Disclaimer: Still not J.K. Rowling, still isn't mine.
Summary: She's always grinning at him, and he starts to wonder if he should have stopped noticing by now.
A/N: Written for the "30 Drabbles in 30 Days" Harry Potter challenge. Set a few weeks after 'Calling The Shots', but it's not necessary to understand. The prompt was 'Love? What do I know about love?', and the song quoted is What Do Ya Know About Love by Lita Ford. I was clearly thinking outside the box ok leave me alone.
"YOU'VE GOT IT ALL, IT'S NOT ENOUGH, WHEN IT COMES TO LOVE, BABE YOU'RE OUT OF LUCK!"
He stumbled blindly into the kitchen, groping for something to throw. A wooden spoon sat halfway down the enormous old table, and without pausing to wonder why it was there at all, he chucked it none too gently in the direction of the screeching.
"Ha-ha!" came the shout of delight, as he heard the wood bounce off the wall with a crack. "You'll have to get up earlier than that if you're looking to hit me with spoons, Moony."
"I'm not picky what I hit you with," Remus glared one-eyed down the length of the low-ceilinged room, his left palm pressed very firmly to his forehead. "And I was aiming for the radio. Sirius, what the hell are you doing?"
"Breakfast," Sirius grinned. He stood, fork in hand, before the enormous stove, an assortment of pans sweating in the heat as he poked at the tiny fires beneath them. Occasionally a lid would pop into the air on a spurt of steam, slamming home with a gusto that had Sirius grinning and jabbing his wand in the air like the conductor of an agonizingly over-heated orchestra. A whisk was slopping eggs down the sides of the counter as its bowl skated circles across the polished stone, while the battered radio next to the cutlery bobbed its antenna in time to the music.
Sirius threw back his head as he spun towards a pan that was hissing up clouds of black smoke. "WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LOVE…"
"Why," Remus demanded, rubbing his eyes and wincing as the overzealous batch of eggs hit the floor with a crack.
"…MORE TO IT THAN LYING DOW—Sorry?"
"Why in the name of Merlin are you cooking breakfast at five o'clock in the morning?" he hollered.
Sirius turned his vicious enthusiasm to a paring knife and a pile of strawberries. "You're the one that said you wanted to stop finding me drunk and passed out on the table every morning."
"This was not," Remus sank dejectedly into a chair, "what I meant when I said 'other options'."
"Remus, let me ask you something," Sirius said, abandoning his knife as the bacon began to pop. "Do you know what they don't have in prison? Or Barbados? Or the Virgin Islands?" He paused to watch Remus bury his head in his arms.
"Although," Sirius laughed, "I'll tell you what they do have in the Virgin Islands—"
"Don't," Remus pointed a blind finger above his head. "I don't want to know."
Sirius sighed. The music dipped a fraction as he wiped his hands on his jeans and leaned across the table, aiming a fork at Remus's temple. "They don't have radios, Moony. No radios and no music. And no bacon, either. Only despair." Remus groaned and Sirius inched forward, "despair and death."
"So," he yanked Remus's ear, snatching his hand away before he could be smacked, "stop raining on my parade, you heartless, unfeeling old man."
The radio bounced back up to a scream.
"MIND'S TICKIN', HEART'S STOPPED, YOUR EYES ARE ICE COLD, YOUR LIPS ARE RED HOT."
Smoke thickened in the gloomy room as a whistling kettle joined the snaps of grease and the dull thumping of the fruit knife against the counter. Remus kept his head pressed against the table, trying unsuccessfully to drown out the wailing radio, and only looked up when Sirius began drumming the chorus against a teapot.
"Let me ask you, something Padfoot," he said, squinting out at Sirius through red-rimmed eyes, "Do you know what time I got back from duty?"
Sirius's buoyancy vanished with an almost audible pop. He folded himself inward, a scowl snapping up his face as his eyes rolled back to focus on a crack in the ceiling. "Yes, duty," he sneered, head lolling, "Lucky me, stuck here drinking with that damned elf while you traipse around the Ministry hunting Death Eaters all night."
The steaming teakettle began to shake on its burner.
"Four in the morning," Remus said placidly, "I got back at four in the morning."
Sirius turned dark eyes on the erupting kettle, his shoulders tense.
"LIVE WIRE, SHORT FUSE, WALKIN' DETONATOR IN SNAKESKIN BOOTS."
"That means," Remus pressed, watching Sirius regard the kettle dangerously, "that I got forty-five minutes of sleep last night. Forty-five minutes of sleep, you horrible, horrible human being."
Sirius turned to stare at him. The kettle was exploding and the music was screaming and Remus's lips were twitching. His face split into a grin as easily as flipping on a switch.
"Ah, but a horrible, horrible human being who has made you breakfast, Moony," he whisked the kettle off the stove and poured a pot of tea, simultaneously directing his wand over his shoulder at the pan of bacon, which snappily began to serve itself onto a freshly washed plate.
"I'M GONNA SHAKE YOU FROM YOUR SLEEPWALK IN THE DARK."
Remus ate two platefuls in the kitchen with Sirius and hummed while helping himself to a third. He nearly lost a hardboiled egg when he kicked the study door closed behind him and set his breakfast down neatly on a stack of dusty papers.
"With your dirty mind and your heart of stone… you got a lot of friends but you're all alone."
He heard his housemate bouncing around happily on the floor above and smiled to himself.
Remus hummed his way though a mid-morning briefing with Hestia Jones. He hummed over lunch and hummed over paperwork, hummed over a Ministry map that Podmore dropped off, a scrawled note of Charlie's on the leg of a dusty owl, and hummed a hello when Mundungus tripped his way through the front door late that afternoon.
(He didn't hum while hauling a swearing Sirius up the stairs and away from an oozingly smug Snape, who had drifted in after Fletcher on the pretense of looking for Dumbledore.)
He finally dozed off with a finger between the pages of A Handful of Dust, and was jerked awake an hour later by the tinny sound of a clock striking nine somewhere in the depths of the library. Yawning hugely, he glanced at the dark windows and slipped a bit of string between the pages of his book. As he tramped to the basement he entertained a vague hope that Sirius's cooking frenzy had extended into whipping up late suppers.
It hadn't.
He was crouched on the floor of the pantry mouthing "how can you run from the truth, baby, baby" to a box of pasta when a series of bangs brought him to his feet. Whirling about, wand in hand, it took him a moment to register Tonks on her knees and fishing under the table for the books that had tumbled beneath it. She grinned up at him.
"Sorry," she said, shaking long purple hair from her face and straightening up to slap a thin paperback onto her stack. "Wotcher, Remus. Ah!" She pulled another from beneath a chair.
"Tonks," he said rather weakly, "What are you-? Let me help you with that." He stuck his wand into his pocket and moved towards her.
"No, it's fine Remus don't worry," she waved a hand above her head, and he watched with a throat gone suddenly dry as she stretched herself out to reach a book that had skidded several feet further than the others.
" Actually," her laugh came from halfway under the table, "you could grab that one by your foot. Your left—yes, there."
"What is all this?" he asked, stooping to pick up the thick volume and sinking back to his heels. He ran a hand across the withered cover.
"Books."
"On the Registry of Proscribed Charmable Objects?"
"Well, I did have my doubts about that one," Tonks said, hauling herself out from between the chairs with book in hand. She ruffled the dirt from her hair and scooted closer to him. "Kreacher really does do an appalling job on this place, Sirius should have a word."
Tossing her book at his feet, she inched closer to his shoulder. "I had to know the ins and outs of that for my Auror training," she said. "Thought it was terribly dry, but then again I wouldn't read a book on India for pleasure, so I took a gamble. You'll have to let me know how it ends."
He looked at her.
"They're for you," she said, nodding to the few restacked haphazardly by the door.
"Why?"
She blinked at him and shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. "We have a library down in Magical Law Enforcement—old case studies and books on policy and that. A few caught my eye today, and you were reading that book on India…" she trailed off and rubbed at her knee.
He smiled and she looked up at him, her face very close to his. She had a scar on the left side of her nose.
"Where did you come up with this one?" he cleared his throat hastily, looking down to the book in his lap.
"Section: Middle East; Subsection: Transportation; Subsection: Flying carpets; See: Registry of Proscribed Charmable Objects," Tonks rattled off, back to grinning at him. "It's a real page-turner."
"There was also one on—" she turned and squinted round the room, ducking her head to peek under the china cabinet that stood on the opposite wall, "There it is." Remus followed as she scrambled to her feet and around the table, dropping back down to her stomach and stretching an arm under the heavy wooden set.
"I can't quite reach it," she said through a grimace. She tugged at his trouser leg, "You come down here and try."
Remus pulled his wand from his pocket and set it carefully aside before rejoining her on the floor. "Can you see it?" she asked.
"Mmm," it was very far back. He scooted closer and reached, but his fingers fell just short of the cracked spine. Though he shifted as close as he could and pressed his shoulder flush against the dresser, the book remained tantalizingly beyond the ends of his fingers.
"You're not much help, then. I thought werewolves were notoriously long-limbed."
Remus's eyes snapped to hers, startled. His stomach felt very suddenly and surprisingly warm at the laughter in them. "Only the romanticized versions," he told her with a smile. "I know a fellow—particularly ferocious and only five-foot-three."
Little clouds of dust rose around her face as she snorted in amusement. Remus's fingers were still reaching for the book, but he wasn't paying them much mind. Her own were stretched out by her chin and her nails were coloured a vibrant shade of green. He smiled. She smiled back.
"Remus, what—"
They both jumped.
"What are you doing?"
Sirius frowned down at them as Tonks rolled to her back and Remus scrambled to his knees. He looked terrible; his eyes were bloodshot and an empty bottle of mead dangled limply from between his fingers. As he moved to put a hand on the table, a drop streaked down the side and fell onto Tonks's forehead.
"What are you, doing, Padfoot," Remus said seriously, watching Sirius screw up his face in an effort to keep him in focus. "It's only nine o'clock at night."
Sirius's lip curled, "well thank you, Moony, master of time-telling." He gave an exaggerated bow that quickly had him grasping for the table again. Remus scrambled to his feet to grab his elbow, but Sirius shook him off.
"What are you doing on my floor?" he glared at Remus. "Leave off, Moony, I'm fine."
"I dropped a book under there," Tonks supplied from the foot of the cabinet. Sirius blinked down at her, and Remus took the opportunity to slip the empty bottle from his hand.
"So what are you doing on my floor?"
"Well I couldn't reach—" Tonks gestured at the cabinet behind her, but Sirius shook his head.
"Your wand?"
Tonks froze, open-mouthed. She looked to Remus, who in turn blinked from Sirius to his wand, which sat halfway down the long kitchen table where he had left it. Out of the way.
Sirius snorted and drew his own. "Accio Books". With a whoosh the volumes zoomed through the air and dropped themselves neatly into his outstretched arms, the book from beneath the cabinet settling on top with a dusty thump.
"You're an idiot, Moony," he told Remus, voice thick with contempt. He pushed the pile into Remus's arms and shot a sullen look at Tonks.
"Aren't you supposed to be on duty?" Sirius asked her acidly, turning with a wobble to stalk away into the pantry. A moment after he disappeared beneath the low doorframe they heard him clinking his way carelessly through shelves of bottles.
Remus set the books on the table and stretched out a hand to Tonks, who rubbed unhappily at her nose before taking it. As he pulled her to her feet she eyed the pantry door.
"You're cheerful tonight," she called to her cousin.
Sirius emerged, pulling the glass stopper from a half-empty bottle of Firewhiskey with his teeth. "Go away," he told her thickly, then, "Ow". He spat the stopper to the floor and retreated unsteadily across the kitchen, bumping into a chair as he veered slightly toward the door. The sound of him singing to himself echoed back to them as he trudged up the stone stairwell.
"Little lies that you tell, whispered like an angel straight from hell…"
A door slammed on the floor above. Remus ran a hand through his hair and glanced at Tonks, who was staring miserably at the ceiling.
"He's not well, is he?" she said.
"No."
He watched her nostrils flare from the corner of his eye; she was suddenly furious. "Then he shouldn't be—" she gestured broadly but trailed off, the words hanging in the air as she shook her head and cast a bitter look around the grimy kitchen. "This stupid house."
Her eyes found Remus's. "This stupid house," he agreed.
They looked at each other for a moment before he moved away to examine the pile of books on the table. He swallowed thickly in the silence.
"Still," Tonks said, rocking back on her heels, "he has decent taste in music." She offered him a sad smile when his eyes snapped back up to hers.
"With a dirty mind and a heart of stone," Remus nodded slowly, amusement creeping back up his face in spite of himself. His smile widened as Tonks's eyebrows shot up.
"You know Lita Ford?"
"I've only... recently come to appreciate her," he resisted the urge to roll his eyes at his own cheesiness and returned to his books. "So what else do you have in here?"
"A few things," Tonks said simply, dusting off her jeans and fixing the clasp of her cloak. "Let me know if there's anything good, won't you?" She hummed under her breath as she patted down her pockets.
"I wanna tie myself to your bed of fire—have you seen my hair tie?"
"Sorry?" his voice was rather squeaky.
Her hands were going through the pockets in her robe. "Oh, never mind." She screwed up her face and the purple waves shrank back into a severe brown bob, which she ran her hands through before rubbing a finger wearily down the bridge of her nose. Despite having known her for several weeks, her sudden shifts into someone else often left Remus reeling, and he watched her for a moment, unsteadily. But when she opened her eyes it was the same Tonks grinning back at him.
He smiled quickly.
"Spreading yourself all over town, tonight?" he quipped, then laughed at his sudden daring.
"Date with a door at the end of a corridor," she eyed him and smiled a bit wickedly, "Maybe you could set me up with that werewolf chap of yours. He sounds a good deal more interesting than the evening I have planned."
Remus stared, "I—"
"The ferocious five-foot-three one," she grinned at his discomfort. She was always grinning at him.
"Oh, yes, he's… he's interesting," Remus cleared his throat and focused on his pile of books. He could practically hear her smiling at him.
She turned to go. "A bad mistake you can't wait to make," he offered suddenly, unwilling to let her have the last word.
Tonks laughed. She had a nice laugh.
"Ah, but what does he know about love?"
Remus smiled at her. "Not enough."
She gave him a small wink as she bounced backwards through the doorframe. "Night, Remus," she called.
"Goodnight, Tonks."
"You're a bad mistake, but I can't wait to make you. I'm gonna shake you from your sleepwalk in the dark."
A/N: Erm, it got away from me a bit and I didn't really know what to do. I write things longer than 1000 words like.. never, so thoughts for better or for worse are very much appreciated. Eh.