[Kaleidoscope revision] Colours | 5. Moon by Moon
Chapter 5 of Colours (the first "book" of Kaleidoscope) has been revised and is now up at FanFiction.net.
Kaleidoscope (I): Colours
5. Moon by Moon (2800 words | PG)
[also on FF.N] [ old LJ version at metamorfic_moon]
Last month, Sirius carefully explained to Tonks that Remus needs privacy after the full moon. But now somehow, something has started to change.
Chapter 5
Moon by Moon
September
Sirius had set three separate knives to chopping vegetables. He was presiding somewhat smugly over the chopping block-feeling like an orchestra conductor, with his wand for a baton-when the Floo turned green.
“Sirius? You there?”
His cheery little cousin’s spiky head appeared in the flames.
Sirius waved his wand to pause the chopping and swung around with a grin. “Hullo, peanut.”
“Is it all right if I come through for a minute?” Tonks peered up at him, oddly intent. “Just for a minute.”
Sirius raised his eyebrows. “Of course. You know you’re welcome here anytime you can stand a little bachelor company.”
Tonks pulled her head out of the fire and came spinning through the Floo out onto the hearth. She was holding a heavy-looking crockery bowl with both hands, and Sirius winced when she stumbled. But she slapped a Hover Charm on the dish even before she’d grabbed at the back of a chair to steady herself, and the bowl waited patiently in midair for her to catch her balance. Once she had found her feet, she floated it deftly over to the table, trying to look nonchalant.
Sirius had a sneaking suspicion that Tonks had had a lot of practice casting Hover Charms.
“What’ve you got there?” The bowl was covered with a tea towel, but when he sniffed he caught a whiff of cinnamon and something sweet. “Smells nice.”
“Erm.” Tonks tugged at a tangerine-coloured spike of hair and gave him a sideways grin. “I made some pumpkin trifle, so I thought I’d bring it by.”
“You cook?”
“Yes, I cook.” She crossed her arms over her T-shirt, which had a charmed tie-dye pattern that was swirling in a slow spiral (making Sirius feel slightly dizzy, and he hadn’t even been at the firewhisky yet). “Just because I’m no good at householdy spells doesn’t mean I’m no good with food. It’s completely different. Cooking is like-it’s like Potions. I have a N.E.W.T. in Potions, you know. Had to, to be an Auror.”
Sirius held up his hands in surrender. “Right, sorry-I’m sure you’re a brilliant cook.” Still, he couldn’t help smirking at the smears of flour that she had all over her T-shirt and jeans, and even in her hair.
Tonks rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Well, I’ll see you at the meeting on Monday, then.” She turned back to the fire and took a pinch of Floo powder from the urn on the mantlepiece.
Sirius blinked. “Leaving already?” He’d expected she would at least stay long enough to have a drink with him. It was lonely in this great gloomy house with Remus upstairs sleeping off the transformation, especially now that all the children were back at Hogwarts and even Molly and Arthur had gone home to the Burrow. “You must be a marvellous cook. Really.”
She sniggered a little, but she shook her head. “I only came to leave the trifle, so now I’ve done that, I’ll go on home.” Her expression sobered. “I remember what you told me last month, that Remus doesn’t really like to have people see him before he’s had a chance to recover from the moon. I just thought a pudding might cheer him up a bit. I saw how much he liked Molly’s pumpkin trifle after a meeting, once.”
Sirius could only approve; Moony needed more people looking after him. “I’m sure he’ll enjoy it.” He leered theatrically at the covered bowl. “I’ll even save him a bite.”
She laughed again, eyes crinkling, and whacked him on the arm. “You’d better, you git.”
Tonks disappeared back into the Floo, and Sirius returned to conducting his vegetable-chopping ensemble until he had the whole stew bubbling properly.
Slow, careful steps sounded on the stairs.
“You’re just in time,” Sirius called out. “Stew’s almost done.”
“I could tell.” Remus appeared around the doorframe, smiling, although his voice was awfully hoarse. “Smells good.”
“And look at this,” Sirius added, watching Remus lower himself shakily into a chair at the table. “Tonks made us a pumpkin trifle for afters. Seems to be edible, even.”
“Oh?” Remus brightened, but he didn’t look at the trifle at all. He looked around the kitchen, and then glanced toward the stairs. “Is she here for supper, then?”
“No, of course not.” Sirius blinked. “She’s a bright one-she’s caught on that you like a little privacy right after the moon.”
“Oh,” said Remus again. “Of course.” He smiled a little, and this time he did lift the tea towel to peek in at the trifle. “It was awfully kind of her to bring this over.”
But now he looked, Sirius thought, a little greyer than he had before.
That was certainly interesting.
~ * ~
October
Tonks popped out of the Floo to find Sirius busy cooking once again.
Usually it was Remus who cooked, she’d found, now that the Weasleys had moved back home-though sometimes Molly still came by to fix a meal, especially if there was going to be an Order meeting. When Sirius was left to fend for himself, he tended to slap together some kind of sandwich, wash it down with firewhisky, and call it supper.
But tonight was the night after the full moon.
Sirius looked up from a half-dozen browning pork chops and smirked at her. “Hullo, peanut! Did you bring us a trifle?”
“Of course not.” She smirked back, setting a covered plate carefully on the table. “Chocolate cake this time.”
Grey eyes gleamed. “I’ll make short work of that.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Tonks swatted the hand that was lifting up the cover to peek at the cake. “It’s for Remus, and you know it.”
Sirius snorted.
“How is he?” she asked, in a small voice. For the rest of the month, Remus was an Order colleague, her favourite partner for missions, a secret subtle prankster-someone who was strong and clever and witty, and bloody well could have been an Auror for real. But when the full moon came, she remembered how it made him look afterward, and she worried.
“Stay for supper and see for yourself.” Sirius smirked at her again and started a small mountain of apples peeling.
Tonks stared. Her cousin must be joking.
“Tell him I’ve asked after him,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Somewhere else to be?” Sirius floated the peeled apples into a bowl and aimed a powerful Roasting Charm at them.
“Hardly,” she laughed. Between her job and her Order work, there wasn’t much time left for a social life. “But-”
“Hello, Tonks,” sounded hoarsely from behind.
She turned around quickly enough to lose her balance, but managed to grab the back of a chair and avert disaster. “Wotcher, Remus.”
This was why she worried. She had seen him once before on the evening after a full moon, and it had been impossible to forget just how grey and gaunt it left him, how deep were the lines etched into his face by exhaustion and pain.
How much nearer the surface were the emotions that he normally kept so deeply buried.
This time, though, what leaked through wasn’t loneliness or shame. He smiled at her, a bright blazing smile that lit him up from inside and stole her breath.
“You’ll stay for supper, won’t you?” he rasped.
“Told you so,” Sirius muttered from right behind her.
“Ta,” she said, feeling a bit like she’d been spinning too fast on her broom and hadn’t got her bearings after landing, but she met Remus’s smile with one of her own. “Those pork chops are awfully tempting.”
Remus was quiet at supper, and he kept very close to the fire, but he ate two whole pork chops and two slices of chocolate cake. And he grinned often at the silly banter that Sirius kept launching and Tonks parried as well as she could. Still, by the time the table was cleared away and the dishes were done, Remus had started to sag a little in his chair.
Tonks raised an eyebrow at Sirius, wondering whether it was time for her to take her leave.
“Right, then, Moony,” said Sirius expansively, “I think it’s time we gave Tonks here some education in the ways of the world.”
“Really?” Tonks would have poked Sirius in the arm for his patronising attitude, but the laughter that displaced the exhaustion in Remus’s eyes was enough to stop her, so she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. “What sort of education did you have in mind?”
Sirius cleared his throat and pulled out his wand with a dramatic flourish. “Accio Exploding Snap cards!”
A charred and battered deck came flying down the stairs and into his waiting hand.
“We’re going to play Exploding Snap?” Tonks would never have expected Sirius to suggest something so tame.
But now her cousin was staring at the cards in his hand with an oddly pained look on his face, and Remus had reached over to rest a hand on his elbow.
“Not Exploding Snap,” he said quietly to Tonks. “Exploding Poker. Muggle poker with Exploding Snap cards.” His smile was sad now. “We always used to play it in the hospital wing or the dormitory, after moons-after the others had worked out my secret, that is.” He gave the bony elbow a squeeze. “It’s all right, Padfoot. Let’s play something else. Three-way chess?”
“No,” said Sirius stubbornly, his jaw set. “We’ll play Exploding Poker. That rat isn’t taking this away from me.” He cast a quick Shuffle charm, and the gleam of mischief returned to his eyes. “I’ll lay the first wager: Losers take over washing dishes for the winner for the rest of the month.”
It wasn’t a late night-even this laughing, joking version of a post-moon Remus needed his sleep. So they wrapped things up after each of them had won a few times and collected juicy forfeits. Tonks was particularly pleased with the hand that had won her hot cocoa every evening for a week, not least because it would give her an excuse to spend time in this kitchen that had come to feel more like home to her than her own small flat.
Remus wished her a good night, with one more incandescent smile, and started the slow process of hauling himself up three flights of stairs to his room. She watched Sirius watching him, with a sharp line between his eyebrows, and understood without having to ask that it was no good offering Remus a hand with the climb.
Instead, Sirius walked her to the front door and waited as she put on her pea coat and wrapped up in a long, lumpy purple muffler.
“Thanks for staying,” he said, his voice unexpectedly earnest. “It was good for him.”
“I was-” honoured, she almost said, because the trust Remus had shown her in actually wanting to spend this difficult evening in her company had somehow shaken her a little-“glad to. It was fun.”
“Come by after moons,” said Sirius. “When you can. I’ll be here, obviously-” he rolled his eyes-“but if there’s someone else he’s willing to have around, all the better. I don’t like to think how many years went by where he was left alone to recover on his own.”
“Yeah,” said Tonks. She didn’t like to think about that, either. “No worries. I’ll make sure to come and help cheer him up.”
In fact, starting tomorrow, she would pull as many strings as she could in the Auror Office to avoid ever being scheduled for a night shift on post-moon evenings.
~ * ~
November
Remus woke with a start, wincing at the sharp pains and tight stiffness in his back and limbs.
He must have been sound asleep for most of the day. The last purple streaks of sunset were already fading from the sky, leaving cold slate-grey clouds that promised rain before morning.
He pushed himself up and out of his thick cocoon of blankets until he was sitting on the edge of the bed, shivering, hissing when new scabs pulled and stung as he moved. His head ached, and his thoughts looped sluggishly even after all the sleep he’d apparently had. Most months, his throat would be somewhat sore after a night spent howling, but this time it felt as though it had been scraped raw.
It had, he acknowledged, been rather a bad moon.
That was hardly a surprise. It was always a bad moon when it fell this close to Hallowe’en.
This year, it hadn’t been only his own grief he’d had to face. Sirius had careened between raging around the house blasting things with his wand, and drinking himself into a stupor, and-perhaps the worst of all-sitting huddled in a ball on the ratty carpet of the first-floor drawing room, muttering to himself or turning into Padfoot, and refusing to eat.
But now, Remus hoped, the worst might have passed. This morning, he’d been prepared to make do with some cold bread and cheese before dragging himself up to his room to sleep off the after-effects of the transformation, just as he always did when he lived alone. But Sirius was waiting for him in the kitchen, after all. The circles under his eyes were deeper than usual, it was true-but he had a fry-up ready on the table, and a pot of steaming tea.
For once, Remus was almost glad he was such a wreck after transformations, if it gave Sirius a reason to pull himself together again.
And it was still working, it seemed. The aroma of Sirius’s signature prop-Moony-up stew came drifting enticingly upstairs from the kitchen. That was probably what had pulled Remus out of his sound sleep, in fact. His stomach growled, almost painfully-he had slept right through lunchtime, and it took more than one good hot breakfast to assuage the tearing hunger of a werewolf who hadn’t hunted at the full moon.
Remus lurched stiffly to his feet, Accio’d a set of clean clothes from the wardrobe, and limped down the hall to the bathroom. As he savoured his shower, letting the steamy heat soak into his bones and ease some of the aches and chills, he tried very hard not to wonder if Tonks would stop in tonight. Just because she had come by on the night after the moon last month-and brought trifle the month before that-it most certainly did not mean that she would waste another perfectly fine evening on a cranky fugitive and a broken-down werewolf. Especially since she knew how difficult Sirius had been to manage, this last week.
The water in the shower was always good and hot, thank Merlin, but the old Black house was, to put it mildly, drafty. Especially when one’s physical and magical reserves were thoroughly depleted. Remus, making his way down too many flights of stairs, couldn’t stop himself from shivering hard enough to rattle his teeth. At least the kitchen would be warm, with a roaring fire in the huge old-fashioned fireplace.
The kitchen would be warm, which was far more than he could say for some of the places he’d spent post-moon evenings. There was a hot stew (smelling better every minute) waiting for him. And he wouldn’t be alone, not with Sirius to feed him supper, and spend the evening with him, and remind him in a hundred small ways that he was more than just the wolf.
He was lucky, already, he reminded himself, finally reaching the bottom of the last flight of stairs and pausing to catch his breath. Luckier than he had been in years. He couldn’t believe he had the cheek to even think of wishing for more-
“Wotcher, Remus!”
But there Tonks was, after all, sprawled in a chair at the long kitchen table, with a “Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle” T-shirt and her hair in neon-green dreadlocks. Her grin was cheery, even as her eyes were intent, taking in the lines on his face and the slight, pained hunch of his shoulders.
“Hello, Tonks.” He tried not to wince at the roughness of his voice, so hoarse it was little more than a harsh whisper, but he hoped the smile he could feel spreading across his face would compensate. “Ready for another round of Exploding Poker?”
“Not half!” She pretended to glower at Sirius, who actually managed a creaky grin in return as he ladled stew into bowls. “There’s no way I’m going to lose the dishwashing wager this time.”
Her smile made her dark eyes shine.
It didn’t seem possible that it could grow even brighter, but when he smiled back, that was just what it did.
Remus didn’t think he’d ever felt so warm after a moon in his life.
~ * ~
[ ← Chapter 4 | → Chapter 6 | ↑ Kaleidoscope series index ]
Author’s notes: This is a revised version of a story that was posted at the metamorfic_moon community on LiveJournal in December 2011.
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Kaleidoscope (I): Colours
5. Moon by Moon (2800 words | PG)
[also on FF.N] [ old LJ version at metamorfic_moon]
Last month, Sirius carefully explained to Tonks that Remus needs privacy after the full moon. But now somehow, something has started to change.
- What has changed: I’ve moved the timeline up one month, to start in September rather than October, because it makes more sense for “Stripes” to have taken place in August. Also, a few new details have been added; in particular, the third scene has been expanded to take into account the fact that at some point, Remus and Sirius would have had to face Hallowe’en.
Chapter 5
Moon by Moon
September
Sirius had set three separate knives to chopping vegetables. He was presiding somewhat smugly over the chopping block-feeling like an orchestra conductor, with his wand for a baton-when the Floo turned green.
“Sirius? You there?”
His cheery little cousin’s spiky head appeared in the flames.
Sirius waved his wand to pause the chopping and swung around with a grin. “Hullo, peanut.”
“Is it all right if I come through for a minute?” Tonks peered up at him, oddly intent. “Just for a minute.”
Sirius raised his eyebrows. “Of course. You know you’re welcome here anytime you can stand a little bachelor company.”
Tonks pulled her head out of the fire and came spinning through the Floo out onto the hearth. She was holding a heavy-looking crockery bowl with both hands, and Sirius winced when she stumbled. But she slapped a Hover Charm on the dish even before she’d grabbed at the back of a chair to steady herself, and the bowl waited patiently in midair for her to catch her balance. Once she had found her feet, she floated it deftly over to the table, trying to look nonchalant.
Sirius had a sneaking suspicion that Tonks had had a lot of practice casting Hover Charms.
“What’ve you got there?” The bowl was covered with a tea towel, but when he sniffed he caught a whiff of cinnamon and something sweet. “Smells nice.”
“Erm.” Tonks tugged at a tangerine-coloured spike of hair and gave him a sideways grin. “I made some pumpkin trifle, so I thought I’d bring it by.”
“You cook?”
“Yes, I cook.” She crossed her arms over her T-shirt, which had a charmed tie-dye pattern that was swirling in a slow spiral (making Sirius feel slightly dizzy, and he hadn’t even been at the firewhisky yet). “Just because I’m no good at householdy spells doesn’t mean I’m no good with food. It’s completely different. Cooking is like-it’s like Potions. I have a N.E.W.T. in Potions, you know. Had to, to be an Auror.”
Sirius held up his hands in surrender. “Right, sorry-I’m sure you’re a brilliant cook.” Still, he couldn’t help smirking at the smears of flour that she had all over her T-shirt and jeans, and even in her hair.
Tonks rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Well, I’ll see you at the meeting on Monday, then.” She turned back to the fire and took a pinch of Floo powder from the urn on the mantlepiece.
Sirius blinked. “Leaving already?” He’d expected she would at least stay long enough to have a drink with him. It was lonely in this great gloomy house with Remus upstairs sleeping off the transformation, especially now that all the children were back at Hogwarts and even Molly and Arthur had gone home to the Burrow. “You must be a marvellous cook. Really.”
She sniggered a little, but she shook her head. “I only came to leave the trifle, so now I’ve done that, I’ll go on home.” Her expression sobered. “I remember what you told me last month, that Remus doesn’t really like to have people see him before he’s had a chance to recover from the moon. I just thought a pudding might cheer him up a bit. I saw how much he liked Molly’s pumpkin trifle after a meeting, once.”
Sirius could only approve; Moony needed more people looking after him. “I’m sure he’ll enjoy it.” He leered theatrically at the covered bowl. “I’ll even save him a bite.”
She laughed again, eyes crinkling, and whacked him on the arm. “You’d better, you git.”
Tonks disappeared back into the Floo, and Sirius returned to conducting his vegetable-chopping ensemble until he had the whole stew bubbling properly.
Slow, careful steps sounded on the stairs.
“You’re just in time,” Sirius called out. “Stew’s almost done.”
“I could tell.” Remus appeared around the doorframe, smiling, although his voice was awfully hoarse. “Smells good.”
“And look at this,” Sirius added, watching Remus lower himself shakily into a chair at the table. “Tonks made us a pumpkin trifle for afters. Seems to be edible, even.”
“Oh?” Remus brightened, but he didn’t look at the trifle at all. He looked around the kitchen, and then glanced toward the stairs. “Is she here for supper, then?”
“No, of course not.” Sirius blinked. “She’s a bright one-she’s caught on that you like a little privacy right after the moon.”
“Oh,” said Remus again. “Of course.” He smiled a little, and this time he did lift the tea towel to peek in at the trifle. “It was awfully kind of her to bring this over.”
But now he looked, Sirius thought, a little greyer than he had before.
That was certainly interesting.
~ * ~
October
Tonks popped out of the Floo to find Sirius busy cooking once again.
Usually it was Remus who cooked, she’d found, now that the Weasleys had moved back home-though sometimes Molly still came by to fix a meal, especially if there was going to be an Order meeting. When Sirius was left to fend for himself, he tended to slap together some kind of sandwich, wash it down with firewhisky, and call it supper.
But tonight was the night after the full moon.
Sirius looked up from a half-dozen browning pork chops and smirked at her. “Hullo, peanut! Did you bring us a trifle?”
“Of course not.” She smirked back, setting a covered plate carefully on the table. “Chocolate cake this time.”
Grey eyes gleamed. “I’ll make short work of that.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Tonks swatted the hand that was lifting up the cover to peek at the cake. “It’s for Remus, and you know it.”
Sirius snorted.
“How is he?” she asked, in a small voice. For the rest of the month, Remus was an Order colleague, her favourite partner for missions, a secret subtle prankster-someone who was strong and clever and witty, and bloody well could have been an Auror for real. But when the full moon came, she remembered how it made him look afterward, and she worried.
“Stay for supper and see for yourself.” Sirius smirked at her again and started a small mountain of apples peeling.
Tonks stared. Her cousin must be joking.
“Tell him I’ve asked after him,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Somewhere else to be?” Sirius floated the peeled apples into a bowl and aimed a powerful Roasting Charm at them.
“Hardly,” she laughed. Between her job and her Order work, there wasn’t much time left for a social life. “But-”
“Hello, Tonks,” sounded hoarsely from behind.
She turned around quickly enough to lose her balance, but managed to grab the back of a chair and avert disaster. “Wotcher, Remus.”
This was why she worried. She had seen him once before on the evening after a full moon, and it had been impossible to forget just how grey and gaunt it left him, how deep were the lines etched into his face by exhaustion and pain.
How much nearer the surface were the emotions that he normally kept so deeply buried.
This time, though, what leaked through wasn’t loneliness or shame. He smiled at her, a bright blazing smile that lit him up from inside and stole her breath.
“You’ll stay for supper, won’t you?” he rasped.
“Told you so,” Sirius muttered from right behind her.
“Ta,” she said, feeling a bit like she’d been spinning too fast on her broom and hadn’t got her bearings after landing, but she met Remus’s smile with one of her own. “Those pork chops are awfully tempting.”
Remus was quiet at supper, and he kept very close to the fire, but he ate two whole pork chops and two slices of chocolate cake. And he grinned often at the silly banter that Sirius kept launching and Tonks parried as well as she could. Still, by the time the table was cleared away and the dishes were done, Remus had started to sag a little in his chair.
Tonks raised an eyebrow at Sirius, wondering whether it was time for her to take her leave.
“Right, then, Moony,” said Sirius expansively, “I think it’s time we gave Tonks here some education in the ways of the world.”
“Really?” Tonks would have poked Sirius in the arm for his patronising attitude, but the laughter that displaced the exhaustion in Remus’s eyes was enough to stop her, so she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. “What sort of education did you have in mind?”
Sirius cleared his throat and pulled out his wand with a dramatic flourish. “Accio Exploding Snap cards!”
A charred and battered deck came flying down the stairs and into his waiting hand.
“We’re going to play Exploding Snap?” Tonks would never have expected Sirius to suggest something so tame.
But now her cousin was staring at the cards in his hand with an oddly pained look on his face, and Remus had reached over to rest a hand on his elbow.
“Not Exploding Snap,” he said quietly to Tonks. “Exploding Poker. Muggle poker with Exploding Snap cards.” His smile was sad now. “We always used to play it in the hospital wing or the dormitory, after moons-after the others had worked out my secret, that is.” He gave the bony elbow a squeeze. “It’s all right, Padfoot. Let’s play something else. Three-way chess?”
“No,” said Sirius stubbornly, his jaw set. “We’ll play Exploding Poker. That rat isn’t taking this away from me.” He cast a quick Shuffle charm, and the gleam of mischief returned to his eyes. “I’ll lay the first wager: Losers take over washing dishes for the winner for the rest of the month.”
It wasn’t a late night-even this laughing, joking version of a post-moon Remus needed his sleep. So they wrapped things up after each of them had won a few times and collected juicy forfeits. Tonks was particularly pleased with the hand that had won her hot cocoa every evening for a week, not least because it would give her an excuse to spend time in this kitchen that had come to feel more like home to her than her own small flat.
Remus wished her a good night, with one more incandescent smile, and started the slow process of hauling himself up three flights of stairs to his room. She watched Sirius watching him, with a sharp line between his eyebrows, and understood without having to ask that it was no good offering Remus a hand with the climb.
Instead, Sirius walked her to the front door and waited as she put on her pea coat and wrapped up in a long, lumpy purple muffler.
“Thanks for staying,” he said, his voice unexpectedly earnest. “It was good for him.”
“I was-” honoured, she almost said, because the trust Remus had shown her in actually wanting to spend this difficult evening in her company had somehow shaken her a little-“glad to. It was fun.”
“Come by after moons,” said Sirius. “When you can. I’ll be here, obviously-” he rolled his eyes-“but if there’s someone else he’s willing to have around, all the better. I don’t like to think how many years went by where he was left alone to recover on his own.”
“Yeah,” said Tonks. She didn’t like to think about that, either. “No worries. I’ll make sure to come and help cheer him up.”
In fact, starting tomorrow, she would pull as many strings as she could in the Auror Office to avoid ever being scheduled for a night shift on post-moon evenings.
~ * ~
November
Remus woke with a start, wincing at the sharp pains and tight stiffness in his back and limbs.
He must have been sound asleep for most of the day. The last purple streaks of sunset were already fading from the sky, leaving cold slate-grey clouds that promised rain before morning.
He pushed himself up and out of his thick cocoon of blankets until he was sitting on the edge of the bed, shivering, hissing when new scabs pulled and stung as he moved. His head ached, and his thoughts looped sluggishly even after all the sleep he’d apparently had. Most months, his throat would be somewhat sore after a night spent howling, but this time it felt as though it had been scraped raw.
It had, he acknowledged, been rather a bad moon.
That was hardly a surprise. It was always a bad moon when it fell this close to Hallowe’en.
This year, it hadn’t been only his own grief he’d had to face. Sirius had careened between raging around the house blasting things with his wand, and drinking himself into a stupor, and-perhaps the worst of all-sitting huddled in a ball on the ratty carpet of the first-floor drawing room, muttering to himself or turning into Padfoot, and refusing to eat.
But now, Remus hoped, the worst might have passed. This morning, he’d been prepared to make do with some cold bread and cheese before dragging himself up to his room to sleep off the after-effects of the transformation, just as he always did when he lived alone. But Sirius was waiting for him in the kitchen, after all. The circles under his eyes were deeper than usual, it was true-but he had a fry-up ready on the table, and a pot of steaming tea.
For once, Remus was almost glad he was such a wreck after transformations, if it gave Sirius a reason to pull himself together again.
And it was still working, it seemed. The aroma of Sirius’s signature prop-Moony-up stew came drifting enticingly upstairs from the kitchen. That was probably what had pulled Remus out of his sound sleep, in fact. His stomach growled, almost painfully-he had slept right through lunchtime, and it took more than one good hot breakfast to assuage the tearing hunger of a werewolf who hadn’t hunted at the full moon.
Remus lurched stiffly to his feet, Accio’d a set of clean clothes from the wardrobe, and limped down the hall to the bathroom. As he savoured his shower, letting the steamy heat soak into his bones and ease some of the aches and chills, he tried very hard not to wonder if Tonks would stop in tonight. Just because she had come by on the night after the moon last month-and brought trifle the month before that-it most certainly did not mean that she would waste another perfectly fine evening on a cranky fugitive and a broken-down werewolf. Especially since she knew how difficult Sirius had been to manage, this last week.
The water in the shower was always good and hot, thank Merlin, but the old Black house was, to put it mildly, drafty. Especially when one’s physical and magical reserves were thoroughly depleted. Remus, making his way down too many flights of stairs, couldn’t stop himself from shivering hard enough to rattle his teeth. At least the kitchen would be warm, with a roaring fire in the huge old-fashioned fireplace.
The kitchen would be warm, which was far more than he could say for some of the places he’d spent post-moon evenings. There was a hot stew (smelling better every minute) waiting for him. And he wouldn’t be alone, not with Sirius to feed him supper, and spend the evening with him, and remind him in a hundred small ways that he was more than just the wolf.
He was lucky, already, he reminded himself, finally reaching the bottom of the last flight of stairs and pausing to catch his breath. Luckier than he had been in years. He couldn’t believe he had the cheek to even think of wishing for more-
“Wotcher, Remus!”
But there Tonks was, after all, sprawled in a chair at the long kitchen table, with a “Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle” T-shirt and her hair in neon-green dreadlocks. Her grin was cheery, even as her eyes were intent, taking in the lines on his face and the slight, pained hunch of his shoulders.
“Hello, Tonks.” He tried not to wince at the roughness of his voice, so hoarse it was little more than a harsh whisper, but he hoped the smile he could feel spreading across his face would compensate. “Ready for another round of Exploding Poker?”
“Not half!” She pretended to glower at Sirius, who actually managed a creaky grin in return as he ladled stew into bowls. “There’s no way I’m going to lose the dishwashing wager this time.”
Her smile made her dark eyes shine.
It didn’t seem possible that it could grow even brighter, but when he smiled back, that was just what it did.
Remus didn’t think he’d ever felt so warm after a moon in his life.
~ * ~
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Author’s notes: This is a revised version of a story that was posted at the metamorfic_moon community on LiveJournal in December 2011.
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