A/n: Thanks again for the reviews, they really are delightful, and I love getting them! Chapter Two

Passing the Time

"Just because I nearly failed Stealth and Tracking doesn't mean I was rubbish at transfiguration," Tonks said cheekily.

"My apologies, N-" Lupin stopped for a split second, recognizing the dangerous look in her eyes, and swiftly transfigured one word into another. "Not meaning to offend."

"Obviously not," she said, glaring at him so that he could see she knew what he was really going to say.

"So, no 'spin the bottle,' then." Pushing a strand of green hair behind an ear, she leaned over and made as if she were marking something off a list. She could feel him watching her. "Well, there goes my suggestion," she said, sticking the quill into her hair. "Your turn."

Lupin just stared at her.

"What's wrong, Moony, didn't you and your friends play games ever?" She said, emphasizing his playful nickname.

"Whether I played games in school or not is irrelevant, Nymphadora."

"Touché," she muttered.

"We could play the quiet game," he said, seeming to focus his attention very seriously on his parchment as he spoke.

"The-" Tonks could not believe he'd just said that.

"You know, where we both try to stay quiet and see which of us can stay silent the longest?"

"Yes, I know what it means, you-" she broke off as he looked at her inquisitively, one eyebrow raised; the whole expression seemed to beg her to act childish and validate his suggestion of the quiet game. Oh, she'd show him, she thought. She'd wipe that smirk right off his face.

"Fine." Tonks got up and leaned against the wall defiantly, crossing her arms and cocking her head to the side. "Starting now." He nodded his acquiescence and turned back to the task of monitoring the pub entrance, no doubt secure in the knowledge that he wouldn't be the first to speak. Well, let him, Tonks thought with glee. I'll show him.

She started by pacing the floor, being careful to step on any creaky boards multiple times. After the third squeak from a particularly annoying floorboard, Lupin turned to her with a pained expression. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say 'I can't help it that the floor is old!' After practically hopping on the loudly protesting section of floor for two minutes with hardly a reaction from the room's other occupant, Tonks ramped it up a little.

Counting on the fact that his senses were probably more acute than a normal man's, she started to walk towards him, this time attempting to make as little sound as possible. Somehow she knew that a quiet Tonks would probably unnerve him more than a clumsy and noisy one, and she was right. Fully three times he lifted his head to listen carefully, each time she froze in place and hardly dared to breathe. The fourth time, he almost turned to look for her, but instead let out a great sigh and bent back to the parchment he was reading. She almost asked him aloud if sighing counted as speech, then caught herself. Tricky bastard.

Tonks knew she was clumsy. She also knew that other people expected her to be clumsy. She also knew that, generally speaking, the longer she went without doing something disastrous increased the expectancy that she would, and soon. She was counting on this.

She'd stood in the same spot for roughly 5 minutes straight when he lifted his head again. She had been sure to make no noise, and the fact that she was making him nervous by doing absolutely nothing gave her a splendid feeling of power. Now, for the coup de gras.

Making sure his ink bottle was nowhere nearby, Tonks deliberately tripped and fell almost on top of Lupin.

"Bloody hell!" he fairly shouted, and looked as if she'd just scared him out of his skin. Tonks got up quickly and leapt not-quite-gracefully onto her leather armchair, crossing her legs and smiling at him.

"I win."

"You-" he looked genuinely angry, and she felt her self-confidence start to crumble a bit. Then, he closed his eyes, ran his hand through his hair a bit shakily, and started to laugh. The laugh turned into a full-blown chuckle, and when he opened his eyes, they were filled with mirth. "You," he said again, much more gently, "are a worthy opponent, Miss Tonks." The praise flowed through her veins like rich hot chocolate.

"Thank you, Mr. Lupin." Tonks grinned, and continued in a decidedly mischievous voice, "and now, I believe it is once again my turn to pick a game." He sighed deeply, and then a ghost of a smile flickered across his face. She gave him a questioning look, and the smile returned in full force.

"I am beginning to understand why Moody carries around a hip flask." With that, he settled himself down again, looking out the window, his shoulders shaking with his laughter.

Once again, she stared at him. It was becoming quite a habit. She was, however, getting sick of letting him get the last word.

"Well, how about 'truth or dare,'" she said, before she could stop herself. Whatever possessed me to ask THAT! She asked herself in despair. He sat there for a long moment; each second that passed when he didn't say something ramped up the tension in her for when he would.

"Is this entire night a sort of game where you attempt to always get the last word?" He asked, his voice a mix of curiosity and annoyance.

"If it is, it's not working." She said, dryly. Tonks watched as Lupin fought with a grin, and lost. He turned to her, still smiling.

"All right then—but I get to go first."

My mouth is going to start to hurt if he keeps shocking it open so bloody much, she thought. Although I suppose there are worse things to stare at… She saw that he was scribbling something on a spare bit of parchment, which he showed to her with somewhat of a cheeky grin on his face.

'One for my side.' She scowled at him. Lupin then took the paper back and wrote something else on it.

'Truth or dare?' He was chuckling at her now.

"I'm not completely speechless!" she protested, ignoring the fact that she had been not a moment before, until the insufferable man had goaded her. She decided to up the ante.

"Dare."

But his face didn't fall as she had expected it would. In fact, she had a sneaking suspicion that he'd wanted her to pick dare—which he confirmed with his next statement.

"All right, then," he said, all of a sudden seeming to be completely fascinated a fray in the sleeve of his robe, "I dare you to be silent for an hour."

She was going to kill him.

She was going to look up that Ginny Weasley and have her teach her the bat-bogey hex. She was- Lupin had picked up his quill again and prepared to write something down on the same scrap of parchment, and she couldn't let him think he'd stunned her speechless again. Even though he had.

"You play dirty."

"Thank you."

Before she let her mind dwell on the other implications of their brief conversation, Tonks popped out of her chair and raced over to the ratty bookshelf, grabbing an old book at random and placing it on one of the arms of her chair. She then removed her wand—determinedly not allowing herself to frown at Lupin, who'd started to discretely edge away from her line-of-sight—and promptly transfigured the volume into a canary yellow alarm clock. She ostentatiously set it for one hour, and faced the thing at her fellow Order member. Then, she made herself comfortable and started to contribute to the surveillance. After all, she figured, with that thing staring at him, the man in the chair next to her would most likely go batty before the hour was up.

She wondered, idly, what kind of sound a bright yellow goggly-eyed alarm clock would make when it went off…

TBC