He Knows
Title: He Knows
Author: tierfal
Ratings & Warnings: G, I suppose. As for warnings, unadulterated fluff alert! And... theological-ish references? Sort of? Something?
Prompts: Sledding
and
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows if you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
(So you’d) better be good for goodness sake.
- Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - Bruce Springsteen
Word Count: 2439
Summary: Christmas morning at 12 Grimmauld Place becomes a little more interesting than Remus Lupin would have anticipated.
Author's Notes: I kind of wrote this in pieces as the parts came to me and then vaguely strung the sections together. Pretty bitty please pretend the mangled lyrics are Sirius’s error and not mine... And as for time period, as usual, I have largely ignored the constraints of the books in order to get Sirius involved. Because I adore Sirius. Probably a little too much. Millions of thanks to eltea for the beta-ing and to ladybracknell for ameliorating my American-ness.
He Knows
Jolted with sinful violence from a pleasant dream, Remus cracked an eye open. Sirius was singing.
Or, more accurately, Sirius was yelling along a vague approximation of a melody.
“He knows when you’ve been sleeping!”
That much was obvious: Not anymore.
“He knows when you’re awake!”
Remus looked grudgingly at the clock. It was six-thirty. The gravity of this revelation took a moment to sink in, and then, with a sound like fwump, it arrived:
Sirius was shouting Christmas carols at six-thirty in the morning.
“He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”
Remus wondered how God felt about the red-suited man challenging His omniscience. He wondered if there was a remote possibility that God might strike down anyone singing in Santa’s favor, preferably one Sirius Black.
“Ohhhhh, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not p--”
There was a shriek, a crashing noise, and then silence.
Merry Christmas, Remus thought, holding back a sigh. He leapt from the bed, galloped down the stairs (his knees protesting vociferously), and careened into the living room of 12 Grimmauld Place, where he found--
Tonks, dressed in a bright red sweater and a green scarf, her hair also red and green for the occasion, helping Sirius off of the floor and brushing pine needles from his back.
“Why couldn’t you use the doorbell like a normal person?” Sirius demanded.
“Because then you wouldn’t be surprised when your gifts were under the tree, of course!” Tonks cried.
Sirius turned to Remus, his eyebrows rising, his scowl deepening. He thrust a finger towards Tonks. “Mister Lupin,” he said, “please inform this impudent upstart that breaking and entering is a crime, not a service.”
Remus turned to Tonks, anticipating her retort.
She didn’t keep him waiting.
“Mister Lupin,” she sniffed, “please inform this soulless monster posing as a man that Christmas is a time for cheer and love and forgiveness.”
Remus turned to Sirius again. “Tonks would like you to know--”
Sirius was eyeing her suspiciously. “All I can say,” he interrupted, “is that you had better have bought me something good.”
Tonks grinned smugly, and one of Sirius’s eyebrows flicked up.
“Really good,” he emended.
* * * * * * * *
Tonks had not technically bought Sirius anything. Rather, she had made him something, and that something was a pink scarf.
She had only taken up knitting a month ago, so the workmanship was less than stunning, too--as if the glaring prominence of the color wasn’t enough. But Tonks knew Sirius Black very well. She knew that he would moan and howl and make a tremendous fuss, and then he would wear the abominable accessory almost religiously. She knew that he would inform people, with the air of a wounded saint bearing the pain for the greater good of all mankind, that his little cousin had made it for him, and he would gleefully reap the “Aww”s that followed, and he would be altogether quite grateful.
She was planning to omit mention of the fact that she had put significantly more time, energy, and thought into the scarf she had made for Remus. It had taken her a full half hour at the knitting boutique off Diagon Alley just to choose the wool, after which she had finally decided on a very soft one of a pale greyish blue--the color of his eyes.
“Instead of attempting to impersonate Peeves by destroying my humble abode,” Sirius remarked, “why don’t you make yourself useful and deal with this?” With a foot sheathed in a red-striped yellow sock, he nudged in her direction an extremely disorganized cardboard box brimming with an impressive variety of Christmas decorations. “Don’t you girls enjoy these sorts of things?”
“Yes,” she responded equably, “although we enjoy hexing sexist boys even more.”
But she started emptying the contents of the box anyway.
“This one seems to be mostly tinsel,” Remus noted, hefting a different container, “if you’re interested.” Almost tentatively, he proffered it to her.
Tonks took it from him and peered in eagerly.
SHINY! she thought.
* * * * * * * *
As Tonks tackled the tinsel--literally enough that Remus worried for both its safety and hers--Sirius snatched his sleeve and dragged him into the kitchen.
“All right,” he prefaced, rubbing his hands together. “You, Remus, m’boy, are going to take cousin Dora on a walk, and you are going to bring this sled.” Proudly he indicated the old-fashioned sled perched on the kitchen table, a construction of varnished wooden slats and red-painted runners.
Remus looked at him. “Why?” he asked slowly. Sometimes, with Sirius--or, rather, most of the time--you didn’t want to know.
Sirius rolled his eyes. “Because walks in the snow are very romantic, as is sledging. Lots of close contact and whatnot. You forget you’re dealing with the undisputed master of all things seductive.”
Remus frowned. “Why would I want a roman--”
“Because you’re in love, you dolt,” Sirius interrupted impatiently.
“I am no--”
“Yes, you are. I know you better than you know yourself and always have done.”
Remus folded his arms across his chest. It was his favourite barrier. “I won’t go,” he decided.
“You will,” Sirius replied blithely.
“And why’s that?” Remus inquired.
Sirius smiled the worst of his smiles--the I’ve-already-beaten-you one. “Because I said so,” he answered.
Remus offered him a sardonic look. “Evidently, I live in constant fear of incurring your terrible wrath,” he deadpanned.
“As well you should,” Sirius rejoined. “You remember when James was too scared to propose to Evans, don’t you?”
“Vaguely,” Remus managed.
“Then perhaps you will recall,” Sirius went on, attempting to suppress his delight and largely failing, “that he had starfish-shaped bruises for a month.”
“I still don’t know where you got that starfish,” Remus informed him.
“A magician never tells his secrets,” Sirius responded airily. “But unless you’d like to see what other sea creatures I can recruit to my cause--I’m thinking perhaps a shark this time; wouldn’t that be dramatic?--you will take Tonks on a nice, long, romantic walk, and you will do it now.”
Remus knew when he had been outmaneuvered. He stuck his head into the living room. “Nymphadora?”
“Tonks,” she corrected offhandedly, raising a battered-looking wreath to the light and frowning at it absently.
“Right. Would you… like to go for a walk? After breakfast, perhaps?”
She gave him a grin that could have lit up half of London. “I’d love to,” she said.
* * * * * * * *
Nymphadora Tonks had known since the first moment she saw the trademark glint in Remus Lupin’s eye that he was far too smart for his own good. But the one thing that the enterprising tendrils of his vast intelligence had not been able to wrap themselves around was the fact that she loved him, and that no one could talk her out of it--least of all him, given that his diligent attempts to be painstakingly logical were only more endearing.
As she fought her way into her coat and he strung his gray plaid scarf around his neck--meticulously, the way he did everything--she wrinkled her nose a moment and brought her hair back to pink.
“Wouldn’t want to attract any undue attention,” she noted airily.
Seeing Remus grin was like winning the House Cup. Or, rather, like she imagined winning the House Cup to be, given that Hufflepuff had never managed to come within even a reasonable distance of so doing. It probably hadn’t helped that she’d thrown things at the back of Snape’s head at every possible opportunity, but that had been classic. Not even winning the House Cup could be that good.
That digression aside, Remus was holding the door open for her. It was just another thing that Remus seemed to insist upon doing, and just another thing he did that her heart seemed to insist upon fluttering over.
Such, Tonks reflected, was the nature of life.
* * * * * * * *
Remus had been trying to be angry with Sirius, but it wasn’t working. The crispness of the frigid air tingled in his lungs, the new snow glimmered with something like mischief and something like wonder, and a young woman by the delectable name of Nymphadora Tonks was smiling at him.
“Go on,” she persisted. “Pick something. It’s the best party trick in the universe, I’m telling you.”
There was a bit more hesitation from him and a bit more prodding from her, and then he readjusted the sled tucked under his arm and pointed to the nearest towering fir with his free hand. “Can you do that one?” he asked.
Tonks considered it momentarily, licked her lips, and then scrunched up her face. In seconds, her hair went rigid and extended outward, darkening like slaughtered hope from sprightly pink to shadowy green, until she resembled what could only be called an evergreen porcupine.
Powerless against the grin that staged an efficient coup of his face, Remus cast an eye over the scenery. Shortly, both that eye and its counterpart lit up, and he extended a finger towards something new.
“How about that?”
Obediently, not to mention speedily, each hair came to imitate the rough, mottled brown of the spindly branch that he had indicated, such that she looked like a rather spiky bush. It was somewhat disturbing, and also, oddly, somewhat lovely.
Except for one small detail.
“I was referring to the bird on the branch,” he noted.
A deeper, darker red suffused the lively pink that the cold had balanced on her cheekbones. “Oh,” she said.
“Not that your way was any less wonderful,” he added quickly.
“I’m an idiot,” she decided flatly.
“You’re nothing of the sort,” he averred before he realized he’d opened his mouth. “You are extraordinarily intelligent and extremely tenacious, and if you weren’t, you’d never have become such a successful Auror, let alone such a brilliant conversationalist.”
There was a very, very long pause as they both attempted to process what he had just said. When the silence but for boots whuffing and crunching in the snow had become almost too much to bear, he cleared his throat.
“Sledging?” he asked.
“Excellent idea,” she responded.
* * * * * * * *
The hill was steep, and the sled was small. Tonks was not optimistic about the odds for an enterprising sledder.
“You go first,” she told Remus.
He opened his mouth as if to argue and then sighed. “All right,” he yielded. He set the sled down, sat upon it, and squirmed for a while trying to fit all of himself on the surface, his knees crammed up against his chest and the majority of his snow boots protruding off the sled’s front. Tonks tried very hard not to giggle hysterically.
She failed.
Remus settled, grinning ruefully, and then paused. “I believe,” he said, “that I will be needing a bit of a push.”
Tonks planted her gloved hands on his back and gave a prodigious shove, and Remus went hurtling over the smooth snow, whooping with what might have been helpless elation and might have been helpless terror.
Then there was a bump, followed by an “AAAAAAAH--OOF!”, followed by a fwoosh. Snow burst upward in a miniature mushroom cloud over the space where Remus had just proceeded to perform a glorious face-plant, the sled lodged in the snow nearby like a triumphant flag to mark the place.
Before Tonks could do anything more than squeak and cover her mouth with her hands, Remus rolled over onto his back, moaning audibly.
“You should have gone first,” he called.
Tonks’s heart stopped beating three times per split-second and began to return to a normal rate, which was good, since otherwise she might have been at risk of passing out on the spot. Not without some lingering concern, she started down the hill, only tripping over her own feet once.
All right, twice, but the second one didn’t really count.
“I think I have snapped my spinal cord in half,” Remus notified her calmly as she approached.
She considered. “Raise your arm.”
He obliged.
“Now wiggle your fingers.”
He obliged again.
“Try a foot.”
His right boot moved back and forth a little.
“Your spinal cord is intact,” Tonks decided.
“As for my rational mind…” Remus began.
“That remains in question,” she concluded. He grinned, and she couldn’t help but return the gesture as she leaned down to give him a hand up. She dragged him to his feet, he groaned something about being too old for this, and she told him not to be silly and commenced dusting him off.
“There,” she concluded. “You’re cured.”
He rubbed at the back of his head idly, and she noticed that there were little snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes as if in fear of abandonment. “My face is freezing,” he announced.
Tonks raised an eyebrow at him. Then she smiled.
As she soon discovered, his lips, at least, were warm enough.
* * * * * * * *
When two flushed, grinning individuals, hands linked, fingers intertwined, walked back into an imposing townhouse full of slightly chaotic Christmas decorations, Remus Lupin, being one half of said pair of individuals, heard something he had dared to hope he might never hear again.
“He knows when you’re together!” Sirius sang pleasantly. “He knows when it’s pure fate! He knows when you’ve been snogging, and he wants to know your wedding date!”
Remus and Tonks shared a look that encompassed mortification, bewilderment, and, subtly and shyly, a bit of outright adoration. There weren’t a lot of things that Remus thought one could know in life--not with any certainty--but one of those things was that, whether it was against Voldemort, the cruel whims of chance, or the implications of voyeurism in Sirius’s invented lyrics, they were in this together.
“Soooooo, you better come clean; you better tell true; ’cause Sirius is mean and won’t feed you ’til you do!”
Remus smiled at her. “Happy Christmas, Tonks,” he said.
She smiled back, and his heart rose--rose like a plump red balloon, the ribbon having slipped out of its owner’s fingers to trail along behind, undulating eagerly as the captured helium carried it beyond reach and off into the bright, open sky. “Happy Christmas, Remus,” she replied. She pushed herself up on her toes and kissed him again.
Remus might have heard Sirius cackling maniacally from the kitchen, but he was a bit too happy to tell for sure.
Author: tierfal
Ratings & Warnings: G, I suppose. As for warnings, unadulterated fluff alert! And... theological-ish references? Sort of? Something?
Prompts: Sledding
and
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows if you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
(So you’d) better be good for goodness sake.
- Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - Bruce Springsteen
Word Count: 2439
Summary: Christmas morning at 12 Grimmauld Place becomes a little more interesting than Remus Lupin would have anticipated.
Author's Notes: I kind of wrote this in pieces as the parts came to me and then vaguely strung the sections together. Pretty bitty please pretend the mangled lyrics are Sirius’s error and not mine... And as for time period, as usual, I have largely ignored the constraints of the books in order to get Sirius involved. Because I adore Sirius. Probably a little too much. Millions of thanks to eltea for the beta-ing and to ladybracknell for ameliorating my American-ness.
He Knows
Jolted with sinful violence from a pleasant dream, Remus cracked an eye open. Sirius was singing.
Or, more accurately, Sirius was yelling along a vague approximation of a melody.
“He knows when you’ve been sleeping!”
That much was obvious: Not anymore.
“He knows when you’re awake!”
Remus looked grudgingly at the clock. It was six-thirty. The gravity of this revelation took a moment to sink in, and then, with a sound like fwump, it arrived:
Sirius was shouting Christmas carols at six-thirty in the morning.
“He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”
Remus wondered how God felt about the red-suited man challenging His omniscience. He wondered if there was a remote possibility that God might strike down anyone singing in Santa’s favor, preferably one Sirius Black.
“Ohhhhh, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not p--”
There was a shriek, a crashing noise, and then silence.
Merry Christmas, Remus thought, holding back a sigh. He leapt from the bed, galloped down the stairs (his knees protesting vociferously), and careened into the living room of 12 Grimmauld Place, where he found--
Tonks, dressed in a bright red sweater and a green scarf, her hair also red and green for the occasion, helping Sirius off of the floor and brushing pine needles from his back.
“Why couldn’t you use the doorbell like a normal person?” Sirius demanded.
“Because then you wouldn’t be surprised when your gifts were under the tree, of course!” Tonks cried.
Sirius turned to Remus, his eyebrows rising, his scowl deepening. He thrust a finger towards Tonks. “Mister Lupin,” he said, “please inform this impudent upstart that breaking and entering is a crime, not a service.”
Remus turned to Tonks, anticipating her retort.
She didn’t keep him waiting.
“Mister Lupin,” she sniffed, “please inform this soulless monster posing as a man that Christmas is a time for cheer and love and forgiveness.”
Remus turned to Sirius again. “Tonks would like you to know--”
Sirius was eyeing her suspiciously. “All I can say,” he interrupted, “is that you had better have bought me something good.”
Tonks grinned smugly, and one of Sirius’s eyebrows flicked up.
“Really good,” he emended.
* * * * * * * *
Tonks had not technically bought Sirius anything. Rather, she had made him something, and that something was a pink scarf.
She had only taken up knitting a month ago, so the workmanship was less than stunning, too--as if the glaring prominence of the color wasn’t enough. But Tonks knew Sirius Black very well. She knew that he would moan and howl and make a tremendous fuss, and then he would wear the abominable accessory almost religiously. She knew that he would inform people, with the air of a wounded saint bearing the pain for the greater good of all mankind, that his little cousin had made it for him, and he would gleefully reap the “Aww”s that followed, and he would be altogether quite grateful.
She was planning to omit mention of the fact that she had put significantly more time, energy, and thought into the scarf she had made for Remus. It had taken her a full half hour at the knitting boutique off Diagon Alley just to choose the wool, after which she had finally decided on a very soft one of a pale greyish blue--the color of his eyes.
“Instead of attempting to impersonate Peeves by destroying my humble abode,” Sirius remarked, “why don’t you make yourself useful and deal with this?” With a foot sheathed in a red-striped yellow sock, he nudged in her direction an extremely disorganized cardboard box brimming with an impressive variety of Christmas decorations. “Don’t you girls enjoy these sorts of things?”
“Yes,” she responded equably, “although we enjoy hexing sexist boys even more.”
But she started emptying the contents of the box anyway.
“This one seems to be mostly tinsel,” Remus noted, hefting a different container, “if you’re interested.” Almost tentatively, he proffered it to her.
Tonks took it from him and peered in eagerly.
SHINY! she thought.
* * * * * * * *
As Tonks tackled the tinsel--literally enough that Remus worried for both its safety and hers--Sirius snatched his sleeve and dragged him into the kitchen.
“All right,” he prefaced, rubbing his hands together. “You, Remus, m’boy, are going to take cousin Dora on a walk, and you are going to bring this sled.” Proudly he indicated the old-fashioned sled perched on the kitchen table, a construction of varnished wooden slats and red-painted runners.
Remus looked at him. “Why?” he asked slowly. Sometimes, with Sirius--or, rather, most of the time--you didn’t want to know.
Sirius rolled his eyes. “Because walks in the snow are very romantic, as is sledging. Lots of close contact and whatnot. You forget you’re dealing with the undisputed master of all things seductive.”
Remus frowned. “Why would I want a roman--”
“Because you’re in love, you dolt,” Sirius interrupted impatiently.
“I am no--”
“Yes, you are. I know you better than you know yourself and always have done.”
Remus folded his arms across his chest. It was his favourite barrier. “I won’t go,” he decided.
“You will,” Sirius replied blithely.
“And why’s that?” Remus inquired.
Sirius smiled the worst of his smiles--the I’ve-already-beaten-you one. “Because I said so,” he answered.
Remus offered him a sardonic look. “Evidently, I live in constant fear of incurring your terrible wrath,” he deadpanned.
“As well you should,” Sirius rejoined. “You remember when James was too scared to propose to Evans, don’t you?”
“Vaguely,” Remus managed.
“Then perhaps you will recall,” Sirius went on, attempting to suppress his delight and largely failing, “that he had starfish-shaped bruises for a month.”
“I still don’t know where you got that starfish,” Remus informed him.
“A magician never tells his secrets,” Sirius responded airily. “But unless you’d like to see what other sea creatures I can recruit to my cause--I’m thinking perhaps a shark this time; wouldn’t that be dramatic?--you will take Tonks on a nice, long, romantic walk, and you will do it now.”
Remus knew when he had been outmaneuvered. He stuck his head into the living room. “Nymphadora?”
“Tonks,” she corrected offhandedly, raising a battered-looking wreath to the light and frowning at it absently.
“Right. Would you… like to go for a walk? After breakfast, perhaps?”
She gave him a grin that could have lit up half of London. “I’d love to,” she said.
* * * * * * * *
Nymphadora Tonks had known since the first moment she saw the trademark glint in Remus Lupin’s eye that he was far too smart for his own good. But the one thing that the enterprising tendrils of his vast intelligence had not been able to wrap themselves around was the fact that she loved him, and that no one could talk her out of it--least of all him, given that his diligent attempts to be painstakingly logical were only more endearing.
As she fought her way into her coat and he strung his gray plaid scarf around his neck--meticulously, the way he did everything--she wrinkled her nose a moment and brought her hair back to pink.
“Wouldn’t want to attract any undue attention,” she noted airily.
Seeing Remus grin was like winning the House Cup. Or, rather, like she imagined winning the House Cup to be, given that Hufflepuff had never managed to come within even a reasonable distance of so doing. It probably hadn’t helped that she’d thrown things at the back of Snape’s head at every possible opportunity, but that had been classic. Not even winning the House Cup could be that good.
That digression aside, Remus was holding the door open for her. It was just another thing that Remus seemed to insist upon doing, and just another thing he did that her heart seemed to insist upon fluttering over.
Such, Tonks reflected, was the nature of life.
* * * * * * * *
Remus had been trying to be angry with Sirius, but it wasn’t working. The crispness of the frigid air tingled in his lungs, the new snow glimmered with something like mischief and something like wonder, and a young woman by the delectable name of Nymphadora Tonks was smiling at him.
“Go on,” she persisted. “Pick something. It’s the best party trick in the universe, I’m telling you.”
There was a bit more hesitation from him and a bit more prodding from her, and then he readjusted the sled tucked under his arm and pointed to the nearest towering fir with his free hand. “Can you do that one?” he asked.
Tonks considered it momentarily, licked her lips, and then scrunched up her face. In seconds, her hair went rigid and extended outward, darkening like slaughtered hope from sprightly pink to shadowy green, until she resembled what could only be called an evergreen porcupine.
Powerless against the grin that staged an efficient coup of his face, Remus cast an eye over the scenery. Shortly, both that eye and its counterpart lit up, and he extended a finger towards something new.
“How about that?”
Obediently, not to mention speedily, each hair came to imitate the rough, mottled brown of the spindly branch that he had indicated, such that she looked like a rather spiky bush. It was somewhat disturbing, and also, oddly, somewhat lovely.
Except for one small detail.
“I was referring to the bird on the branch,” he noted.
A deeper, darker red suffused the lively pink that the cold had balanced on her cheekbones. “Oh,” she said.
“Not that your way was any less wonderful,” he added quickly.
“I’m an idiot,” she decided flatly.
“You’re nothing of the sort,” he averred before he realized he’d opened his mouth. “You are extraordinarily intelligent and extremely tenacious, and if you weren’t, you’d never have become such a successful Auror, let alone such a brilliant conversationalist.”
There was a very, very long pause as they both attempted to process what he had just said. When the silence but for boots whuffing and crunching in the snow had become almost too much to bear, he cleared his throat.
“Sledging?” he asked.
“Excellent idea,” she responded.
* * * * * * * *
The hill was steep, and the sled was small. Tonks was not optimistic about the odds for an enterprising sledder.
“You go first,” she told Remus.
He opened his mouth as if to argue and then sighed. “All right,” he yielded. He set the sled down, sat upon it, and squirmed for a while trying to fit all of himself on the surface, his knees crammed up against his chest and the majority of his snow boots protruding off the sled’s front. Tonks tried very hard not to giggle hysterically.
She failed.
Remus settled, grinning ruefully, and then paused. “I believe,” he said, “that I will be needing a bit of a push.”
Tonks planted her gloved hands on his back and gave a prodigious shove, and Remus went hurtling over the smooth snow, whooping with what might have been helpless elation and might have been helpless terror.
Then there was a bump, followed by an “AAAAAAAH--OOF!”, followed by a fwoosh. Snow burst upward in a miniature mushroom cloud over the space where Remus had just proceeded to perform a glorious face-plant, the sled lodged in the snow nearby like a triumphant flag to mark the place.
Before Tonks could do anything more than squeak and cover her mouth with her hands, Remus rolled over onto his back, moaning audibly.
“You should have gone first,” he called.
Tonks’s heart stopped beating three times per split-second and began to return to a normal rate, which was good, since otherwise she might have been at risk of passing out on the spot. Not without some lingering concern, she started down the hill, only tripping over her own feet once.
All right, twice, but the second one didn’t really count.
“I think I have snapped my spinal cord in half,” Remus notified her calmly as she approached.
She considered. “Raise your arm.”
He obliged.
“Now wiggle your fingers.”
He obliged again.
“Try a foot.”
His right boot moved back and forth a little.
“Your spinal cord is intact,” Tonks decided.
“As for my rational mind…” Remus began.
“That remains in question,” she concluded. He grinned, and she couldn’t help but return the gesture as she leaned down to give him a hand up. She dragged him to his feet, he groaned something about being too old for this, and she told him not to be silly and commenced dusting him off.
“There,” she concluded. “You’re cured.”
He rubbed at the back of his head idly, and she noticed that there were little snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes as if in fear of abandonment. “My face is freezing,” he announced.
Tonks raised an eyebrow at him. Then she smiled.
As she soon discovered, his lips, at least, were warm enough.
* * * * * * * *
When two flushed, grinning individuals, hands linked, fingers intertwined, walked back into an imposing townhouse full of slightly chaotic Christmas decorations, Remus Lupin, being one half of said pair of individuals, heard something he had dared to hope he might never hear again.
“He knows when you’re together!” Sirius sang pleasantly. “He knows when it’s pure fate! He knows when you’ve been snogging, and he wants to know your wedding date!”
Remus and Tonks shared a look that encompassed mortification, bewilderment, and, subtly and shyly, a bit of outright adoration. There weren’t a lot of things that Remus thought one could know in life--not with any certainty--but one of those things was that, whether it was against Voldemort, the cruel whims of chance, or the implications of voyeurism in Sirius’s invented lyrics, they were in this together.
“Soooooo, you better come clean; you better tell true; ’cause Sirius is mean and won’t feed you ’til you do!”
Remus smiled at her. “Happy Christmas, Tonks,” he said.
She smiled back, and his heart rose--rose like a plump red balloon, the ribbon having slipped out of its owner’s fingers to trail along behind, undulating eagerly as the captured helium carried it beyond reach and off into the bright, open sky. “Happy Christmas, Remus,” she replied. She pushed herself up on her toes and kissed him again.
Remus might have heard Sirius cackling maniacally from the kitchen, but he was a bit too happy to tell for sure.