd always been guiltily fond of morbid metaphors.
But it wasn't a falling, and you weren't on a cliff's edge. You were on the beach, with the wet sand between your toes, and it was a wading.
The water was only cold at first.
…and then came the undertow.
Remus pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. Morbid Moony. Charming, as always.
About as charming as the unmistakable scent of wet dog.
…he really needed to do something about that.
Tonks headed back to the junk shop again the next day. Remus must've come intending to look for something, and they'd gotten so busy talking that he'd probably forgotten. Maybe he'd come back.
Tonks was forced to arrive at the rather depressing revelation that she was a glutton for punishment.
There was really nothing to do with the day but to wait for the harried young woman at the Wizarding Employment Office to troll through all the nothing and eventually call him with the lack-of-results.
Remus had long since resigned himself to the lack-of-results.
He had an automatic answering machine, however—he'd always wanted to change the recitation to You've reached Remus Lupin, miserable, fading, pathetic man that he is, and if you're inexplicably feeling inclined to leave this wreckage a message, please do so after the phone beeps at you like a censored cuss word but had never quite worked up the nerve—and he wanted air.
He couldn't remember if he'd appreciated the air as much before he'd drunk it in and filled lupine lungs with its nuances and splendor. Night meant something different to him now, and the sky whispered secrets for his ears alone.
Alone. It figured.
He hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands into his pockets, huddling against the cold and the pessimism both, thinking of pea coats that looked almost as soft as wispy pink curls.
He was idly watching the pavement in case it decided to try to leave chewing gum kisses on the soles of his shoes again when an immovable hand grasped his arm and dragged him into the alleyway whence it had emerged.
Fenrir Greyback slammed him against the wall so hard that stars like snowflakes burst before his eyes.
Or were they snowflakes like stars?
That was probably the absolute least of his concerns.
It wasn't what Fenrir could do to him that made Remus's stomach clench and coil—though the murder written in the bloodshot eyes reminded him that that was quite a lot. It was the fact that this creature was more wolf than man—that the potentiality of such a thing existed and had become a horrible reality.
"You don't look very happy to see me," Fenrir told him through a serrated grin. "Does little Frankenstein hate his creator?"
Once Remus recovered from the shock of Fenrir Greyback making a literary allusion, he responded, as crisply as possible around the thick fingers clenched about his throat, "Victor Frankenstein is the creator, which makes for a very interesting interpretation of the title, consi—"
The thunderous growl that grated low in Fenrir's chest seemed to be his way of articulating that he wasn't in the mood for a discussion on the nature of monstrosity.
And they'd been making so much progress, too.
"Tell me why I shouldn't kill you, Lupin," Fenrir jeered, regaining his good-ill humor (depending on whom you were asking, that was).
There were people walking by. There were people on the street, and they were just walking by. As if Remus's faith in humanity wasn't tenuous enough, they averted their eyes and kept going their merry ways.
Resignedly, he supposed that, given the state of his general being, they probably assumed that he was a closet coke addict who hadn't paid his dealer.
Which was the most laughably absurd idea since someone had thought that letting sapient headgear make segregating decisions would be brilliant, but none of the pedestrians could have known that.
"You shouldn't kill me," Remus answered levelly, "because that would be distinctly unpleasant for one of us."
As Fenrir released a foul-smelling roar and hurled him into a row of trashcans, Remus reflected that perhaps now was not the time to hone his wit.
Thick fingers curled in his lapels, jagged fingernails slicing through the worn fabric.
Damn, Remus thought distantly. I like this shirt.
Fenrir heaved him to his feet with less difficulty than Remus would have liked. Saliva beaded at the edges of the snarl that spread over misshapen features.
"Got any friends left?" Fenrir sneered. "Or is your funeral going to be empty?"
"Hey, Fuzzbucket," a faintly tremulous voice interrupted. "Ever met a shower, or would there be nothing left of you under the filth?"
Vaguely interested, Fenrir glanced over his shoulder.
Tonks had him Stupefied before he could bat a crusty eyelash.
While this advent was incontrovertibly a good one, Fenrir's fingers were still tangled in his would-be victim's raiment, which meant that Remus went down with him.
Tonks squeaked, shoved her wand into the pocket of her pea coat, and raced over to free him.
Debris and trash-bags and Fenrir's sprawled limbs littered the alley, but she didn't trip once.
She pulled him to his feet, stripped off her gloves (which were black at the base, with a different color for every finger), and began inspecting the marks on his neck.
"I'm fine," he managed, slightly hoarsely. "But thank you. And thank you in…" He waved a hand weakly. "…general…"
She caught his hand and pressed it in both of hers. His heart abruptly Stupefied itself.
"Will you come back to my place?" she asked, more plaintively than he would have anticipated. "I'll make tea… I think I have tea… I'll… invent some tea…"
Nymphadora Tonks inventing tea sounded positively deadly, but that wasn't the point.
"I…" he heard himself say. "If you'll have me…"
Tonks scoured the cupboards next to the sink for the lid to that blasted teapot. The thing could've bested a shadow at Hide and Seek.
Had she really done that? Well, obviously she had; the evidence of it was loitering awkwardly around her living room, but how in a thousand hells (presumably what she'd suffer) had she worked up the lily-livered guts?
She'd brought this man, this strange, off-kilter, vastly intelligent, desperately witty, unexpectedly beautiful man, into her home, and she was going to make him tea. What did that mean? Where would it go? What was she doing?
The teapot lid still at large, she glanced through the kitchen doorway, which framed Remus where he had bent to examine a certain lyrical glass container.
"This is a lovely vase," he said.
"Let not th'arduous slope to be ignored," the vase murmured; "The steeper it, the greater the reward."
"Dear God, it speaks?" Remus stumbled backward, alarmed.
"It hasn't for months," Tonks explained, "until you talked to it."
Remus looked at her. She looked back.
They smiled.
Tonks was still smiling when she returned to the hunt for the elusive lid.
Whatever else could and would and might be said, Remus Lupin was a keeper.
Which might just save her a lot of money on self-help books.