Fic: Nightwearwolf, by MrsTater
Title: Nightwearwolf
Author: MrsTater
Rating & Warnings: PG-13 for implied sex and nudity
Prompts: nightwear, "Lights will guide you home / and ignite your bones / and I will try to fix you" (Coldplay, Fix You)
Word Count: 1985
Summary: What had happened between Bellatrix hexing her in the Veil Room and her awakening in hospital that had altered the close friendship they had formed during their year together in the Order of the Phoenix?
Author’s Notes: A new take on how Remus and Tonks might have gotten together, following the battle at the Department of Mysteries. Many thanks to Godricgal for encouraging me to finish even when I haven't felt up to writing, and for hearing all my ideas and being the bestest beta ever. No arguments. ;)
Nightwearwolf
Remus turned to look at Tonks at the precise moment as she, having first cast her wary Auror’s eye over the flight of stairs stretching up before them from the ground floor of her apartment building, turned to scrutinise Remus. If he had thought her leery of the staircase, the sight of him, no doubt noting how grey and ill he looked, made her sceptically arched eyebrow hitch even higher on her forehead, disappearing beneath messy brown fringe. He was accustomed to this sort of behaviour, though not from Tonks, who was normally comfortably and jokily compassionate toward him after full moons; if Mad-Eye hadn't sent them off together himself, he'd say this was Molly Weasley Polyjuiced as Tonks, who was always kind but clearly afraid of him. But if Remus had caught his breath and dug his heels into the worn, dingy carpet, bracing himself for fear from Tonks, he immediately exhaled and relaxed again, having caught the telltale twinkle in the dark eye beneath the quirked eyebrow.
“You’re not going to want to do something noble and idiotic like carry me upstairs, are you?”
Remus sniffed. “I was wondering the same thing about you.”
He watched, straight-faced, as the other eyebrow rose up to join its mate, then turned back to the regard the stairs, shoving his hands into the pockets of his overcoat as a draft stole into the hall from a gust that barraged the front door of the building. Muggle Londoners welcomed the unseasonable cool after last summer’s dog days, while their Wizarding counterparts bolted doors and shutters against the encroaching Dementors.
“You’ve been in hospital,” Remus went on, “but I am perfectly aware of how I look after full moon. The first time I met Ron Weasley, he thought I was dead.”
“Ron told you you looked dead?”
“I was asleep in the compartment. He asked Harry if he reckoned I was dead.”
Tonks snorted. “You weren’t asleep, you were eavesdropping.”
“How else was I to gauge my students’ first impressions of me?”
Remus turned to look at her, and returned her grin, faintly. He didn’t feel much like smiling, but was glad to see her smiling again for the first time since the battle in the Department of Mysteries. She certainly hadn’t been smiling when he turned up at St. Mungo’s, both of them having received owls from Mad-Eye that Remus was to escort her from the hospital upon her discharge and supervise her recovery at home until she was fit to return to active duty. She was annoyed, he expected, to be given a nursemaid -- nursewizard? -- werenurse? Whatever he was. Would she feel any differently if she knew, as he did, that the arrangement had been made far less for her sake than for his? Because Grimmauld Place was off-limits to the Order, pending the discovery of Sirius’ will, rendering Remus, not for the first time in his life, homeless. Because they thought it might lessen the sting of having to accept charity if it were under the pretence of the beneficiary requiring his services.
It didn't. Not when his services clearly weren't wanted.
Only it seemed to Remus supremely out of character for Tonks not to simply say she was annoyed to have someone looking after her. She'd never had any difficulty expressing her immediate feelings. Which made him wonder if there weren't some deeper underlying issue.
"No, Tonks, I'm not going to do something noble and idiotic like carry you upstairs."
She nodded, and said, "Good--Oy! Lupin, you bloody great git!"
Because he was levitating her up the stairs.
"Let's see...blanket, check...pillow, check...sofa, check..." Tonks, now firmly on her own two feet again, despite Remus' mild remonstration when him put her down in her living room that the Healers expected her to stay off her feet as much as possible, looked up from the stack of bed things she'd just plopped down on her worn green velvet sofa that sagged at the middle, appraising him once again. "You'll need pyjamas as well."
Before he could protest that he'd as soon sleep in his clothes than borrow pyjamas from a girl with shorter arms and legs than he, she span on her heel and marched into the bedroom off the room. She didn't cast a Lumos charm, but in the darkness Remus heard a drawer slide open -- overstuffed, he assessed, from its groan on the track -- and the telltale softer sounds of rummaging through piles of clothes. A moment later she returned with a pair of crumpled plaid pyjamas that belonged to a man with arms and legs decidedlylonger -- not to mention thicker -- than Remus'.
As he accepted them from her, along with the explanation that they were some old ones of her father's that she'd nicked, not wanting to meet her gaze as shame prickled at his collar that he did not even have any nightwear of his own that wasn't off-limits at Grimmauld Place, Tonks' twinkling dark eyes drew his to meet her anyway. As they never failed to do.
"Don't tell my mum."
"That you stole your father's pyjamas?"
"That they're not pressed. Mum won't let anyone sleep under her roof without pressed pyjamas."
"That sounds a bit, ah, rigid."
"Quite."
Tonks' mild response was Remus' next clue that not all was as usual between them; as he looked into her eyes, he watched the impishness in them give way to a different emotion entirely. The humour only skimmed the surface of her smile; beneath it lay something that made him think that she was just hanging on to the edge of a precipice by her fingernails, and she was struggling to hold on to whatever shred of their old relationship still remained. It was the way she'd looked at him when he'd visited her in St. Mungo's. His chest tightened, and part of him wanted to ask what was wrong, what had happened between Bellatrix hexing her in the Veil Room and her awakening in hospital that had altered the close friendship they had formed during their year together in the Order of the Phoenix.
But all he said was, "I solemnly swear not to tell your mum you don't press your pyjamas. Besides," he added, "I'm just glad I don't have to borrow girly ones with teddies or kittens on."
She smiled tightly at him.
"Oh bugger it!"
Tonks' swearing pulled Remus from his sleep just before a pair of hands connected sharply with his belly and made him sit bolt upright on the sofa currently serving as his bed. Or he would have sat bolt upright, if there had not been a female figure sprawled across him like another blanket.
"You know I said you could just call if you need anything," he said, blinking up at what he could make out of her face in the darkness. "I may look like I drank a Draught of Living Death, but I'm actually a very light sleeper."
"I couldn't sleep," Tonks said. "And when you can't sleep, it seems so cruel to wake someone who can."
"Sirius never seemed to think so."
It was difficult to tell in the dim light from his wand, which he'd reflexively lit on waking, but he thought she winced.
"I was getting some cocoa." She scrambled off of him, but Remus caught her wrist as she stumbled in the pool of blanket falling over the edge of the couch.
"Please," he said, swinging his bare feet to the floor. "Let me."
"I can get my own bloody cocoa, Remus."
She was struggling in his grasp, but he did not release her. "I don't doubt it, but I'm here to look after you. If Mad-Eye finds out I didn't do a thing for you--"
"You levitated me up the stairs."
"--he'll turn me into a ferret, and I don't fancy that after spending last night in wolf's clothing."
With a sigh, Tonks gave up her struggle against him and sank onto the edge of the sofa. "Fine." As he released her and stood, she added, sullenly or meekly, Remus could not be sure, "Thank you."
But as Remus pottered about with the kettle, he noted that Tonks became increasingly agitated as she watched him from her perch, shifting and fidgeting and clenching her fists and tightening the muscle in her cheek.
"If you're worried about your kitchen," said Remus, "I can assure you, that incident with the cheese at Grimmauld Place was entirely Sirius' doing--"
"Stop it!" She leapt to her feet, and stood in front of the sofa with its tangle of blankets and sheets, looking rather deranged in her teddy bear pyjamas with her short brown hair on end.
"You've changed your mind about the cocoa?" Remus ventured.
"Stop taking care of me, stop trying to make me laugh!" Tonks beat her fists against her thighs. "Your kindness is killing me, knowing that I killed him!"
Her words hung suspended in the air as if under a Levitation Charm, as Remus dangled the kettle by its handle, trying to absorb her meaning. He might have known she was upset about Sirius' death, but--
"Bellatrix killed Sirius," he said, hoarsely. "With the Killing Curse."
"After she duelled me," Tonks ground out between clenched teeth. "I'm the trained Dark Wizard Chaser, and I failed. Because I'm a great clumsy idiot who landed herself in hospital, and it's all my fault you're alone now, and have nowhere to go, and you're being so bloody kind..."
Still not entirely knowing what he was hearing, without entirely knowing what he was doing, Remus set the kettle on the hob and strode from the kitchen to the lounge and placed his hands on Tonks' shoulders. He thought he shook her a little.
"Do you really think I could be kind to you if I blamed you? Do you think I could be here?" he asked. His voice was soft, tremulous, and his hands shook, too, as they slid upward from her shoulders to stroke the soft, warm skin of her neck above the collar of her flannel pyjamas before cupping her chin. "Do you think if I blamed you, I could do this?"
And then, really not knowing what he was doing, he pressed his lips to hers in a firm kiss that quickly gave way to urgency as he realized that this was what he'd wanted to do since he'd first seen her in St. Mungo's...since he'd first seen her, pink-haired and grinning sheepishly up from the floor by her nemesis the troll-foot umbrella stand in Grimmauld Place all those months ago. Judging from her enthusiastic response, it was what she'd wanted, too.
"I don't blame you, Dora Tonks," he breathed between kisses, his fingers raking through her hair, which was turning pink beneath his touch. "I love you, and I can only thank Merlin that Bellatrix didn't take you from me, too."
Tonks answered this by pulling him down onto the sofa with her, where they kissed for some moments, his body stretching out over hers, before she pulled back to look at him. The kitchen light reflected in her dark eyes like light on the water, and even though the moon was only just on the wane, he no longer felt that bone-weary exhaustion that had plagued him since his transformation.
"Remus," Tonks drawled softly as she lay in his arms sometime later.
"Yes, Dora?"
She grinned impishly as she ran her fingers over his bare chest, against which her own naked breasts were pressed. "I reckon all our bother about nightwear was a bit of a waste of time, don't you?"
"Yes," he said, glancing at their crumpled pile of pyjamas on the floor beside the sofa and feeling a responding smile stretch slowly but fully across his face. "I reckon so."
Author: MrsTater
Rating & Warnings: PG-13 for implied sex and nudity
Prompts: nightwear, "Lights will guide you home / and ignite your bones / and I will try to fix you" (Coldplay, Fix You)
Word Count: 1985
Summary: What had happened between Bellatrix hexing her in the Veil Room and her awakening in hospital that had altered the close friendship they had formed during their year together in the Order of the Phoenix?
Author’s Notes: A new take on how Remus and Tonks might have gotten together, following the battle at the Department of Mysteries. Many thanks to Godricgal for encouraging me to finish even when I haven't felt up to writing, and for hearing all my ideas and being the bestest beta ever. No arguments. ;)
Nightwearwolf
Remus turned to look at Tonks at the precise moment as she, having first cast her wary Auror’s eye over the flight of stairs stretching up before them from the ground floor of her apartment building, turned to scrutinise Remus. If he had thought her leery of the staircase, the sight of him, no doubt noting how grey and ill he looked, made her sceptically arched eyebrow hitch even higher on her forehead, disappearing beneath messy brown fringe. He was accustomed to this sort of behaviour, though not from Tonks, who was normally comfortably and jokily compassionate toward him after full moons; if Mad-Eye hadn't sent them off together himself, he'd say this was Molly Weasley Polyjuiced as Tonks, who was always kind but clearly afraid of him. But if Remus had caught his breath and dug his heels into the worn, dingy carpet, bracing himself for fear from Tonks, he immediately exhaled and relaxed again, having caught the telltale twinkle in the dark eye beneath the quirked eyebrow.
“You’re not going to want to do something noble and idiotic like carry me upstairs, are you?”
Remus sniffed. “I was wondering the same thing about you.”
He watched, straight-faced, as the other eyebrow rose up to join its mate, then turned back to the regard the stairs, shoving his hands into the pockets of his overcoat as a draft stole into the hall from a gust that barraged the front door of the building. Muggle Londoners welcomed the unseasonable cool after last summer’s dog days, while their Wizarding counterparts bolted doors and shutters against the encroaching Dementors.
“You’ve been in hospital,” Remus went on, “but I am perfectly aware of how I look after full moon. The first time I met Ron Weasley, he thought I was dead.”
“Ron told you you looked dead?”
“I was asleep in the compartment. He asked Harry if he reckoned I was dead.”
Tonks snorted. “You weren’t asleep, you were eavesdropping.”
“How else was I to gauge my students’ first impressions of me?”
Remus turned to look at her, and returned her grin, faintly. He didn’t feel much like smiling, but was glad to see her smiling again for the first time since the battle in the Department of Mysteries. She certainly hadn’t been smiling when he turned up at St. Mungo’s, both of them having received owls from Mad-Eye that Remus was to escort her from the hospital upon her discharge and supervise her recovery at home until she was fit to return to active duty. She was annoyed, he expected, to be given a nursemaid -- nursewizard? -- werenurse? Whatever he was. Would she feel any differently if she knew, as he did, that the arrangement had been made far less for her sake than for his? Because Grimmauld Place was off-limits to the Order, pending the discovery of Sirius’ will, rendering Remus, not for the first time in his life, homeless. Because they thought it might lessen the sting of having to accept charity if it were under the pretence of the beneficiary requiring his services.
It didn't. Not when his services clearly weren't wanted.
Only it seemed to Remus supremely out of character for Tonks not to simply say she was annoyed to have someone looking after her. She'd never had any difficulty expressing her immediate feelings. Which made him wonder if there weren't some deeper underlying issue.
"No, Tonks, I'm not going to do something noble and idiotic like carry you upstairs."
She nodded, and said, "Good--Oy! Lupin, you bloody great git!"
Because he was levitating her up the stairs.
"Let's see...blanket, check...pillow, check...sofa, check..." Tonks, now firmly on her own two feet again, despite Remus' mild remonstration when him put her down in her living room that the Healers expected her to stay off her feet as much as possible, looked up from the stack of bed things she'd just plopped down on her worn green velvet sofa that sagged at the middle, appraising him once again. "You'll need pyjamas as well."
Before he could protest that he'd as soon sleep in his clothes than borrow pyjamas from a girl with shorter arms and legs than he, she span on her heel and marched into the bedroom off the room. She didn't cast a Lumos charm, but in the darkness Remus heard a drawer slide open -- overstuffed, he assessed, from its groan on the track -- and the telltale softer sounds of rummaging through piles of clothes. A moment later she returned with a pair of crumpled plaid pyjamas that belonged to a man with arms and legs decidedlylonger -- not to mention thicker -- than Remus'.
As he accepted them from her, along with the explanation that they were some old ones of her father's that she'd nicked, not wanting to meet her gaze as shame prickled at his collar that he did not even have any nightwear of his own that wasn't off-limits at Grimmauld Place, Tonks' twinkling dark eyes drew his to meet her anyway. As they never failed to do.
"Don't tell my mum."
"That you stole your father's pyjamas?"
"That they're not pressed. Mum won't let anyone sleep under her roof without pressed pyjamas."
"That sounds a bit, ah, rigid."
"Quite."
Tonks' mild response was Remus' next clue that not all was as usual between them; as he looked into her eyes, he watched the impishness in them give way to a different emotion entirely. The humour only skimmed the surface of her smile; beneath it lay something that made him think that she was just hanging on to the edge of a precipice by her fingernails, and she was struggling to hold on to whatever shred of their old relationship still remained. It was the way she'd looked at him when he'd visited her in St. Mungo's. His chest tightened, and part of him wanted to ask what was wrong, what had happened between Bellatrix hexing her in the Veil Room and her awakening in hospital that had altered the close friendship they had formed during their year together in the Order of the Phoenix.
But all he said was, "I solemnly swear not to tell your mum you don't press your pyjamas. Besides," he added, "I'm just glad I don't have to borrow girly ones with teddies or kittens on."
She smiled tightly at him.
"Oh bugger it!"
Tonks' swearing pulled Remus from his sleep just before a pair of hands connected sharply with his belly and made him sit bolt upright on the sofa currently serving as his bed. Or he would have sat bolt upright, if there had not been a female figure sprawled across him like another blanket.
"You know I said you could just call if you need anything," he said, blinking up at what he could make out of her face in the darkness. "I may look like I drank a Draught of Living Death, but I'm actually a very light sleeper."
"I couldn't sleep," Tonks said. "And when you can't sleep, it seems so cruel to wake someone who can."
"Sirius never seemed to think so."
It was difficult to tell in the dim light from his wand, which he'd reflexively lit on waking, but he thought she winced.
"I was getting some cocoa." She scrambled off of him, but Remus caught her wrist as she stumbled in the pool of blanket falling over the edge of the couch.
"Please," he said, swinging his bare feet to the floor. "Let me."
"I can get my own bloody cocoa, Remus."
She was struggling in his grasp, but he did not release her. "I don't doubt it, but I'm here to look after you. If Mad-Eye finds out I didn't do a thing for you--"
"You levitated me up the stairs."
"--he'll turn me into a ferret, and I don't fancy that after spending last night in wolf's clothing."
With a sigh, Tonks gave up her struggle against him and sank onto the edge of the sofa. "Fine." As he released her and stood, she added, sullenly or meekly, Remus could not be sure, "Thank you."
But as Remus pottered about with the kettle, he noted that Tonks became increasingly agitated as she watched him from her perch, shifting and fidgeting and clenching her fists and tightening the muscle in her cheek.
"If you're worried about your kitchen," said Remus, "I can assure you, that incident with the cheese at Grimmauld Place was entirely Sirius' doing--"
"Stop it!" She leapt to her feet, and stood in front of the sofa with its tangle of blankets and sheets, looking rather deranged in her teddy bear pyjamas with her short brown hair on end.
"You've changed your mind about the cocoa?" Remus ventured.
"Stop taking care of me, stop trying to make me laugh!" Tonks beat her fists against her thighs. "Your kindness is killing me, knowing that I killed him!"
Her words hung suspended in the air as if under a Levitation Charm, as Remus dangled the kettle by its handle, trying to absorb her meaning. He might have known she was upset about Sirius' death, but--
"Bellatrix killed Sirius," he said, hoarsely. "With the Killing Curse."
"After she duelled me," Tonks ground out between clenched teeth. "I'm the trained Dark Wizard Chaser, and I failed. Because I'm a great clumsy idiot who landed herself in hospital, and it's all my fault you're alone now, and have nowhere to go, and you're being so bloody kind..."
Still not entirely knowing what he was hearing, without entirely knowing what he was doing, Remus set the kettle on the hob and strode from the kitchen to the lounge and placed his hands on Tonks' shoulders. He thought he shook her a little.
"Do you really think I could be kind to you if I blamed you? Do you think I could be here?" he asked. His voice was soft, tremulous, and his hands shook, too, as they slid upward from her shoulders to stroke the soft, warm skin of her neck above the collar of her flannel pyjamas before cupping her chin. "Do you think if I blamed you, I could do this?"
And then, really not knowing what he was doing, he pressed his lips to hers in a firm kiss that quickly gave way to urgency as he realized that this was what he'd wanted to do since he'd first seen her in St. Mungo's...since he'd first seen her, pink-haired and grinning sheepishly up from the floor by her nemesis the troll-foot umbrella stand in Grimmauld Place all those months ago. Judging from her enthusiastic response, it was what she'd wanted, too.
"I don't blame you, Dora Tonks," he breathed between kisses, his fingers raking through her hair, which was turning pink beneath his touch. "I love you, and I can only thank Merlin that Bellatrix didn't take you from me, too."
Tonks answered this by pulling him down onto the sofa with her, where they kissed for some moments, his body stretching out over hers, before she pulled back to look at him. The kitchen light reflected in her dark eyes like light on the water, and even though the moon was only just on the wane, he no longer felt that bone-weary exhaustion that had plagued him since his transformation.
"Remus," Tonks drawled softly as she lay in his arms sometime later.
"Yes, Dora?"
She grinned impishly as she ran her fingers over his bare chest, against which her own naked breasts were pressed. "I reckon all our bother about nightwear was a bit of a waste of time, don't you?"
"Yes," he said, glancing at their crumpled pile of pyjamas on the floor beside the sofa and feeling a responding smile stretch slowly but fully across his face. "I reckon so."