Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1/4) - Chapter 1: Puttin' on the Ritz
AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'
Summary: It wouldn't be the Auror Christmas party without a mystery to solve, a spot of mischief, and a very well-earned slow dance.
Characters: Tonks, Remus, briefly Sirius; various minor characters
Words: ca. 7,000 total; this chapter 1,900 words
Notes: My main fic from this winter's rt_morelove event!
By the nature of their canonical relationship (compressed timeline, inherent tragedy, so much personal struggle and interpersonal angst!) I feel like when I write Remus/Tonks so much of it ends up being intensely emotion-focused. Even when it's positive emotions and fluffy moments, it feels like I'm fighting to give them as much happiness as possible before their inevitable end! So with this one I wanted a different focus, wanted to give them something fun to do, a bit of an adventure - showcase Tonks and Remus doing cool stuff as the interesting characters they are, not just having relationship angst. I don't know whether I've succeeded, but that was the intention. :-)
I've borrowed one small but crucial detail from the great Dorothy L. Sayers. I'd like to hope she wouldn't mind!
Written for the following plethora of prompts:
#11, 'I would always rather be happy than dignified.' -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
#9, The Auror Christmas Party
#15, [picture of a really snazzy red dress, here]
#14, 'My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities...like the ability to behave myself.' ―J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
plus a bit of #7, Sirius' Christmas
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'
Chapter 1: Puttin' on the Ritz
Sirius’ jaw dropped.
That sight - Sirius’ jaw dropping - was quite gratifying, Tonks decided with a grin. She turned a little, where she stood on the lowest step of the stairs that descended from the house’s upper storeys, spinning on the spot to show the dress to best advantage, how its stiff folds flared out from her hips and the sleek red contours of the bust and waist shone in the lamplight of the entrance hallway at 12 Grimmauld Place. She’d made her hair long and dark today, and piled it high on her head.
“Er,” Sirius said, still staring at her. He tried again, “Er…”
Remus moved like a cat, descending even these creaky old stairs noiselessly, but Tonks felt him arrive near the bottom of the stairs, a warm presence behind her.
His voice, when he spoke, was richly amused. “Might want to put your eyes back in their sockets, Sirius. Because right now it rather looks like you’re lusting after your baby cousin, and I have to say, it’s not a good look on you.”
Tonks smirked at gobsmacked Sirius, standing there in the hall with his mouth still hanging open. “Okay,” she said, not yet turning around to look at Remus behind her, “number one: definitely not a baby. Number two… Oh, no wait, hang on. I think the rest of that statement was accurate, actually.”
“You look very nice, Tonks,” Sirius said, finding his voice at last but still sounding a little strangled.
Remus, behind her, chuckled and came the rest of the way down the stairs, resting one hand very gently against Tonks’ back as he moved past. That casual touch sent a spike of warmth through her. Remus, usually so cautious, so wary around people, sometimes touched Tonks and didn’t even seem to know he was doing it.
Remus stepped into the light of the hall - and Sirius’ mouth dropped open again. “Erm, Moony…” was all he managed.
Surprised, Tonks took the last step down to the hallway floor, so she could turn and look at Remus properly.
He was in dress robes, as she had known he would be. Tonks’ dress she’d bought new in Diagon Alley, but Remus’ robes, understandably, were borrowed. But these were not just any dress robes. When Sirius had promised to dig something out of the house’s capacious and long-unused wardrobes for Remus, Tonks had figured it would be something musty and out of date, passable enough for a Ministry party but nothing great to look at.
These robes, though, were so out of date as to be in fashion again. Sleek, classic lines hugged Remus’ figure, then flared subtly at the knee. The cut of the robes made his shoulders seem broader and his legs very long. The sumptuous material was a very deep midnight blue, and somehow contrived to make Remus’ brown eyes sparkle more brightly than usual. And his greying hair looked particularly distinguished, set against that rich shade of blue.
Tonks’ own jaw was perilously close to dropping. She would be the first to admit that Remus wasn’t what most people would call classically handsome, though she herself secretly (or not so secretly, given the speculative looks Sirius had lately been casting at both her and Remus) found him plenty sexy. But in these robes…he was stunning.
Remus coughed in embarrassed surprise, with the weight of both their eyes on him. “Er, yes, well,” he said. “This is what we were able to dig out of the wardrobe here, Tonks. I hope it suits.”
“Yeah,” Tonks said, feeling a little hoarse. “That’ll do very nicely.”
“You two are going to be the show-stoppers of this party,” Sirius declared fervently, swivelling slowly back and forth on his heels so he could look at them both - Tonks at the foot of the stairs, Remus standing to the other side of the banister.
Tonks felt sudden joy bubbling up inside her chest. She’d been delighted that Remus had agreed to come to the Aurors’ Christmas party with her - though the fact that he’d accepted so easily, with not even the slightest existential panic, suggested he still hadn’t twigged that she was asking him in a romantic way, not a we’re-just-friends-really-truly-we-are way.
Remus coming to the party at all had been more than she’d hoped for. Then Sirius had offered to dress him for the event, and the two of them had got quite adorably eager about the whole thing, laughing a lot as they dug through all the horrid fashions the house’s wardrobes had to offer, roping Harry and Hermione and the Weasley kids into the search. Tonks was heartily in favour of anything that made Sirius laugh. Or Remus laugh, for that matter.
And now, as if all that weren’t gift enough, she stood with her eyes fixed on a Remus who looked every inch the aristocratic wizard from some romantic, bygone era. (Except conveniently minus the bigotry and arrogance that tended to come with aristocratic wizards from bygone eras.)
She was going to walk into that pretentious Auror Christmas party arm in arm with the handsomest man in the room. And Remus would see, for once, that it was possible for people to look at him with something other than fear.
“Yes,” Tonks said, still riding a wave of giddy happiness. “We are going to be fabulous.”
Sirius grinned at both of them. “Knock ‘em dead, you two. I want to hear all the details afterwards about the mischief you managed to get into.”
Tonks shook her head at him. “There won’t be any mischief. This is about the one place in Britain tonight that’s guaranteed not to have mischief happen.”
The Auror party was a reasonably high-profile event, so the Order would have an undercover member posted within the Ministry (Hestia Jones, under an Invisibility Cloak) just to make sure no one with nefarious plans took advantage of the occasion. And of course both Tonks and Kingsley would be at the party, undercover in plain sight. Plus, at least half the party guests were Aurors. Frankly, it would be hard to find somewhere more secure from mischief than the Ministry tonight.
Sirius smirked. “You say that now. But I know how much trouble either of you could get up to alone, and with both of you together…”
Tonks rolled her eyes at him. “We’re not going to get into trouble. We’re going to eat fussy little finger foods, make polite chit chat, wow everybody with our gorgeousness, and dance a couple of dances. That’s it.”
“Dances?” Remus asked, sounding faintly alarmed. “Tonks, I believe you may have neglected to mention there would be dancing.”
“It’s a party, of course there’ll be dancing!” Tonks said blithely. Sirius, shifting himself subtly out of Remus’ line of sight, gave her a wink. Yeah, Sirius definitely knew what was what, even if Remus didn’t.
“And you’ll be too late even to be fashionably late if you don’t get going,” Sirius said, sounding so much like a disapproving mother that Tonks giggled. “Go on,” he said. “Get out of the house and go have fun.”
Tonks’ giggle faded as she looked at Sirius. He got the fun of dressing Remus up, of admiring Tonks’ dress, of teasing them, but he didn’t actually get to come to the party, which was really the point of it all.
“I don’t mind,” he said quietly, catching her look. “Really, Tonks. Go have fun, force Moony to have some fun even if it kills him, and tell me all about it afterwards.”
“Hey!” Remus protested. “It’s not like I don’t know how to…”
His objections were drowned out under the sound of Sirius and Tonks’ laughter, as Tonks grabbed Remus’ wrist and pulled him towards the front door.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Not entirely unpredictable, Tonks thought. They’d made it into the Ministry (they’d entered through the employees’ entrance and received the little gilt-edged “guest” badge for Remus, since he was her official guest for a formal event, no mere daily business visitor) and were nearly to the wide wooden double doors of the ballroom on Level 7, from which laughter and music filtered out into the corridor, when Remus’ step hitched.
He made it a few more paces, then stopped again. “Tonks - Dora -”
There was no one else in the corridor at the moment; either they really were extremely late arriving, or everyone else was even later than them. Tonks stopped too, and turned to Remus, her eyebrows lifting in a question.
“I’m not sure I…” Remus closed his eyes very briefly, then opened them again. “Is this what you want?”
“Is what what I want?” Tonks asked, though she had a sinking feeling she knew what he was getting at.
“You needn’t feel you have to -” Remus rubbed the tips of two fingers against that spot between his eyebrows where his forehead always wrinkled when he was thinking too hard. “I won’t be offended if you’d rather not have me come in there with you after all. We’re here in the Ministry, the very place that keeps the Werewolf Registry. Aurors are the ones who catch werewolves, when the Beast Division can’t handle it. Even if I hadn’t been rather publicly outed a couple years ago, there’s nowhere else in Britain where people are more likely to know exactly what I am. Surely even attending this party solo can’t be as bad as the liability I would be.”
Now Tonks’ jaw did drop, and properly. “Remus. I didn’t ask you to this party because I was desperate and couldn’t find a single other person who would come with me or something! Is that what you think? I asked you because I think this party will be a whole lot more fun with you there. If you don’t want to come, you definitely, definitely don’t have to. …But I’d like it if you would.”
Remus looked over at her, like he was seeing her properly for the first time all evening. Tonks caught herself holding her breath. She couldn’t begin to guess what he was going to say.
At long last, Remus’ face broke into a sudden, wide smile. “Dora,” he said, turning to her fully. “I hope you don’t mind if I point out how exceedingly unusual you are. I don’t pretend to see what I can add to the evening, but if you truly want me to accompany you to the party, it would be my honour.”
“I didn’t mean to push you into this,” Tonks said, abashed. She’d been so enthusiastic about getting Remus out to a fun event (well, fun in her mind, but as it turned out maybe not so much in his) that she hadn’t stopped to consider whether he’d only agreed to come as a favour to her. “If you’ll be uncomfortable in there, you don’t have to go. We don’t have to go.”
But Remus was still smiling. “Believe me, I’ve experienced far worse than a few uncomfortable glances at a Christmas party,” he said gently. “I’m ready if you are.”
Tonks blinked at him, stunned at the realisation that all his hesitance had been for her benefit alone. When it came to himself, he only said, I’ve had worse.
Right. She was going to make sure that tonight Remus had the best Christmas party ever.
Tonks grinned and offered him her arm. “Shall we?”
(continue to CHAPTER TWO: In the Mood)
.
Summary: It wouldn't be the Auror Christmas party without a mystery to solve, a spot of mischief, and a very well-earned slow dance.
Characters: Tonks, Remus, briefly Sirius; various minor characters
Words: ca. 7,000 total; this chapter 1,900 words
Notes: My main fic from this winter's rt_morelove event!
By the nature of their canonical relationship (compressed timeline, inherent tragedy, so much personal struggle and interpersonal angst!) I feel like when I write Remus/Tonks so much of it ends up being intensely emotion-focused. Even when it's positive emotions and fluffy moments, it feels like I'm fighting to give them as much happiness as possible before their inevitable end! So with this one I wanted a different focus, wanted to give them something fun to do, a bit of an adventure - showcase Tonks and Remus doing cool stuff as the interesting characters they are, not just having relationship angst. I don't know whether I've succeeded, but that was the intention. :-)
I've borrowed one small but crucial detail from the great Dorothy L. Sayers. I'd like to hope she wouldn't mind!
Written for the following plethora of prompts:
#11, 'I would always rather be happy than dignified.' -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
#9, The Auror Christmas Party
#15, [picture of a really snazzy red dress, here]
#14, 'My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities...like the ability to behave myself.' ―J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
plus a bit of #7, Sirius' Christmas
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'
Chapter 1: Puttin' on the Ritz
Sirius’ jaw dropped.
That sight - Sirius’ jaw dropping - was quite gratifying, Tonks decided with a grin. She turned a little, where she stood on the lowest step of the stairs that descended from the house’s upper storeys, spinning on the spot to show the dress to best advantage, how its stiff folds flared out from her hips and the sleek red contours of the bust and waist shone in the lamplight of the entrance hallway at 12 Grimmauld Place. She’d made her hair long and dark today, and piled it high on her head.
“Er,” Sirius said, still staring at her. He tried again, “Er…”
Remus moved like a cat, descending even these creaky old stairs noiselessly, but Tonks felt him arrive near the bottom of the stairs, a warm presence behind her.
His voice, when he spoke, was richly amused. “Might want to put your eyes back in their sockets, Sirius. Because right now it rather looks like you’re lusting after your baby cousin, and I have to say, it’s not a good look on you.”
Tonks smirked at gobsmacked Sirius, standing there in the hall with his mouth still hanging open. “Okay,” she said, not yet turning around to look at Remus behind her, “number one: definitely not a baby. Number two… Oh, no wait, hang on. I think the rest of that statement was accurate, actually.”
“You look very nice, Tonks,” Sirius said, finding his voice at last but still sounding a little strangled.
Remus, behind her, chuckled and came the rest of the way down the stairs, resting one hand very gently against Tonks’ back as he moved past. That casual touch sent a spike of warmth through her. Remus, usually so cautious, so wary around people, sometimes touched Tonks and didn’t even seem to know he was doing it.
Remus stepped into the light of the hall - and Sirius’ mouth dropped open again. “Erm, Moony…” was all he managed.
Surprised, Tonks took the last step down to the hallway floor, so she could turn and look at Remus properly.
He was in dress robes, as she had known he would be. Tonks’ dress she’d bought new in Diagon Alley, but Remus’ robes, understandably, were borrowed. But these were not just any dress robes. When Sirius had promised to dig something out of the house’s capacious and long-unused wardrobes for Remus, Tonks had figured it would be something musty and out of date, passable enough for a Ministry party but nothing great to look at.
These robes, though, were so out of date as to be in fashion again. Sleek, classic lines hugged Remus’ figure, then flared subtly at the knee. The cut of the robes made his shoulders seem broader and his legs very long. The sumptuous material was a very deep midnight blue, and somehow contrived to make Remus’ brown eyes sparkle more brightly than usual. And his greying hair looked particularly distinguished, set against that rich shade of blue.
Tonks’ own jaw was perilously close to dropping. She would be the first to admit that Remus wasn’t what most people would call classically handsome, though she herself secretly (or not so secretly, given the speculative looks Sirius had lately been casting at both her and Remus) found him plenty sexy. But in these robes…he was stunning.
Remus coughed in embarrassed surprise, with the weight of both their eyes on him. “Er, yes, well,” he said. “This is what we were able to dig out of the wardrobe here, Tonks. I hope it suits.”
“Yeah,” Tonks said, feeling a little hoarse. “That’ll do very nicely.”
“You two are going to be the show-stoppers of this party,” Sirius declared fervently, swivelling slowly back and forth on his heels so he could look at them both - Tonks at the foot of the stairs, Remus standing to the other side of the banister.
Tonks felt sudden joy bubbling up inside her chest. She’d been delighted that Remus had agreed to come to the Aurors’ Christmas party with her - though the fact that he’d accepted so easily, with not even the slightest existential panic, suggested he still hadn’t twigged that she was asking him in a romantic way, not a we’re-just-friends-really-truly-we-are way.
Remus coming to the party at all had been more than she’d hoped for. Then Sirius had offered to dress him for the event, and the two of them had got quite adorably eager about the whole thing, laughing a lot as they dug through all the horrid fashions the house’s wardrobes had to offer, roping Harry and Hermione and the Weasley kids into the search. Tonks was heartily in favour of anything that made Sirius laugh. Or Remus laugh, for that matter.
And now, as if all that weren’t gift enough, she stood with her eyes fixed on a Remus who looked every inch the aristocratic wizard from some romantic, bygone era. (Except conveniently minus the bigotry and arrogance that tended to come with aristocratic wizards from bygone eras.)
She was going to walk into that pretentious Auror Christmas party arm in arm with the handsomest man in the room. And Remus would see, for once, that it was possible for people to look at him with something other than fear.
“Yes,” Tonks said, still riding a wave of giddy happiness. “We are going to be fabulous.”
Sirius grinned at both of them. “Knock ‘em dead, you two. I want to hear all the details afterwards about the mischief you managed to get into.”
Tonks shook her head at him. “There won’t be any mischief. This is about the one place in Britain tonight that’s guaranteed not to have mischief happen.”
The Auror party was a reasonably high-profile event, so the Order would have an undercover member posted within the Ministry (Hestia Jones, under an Invisibility Cloak) just to make sure no one with nefarious plans took advantage of the occasion. And of course both Tonks and Kingsley would be at the party, undercover in plain sight. Plus, at least half the party guests were Aurors. Frankly, it would be hard to find somewhere more secure from mischief than the Ministry tonight.
Sirius smirked. “You say that now. But I know how much trouble either of you could get up to alone, and with both of you together…”
Tonks rolled her eyes at him. “We’re not going to get into trouble. We’re going to eat fussy little finger foods, make polite chit chat, wow everybody with our gorgeousness, and dance a couple of dances. That’s it.”
“Dances?” Remus asked, sounding faintly alarmed. “Tonks, I believe you may have neglected to mention there would be dancing.”
“It’s a party, of course there’ll be dancing!” Tonks said blithely. Sirius, shifting himself subtly out of Remus’ line of sight, gave her a wink. Yeah, Sirius definitely knew what was what, even if Remus didn’t.
“And you’ll be too late even to be fashionably late if you don’t get going,” Sirius said, sounding so much like a disapproving mother that Tonks giggled. “Go on,” he said. “Get out of the house and go have fun.”
Tonks’ giggle faded as she looked at Sirius. He got the fun of dressing Remus up, of admiring Tonks’ dress, of teasing them, but he didn’t actually get to come to the party, which was really the point of it all.
“I don’t mind,” he said quietly, catching her look. “Really, Tonks. Go have fun, force Moony to have some fun even if it kills him, and tell me all about it afterwards.”
“Hey!” Remus protested. “It’s not like I don’t know how to…”
His objections were drowned out under the sound of Sirius and Tonks’ laughter, as Tonks grabbed Remus’ wrist and pulled him towards the front door.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Not entirely unpredictable, Tonks thought. They’d made it into the Ministry (they’d entered through the employees’ entrance and received the little gilt-edged “guest” badge for Remus, since he was her official guest for a formal event, no mere daily business visitor) and were nearly to the wide wooden double doors of the ballroom on Level 7, from which laughter and music filtered out into the corridor, when Remus’ step hitched.
He made it a few more paces, then stopped again. “Tonks - Dora -”
There was no one else in the corridor at the moment; either they really were extremely late arriving, or everyone else was even later than them. Tonks stopped too, and turned to Remus, her eyebrows lifting in a question.
“I’m not sure I…” Remus closed his eyes very briefly, then opened them again. “Is this what you want?”
“Is what what I want?” Tonks asked, though she had a sinking feeling she knew what he was getting at.
“You needn’t feel you have to -” Remus rubbed the tips of two fingers against that spot between his eyebrows where his forehead always wrinkled when he was thinking too hard. “I won’t be offended if you’d rather not have me come in there with you after all. We’re here in the Ministry, the very place that keeps the Werewolf Registry. Aurors are the ones who catch werewolves, when the Beast Division can’t handle it. Even if I hadn’t been rather publicly outed a couple years ago, there’s nowhere else in Britain where people are more likely to know exactly what I am. Surely even attending this party solo can’t be as bad as the liability I would be.”
Now Tonks’ jaw did drop, and properly. “Remus. I didn’t ask you to this party because I was desperate and couldn’t find a single other person who would come with me or something! Is that what you think? I asked you because I think this party will be a whole lot more fun with you there. If you don’t want to come, you definitely, definitely don’t have to. …But I’d like it if you would.”
Remus looked over at her, like he was seeing her properly for the first time all evening. Tonks caught herself holding her breath. She couldn’t begin to guess what he was going to say.
At long last, Remus’ face broke into a sudden, wide smile. “Dora,” he said, turning to her fully. “I hope you don’t mind if I point out how exceedingly unusual you are. I don’t pretend to see what I can add to the evening, but if you truly want me to accompany you to the party, it would be my honour.”
“I didn’t mean to push you into this,” Tonks said, abashed. She’d been so enthusiastic about getting Remus out to a fun event (well, fun in her mind, but as it turned out maybe not so much in his) that she hadn’t stopped to consider whether he’d only agreed to come as a favour to her. “If you’ll be uncomfortable in there, you don’t have to go. We don’t have to go.”
But Remus was still smiling. “Believe me, I’ve experienced far worse than a few uncomfortable glances at a Christmas party,” he said gently. “I’m ready if you are.”
Tonks blinked at him, stunned at the realisation that all his hesitance had been for her benefit alone. When it came to himself, he only said, I’ve had worse.
Right. She was going to make sure that tonight Remus had the best Christmas party ever.
Tonks grinned and offered him her arm. “Shall we?”
(continue to CHAPTER TWO: In the Mood)
.