"Hey, I need you to come get him up for me."

Remus didn't need to hear anything else to know what Tonks meant. Sirius had been in bed for most of the day today. They didn't pay it much mind, assuming "Sirius will be Sirius" and that he was probably doing some odd job or was sitting with Buckbeak, until Harry said he couldn't find him. The house was just big enough that if you weren't looking, you could lose someone. It wasn't uncommon to not see or hear from someone until mealtimes, and you could almost lose track of all the people that came and went all the time. Of all the people in the world, Sirius wouldn't have usually lock Harry out. If he talked to anyone, it was always Harry.

So Remus was still trying to put the story together. Sirius wasn't talking to Sirius because she said something personal (and somehow Remus got dragged into that). Sirius was also trying to stop talking to Remus after the accident, Remus presumed, because he didn't know how to handle it. On top of all that, Sirius had been explicitly warned not to leave the house. All of this was playing in Remus's mind every time he tried to go to sleep. All he could think about was how he was supposed to be trying to fix this, but he had no idea how to.

At least he was talking to Harry. Harry was his pride and joy and everything Sirius did had him in mind. All Sirius ever wanted was for him to be safe and happy, and have at least somewhat of a normal life. In just a couple of months, however, he was going to lose him when he went off to school. Dumbledore had made it clear that while Sirius was his guardian, he could not be the sole guardian, and that until Harry was seventeen, he could not live with Sirius. At which point, Sirius asked, "why bother?" Didn't most seventeen year olds want to move away from home? He had had such little time with the boy that he was no longer even a boy.

But Sirius hadn't gotten out of bed today.

It wasn't common nor unusual for Remus to sleep late or sleep the entire day. He had a sense of light, but it always disturbed him enough that he was constantly restless. He was always falling into a deep sleep, but he never quite felt rested. He had no clock to tell him when to go to sleep and when to wake up, so it seemed like every week was a new schedule.

But this was Sirius. The same Sirius who was just helping Molly with lunch or was feeding Buckbeak or helping get the never-ending supply of doxies out of the moth eaten curtains around the windows. He was just there.

Remus has no wand and he hadn't attempted magic in the last couple of months, but he wasn't about to let that keep him from being the only one not working (also, it was mostly Molly who told him he had to work, but Remus wanted to anyway). He was in charge of holding a large plastic bag that whenever they found a dead mouse or a dead doxie or any kind of trash, they at least had somewhere to put it. Remus was quite proud of the fact that he was getting better at finding people from across the room when they called him, although he did manage to creep up on people enough to make them jump. He tried to think of that lightly.

Currently in the room, Remus knew there were the twins, Hermione, and Ron, though Remus suspected Ron had snuck out, because he was never that quiet.

"Remus?" A familiar woman's voice came through the doorway. Something sounded wrong.

"Tonks?"

"I need your help with something." She told him.

"What's wrong?" He quickly folded up the garbage bag and set it aside, following her voice.

"Hey, I need you to come get him up for me." She said quietly. She was weirdly quiet. Something seemed very wrong.

"Is he still in his room?"

"Yeah, on the bed. I didn't go past the doorway, I thought maybe you should go see him." They we're already on their way upstairs to his room. The stopped, and she opened the door. "I'll leave you two alone, okay? Please try and talk to him."

Tonks walked away.

"Hey Sirius?" Remus announced. "You're still breathing, aren't you, mate?"

Remus knew that he was of course. One, Tonks, a trained auror, wouldn't have abandoned him if he wasn't breathing. And two, he could hear his faint breathing and rustling under the bedsheets.

"We're worried about you. No one's heard from you in a bit. Are you tired? It's Remus. Tonks is already gone, so you can talk to me. I'm alone." No response. "Seriously, you should at least drink some water if you're going to be completely sedentary all day." No response. "It's a bit after noon. Should I come back before dinner?"

No response.

"You know, I'm really trying to figure you out right now. There's a million things you could be angry at me for, but for once in my life, I don't want to shut up. Why are you being so quiet? To me and to Tonks? Are you upset because we've gone out because that's only been a couple times and I know she would happily take you if you changed. Are you upset because I've been ignoring you? Because I've not been trying to. I thought you didn't want anything to do with me, so I backed off and now you're hole up here. I'm sorry for whatever I've done. I know I can't speak for Tonks, but I know she's just as clueless and sorry as I am. We just want you to come out and talk to us again, like you used to. Something's wrong and all we want is to help you."

"I know." His voice said quietly. "Can you come sit for a second?" Remus stumbled over to what he presumed the bed was. He had never actually been in here and he didn't know where he was going. "I'm going to need you to back up, mate, my face is right here."

"Sorry." Remus mumbled and awkwardly sat towards the other end.

"Not that far, it's okay." Sirius's was sitting up. "Okay."

"Okay." Remus repeated. "Do you want to talk about what's going on or would you rather not?"

"You need to know something." Sirius told him. "And the thing is, is I have no idea how you're going to react to this and I don't know if I know how to handle this."

"What's wrong?"

"It's about you and Tonks."

"Sirius, I'm not going to quit having friends because you don't like them, or whatever it is you've got going here-"

"She likes you." Sirius blurted out.

Remus paused. "Okay." He said. He was assuming that Sirius didn't mean what he thought he meant.

"I don't know how I feel about that." Sirius's confessed. "I don't know if you do."

"Why- Why would I see any particular way about this?"

"Remus, she likes you." He repeated. "My cousin fancies my best friend. I'm trying to simplify this for you because I feel like you don't get it."

"I... she is what? I don't understand why she would-"

So this was certainly news for him. Remus couldn't quite process what this meant. She was so young and full of life and why on earth would she look at someone like him and begin to feel affection of all things? But things made more sense now. When Remus was under the presumption that it was Sirius she fancied, of course he had been upset. He didn't want to see that. He didn't know why, but cousins or not, he didn't want the two of them together. But he was more afraid of losing them as friends.

"She told me a good while back." Sirius told him. "I dunno, I just... I have a bad feeling about this, you know? I mean, she's thirteen years younger than us. I don't know what the others would say about you. But I feel sort of... left out anyways. I'm sorry for being such a downer, but you need to know."

"Is that why you didn't come out this morning? Because I'm still upset that we've been cleaning up dead rodents while you get to sleep-"

"Stop trying to change the subject." Sirius said firmly. "You need to sort this out with her. I don't care how."

Remus sighed. "I'm sorry, but I'm really rather tired of all this drama that you're creating."

"I'm sorry, but she didn't want you to know! Excuse me for being a little grossed out at the proposition that the two of you would be..." Sirius was angry and flustered, and was making wild hand gestures. "Am I the only one who thinks that maybe that's a little weird?"

What Sirius was saying made sense logically. He was saying words that portrayed Tonks as having some sort of romantic inclination towards Remus. But it still wasn't exactly registering properly. Remus was listening, but it sounded like nothing more than reading off a shopping list, because that was about as much sense as it made.

"I thought she liked you there for a while." Remus quietly confessed.

"What!" Sirius seemed at least ten times more disgusted at this notion than Tonks was. He raised his voice to a point that made Remus jerk away from him.

"I know where you're coming from though, because that's how I felt!" Remus threw in quickly.

"So what are you going to tell her?"

"I..." Remus felt his eyes tear into him. "I need to ask her about this first and we'll get this all sorted out and you're going to quit acting stupid and you're actually going to act normal, right?"

"You don't actually have feelings for her, do you?" Sirius demanded.

"I don't know what I'm feeling right now, okay? Can you let me think about this for a minute?"

The idea was finally begin to sink into his mind. He didn't understand it. What about him was supposed to be attractive? His face? That was a bit repulsive to imagine that she actually preferred to look at his face. She was just being childish, wasn't she? This was some childish crush that he was going to have to talk her down from. But if he brought it up, they were never going to look at each other the same way, were they? She was still his friend. Did she even see him as a friend anymore? How long had she been feeling this way about him?

"I'm sorry." Sirius mumbled. "Maybe I shouldn't have said anything."

"I'm just tired of all of us ignoring each other like this." Remus sounded a bit like he was scolding him. "I'll sort this out and we're all going to quit acting like this. We're just going to go to go on with our lives."

xxxxx

When Remus went to sleep that night, he saw her face for this first time.

Dreaming was either quite pleasant for Remus, or was utterly terrifying. On the one hand, getting to see colours and objects was very euphoric. He wanted to see his old house again. He wanted to see trees and gardens and animals again. He had mentally created a layout of what he thought Grimmauld looked like. It wasn't perfect, but he made it out of the descriptions the others had given him.

The people? Utterly terrifying. Not because they were grotesque or disfigured, but whenever he found himself having a conversation with someone he knew while he was dreaming, their face was never correct. He couldn't quite remember faces, but he could remember people well enough to know when their faces were just plain wrong. What scared him was when he was lucid enough to look at someone and tell them that their face was wrong and they would get so offended with him, they walked away, and then he could wake up wondering if someone was genuinely angry at him.

But then there was Tonks. He had never actually seen her face before, but there were tiny details he knew about her. She had piercings in her ears and one in her nose. She was considerably shorter than him. She wore a lot of black. Her hair was fairly short (unless she was in a disguise in which, she never made it much longer).

He felt pretty awful for making up a face for her when he woke up. But as soon as he saw her in his sleep, he knew he recognized her immediately.

Remus had mentally clipped together what little information he knew (or thought he knew) about her with other people he had previously seen. She looked really familiar (he hoped that he hadn't given her the face of someone famous or from an advertisement he had once seen, but he also hoped he hadn't given her the face that belonged to someone else that he knew). That was her face now. He gave her brown hair and light coloured eyes, and freckles, but only around her nose that could be seen close up. She was quite pretty, and that surprised him.

When he saw her at breakfast the next morning, she was polite as always, talking as if nothing had ever been different between them and she knew nothing different from any other day, and it was like his whole world went spinning. When she laughed, he could see her laughing. He could see her smirk and roll her eyes and he could pretend it was the real thing. He wanted nothing more than to listen to her talk all day long.

She had such a pretty laugh.

And for just a second, he let himself imagine that maybe he fancied her just as much as she fancied him.