Author's note: Enjoy!
Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights
Quidditch League: Holyhead Harpies, Finals, Seeker, Task: Your character must ignore facts so they don't have to change their opinion.
Warnings: Alcohol consumption
There's a Place I Know
There's a place I go
Where the lights hang low
Walls are stale
From a thousand Marlborough lights
And the carpet tells a tale
Of a thousand Friday nights
—Where the Lights Hang Low, Passenger
Remus eased the door of Grimmauld Place shut behind him, eager not to wake Mrs. Black's disaster of a portrait since he was coming home late. He crept up the main staircase but found the living room still aglow by the final stretch of a fire in the hearth. Sirius was slumped on the couch, hugging a bottle of what Remus assumed was Firewhisky because it usually was.
"Didn't think I'd see you here tonight," Sirius said.
"You did ask me to move in with you," Remus pointed out.
"So," Sirius said, making no effort to sit up and paying Remus no mind. "How was your date?"
Remus froze midstep. "My what?"
"Your date," Sirius said. "You know, with Tonks? The pink one?"
Remus took a second to try to compute.
"Well, you had your wish," Sirius said, slapping Remus' shoulder as they did the dishes after the Order meeting—which amounted to a ridiculous amount of teacups, saucers, and teaspoons. "You went the whole day without anyone finding out it was your birthday."
"It was your what?"
They spun away from the sink and towards the doorway to find Tonks standing there, jaw dropped. She was wearing a slouchy green cardigan, a Weird Sisters t-shirt, and a pair of black-and-white checkered pants nearly as loud as today's shade of mustard yellow hair.
"It's your birthday?" Tonks asked, dumbfounded. "Like, it has been all day?"
"Yup," Sirius said, popping his 'p.'
"Well happy birthday," Tonks said. "Merlin, didn't think you should've said anything? We could've had cake at the meeting or something. Molly's always looking for a reason to have cake at a meeting!"
"No—I mean, thank you, but I don't really celebrate it," Remus said. He didn't go into the details of it; explaining that his birthday in the last week of October had coincided with his first full moon as a child and had been so devastatingly close to the day Lily and James had died at Godric's Hollow and his life had fallen apart was… well, something of a bummer. It was just best not to celebrate it, really.
"That's madness," Tonks scoffed. "Why not?"
"Yeah Remus," Sirius asked, hopping up onto the counter and smiling innocently. "Why not?"
Remus was already too exhausted by his antics to elaborate, so he made something up instead.
"Just… never something we really did," Remus said. "I never got into the habit."
"Oh," Tonks said, as if that was the most shocking thing someone could have told her. "Well, they say it takes twenty-one days to make a new habit, yeah? Better start now."
"Excellent idea!" Sirius said.
"There's a place I know," Tonks said. "Really small, always quiet, always nice. I could go pick up something for dinner…"
"No, don't mind me," Sirius said. "Just because I have to stay in this house until the asbestos kills me doesn't mean you two should. You know, since Tonks knows a place."
"Alright," Tonks said. Her grey eyes scanned Remus. "I mean, it's your birthday. Birthday dinner is really the least I could do."
"Sure sounds like it to me," Sirius said. He jumped down from the counter and clapped Remus' back. "Why don't I do the dishes while the two of you figure out the details to this birthday dinner?"
"I don't…" Remus trailed off. Suddenly, his complete unwillingness to celebrate his birthday was taken over by his paralyzing desire not to be rude. He turned back to Tonks. "I mean, if you're sure. I thought Friday was your only day off this week?"
"It is," Tonks said. "So it works out nicely, yeah?"
"Alright," Remus said.
"Great," Tonks said. "I can meet you back here at 7:00."
"7:00 sounds nice," Remus agreed.
"That wasn't a date," Remus said. "She was just being kind."
"Right," Sirius said. He cleared his throat and sat up, leaning his elbows on his knees. "Alright, Remus. When she picked you up, what was she wearing?"
She'd grown out her electric pink hair long enough that she could braid it and twist it into a chignon behind her ear. Her little black dress was all sparkles under her leather jacket and if he hadn't been so caught up in it, he would have wondered how much of a hazard her high heels were.
"You look lovely," Remus said, all the while trying not to be self-conscious about the patch in his jacket. It was his only nice jacket, and 'nice' was a stretch.
"Thank you," Tonks said. "I don't often have a reason to dress up."
"Well, you're very capable," Remus said. He stepped out of Grimmauld Place and locked the door behind him with one of the only keys to the house in the world.
"It's this way," Tonks said, holding her hand out to him as she walked away.
"She just… wanted a reason to dress up," Remus said. "That's what she said. And you know Tonks, she likes colours and textures and… things."
"She does like things," Sirius nodded, solemnly. "Speaking of which, this place that she said she knew and liked… how was it?"
The place was small, with exposed brick walls and small round tables. Fairy lights twinkled as they stretched from wall to wall, and the music that played blended softly in the background of polite chatter and clinking utensils.
"This is nice," Remus said once their host had seated them.
"I told you I knew a place," she said with a smile. "I'm a woman of my word, you know."
"And what did you have?" Sirius pressed.
"Moules and frites," Remus said. "It was—that's just because it was a Belgian place."
"A Belgian place," Sirius repeated. He rubbed his eyes. "Right. Remus, I've seen Tonks eat cereal out of the box and a slice of pizza that had fallen on the floor cheese-first. More than once. Does she strike you as someone who just fancies Belgian cuisine on a regular basis?"
"Well, no, but she said it was special…"
"Oh, like a date."
"No, like a birthday. She kept making a big deal about it," Remus said. "She insisted we share a slice of cake and everything."
"You shared a slice of cake—bloody hell," Sirius said, rolling his eyes. "And you're flushed—so I assume you had a glass of wine?"
"Just the one," Remus said.
"Wine and cake," Sirius said. "In a beautiful little hidden gem of a restaurant with a beautiful woman who dressed up."
"I don't know why you're making a big deal out of wine, Mr Cradling-an-Empty-Bottle-of-Firewhisky-by-the-Fireside," Remus said.
"What's in your pocket?" Sirius interrupted.
"What?" Remus asked, taken aback.
"You've got something in your pocket—no, not your wallet, your other pocket. What is it, then?" Sirius asked.
There was a lull in the conversation as they wound down from laughing, Tonks looking into her glass of white wine across the table.
"That reminds me," she said, reaching down to fetch something from her handbag. She put it on the table between them, where the now-empty plate of cake rested, every scrap of chocolate ganache cleaned out.
"What?" Remus asked. "Oh, you didn't need to get me anything…"
"I know, I wanted to," Tonks said. "I thought of you when I saw it at Diagon Alley a few weeks ago, and I finally had a reason to go back for it."
"You're too kind," Remus said.
Tonks shrugged. "In my family, birthdays mean a lot. They're the day you were made to be what nobody else could be. There's bar mitzvahs and such on extra special birthdays, but they're all supposed to be extraordinary."
Remus hoped it was too dim for her to see him blush as he took the little black package and tugged on its ribbon.
"It's…" Remus lost his words and he took the little black box from his pocket and opened it to show Sirius the leather bracelet. The words scrawled across the leather bands were mostly consonants, and Remus was actually surprised that Tonks had recognized them as Welsh when she'd seen it in the magical antique shop. She'd explained to him that it was a Muggle artefact with nothing magical about it, but the shopkeeper had explained that it was meant to bear a protective spell. I don't think you need any help with that yourself, but I reckoned that it's the thought that counts and you could never run out of good thoughts.
"For Merlin's fucking sake Remus, this is nearly more painful than watching James pine after Lily was," Sirius said, burying his face in his hands before trying to turn to the Firewhisky bottle for comfort—finding it empty.
He rolled his eyes and put it down before turning to Remus, hands clasped as they gestured in this direction. "Are you hearing yourself trying to explain why there's nothing romantic about a beautiful woman who went out of her way to make herself prettier taking you out to dinner on your birthday to a nice restaurant and bringing you a thoughtful present that reflects just how much time you two hopeless fucks have spent pining and talking together in this godforsaken unromantic house?"
"No, look," Remus said, shaking his head. "If Tonks wanted a date on a Friday night, she… she's clever, she's witty, she's spunky, she's so kind, and—and okay, yes, like you said, she's beautiful. She could go out with anybody."
"Yes," Sirius said. "Yes, and I think she just did. Unfortunately she picked the most obtuse, dumbest smart man in the world and he doesn't know it."
Remus looked back down at the bracelet in his hand. The dialect was old, but he could still make out the meanings. The world is wide, be well on the broken paths before us.
"I'll be back," Remus said, slipping the bracelet on his wrist.
"Yeah, I thought so," Sirius muttered before sliding back down so he lay on the couch.
He only knew where Tonks' apartment was because he'd walked her there once, when she'd sprained her ankle falling down a staircase at Grimmauld Place and didn't quite have the balance to Apparate there alone. When she opened the door, she'd thrown off her jacket and had unpinned her hair from its updo. She was holding a bottle of wine, white again, by the neck and seemed surprised to see him.
"Remus," she said. "Wotcher! Umm..."
"I think I made a mistake," he admitted.
"O...kay," she said.
"We had a really… really good night and I think I was supposed to kiss you at the end of it," Remus said.
"You didn't need to do that," Tonks said, looking down at her bare feet. Her toenails were painted an obnoxiously electrical lime green.
"I know, I wanted to," Remus said. "I… I had trouble believing that that was really a date and not just a really good birthday, even if the facts were… not on my side."
Tonks bit her lip and looked over her shoulder at something inside the flat. She turned back to him.
"It's technically now 12:01 on October 29th, so it's not your birthday anymore," Tonks said. She leaned against the doorway. "Would you believe it now?"
"Yes," Remus said, before leaning down and kissing her.
WC: 1914