Numbers Game
It's in twenty past four in the morning. Remus has been awake since two o'clock. This isn't unusual- he's such a bad sleeper that he can't remember a night where he hasn't woken up at least once. Padfoot doesn't sleep well either, and some nights he'll knock on Remus' door, whisper, "Moony, are you awake?", and they'll go downstairs together for a glass of brandy. Sirius is frustrated by his own sleeplessness as it's something else to remind him of growing up here, and of the damage done by twelve years of sleeping in a prison full of Dementors. Remus, however, likes having somebody to share his insomnia with. Usually he and Padfoot end up on the sofa together, each quietly nursing their brandy and feeling reassured by having somebody to keep them company.
Tonight, however, Sirius has either managed to drift back to sleep after his usual Dementor-filled dreams, or he doesn't want to have a drink with Remus (possibly, he'd prefer to drink alone. Remus has seen the empty bottles half-hidden in Sirius' bedroom). So Remus is hunched over the desk in desk in the corner of his bedroom at Grimmauld Place, writing numbers in his notebook. Two columns of the same digits. The left-hand column contains the numbers zero to twenty-three, and the right-hand column contain the numbers thirteen to thirty-six. Tonks on the left, him on the right. Remus writes the numbers out every night and studies them, considering which is the worst arrangement of ages, which age gap is the most sordid. He's been doing it since Ash Wednesday, when he decided that this nonsense regarding Tonks has to stop. He's got to get her out of his head and, worse, his heart. Repeatedly reading over the numbers reminds him being captivated by her like this is ludicrous.
Sixteen and three is a bad one. Remus remembers what it was like to be sixteen. The maddening buzz of hormones. The bewilderment. The fascination with sex, equal parts curiosity, lust, excitement and fear. He remembers how sixteen-year-old boys chat and taunt and brag, the jokes they make and the cartoons they doodle on their homework. He was reminded of it the year he was a professor, and with the Weasleys here over Christmas. It's all perfectly normal, until you imagine a three-year-old with them, and then it becomes….Remus doesn't want to think of the word. He knows and remembers less of what three-year-olds are like. Sirius has excitedly shown Remus the photographs of Sirius and Tonks together at her parents' house, taken the Summer holiday after Padfoot ran away from home. Seeing her as a child makes him wince, and his stomach curl up in shame. Sirius insists that Remus visited Tonks' family with him a couple of times, although Remus can't remember that and Tonks says she doesn't either. For months, Remus thought that that was probably for the best, although now part of him wishes that Sirius had a photo of them together. Then, he could see them for himself and understanding how absolutely it is that he keeps imagining kissing somebody who was a toddler when he was revising for his NEWTs.
Eight and twenty-one sticks out, though more to do with him than with her. Anything to do with being twenty-one or of 1981, and Remus can't think of anything but James and Lily, and Peter, and Harry. And Sirius. "Remus, we've got to tell you before it gets out another way….it's Lily and James". He didn't cry. He didn't cry about Sirius and Pete, a few days later. In hindsight, Remus can admit that there was a horrible sort of acceptance to it: of course it had turned out this way. Of course James and Lily couldn't hide forever. Of course Remus would end up alone. Real friends he could have relied on forever? He'd been childish to believe it. And then Remus would hate himself for thinking about himself when James and Lily were cold in the ground and Harry would be unprotected and alone. And all the while, Tonks was an eight-year-old, drawing horses or singing nursery rhymes or practising cartwheels (she probably wasn't very good at those), or whatever eight-year-olds did that wasn't grieving alone for their dead friends.
He was twenty-four the year Tonks started Hogwarts. She was fourteen the year Mam died. She came of age the year Remus turned thirty. His thirtieth birthday doesn't even seem like long ago (he was working as a cleaner in a Muggle warehouse in Wigan, and didn't realise it was his birthday until the evening), because it wasn't, because it isn't long since she came of age. Tonks has got her whole life ahead of her, and it's beyond selfish of him to want to get in her way. She was at school, for Merlin's sake. He's hardly better than those men who drool over "barely legal" models in magazines and who whistle at girls in school uniform. Which brings him on to twenty and thirty-three- the year he was teaching at Hogwarts. Tonks was in her final year of Auror training then. Remus thinks of Lily at twenty, and how their friends would have reacted to a thirty-three-year-old having designs on her. Probably, they would have found it amusingly perplexing. They'd have chortled about whoever it was being a pervert and a cradle-robber, and probably teased Lily about it. James might have pretended to be appalled, though only to show off.
The last numbers on the list are their ages now: twenty-three and thirty-five (only twelve years apart, because Tonks' birthday was at Christmas and his isn't until March Though twelve is no better than thirteen). Remus never writes any further. He won't let himself entertain the idea of twenty-seven and forty, or thirty-four and forty-seven, or sixty-eight and eighty-one. They'll be lucky if they get to grow old at all, and he refuses to let himself entertain the idea that they might do so together. He and Tonks are not and should not be a "together".
The mental gymnastics is wearying enough that Remus wants to go back to bed. Except going to bed means risking the worst part of all this: dreaming about her. When Remus is awake, he can control his thoughts. He can make his list, distract himself, and give himself a talking-to to convince himself of the utter preposterousness and delusion of his fixation on Tonks. In sleep, he doesn't have that control, so she pops up in his dreams. Sometimes the dreams are flashes of pink or a noise that sounds slightly like her laugh. Sometimes Remus dreams that he and Tonks are on opposite armchairs, talking and talking all night. Other times, his dreams more mortifyingly more intimate. All of them prove that everything Remus is attempting to do to un-fall for Tonks isn't working. It's infuriating, because what more can he do? He's trying to avoid her, he's limiting contact between them, he's proving to himself over and over why wanting her like that is indecent and insane. What else is he meant to try to stop this infatuation? To stop Tonks wandering into his head and his dreams uninvited? To stop feeling so bloody happy and alive when she's around him in real life?
Remus tears the page out of his notebook, casts indencio to burn it, then extinguishes his wand. If only, he thinks, sighing, his own emotions were as easy to extinguish.
