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If she had to describe Remus Lupin in one word, Tonks thinks she would choose full. He’s just so full of everything. Full of the things that drew her to him in the first place; thoughtful, dutiful, even artful in his crafty little charms. Full of things of which she is still envious; graceful, purposeful, insightful.
And now.
So bloody infuriatingly careful. Over-careful.
Does he, she wonders, think she doesn’t see him? Washing her mugs a second time? Balling her socks into pairs with their partners? Wandering around their newly shared home, straightening a snow globe purchased one rainy alleged summer holiday with her parents in Lindisfarne? It is petty, she knows, to return it to its usual jaunty angle each time she passes it neatly arranged on its shelf, but –
There is not a but, she reminds herself. It is her trashy souvenir to position.
It is painful to watch. His almost performative, almost feminine grace. Tonks finds herself positioned sideways on the sofa, one eye on Lupin, slowly and solidly sliding plates into the cupboard, whispering, “Go on. Drop it,” into the night and hoping the darkness will swallow her secret.
“He’s rearranged the spoons in my drawer and now all the ugly ones are at the front.”
Moody is unresponsive.
“And he keeps moving my ornament. Not really noticeably. Just, you know, just enough.”
Not for the first time does Tonks wish she could tell her father about this, but she daren’t yet broach the subject of Remus Lupin, let alone his bizarre habits.
“Hmm. Infiltrated a ring like that once.”
“What, of spoon-fanciers?”
“Organised criminals. Intimidated their victims by leaving no evidence of their presence. A goblet missing from the cupboard here, one vial in the store out of place there. Drove them mad.” His face, even in profile, is dead straight.
“I don’t think he’s in a gang, Mad-Eye.”
He only grunts in response.
“I just don’t know how to tell him to…” She sighs softly. “I just don’t know what to tell him.”
“Veritaserum. He’ll squawk like that fire-breathing chicken.”
“Mad-Eye.”
“And that’s all I’ll say.”
The next morning, she watches him potter around the kitchen, making the same breakfast he eats each morning. He does not weigh out the porridge oats, but his portion never wavers.
“That’s salt,” she told him, laughingly, the first time she watched him prepare this gruel-like mixture which, Tonks presumes, is the sort of thing served up in Azkaban. “The sugar’s in this cupboard with the tea.”
“I remember. Thank you.”
“And I’m not rationing the milk. You can – ”
“No, I prefer it with water.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Really now. Milk makes it much too rich.”
“It’s porridge,” she told him. “It’s supposed to be rich, isn’t it?”
But Sunday breakfast is odder still; silky ink-green paste from a brilliant blue tin. He fries it with two – never three, even if it leaves only one left in the pack – rashers of streaky bacon, fills the house with the smell of salt and holidays, and washes the pan before he even sits down to eat. She watches him select neat little portions on the end of his knife before spreading it on unbuttered, perfectly tanned toast. He never makes her this King of Toasts.
Perhaps not kingly, thinks Tonks one morning, halfway out the door with a piece of charcoal-coloured bread in her mouth. Kingly toast would be dripping in butter, but his is still a damn sight closer than this.
“Ah!” she calls, catching sight of his outstretched hand, poised to perfect the snow globe. “Gotcha! Leave it.”
Lupin steps back, eyes wide. “It’s hanging off again. Look.”
“It’s not hanging off. It’s jaunty.” Popping the last corner of burnt toast in her mouth, Tonks steps back into her flat, closing the door on the end of her scarf and pulling herself backwards. “Just once it would be nice if you let me keep my bloody – ” she snaps at it, unsure how to finish the tirade. She gives it a sharp tug, but remains firmly rooted in place.
“It’s not jaunty. I keep catching myself on it.”
“Remus, if you straighten it, it looks like I’m serious about it.”
His brows knit as he looks at her, then her ornament. “Are you…un-serious about it?”
“Yes. It’s…ironic.”
“I don’t – ”
“It’s tat, isn’t it? Haven’t you got tat?”
“No. If you’re somehow ashamed of it, why is it out on display?”
“Because,” she cries, throwing her hands up, “that’s what you do with tat!”
“Oh, but only so long as you’re not serious about it.”
Giving the door knob a sharp twist behind her, voice low like a teddy bear’s growl, “You’re impossible to live with.”
And looking back at him, prepared for triumph and finding only quiet devastation in his dark eyes, Tonks realises this is not the first time he has been told.
When she returns, her little flat is eerily quiet. She has left it like this before; come home to it after days at a time on shift, then on Order business, and straight back to work until she stumbled into a required day off. But this is not quite the same. Her home had always opened its arms and welcomed her after an absence, enveloped her in its cosy Tonksness. This evening, there is something that aches, a scab at which she has picked.
“Remus?”
Something has squeezed her heart in just the wrong way and her inward breath is half-groan. He is gone and her home and her very self is empty. Again. She sits on the mustard sofa, her coat still hanging limply over her forearm, and stares at the offending item. That…that damned snow globe. Mocking her now. How she wishes it was straight. How she could live with it, straight and unironic, pride of place, for the rest of her life. It is hard to determine whether he will be back, she realises, because nothing of his is here. He asked for a drawer when he moved in and in it, she will find only his clothes. Or at least she hopes this is still the case. She cannot bring herself to get up from the sofa and check. He is, in this moment, both popping out for a pint of milk and never coming home; Schrodinger's boyfriend.
Which explains her snapping, “Where the hell have you been?” only moments later as the door catches on the latch.
The very picture of innocence, Lupin responds, “Is it six o’clock already?”
“I thought you weren’t coming home.”
“Your home is – ”
“Our home.”
His responding smile is almost pitying. “It’s your home, Nymphadora.”
“Don’t – yes, but…”
There is not a but, she reminds herself. This home, this little studio flat in an area she can barely afford and into which she has poured her soul until it feels like an extension of herself, is not his. When the boiler clangs – the boiler hasn’t clanged since he moved in, she realises – but when it does, it clangs for her. It is loud and soothing and oddly familiar; she can fall asleep to it. When the window builds up enough condensation for – she glances quickly to a gleaming window. The room is warm, but she can no longer see the patterns she traced with a fingertip last winter in the fog.
“What did you do to the window?”
“I cleaned it.”
“But it’s all…it looks like a proper window.”
“There was a small crack in the frame. Easily fixed.”
She didn’t want it fixed, she wants to tell him. She wanted to watch her fingerprints bloom there.
“Did you not wonder why it was always so cold in here? You must have been spending a fortune just trying to heat the place.”
“I suppose you fixed the boiler too?”
“It was making a dreadful noise all through the night.”
Yes, my noise, my boiler. But she doesn’t say it.
“I didn’t realise you were so keen on DIY.”
Lupin looks at her as though she has grown an additional head. She doesn’t much care for this expression.
“If you don’t care for things, they break.”
“Yes,” she hisses quietly. “I know. Thank you.”
“If you know, why don’t you do it?”
His aim, she has to admit, is perfect. This jibe has not come singing past her ear as she ducks and dodges criticism, this lands squarely and it smarts immediately.
“I do care about things,” she whispers, not quite trusting herself to speak. She can feel burning in the corners of her eyes and she will not give him the satisfaction, just as she would not give it to her mother as a perpetually clumsy child. “Just because I don’t put my spoons the way you want them and I don’t wash the glasses to quite meet your standard and I somehow always manage to fall short. I’ve never met anybody who cares so much about…stuff.”
She wants him to jump to his feet, to take her in his arms and promise her she is absolutely at par, above it even, that anybody who remotely suggests otherwise will die roaring for a priest. She wants him to do something, but this is not the man she has chosen.
His response is quiet. “If you put the spoons you don’t like within easy reach, you can keep the ones you do for best. If you wash glass in hot water and you dry it immediately, you can avoid streaks, so they keep nicely for longer. If your boiler starts screaming for attention at two o’clock and you can’t afford a new one, you really shouldn’t just drown it out with Eros and Psyche on Radio 8.6 because only worse it’ll get.”
She has not let him catch her falling asleep to Eros Malone on Late Night Listening in weeks, but his raspy confession is so charged with pain that she cannot contradict him.
“But I’m sorry all the same.”
“If this about to turn into your too old routine…”
Lupin’s laughter is mirthless, a hollow sound that squeezes at her heart. When he gets to his feet, drowning out the creak in his knees with a soft sigh, she does not follow him. As she straightens the snow globe, she realises it might be time to move on.
“Ta-da!”
This kind of statement is usually reserved for great victories and Tonks can see the confusion blooming in his brow as she closes the door behind them, shutting out the bustling of a nearby muggle train station. Dagenham is not quite Picadilly and she will miss the lights, the sound of the shoppers, the all-night parties that went on in the flat opposite, fuelled, she thinks, by illicit potions she probably ought to have reported. Still, it’s a lower rent payment and there is a corridor here, her first spare bedroom, and nearby, an off licence, a kebab shop, everything a modern witch needs.
“What do you think?”
“It’s…”
“I checked. Boiler’s brand spankers and the windows shut tight.”
Lupin raises an eyebrow.
“New, Remus. Brand spanking? Spankers? Never mind. And it’s had a new kitchen fitted and it’s only two thirds of the rent payment, so it’s a total bargain and we can…” Pausing for breath, she half-heartedly throws her arms to half-mast. “You know, start again.”
The most infuriating thing about living with Remus Lupin, and she is discovering there is at least a top five, is her inability to read him. He’s careful, even around her; guarded, even when they are alone.
“But if you don’t like it, we can always…” She doesn’t want to finish that sentence. She doesn’t want to find somewhere else when she has already mentally moved in. Or worse, have him say that their current arrangement is fine when she knows it is far from it. Tonks takes his hand gently, as though trying to trap a spooked thestral. No sudden movements, no surprises. “I thought it would be nice to make somewhere ours.”
His long fingers slot between hers and squeeze and in this moment, she has never been happier. And then, it begins.
“Remus, what is this?” Tonks pokes a glass box with the toe of her boot, having almost fallen over it the following morning.
“Oh, it’s a tank. I think I kept a hinkypunk in it?”
“Right. It’s quite hinkypunk-less at the moment though, isn’t it? So perhaps it could live somewhere else?”
Dutifully, he tips it onto its side and, shrinking it, slips it into the bottom drawer of a chest.
Tonks attempts a smile. Slowly, she begins to lose track of the conversations that begin this way. Since Tuesday, she has been introduced to four boxes of photographs labelled 1972 – 75, a talking doormat that is allegedly too obscene to actually put down, and three pairs of glasses, (“One to wear, one for spare, and one…these might be my father’s?”) none of which make him look a day under eighty. Holding up a pair of tartan drainpipe trousers, she only looks at him across the bed.
“Ah, now they’re quite special to me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I don’t think there’ll come a day when I’ll put them back on, but – ”
“Good. Let’s not clutter up the wardrobe and lead ourselves into temptation then.”
But before they can be donated to those Tonks thinks might be about to become a great deal more unfortunate, they have been spirited away.
“You’re a liar,” she tells him, settling deep into the sofa with a gillywater tonic to which she has added unmeasured gin and lemon. “You have more tat than anyone I have ever met.”
“It’s not tat,” he tells her, taking a sip and blowing the air slowly out of his cheeks. “What is in this?”
“Gin – ”
“Yes, I thought I could taste regret.” But there is laughter in his eyes. “I am very serious about my things, which by your own definition…”
Two glasses later, Tonks has tucked her legs up beneath her. “What’s the green stuff?”
As he turns to her, his eyes squint slightly; barely perceptively, but she catches it.
“Merlin’s scraggly white beard, you’ve only had three gins.”
When she imagined a live-in boyfriend, she rather thought a drinking partner, someone to get tight with on Fridays, someone who might know how to shake a bottle like Tom McCorkle at The Basilisk in Boots, might be on the cards. But cocktail evenings, Tonks quickly realises, are going to be few and far between.
“Bara lawr.”
The low and rumbling sound of his voice has warped and Tonks sits up straight, swinging one leg out from under her.
“What?”
“Bara lawr. Laverbread.”
He rolls his ‘r’, the vowel sounds long and languid like a babbling stream in a warm summer.
“Are you…Remus, are you Welsh?”
His responding smile is elusive. “Is it a problem?”
“Just a surprise.”
“Not very, if it helps.”
Wanting to assure him that surprise does not equal raging xenophobia, knowing that his experience of genetic revelations will not generally be positive, but already halfway to the kitchen, Tonks only waves it off. “No, but what is it?” she calls, head deep in the cupboard, seeking out a tin.
It must pain him, Tonks realises, watching as he pulls out a pan and heats a little butter until it fizzes, golden and spitting, to make her his Sunday breakfast food late on a Friday night, but he has left her jauntily placed Lindisfarne snow globe well alone for a few days now. Perhaps, she thinks, this creature of habit, so set in his ways, has made the same adjustments she has had to.
“Really,” Lupin tells her, placing four rashers of streaky bacon neatly under the grill, “you need cockles for this, but my father couldn’t even bear the sight of them, so it’s not quite traditional.”
Tonks, recalling a summer in which her own father purchased a small cone of orange-tipped tadpole-looking delicacies and ate them, pickled and cold, with a wooden fork by the sea, is inclined to agree.
Laverbread, up close and plated, she realises, is barely even a solid food, let alone a bread. Its greenish-black hue, inky like the lair she imagines for the giant squid, is deeply unappetising. Gingerly, she scoops a spoonful onto the edge of a triangle of gold toast. “You never make me this toast.”
“Sorry. I should have cooked it for longer.”
Tonks shoots her gaze up to his. “What, the toast? Why?”
“Every time I see you with toast, it’s black.”
“Not by choice.”
For something that smells so much of the sea, it is oddly earthy in both taste and texture. Genuinely wondering how anyone might find this pleasurable, Tonks manages to swallow. She stares down at her plate. She has seen off worse than laverbread. Two Death Eaters and a petty illicit potion brewer were surely harder to dispatch than this. And yet…
“You still haven’t told me what’s in this.”
“Oh oats, butter, seaweed – ”
Tonks pushes the plate towards him. “Remus, I think we can agree I have made some concessions. But I’m drawing the line at seaweed for breakfast.”
Hopping from her seat, aiming for a grace she does not possess, Tonks takes his face in her cupped hands. Expecting him to pull away, she starts as his slightly chapped lips graze the base of her thumb. Her hips, softer, spongier than she would have liked them but unable to morph now lest she give herself away, have been pushed against his in a cabinet while they spent a night spying. They have been living together for weeks. Admittedly after some instruction, she has screamed gibberish into a pile of pillows. Yet this moment, so oppressively quiet, breathless and warm like an August evening before a storm, is the most intimate she feels they have ever been.
“Don’t ever stop being so full of surprises, will you?”