Title: Perennials
Author name: Daria
Category: Drama
Sub-Category: Angst
Rating: T
Spoilers: PoA, OotP.
Summary: Swiped flowers lead to a conversation that was long overdue between two grieving Order of the Phoenix members.
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made from this, and no copyright infringements were intended.

Perennials
(Part II)

Scuffed brown wingtips shuffled in and then halted as the door shut. The toes faced her - from her vantage point as she knelt partly beneath the bed - as if their owner was pressing himself flat against the door. She could hear heavy breathing, and as she recognized the shoes, she thought that strange. The owner of those shoes was always conscious of such things; always watching the volume of his voice, his posture as he spoke with Order members, the weight of his shoes on the creaky floorboards. She sensed his panic, somehow - as if the stale room was suddenly buzzing with his energy. A bad sort of frenzied energy. Had he been chased in there? Was an assailant just behind the doorframe?

Remus had not shut the door with the measured caution he usually reserved for entering this room. He stalked to the gaudy canopy bed and sat down heavily, not noticing the brightly-colored flowers scattered on the dusty hardwood at his feet, and began to weep with the ashamed intensity of a man who had left the funeral of his best friend dry-eyed.

There was not much of a sound coming from above, but Tonks could feel him shaking from her covert place against the bedframe. It made her angry, somehow, that he would conceal his grief from she and everyone else - not because Remus always wore his emotions on his sleeve, or because, as Order members, it went without saying that they were to support each other in such terrible times, but because wasn't this the one loss in which that Remus wasn't obligated to be stoic?

Tonks sat up on her knees and looked at Lupin's back. His thin shoulders looked more square in the ill-fitting suit he was wearing, and they shook perceptibly. His tawny hair touched his collar, and looked especially gray, even under the dim evening light, and it occured to her that he suddenly looked old. Not tired, or sickly - old.

She was trying to decide between lightly touching him and saying something, or remaining hidden, when suddenly the weight was gone from the bed and Lupin was standing, and had turned half-way to regard her. Obviously surprised, he made no move to wipe at his face free of tears or emotion -

"You dropped your bouquet," he said huskily, attempting to compose himself as he turned to face her.

Tonks stood, and held herself, trying to look anywhere but at her older friend, embarrassed for the both of them.

"Remus, I didn't know you would come here, otherwise, I wouldn't have -" she began.

"It's fine," he interrupted. "You have every much a right to be here as I do, if not more."

There was some tone to this remark that made her look up, and a fresh wave of devastation washed over her as she lifted her gaze to catch his.

"You two-"

"Were the last of a dying breed," Remus finished, wiping his nose as he again took a seat on the bed, leaning this time against the headboard, facing her. "-Because I don't count Severus. And he might as well be dead, so far as I'm concerned."

Though Remus had already ruined the pristine state of the covers, Tonks sat in the window seat across from the bed and looked at him, cheeks burning with a different sort of embarrassment. Was there something she had missed? She felt overwhelmingly like an intruder.

"But I don't want to talk about him," he said suddenly, "Or even Sirius," he added, nonplussed when Tonks flinched at the name. "I want to talk about your poor perennials I massacred when I stomped him here," he said, laughing hoarsely and mirthlessly as stooped to collect one.

"I took them from some Muggle's yard - but I left some money - and.. I broke the wards to get out," she said quickly.

Remus was twisting the stem of a tulip between his fingers, and Tonks had the impression that he was far from the musty bedroom they sat in together.

"Sirius once said.." Remus paused, and lifted his chin proudly, "Herbology is for fags."

Tonks was caught off guard and couldn't laugh, but luckily he went on:

"And he pretended to be bollocks at the subject, anyway, just because it bored him. Nothing exploded, and if something bit you, it didn't bite very hard, so naturally he blew off that class most of the time. Professor Atropa hated him, even though he earned an Owl in her class, eventually."

Remus began to examine a long, pointed leaf of the tulip he held.

"Hardly any mischief went on in that class, come to think of it. We all sort of got our hands dirty and fantisized about trying to grow marijuana in the greenhouses, but nothing really happened."

Tonks got the impression that Lupin was - as he often did - weighing his words so heavily that conversation lapsed until he had properly censored himself.

"These flowers die routinely," he said at length, "And yet, each spring, bloom with the same vitality as they possessed in the previous year. They're.. reborn, you could say." He cleared his throat.

Silence reigned for a few moments, and light began to filter in from the partially closed drapes that were a murky green color like many of the ugly tapestries in the house.

"I don't know what the point of this is," Remus said softly, gaze set somewhere past the bedposts, and the wall, and Grimmauld. The tulip leaf had fallen into his lap, and he let his own hands fall do the same."And, I'm not dead yet, but I'm beginning to think that is the way you should lead your life."

Tonks joined him on the four-poster, and sat very near.

"Sirius did. He lived every day as if it were his last. And, in retrospect, that's a sort of a stupid thing to do," here, he sniffed and chuckled a bit, "But, but we won't come back like these damn flowers do, Tonks." His eyes were glassy, and the young witch tried her best to hold the crumpled werewolf, awkwardly, still at his side. They said nothing as the room mirrored the warm orange of the setting sun.

"He isn't really gone," she lied, her own voice muffled as her throat grew thick in an attempt to quell her grief.

"We are born and die many times," he breathed, "But within our lifetimes, and when it is really over for us -" his speech halted upbruptly as his voice cracked.

"It's over," she finished, and knew that Lupin had no more to say.

Tonks held him as his shaking became almost overwhelming, and his anguished cry was muffled into her shoulder.

She hoped that Lupin would be back to his unwavering strength before too long, and that the other broken people staying in the mausoleum would go on with their risky jobs, and eventually the war would end, but she knew that, come morning, the flowers that littered the beside would be gone.

Notes: Soo, I finished it. Years later. Three years? Four? I'm not sure. At any rate, if you choose to review, that would be very helpful.