Disclaimer: I…am a beautiful animal. I…am a destroyer of worlds. I…AM STILL NOT J.K. ROWLING!!
( a/n: So I was sitting around enjoying all my crazy post-graduation free time, and I thought, "Gee, who reads my fanfic?" and I answered myself, "Why, yaoi fangirls, of course!". And then I asked, "And what do yaoi fangirls HATE with a big capital letter-type hatred?" and I answered myself, "Why, Remus/Tonks, of course!" And then I asked myself, "So what should I go and write?" And I answered myself, "Something the fuck else!"
But my habit of not listening to anything sensible unfortunately extends even to talking to myself, so this got written anyway, basically as an explaination of why I can like this pairing and still call myself a fangirl. The whole thing was, as usual, written while listening to the song of the same name (I think it adds to the reading, personally), but I continue to maintain that it is not songfic for reasons known only to me. You can argue about it, but trust me, it won't get you anywhere, because you can't fight the logic of those with no logic.)
This picture says so many things
I wish I'd never had the nerve to say to you, to say to you
But I could be so many things
I wish that I could never be in front of you, in front of you
You say that you never believe
You say that it's time
Oh, you can find a way
Through the rain, the rhythm of the rain
Songs from your past will play
Through the rain, the rhythm of the rain...
—Melee
"OI! ARE YOU GOING TO LET ME CARRY ALL THESE BOXES MYSELF?!" shouted Nymphadora Tonks at the top of her voice, but with her husband mired deep in one of his post-full moon sulk fests, it was hardly likely to do her any good. She scowled, her hair fading into scarlet at the roots in her frustration. "REMUS!"
A floor below her, a door slammed heavily in answer.
Tonks let out a long breath, shifting an open cardboard box around in her arms and making a lengthy series of irritated faces. For a man who could barely afford to clothe himself, Remus Lupin had more crap than she'd ever imagined, and he wasn't helping her move any of it.
"Dammit." She swore under her breath, then out loud as her foot struck several inches of wet cardboard bearing only the vaguest soggy resemblance to the box it once had been and stuck there with an unpleasant squelch. "Remus, for Merlin's sake, I've told you this attic leaks when it rains, don't you—oh, bollocks!"
The expletive did nothing to stop the avalanche of cardboard she'd set off; boxes scattered left and right, the haphazard stacks collapsing in chaotic disarray until the only box not on the floor was the one Tonks herself was holding.
"Brilliant."
The box in her arms split along the bottom with a muffled rip and the contents joined the expanding pile on the floor in an aggravating instant.
"Fucking brilliant."
She crossed the room with a low, malcontented groan, skirting the ever-amassing drip of rainwater through the roof to relocate her husband's possessions to the least damp sections of the attic. It didn't help that it was all books, either. Why couldn't he invest in collecting something waterproof, like Tupperware or ponchos or—
"OUCH!"
She nudged the object that had just violently launched its animate self at her shin with her foot, then knelt to the ground when it proved too heavy to push.
"What's this even doing up here?" A quick swipe at the layer of dust settled atop it revealed the Hogwarts crest, and her instinct for nosiness immediately took over as she fumbled with the latches holding the trunk shut.
She rifled through its contents as though expecting to find an atom bomb, but everything she touched proved to be almost sinfully boring; school robes, ink bottles, parchment scraps…
She paused and blinked as her finger grazed a cold, glassy texture tucked halfway under a textbook at least as old as she was, and grinned to herself as she realized what it was.
"Oh, excellent!" She could count the number of photos she'd seen of Remus's school days on one hand, and tugged excitedly on the edge of the frame, trying to dislodge it without breaking it.
The first thing she noticed was the rain, so heavy the two huddled figures present looked as though they were standing under a malevolent shower head. Remus's hair was plastered to his head in thick, dripping layers, water running in rivulets into his wide, smiling eyes. The laughter would have been plain even in a muggle photograph, but the Remus in this photo grinned hugely and hugged the arm of the figure beside him with a liveliness that even the walking, breathing version sulking in the rooms below her lacked.
The second figure took her an age to make out, partly because she'd never in the whole of her life seen her cousin that happy.
Funny, she thought, the way they were with each other. There was no distance between the two, no sign of the reserved nature Remus could never quite rid himself of, even around his own wife. And none of the gaunt, cynically sarcastic Sirius she knew was present here; he smiled earnestly, stroking the other man's hand with his own and grinning in a hopelessly adolescent way, almost like…almost like…
And just as she came to the word she wanted, they kissed.
It wasn't passionate; it didn't need to be. There was as much love in that brief meeting of lips as she'd ever felt from him herself.
"Dora?"
She dropped the picture suddenly; there wasn't time to do anything else, but her stomach lurched unpleasantly at the tinkle of breaking glass.
"In here, Remus, just…moving boxes." She scurried franticly to pick it up, slicing her finger on the pieces and swearing magnificently, then regretting it immediately as Remus shot up the stairs to help her.
"Are you all right? I heard something break—" He paused, looking slowly from the photo to his wife and back again. A light flush began to color his cheeks and tripped inelegantly over his next few words. "Ah. You…that's my…er…" He floundered wordlessly. "I'll go get something for your hand," he said, and fled desperately down the stairs.
OoOoOo
After the fifth time he'd tied and retied the bandage on her finger, Tonks had to put her foot down.
"Remus—"
"Hold still, it's still crooked."
"Remus—"
"Eat this chocolate."
"REMUS! I DO NOT WANT A BLOODY CHOCOLATE BAR! I WANT YOU TO TELL ME WHAT THE HELL I JUST SAW!"
He tried to take the picture from her as she pulled it from her pocket, but she held it steadily away from him.
"There isn't much to tell."
"Tell me anyway."
He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. "I'm not gay, if that's what you're thinking. I still…you know… like women…"
"You ought to have a word with this photo, Rem. It says otherwise."
"However," he added carefully. "Sirius and I…" He looked away from her, down at the photograph, then quickly away again as though it had burned his eyes. "It was just…different with him. I wasn't thinking like that when we were together. It wasn't important, and it wasn't what I loved about him—" His eyes darted quickly to check her expression for disgust or alarm, and finding nothing apart from slightly indignant curiosity, he continued, "It never meant anything to me that we were both men..." He laughed quietly. "Boys then, really, we must've been seventeen when that picture was taken. I remember Peter whining on and on about the camera getting wet…he whined about everything…" A faint smile crossed his lips at the memory, hardening into a frown at his own mention of the man who'd taken those memories away from him.
"But then Azkaban happened." He said it simply, without emotion, as though reporting the weather. "I don't think he ever forgave me for believing what they said about him…next I saw him after that was thirteen years later, and I could tell in a minute it wasn't going to be like it was. We were friends again, better friends than we'd ever been…but nothing else." He met Tonks' eyes for the first time in an hour with a weak smile. "Somehow I always thought we'd be together, in the end. For two years I kept telling myself he'd come to his senses. I kept our flat and I kept that photo and I kept telling myself that one day he'd fall back in love with me. And the stupid thing was, I honestly believed it." He sighed, turning his gaze to the far wall. "I believed it until the day he died."
"Remus…" she began, but faltered for something to follow it with. Honestly, what was there to say, aside from the one terribly inappropriate thing at the forefront of her mind…and being a terribly inappropriate person, she said it anyway. "How can you still love me after that?"
The hint of a smile lined his mouth. "Merlin, you are so like him sometimes. He always asked me why I bothered with him."
Tonks raised an eyebrow, not sure how she felt about the comparison. "And what did you tell him?"
"The same thing I'm going to tell you," said Remus, sliding the photo back into what was left of its frame and taking Tonks' hands in his own. "You make me happier than I have any right to be."
Tonks gave a small, brief laugh. "You didn't."
"No, but it sounds lovely, doesn't it? I think I heard it in a film once…"
Tonks hit him on the side of the head without any real force and laughed in earnest. "You are such a wanker."
He touched the side of her face gently, smiling as he had for only one other person in the whole of his life. "You don't seem to mind, though," he said as he kissed her.
And in the photograph on the floor beside them, a soft rain fell on the only time Remus Lupin had ever been happier.
(A further a/n: All right, so you could stock a waffle house with all the sap in that ending. Sue me. I'm a recovering angst addict and I must periodically inject myself with bits of fluff to keep myself from buying a Hot Topic location and softly weeping myself to sleep each night to a Hawthorne Heights album.
If you loved this, hated it, or just want to tell me off for making fun of emo kids, I'll remind you that all these things can be conveyed through use of that endlessly magical review button…)