Sweet Beginnings (3/4)
Title: Sweet Beginnings (3/4)
Author: chococoffeekiss
Rating & Warnings: Rated T/PG for language and a little bit of innuendo, Non-Magical American Modern AU
Prompt(s): hot chocolate
Format & Word Count: Chaptered, 2,402/approx. 7500
Summary: Love's labors pay minimum wage; Tonks is a barista by day, ninja by night. Remus writes, or tries to. Sirius levels up. Feat. other HP characters doing even stranger things.
Author's Note: Hot damn, it's getting late. This installment features a reference to that viral MTV video with the Trio and Draco Malfoy doing American accents, and Sirius's thoughts on Neil Gaiman...
Molly, as usual, was right. He was back at the bus stop Monday morning, the day a teenager tried to steal the tip jar.
Tonks had seen it happen from the corner of her eye and sprinted out into the snow after the thief, apron strings trailing. She caught up a few steps out the door, and with a death grip on the hood of his parka, she tackled the teen face-first into a dirty snowdrift at the base of a leafless tree, using an arm-twisting hold to pin him to the ground.
“Give me back the money,” she demanded, hauling him backward by his collar.
“Let me go, stupid bitch!”
She let her grip on his jacket slip and his face met the snow again. Accidentally.
A few people had stopped what they were doing and were staring - it was the tenuous first seconds of a confrontation and no one knew what was going on. The knees of her jeans were getting soaked and her hands were cold and red from the miserable wind, still wet from washing a sink full of teacups.
Most people would have let him go, but Tonks wasn’t most people. She held him down and asked for the money again, trying to keep him from pulling his arm out of socket.
Trying to be gentle with him was a mistake - the kid wriggled, throwing his head back to hit her in the nose and mouth. Stars sparkled before her eyes and she tasted blood. While she was blinking and stunned, he twisted and threw an elbow with all the strength he could muster. It caught her just below her left eye and she lost her grip completely.
He scrambled out from under her, got to his feet and ran directly into an arm (holding a newspaper) thrown out at neck height. The young man dropped like a bag of sand and Molly’s son Ron, about the same age, held him down and berated him for hitting a girl and hitting like a girl.
The money from their tip jar was scattered on the snow, several dozen dollars worth of damp bills and shiny, cold coins. A woman had started picking it up but the milk bottle it had been in was broken. Molly was standing in the doorway, wringing her apron in white-knuckled hands.
Tonks tried to stand up. Bright drops of blood were landing on the snow in front of her and the ground seemed to tilt. A hand caught hers, an arm wrapped around her shoulders and she was gently shepherded along into the shop.
She felt like an idiot. She should’ve just let him go, but since Arthur’s accident at work this was the Weasley’s only income and- oh god, what if he’d had a gun or something?
It took her a few seconds to realize she was saying all of this aloud and that she was now sitting at a table, having blood dabbed from her nose and split lip by a stranger with a paper napkin.
“It’s alright. You’re okay, everyone’s okay. Well, except for that kid, he’s probably pretty embarrassed right now.”
A siren was wailing outside and she could see the flash of red hair between the hats of two cops. Tonks blinked and looked back to the person sitting in front of her.
“Hey, it’s Newspaper Guy,” she said, feeling a little shaky. Her voice sounded thick.
“So we meet again, Hot Chocolate Girl.” The corner of his mouth turned up, but he kept a straight face. “You know, we should really take the time to make up some new superhero names.”
He had her chin cupped in his hand and frowned slightly, holding the napkin to her lower lip. His hands were warm and he turned her face toward the windows, peering at her eyes - ‘Checking for a concussion,’ the logical part of her brain said. The rest of her was saying something along the lines of ‘Eee!’
His black glasses were gone today and his eyes, now that she could see them clearly, were gray-green-blue-brown with laugh lines at the corners. He was older than she would have guessed and she suddenly felt shy, silly, incompetent. Not that she would have been able to say anything intelligent anyway - thinking had become startlingly difficult at such close range.
“Be still, now. Don’t lean your head back when you have a nosebleed, that’ll make you sick.”
“Are you a doctor?” she blurted out, feeling her face flush.
“No, but I play one on TV.”
“Really?”
His smile made him look about fifteen and up to no good. “No, not really.” He looked over at Ginny, Molly’s daughter, who was watching with a pale face, and said, “Can you get us some ice, please?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Tonks said, with the vague thought that she should ask him something, but the words knocked loose in her head wouldn’t coalesce. Maybe she should just kiss him, she thought dizzily, but her mouth felt numb and she wasn’t sure her teeth were all where they should be.
“Give it a few minutes. That was one hell of a hit you took.” He glanced at his watch and with a look like he was apologizing for running over her dog, he said, “I’m really sorry, I have to go. Do you work tomorrow morning?”
She nodded, holding the handful of towel-wrapped ice Ginny had brought to her temple, absolutely screaming with delight inside as caught her hand again and squeezed it.
"I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Ginny accosted him at the door and forced a huge coffee and paper bag stuffed with pastries into his hands before allowing him to leave.
“Dammit!” she swore, five minutes later. The red-haired girl raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t get his name. Did you?”
Ginny shook her head and Tonks sighed, huffing her hair out of her eyes.
Two police interviews, a job offer and one cup of chamomile tea later, the shock had started to wear off and a dark bruise had started to form under her eye. She took some aspirin and sat in one of the overstuffed chairs in the corner, her head pounding. Ron had been giving her looks that vacillated between fear and adoration for the past half hour.
Molly came around the corner with Tonks’s coat and a bag of frozen peas. “Go home and rest, dear. Ronnie will drop you off. Call me if you need anything. We’re doing your infernal cousin’s Christmas party tonight and I need someone to do drinks. If you can’t make it I’ll have to get Charlie-“
“No, it’s okay, I’ll be there."
Tonks shuffled outside to the Weasley’s old beater station wagon. She slumped into the passenger seat, holding the bag of peas against her face (which was hardly sexy as accessories went, but it felt great).
---
The bus was squealing to a stop as Remus backed through the coffeehouse door, trying to balance the impromptu breakfast the little red-haired girl had forced upon him. A policeman was walking up to the building as he left, his partner was putting the kid in the back of the squad car.
He hadn’t meant to clothesline the boy- he’d only been trying to grab his arm. Hopefully the little thief had learned his lesson - being tackled and shoved face first into a heap of dirty snow by an angry ninja warrior woman would be hard to live down.
Remus walked into the office a full ten minutes late and received a double dose of womanly glare. He held out the bag of donuts and Danish. His agent looked assuaged, but McGonagall did not.
Ms. Hermione Granger was thumbing through a sheaf of papers. She was working in the literary field to put herself through law school and she wasn’t even old enough to drink yet, which was bafflingly impressive even to someone who had graduated high school a year early while in and out of the hospital.
He sat down next to her, across a vast oak desk from a formidable-looking woman - Minerva McGonagall. Minnie McG was Sirius’s affectionate and alliterative appellation for her, though he doubted the man had ever used it in her presence. She had hired Sirius (upon his release from prison) as business manager for the fiction division of her little publishing house at the suggestion of his also astronomically-named cousin, Andromeda, who worked as a publicist.
Sirius had coerced Remus into submitting a stack of manuscripts he’d had sitting in a closet for ten years and now he was here, published and no longer starving but still terrified at the prospect of presenting new work.
McGonagall stared him down over square-rimmed glasses, her hair in tight bun, and he couldn’t imagine her enjoying reading youth fiction. Or any fiction. At all. Ever.
The two women spoke rapid-fire lawyer lingo, stopping to ask him the occasional question, usually prefaced by Granger kicking him under the desk.
“Remus, she wants to know if you could turn this into several installments.”
“Oh. Well, the idea had actually occurred to me-” it hadn’t until that moment, “That I could stretch it out into a series. Maybe a trilogy.”
“Email me an outline and we’ll see.” The editor rose from her seat and swept out of the room in a thunderstorm of gabardine.
“You owe me lunch,” Granger said, giving him a baleful look as she gathered up papers and marched him down the hall to the elevator. “With dessert. I skipped an important lecture on copywriting for this and she wasn’t very happy about your being late.”
“Sounds like fun,” he said distractedly. Now they were crossing the lobby to the exit, her heels clicking on the marble floor. She gave him a sideways look. “Sorry. I’ve had an interesting morning.”
Granger smacked him on the arm with a folder as they crossed the parking lot to her silver sedan. “Lunch. Now. Get in the car.”
When he blinked again, they were sitting at the bar at Olive Garden. He didn’t remember ordering or eating, but there was an empty salad plate in front of him, half a glass of iced tea and some ravioli.
“That’s it. You’ve met someone?” Hermione took a sip of her drink and didn’t wait for him to answer. “That must be it. You haven’t even looked at your tiramisu.” She reached over and pulled the untouched dessert plate in front of her, taking a bite. The kid was astute, he had to give her that much. “And you’ve no idea how to turn this book into a series, am I right?”
“Not a clue.”
She waved the bartender over for the ticket. Fifteen minutes later, she was booting him out of her car at his building and shoving a manila file through the window at him with an order to get to work.
So he did. Or he tried to, anyway.
Ninja Girl from the coffeeshop kept cruising around his brain on her shiny motorcycle like one of those circus stunt riders in a metal cage. He hoped she was alright, wondering if he should drop by and check on her. Surely she was allowed to leave after something like that. But what if she had been arrested for assault? Worse yet - what if she had a concussion…or retrograde amnesia?
His thoughts took off on a soap opera tangent with lots of drama, cheap dialogue and an evil twin before he could rein them in (even though he was certain she was at home with a bag of frozen vegetables on her face).
He had actually touched her, which proved she was real and not a product of his fevered imagination. He couldn’t keep his mind off her. Didn’t want to keep his hands off her - that first touch had done him in. With a little concentration he could still feel how soft her skin had been, the full curve of her lips under his fingers…
He put his forehead on the desk and sighed.
There was a reason for his apparent lack of girlfriend. No woman wanted to play second fiddle to a typewriter, that was true, but it wasn’t just his chosen profession that kept the girls at arm’s length. Hospitals and needles and looming death didn’t phase him, but women… good god.
They were, as a collective, sugar and spice and absolutely terrifying. And resistance was completely futile. Though, as he had discovered, twenty years of being relegated to the Oh We’re Just Friends Zone by most of the women he had ever been interested in would condition any man into leaving the fairer sex the hell alone.
Sirius would’ve cornered a woman, said something like, “Baby, I’d do you on sharp gravel,” and he’d have an invitation to the nearest car/coat closet/dark alley within fractions of seconds. Or he’d get slapped. Or have a drink thrown in his face. Remus’s efforts always seemed thwarted by the lack of that gene that lets some waltz through life without fear (or in Sirius’s case, even the consideration) of rejection.
Or maybe it was the Star Trek references. At this point, who could tell?
Stymied by his own hallucinatory mind, he got another mug of coffee, wishing it was hot chocolate in a paper cup. He picked up a pen and started writing with the hope that he could decipher it all later, in a lucid moment.
It was dark outside when a buzz in his pocket made him jump - the damn phone. He flipped it open to read a text from Sirius, reminding him about the Christmas party that started in half an hour.
He made a panicked dash for the shower and the phone rang impatiently as he was going through the contents of his closet, toweling his hair dry with one hand.
“Hey, we’re waiting outside.”
“I’m on my way downstairs now,” he said, throwing on a shirt, slacks and jacket, left his tie forgotten around the reading lamp on his desk, taking the stairs two at a time.
A black limo was parked at the curb and the door flew open. Sirius hopped out and eyed him critically from haphazard hair to an untied pair of faded Chuck Taylors.
“The rumpled nerd look works for you, but Neil Gaiman is still way hotter.”
---
Author: chococoffeekiss
Rating & Warnings: Rated T/PG for language and a little bit of innuendo, Non-Magical American Modern AU
Prompt(s): hot chocolate
Format & Word Count: Chaptered, 2,402/approx. 7500
Summary: Love's labors pay minimum wage; Tonks is a barista by day, ninja by night. Remus writes, or tries to. Sirius levels up. Feat. other HP characters doing even stranger things.
Author's Note: Hot damn, it's getting late. This installment features a reference to that viral MTV video with the Trio and Draco Malfoy doing American accents, and Sirius's thoughts on Neil Gaiman...
Molly, as usual, was right. He was back at the bus stop Monday morning, the day a teenager tried to steal the tip jar.
Tonks had seen it happen from the corner of her eye and sprinted out into the snow after the thief, apron strings trailing. She caught up a few steps out the door, and with a death grip on the hood of his parka, she tackled the teen face-first into a dirty snowdrift at the base of a leafless tree, using an arm-twisting hold to pin him to the ground.
“Give me back the money,” she demanded, hauling him backward by his collar.
“Let me go, stupid bitch!”
She let her grip on his jacket slip and his face met the snow again. Accidentally.
A few people had stopped what they were doing and were staring - it was the tenuous first seconds of a confrontation and no one knew what was going on. The knees of her jeans were getting soaked and her hands were cold and red from the miserable wind, still wet from washing a sink full of teacups.
Most people would have let him go, but Tonks wasn’t most people. She held him down and asked for the money again, trying to keep him from pulling his arm out of socket.
Trying to be gentle with him was a mistake - the kid wriggled, throwing his head back to hit her in the nose and mouth. Stars sparkled before her eyes and she tasted blood. While she was blinking and stunned, he twisted and threw an elbow with all the strength he could muster. It caught her just below her left eye and she lost her grip completely.
He scrambled out from under her, got to his feet and ran directly into an arm (holding a newspaper) thrown out at neck height. The young man dropped like a bag of sand and Molly’s son Ron, about the same age, held him down and berated him for hitting a girl and hitting like a girl.
The money from their tip jar was scattered on the snow, several dozen dollars worth of damp bills and shiny, cold coins. A woman had started picking it up but the milk bottle it had been in was broken. Molly was standing in the doorway, wringing her apron in white-knuckled hands.
Tonks tried to stand up. Bright drops of blood were landing on the snow in front of her and the ground seemed to tilt. A hand caught hers, an arm wrapped around her shoulders and she was gently shepherded along into the shop.
She felt like an idiot. She should’ve just let him go, but since Arthur’s accident at work this was the Weasley’s only income and- oh god, what if he’d had a gun or something?
It took her a few seconds to realize she was saying all of this aloud and that she was now sitting at a table, having blood dabbed from her nose and split lip by a stranger with a paper napkin.
“It’s alright. You’re okay, everyone’s okay. Well, except for that kid, he’s probably pretty embarrassed right now.”
A siren was wailing outside and she could see the flash of red hair between the hats of two cops. Tonks blinked and looked back to the person sitting in front of her.
“Hey, it’s Newspaper Guy,” she said, feeling a little shaky. Her voice sounded thick.
“So we meet again, Hot Chocolate Girl.” The corner of his mouth turned up, but he kept a straight face. “You know, we should really take the time to make up some new superhero names.”
He had her chin cupped in his hand and frowned slightly, holding the napkin to her lower lip. His hands were warm and he turned her face toward the windows, peering at her eyes - ‘Checking for a concussion,’ the logical part of her brain said. The rest of her was saying something along the lines of ‘Eee!’
His black glasses were gone today and his eyes, now that she could see them clearly, were gray-green-blue-brown with laugh lines at the corners. He was older than she would have guessed and she suddenly felt shy, silly, incompetent. Not that she would have been able to say anything intelligent anyway - thinking had become startlingly difficult at such close range.
“Be still, now. Don’t lean your head back when you have a nosebleed, that’ll make you sick.”
“Are you a doctor?” she blurted out, feeling her face flush.
“No, but I play one on TV.”
“Really?”
His smile made him look about fifteen and up to no good. “No, not really.” He looked over at Ginny, Molly’s daughter, who was watching with a pale face, and said, “Can you get us some ice, please?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Tonks said, with the vague thought that she should ask him something, but the words knocked loose in her head wouldn’t coalesce. Maybe she should just kiss him, she thought dizzily, but her mouth felt numb and she wasn’t sure her teeth were all where they should be.
“Give it a few minutes. That was one hell of a hit you took.” He glanced at his watch and with a look like he was apologizing for running over her dog, he said, “I’m really sorry, I have to go. Do you work tomorrow morning?”
She nodded, holding the handful of towel-wrapped ice Ginny had brought to her temple, absolutely screaming with delight inside as caught her hand again and squeezed it.
"I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Ginny accosted him at the door and forced a huge coffee and paper bag stuffed with pastries into his hands before allowing him to leave.
“Dammit!” she swore, five minutes later. The red-haired girl raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t get his name. Did you?”
Ginny shook her head and Tonks sighed, huffing her hair out of her eyes.
Two police interviews, a job offer and one cup of chamomile tea later, the shock had started to wear off and a dark bruise had started to form under her eye. She took some aspirin and sat in one of the overstuffed chairs in the corner, her head pounding. Ron had been giving her looks that vacillated between fear and adoration for the past half hour.
Molly came around the corner with Tonks’s coat and a bag of frozen peas. “Go home and rest, dear. Ronnie will drop you off. Call me if you need anything. We’re doing your infernal cousin’s Christmas party tonight and I need someone to do drinks. If you can’t make it I’ll have to get Charlie-“
“No, it’s okay, I’ll be there."
Tonks shuffled outside to the Weasley’s old beater station wagon. She slumped into the passenger seat, holding the bag of peas against her face (which was hardly sexy as accessories went, but it felt great).
---
The bus was squealing to a stop as Remus backed through the coffeehouse door, trying to balance the impromptu breakfast the little red-haired girl had forced upon him. A policeman was walking up to the building as he left, his partner was putting the kid in the back of the squad car.
He hadn’t meant to clothesline the boy- he’d only been trying to grab his arm. Hopefully the little thief had learned his lesson - being tackled and shoved face first into a heap of dirty snow by an angry ninja warrior woman would be hard to live down.
Remus walked into the office a full ten minutes late and received a double dose of womanly glare. He held out the bag of donuts and Danish. His agent looked assuaged, but McGonagall did not.
Ms. Hermione Granger was thumbing through a sheaf of papers. She was working in the literary field to put herself through law school and she wasn’t even old enough to drink yet, which was bafflingly impressive even to someone who had graduated high school a year early while in and out of the hospital.
He sat down next to her, across a vast oak desk from a formidable-looking woman - Minerva McGonagall. Minnie McG was Sirius’s affectionate and alliterative appellation for her, though he doubted the man had ever used it in her presence. She had hired Sirius (upon his release from prison) as business manager for the fiction division of her little publishing house at the suggestion of his also astronomically-named cousin, Andromeda, who worked as a publicist.
Sirius had coerced Remus into submitting a stack of manuscripts he’d had sitting in a closet for ten years and now he was here, published and no longer starving but still terrified at the prospect of presenting new work.
McGonagall stared him down over square-rimmed glasses, her hair in tight bun, and he couldn’t imagine her enjoying reading youth fiction. Or any fiction. At all. Ever.
The two women spoke rapid-fire lawyer lingo, stopping to ask him the occasional question, usually prefaced by Granger kicking him under the desk.
“Remus, she wants to know if you could turn this into several installments.”
“Oh. Well, the idea had actually occurred to me-” it hadn’t until that moment, “That I could stretch it out into a series. Maybe a trilogy.”
“Email me an outline and we’ll see.” The editor rose from her seat and swept out of the room in a thunderstorm of gabardine.
“You owe me lunch,” Granger said, giving him a baleful look as she gathered up papers and marched him down the hall to the elevator. “With dessert. I skipped an important lecture on copywriting for this and she wasn’t very happy about your being late.”
“Sounds like fun,” he said distractedly. Now they were crossing the lobby to the exit, her heels clicking on the marble floor. She gave him a sideways look. “Sorry. I’ve had an interesting morning.”
Granger smacked him on the arm with a folder as they crossed the parking lot to her silver sedan. “Lunch. Now. Get in the car.”
When he blinked again, they were sitting at the bar at Olive Garden. He didn’t remember ordering or eating, but there was an empty salad plate in front of him, half a glass of iced tea and some ravioli.
“That’s it. You’ve met someone?” Hermione took a sip of her drink and didn’t wait for him to answer. “That must be it. You haven’t even looked at your tiramisu.” She reached over and pulled the untouched dessert plate in front of her, taking a bite. The kid was astute, he had to give her that much. “And you’ve no idea how to turn this book into a series, am I right?”
“Not a clue.”
She waved the bartender over for the ticket. Fifteen minutes later, she was booting him out of her car at his building and shoving a manila file through the window at him with an order to get to work.
So he did. Or he tried to, anyway.
Ninja Girl from the coffeeshop kept cruising around his brain on her shiny motorcycle like one of those circus stunt riders in a metal cage. He hoped she was alright, wondering if he should drop by and check on her. Surely she was allowed to leave after something like that. But what if she had been arrested for assault? Worse yet - what if she had a concussion…or retrograde amnesia?
His thoughts took off on a soap opera tangent with lots of drama, cheap dialogue and an evil twin before he could rein them in (even though he was certain she was at home with a bag of frozen vegetables on her face).
He had actually touched her, which proved she was real and not a product of his fevered imagination. He couldn’t keep his mind off her. Didn’t want to keep his hands off her - that first touch had done him in. With a little concentration he could still feel how soft her skin had been, the full curve of her lips under his fingers…
He put his forehead on the desk and sighed.
There was a reason for his apparent lack of girlfriend. No woman wanted to play second fiddle to a typewriter, that was true, but it wasn’t just his chosen profession that kept the girls at arm’s length. Hospitals and needles and looming death didn’t phase him, but women… good god.
They were, as a collective, sugar and spice and absolutely terrifying. And resistance was completely futile. Though, as he had discovered, twenty years of being relegated to the Oh We’re Just Friends Zone by most of the women he had ever been interested in would condition any man into leaving the fairer sex the hell alone.
Sirius would’ve cornered a woman, said something like, “Baby, I’d do you on sharp gravel,” and he’d have an invitation to the nearest car/coat closet/dark alley within fractions of seconds. Or he’d get slapped. Or have a drink thrown in his face. Remus’s efforts always seemed thwarted by the lack of that gene that lets some waltz through life without fear (or in Sirius’s case, even the consideration) of rejection.
Or maybe it was the Star Trek references. At this point, who could tell?
Stymied by his own hallucinatory mind, he got another mug of coffee, wishing it was hot chocolate in a paper cup. He picked up a pen and started writing with the hope that he could decipher it all later, in a lucid moment.
It was dark outside when a buzz in his pocket made him jump - the damn phone. He flipped it open to read a text from Sirius, reminding him about the Christmas party that started in half an hour.
He made a panicked dash for the shower and the phone rang impatiently as he was going through the contents of his closet, toweling his hair dry with one hand.
“Hey, we’re waiting outside.”
“I’m on my way downstairs now,” he said, throwing on a shirt, slacks and jacket, left his tie forgotten around the reading lamp on his desk, taking the stairs two at a time.
A black limo was parked at the curb and the door flew open. Sirius hopped out and eyed him critically from haphazard hair to an untied pair of faded Chuck Taylors.
“The rumpled nerd look works for you, but Neil Gaiman is still way hotter.”
---