As an apology for not updating for so long, I am posting a second chapter tonight. I hope you enjoy! Just to note - the timeline may start getting a little woolly from here on in! I have the rest of the story mapped out and the next few chapters (almost 8 thousand words) already written! So thanks for sticking with me... I have no excuse for the lack of posting other than ... life! I hope the double chapters make up for it! :)
Love is everything around you. Love is everything. You are love.
As she entered her living quarters, Tonks was instantly reminded that she really did have tons to do. Wrapping paper was strewn across the floor, the sofa and her desk. This was why she always left wrapping presents until the last possible second, because she hated it. Though of course usually at this point, 3 days before Christmas, she'd have no presents ready to wrap, so she reasoned with herself, at least she had grown in one way over the last year. Albeit a very small way.
Christmas shopping to Tonks had always meant leaving it until the very last possible moment, usually after she finished her half day at the ministry at 12pm on Christmas Eve. It wasn't that she didn't care about her family and friends enough to plan meticulously and shop earlier, it was that she was too indecisive. If given too much time to think, Tonks would talk herself out of any gift, deciding instead to carry on looking and come back later. That would turn into her grabbing something last minute even though she had started looking in September. And so her Christmas tradition of buying most of her presents on Christmas Eve had begun. Except this year she had made a decision in November and actually stuck to it.
One of the great things about coming straight out of Hogwarts and into the ministry was that Tonks had started earning straight away. She rented her tiny little flat in London but other than that had very few expenses as she was always working or training. So the tradition she'd had in school of hand making presents for her family had faded, replaced by the more practical and time efficient shop bought but slightly more expensive gifts.
This year she would revert back to handmade gifts. The idea had come to her on a walk with Remus. It was a bitingly cold day at the very beginning of November when her and Remus had been walking to Hogsmeade one evening. They'd headed to The Three Broomsticks for a warming butterbeer. As they'd entered the pub the heat of the roaring fire had been a welcome embrace. However it wasn't too long after they had arrived that Remus had removed his cardigan placing it on the table next to him– the beige cardigan Tonks remembered so vividly him wearing the first day they had met. As the pub filled and became almost unbearably crowded a group of inebriated Quidditch fans had bumped into Remus, spilling his butterbeer all over the table – his cardigan soaking up most of the spillage almost immediately.
Remus had tried to clean the cardigan, using a number of different spells, Tonks had even attempted a 'spick span' spell her Mother had taught her, but nothing it seemed could take away the sticky feeling the jumper had developed. Remus had no choice but to throw it away.
Tonks had gone back to her living quarters that night and made a decision – her Christmas present to Remus would be a new cardigan – a handmade cardigan. She had spoken with Nana Tonks, who had sent her (via her Dad, muggle postmen struggled to find Hogwarts), some books and equipment and she had got started. It wasn't her first-time making clothes. Nana Tonks had taught her from about 5 years old how to sew, then how to knit and crochet. She was a fire cracker of a Nana, always cracking jokes and asking Tonks to transform into things that would scare her Grandpa. She told her that learning to sew was an important life skill – not so she could darn her husbands socks or sew a button on his shirt, but so she could be self-sufficient. "Don't be someone who looks for a rich man Tonks, but your own rich woman" she had said to her often.
So she had sat in her living quarters on the nights Remus was ill or too busy for a game or a drink and made him a cardigan.
A beige cardigan.
It was funny really. When she'd met Remus, she really couldn't understand how anyone could own so much beige. How anyone could even like the colour. To Tonks it was so drab, so pointless.
Yet as she had meticulously woven together the beige fabrics, she'd purchased she realised just how much her opinions had changed in just a few months. The colour beige no longer seemed drab but dependable. Not pointless, but calming, loyal and patient.
Beige was Remus through and through. It suited him. His steadfast nature. But she had wanted to put a little bit of herself in their too, so she had threaded some very thin gold thread into the cardigan too, around the elbow patches and collar, for some added flair and to hopefully show Remus that he was special to her.
As she wrapped the garment carefully, she wondered if any gift could ever show Remus just how special he really was to her. Or whether she would just have to come out and tell him.
Remus finished the final paper he needed to mark until after the holidays. He was pleased his students had, on the whole done well on their first full assignment of the year and he was excited to share the results with them upon their return.
However, now his Professor duties were over for a few weeks, he was suddenly very excited about Christmas. It had been a long time since Remus had really celebrated Christmas. So isolated had he allowed himself to become, there had been times in the past 13 years when he hadn't even realised it was Christmas until he had spotted decorations up in a shop. Even when he had been around people that made him want to celebrate the holidays he had never had enough money to buy anyone a present and so he had always either made something or given away some of his own prize possessions.
This year, he found himself in the unusual position of having both a little savings and people to buy presents for. His job at Hogwarts had given him both. As he had no living costs, he had been putting most of his wage aside each month and so he felt he could splurge a little on two presents, one for Dumbledore and one for Tonks.
Dumbledore had been easy. Remus had found an old muggle sweet shop nestled away down a side street in London. There he had bought a book on the history of muggle sweets as well as a selection of some of the less well-known ones for Dumbledore to sample.
Buying a present for Tonks had been much harder. It wasn't that he didn't have an ideas, it was that he had too many! And nothing seemed good enough – nothing seemed special enough to convey just how much she meant to him, without really conveying anything at all but they could never be anything more than friends. He was a dangerous, old, foolish werewolf and she was a beautiful young Auror who deserved so much better…
These were the rants his brain dove into every time he considered a present for Tonks. In the end he had stumbled upon her present in a muggle shop in Scotland one afternoon and had purchased it before his brain could persuade him otherwise.
It was a handwritten prose, by an author and poet called Bianca Sparacino who Remus had heard Tonks speak about. The prose read:
My God, I hope you find love.
And I don't just mean that in regards to someone you wrap your tired bones around at night.
I mean that I hope you find love in every aspect of your life
I hope you find it tucked into early morning sunrises, and the smell of your favourite places.
I hope you find it strung between the laughter you share with your friends, I hope it bounces off of you when you hug the people you care for, I hope it swells within your ribcage whenever you hear your favourite song.
I hope you fall in love with growth, and change, and the messiness and beauty of making mistakes and becoming exactly who you want to be.
I hope you find love in places that were once void of it, in places within yourself that you could have been softer to, kinder to, in the past.
Because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that love is so much more than a boy, or a girl who holds your heart.
Love is everything around you.
Love is everything.
You are love.
Remus had enchanted the print so that it changed colour slowly, blending from one pastel colour into the next.
As he took the gift out and put it on his desk to wrap it, his brain began to protest. It was nothing short of a love letter. He couldn't possibly give it to Tonks, she would get entirely the wrong message – or entirely the right message, but a message he had not right to be sending her!
He reasoned with himself that it wasn't as though he had written it, it had been written by a new author that Tonks was particularly fond of and that she wouldn't read anything more into than Remus listened when she told him things like what book she was currently reading.
He wrapped the frame carefully in brown paper and tied it with some string before placing it under the tiny Christmas tree he had put up in his living quarters.
Thank you for reading! I really do appreciate any feedback or comments. I have the next few chapters written so I'll post the next one early next week.