Disclaimer: See Prologue
A/N: This is a little different to the others. There were several drafts written for "First", but this one's probably the most interesting. The next one will be a little more like the others though, promise.
11. First
1998
It's their first date since their son was born, since the war ended, since their lives have changed completely. Lupin's not been on what he thinks might constitute an actual date in years, so he sits in the kitchen, wondering where he is going to take his wife, and wishing she had not left this to him.
But Tonks has bigger problems. She stands alone before the mirror, analysing her appearance. Her baby-weight has been morphed away. She doesn't entirely hate it; he won't admit it, but she knows the sudden swell of her breasts, the curve of her tiny waist leading to hips almost as wide as her shoulders, is driving her husband quietly mad.
This, she knows, is partly due to his typical male tendencies, and partly due to the fact that she was told it would be best to avoid "relations" until six weeks had passed. Their son is now eight weeks old and Lupin hasn't pushed the issue, but she thinks tonight might be the first time in almost two months that they make love.
And she is terrified.
There are some things she cannot hide when she morphs; her heart-shaped face, her widow's peak, a blush. He's only a baby, but she's noticed Ted's face is always heart-shaped too. She's resigned herself to the fact that there's no way around it.
Sometimes, she is glad that her husband is terribly romantic about it and insists that she be in her natural form when they are intimate. She rolls her eyes every time he asks her to be the short, mousy-haired little nobody she used to hate, but he's enabled her to make peace with her natural appearance.
And this would be fine – more than fine – except since the war, since Ted, she's not as comfortable as she once was. She knows he has glimpsed the lattice pattern of scars across her chest and he knows that she morphs them away. She wonders whether it is churlish to hide them when he cannot, whether it is hypocritical to idly trace his with short fingernails so as not to open them, in those few minutes when moving is not high on either of their agendas. He's not seen the angry red stretch marks their son has left her with, but there's little point hiding them; he's not stupid.
She hides the scars given to her by her fundamentalist psychopath of an aunt because her dress has a Bardot neckline, but she leaves the others. They're from Ted and she's a bit proud of them. They're not painful to look at; they don't bring back memories that morph into nightmares and wake her in the middle of the night, leaving her drenched in cold sweat.
She physically shakes off the thought, tossing this evening's choice of elbow-length hair as she does so. She pushes the dress taught against her frame. It's on loan from her mother-in-law. Strictly, it should be a little too snug. She's seen photographs of a young Mrs. Lupin – photographs of her bending over, her back forming a perfect arch, her tiny feet en pointe in ballet slippers. If she wasn't a metamorphmagus, the phrase, "I've got a dress you'd look lovely in" would terrify Tonks.
But she is a metamorphmagus and she does look lovely in it. The tangerine cotton looks breath-taking coupled with her mother-in-law's olive skin and wild black curls. Tonks has opted to team orange with auburn, her skin almost deathly pale; she doesn't want to emulate somebody else's appearance, least of all that of her date's mother.
"So where are we going?" she asks, closing the kitchen door behind her. "What do you think? Am I overdressed?"
Lupin only shakes his head.
"What? I know it's not really me, but I rather like it actually and I know it's pretty much a carbon copy of your mother's figure, which is a bit odd, but –"
"Well now that you've told me that, what I was going to say will sound perverse, but you look lovely."
"So where are we going?"
"I know how fond you are of cocktails, so –"
Tonks' eyes light up. "Are we going for cocktails? That's super. I was ridiculously worried about this dress."
"Do you remember The Oyster Catcher?"
Tonks vaguely recalls walking by it one evening; a small shack of a building on the coast, full of noisy punters and interesting records, the bass of one she could feel across the water.
"Oh wow. Are we going there?"
"It's a tourist-trap, but it's still only June; we might be in luck."
She's over-estimated Lupin's alcohol tolerance. It's half past nine and:
"You're hammered."
"No I'm not. I'm festive."
Tonks rolls her eyes good-naturedly. "That works really well at Christmas, I'll give you that."
The Oyster Catcher is far more up-market than she'd expected. The furniture is made of driftwood and the walls haven't been plastered, but the women are wearing cocktail dresses and the chink of her ring against her glass makes such a beautiful sound that it has to be crystal and she almost wants to hear it again.
"I used to work here."
Tonks wrinkles her nose in a mixture of amusement and wonder. "Really?"
Lupin nods. "I think my father confunded someone. I was a barman, summer staff, at sixteen. No idea how I got it. I looked about twelve." He reaches for the nearest glass and knocks back the contents, wincing. "I think that was yours."
Tonks nods.
"It was vile."
"I'm sure I'd say that about yours." She lifts his glass to the light. The drink itself is clear, but there are so many leaves floating in it that it looks like a lake at the end of summer. "What is this?"
"An 'English Mojito'."
"And what's that when it's at home?"
"Gin and lemonade."
"And the leaves?"
"Mint."
Tonks turns her face away from it, disgusted.
"Well, I like it."
"It looks like pond water."
Lupin laughs. "It does rather."
"Come on, drink up. I want to get a move on."
Lupin frowns, but he does as he's told. "And what, may I ask, is your hurry?"
Tonks gets to her feet, pulling him up and clutching his hands. "I want you, not firing on all cylinders, but at least sixty per cent sober tonight."
Lupin winces. "That's a big ask. What have you got planned?"
She looks at him like he is a small, pathetic child; the same half-exasperated, half-pitying look that Peter would give him at least twice a week in Potions.
"Oh. Oh. Yes, right, of course."
He wants to protest, to remind her that she paid for more rounds than he did, but he knows it would either result in further amounts of gin or bankruptcy, so he follows her out onto the cliffs.
It may be June, but the coastal winds whip both Tonks' mane of red hair and the skirt of her dress into her face. She shrieks with laughter and the cold, clamping the skirt to her thighs.
"Jesus!"
"You'd better have this." He hands her his favourite patched brown leather jacket. Without it, he is so cold that he thinks he might freeze if they walk home.
Ordinarily, his clothes suit her. Ordinarily, Tonks is a little taller and a little less pixie-like. Tonight, it swamps her, making her look like a lost child; Lolita, he supposes, in that dress. The sleeves are too long. He rolls them up to her wrists and takes hold of her hand.
"Nice legs, by the way."
"Thanks. They're your mother's."
"Well isn't that nice."
Tonks cackles with laughter and, despite himself, Lupin finds it contagious. Pulling her close to him, close enough to count the freckles on her nose, he pushes a loose strand of auburn hair behind her ear and, though there is no-one around to hear him, whispers, "If I am sixty per cent sober tonight, can you not have the hip-span of a fourteen-year-old boy please?"
"They're your mother's hips too. They had to be to even get in the damn thing. Seriously, Remus, did she never eat?"
"Don't change the subject. What are you worried about?"
They're walking along the cliffpath, holding hands and shivering, and Tonks doesn't think this is the place to discuss it. She's not sure she wants to discuss it at all.
"What makes you think I'm worried?"
Lupin raises his eyebrows. "You don't want to tell me?"
"I'm not worried about anything." Tonks drops his hand, stops, and stares at him.
"All right, well, I am. I'm worried that you wait for me to fall asleep before you'll come to bed. I'm worried that when you wake up in the morning, you leap out of it like I've swapped the mattress for live lobsters." Tonks laughs, but Lupin doesn't. "Most of all, I'm worried that you won't even tell me why."
"Remus, it's me, all right? It's me. I'm…I don't feel like me anymore. I don't look like me anymore and, you know, six weeks are up."
Lupin laughs with relief, but he soon silences himself, realising she will think he's insincere. "You're a metamorphmagus, aren't you?"
Tonks is sceptical. "You ask me not to do that."
Lupin sighs. "That's not a personal preference. What was it Henry Higgins said? 'I've grown accustomed to her face'. I…" He trails off, turning and ambling back the way they came. Tonks follows, frowning deeply and wondering what such a confession can possibly have prompted. She doesn't want a fight, not tonight, not when they're supposed to be celebrating and enjoying one another's company.
He climbs ever higher. Somewhere below her, Tonks can hear the jukebox in the corner of The Oyster Catcher. It's getting dark and she can't see just how high they are until she turns the corner and the cliff-path opens onto plains of long grass and steep drops onto the rocks below. She feels a little sick.
He's sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into nothingness, swinging.
"Remus, please don't sit there. It's terrifying me."
He shuffles backwards, swinging his legs back onto solid ground and taps the space beside him. Reluctantly, Tonks joins him.
"What?"
Lupin smiles sadly. "If you weren't comfortable with it, you ought to have said."
"I was. I am."
"I wanted you to know that I wasn't going to take advantage of what you can do. I wanted you to know that I was, that I am, hopelessly in love with you; not the woman I can dream up. And yes, it's selfish of me, but when I wake up in the morning, I want to wake up next to my wife. That's all. If you want to have pink hair, knock yourself out. If you don't want the scars, I understand. I don't want mine and if I had the opportunity to hide them, I would snatch it."
Tonks reaches for his hand in the darkness. As his fingers wrap around hers, she squeezes her thanks. Only five minutes ago, the silence would be all-consuming, deafening, eating away at her, but now it's companionable. Elevated fifty feet above the town on the coast, almost looking down at clouds, it's not at all as awkward as she'd thought this conversation might be. The cocktails might have something to do with it.
"I love you, you know."
Tonks laughs. "I've had my suspicions for a while. You're not very subtle, Remus."
"No?"
"The wedding ring, the baby in the next room…" She winks at him, her smile spreading into a wide grin. "Are you sixty per cent sober yet? Only I'm bloody freezing and this dress doesn't allow for an insulating layer of blubber. I literally cannot fathom how your mother is able to leave the house in winter."
Lupin shakes his head. "You should see the shoes. I think it's sheer force of will that keeps her upright in a breeze."
Tonks throws her head back. Her laughter is so loud that it echoes, even out on the cliffs. She tumbles onto her back, throwing her arms out behind her, her hair splayed across the grass. She can't understand how she feels so lightheaded. "Do you ever think you could just jump?" Lupin does not respond and she sits up suddenly, a little too quickly. He's staring at her, peering really, his jaw dropping.
"What?" It's little more than a whisper.
"Not in a suicidal way or anything, just, you know, a jump."
"I used to do it all the time," he admits. "Whenever I was lonely, whenever I was spitting with anger, I'd take a running leap."
Tonks is fascinated, hanging on his every word. "What does it feel like?"
"Freedom," he says simply.
"So it is safe then?"
He shrugs. "I have absolutely no idea. It could be sheer luck that I'm not still impaled on a rock down there."
"Right." Tonks gets to her feet with a surprising amount of grace. She hands Lupin his jacket and throws off his mother's dress. He averts his eyes and Tonks, with a sigh, lengthens her legs and widens her waist.
"It's all right. You don't have to feel like Oedipus anymore."
Her hands are splayed across her stomach, trying to shield what seem to her paranoid mind to be welts, but are mere silvery red rivers, not entirely unlike those her husband has given himself. He's looking at her like he might look at a vision of God. Clutching his coat in one hand, he almost stumbles to his feet and slowly steps toward her.
His kiss is electric, a current racing through her veins. She's running out of breath, but she won't release him. It's the first time they've done this for weeks, the first time she has let him.
He pulls away, smiling to himself. His lips are swollen. He's almost hopeful when he asks, "Do you want to go home?"
Tonks nods. "I think I'm ready to actually move on with my life. I know I'm not the same person, but I think I like who I've become. I think I can do this." She smiles sadly. "It's not just Ted. It's not just the scars. It's the nightmares, it's Bellatrix, it's going back to work without Mad-Eye, and I'm sorry I'm taking it all out on you, really I am."
And with that, she takes a running jump, shrieking in surprise as she hits the water.
"Are you out of your senses?" Lupin calls down. "What if you'd died?"
"But I didn't. And neither will you. Come on; I bet you've missed it."
She's waiting for him down there, her skin luminous in the sliver of silver moonlight, her hair like fire on the sea.
And for the first time in seventeen years, Lupin leaps.
Freedom, he thinks, is the sound of air whistling in his ears as he hurtles toward the water. It's the salty taste in the back of his mouth as he surfaces, gasping for breath. It's her legs wrapped around his waist, her long, wet hair entangled around his fingers, her mouth on his.
"Ready to go home?"
He nods, not trusting himself to speak.
"Good, because I'm freezing my tits off in here."
