"Sooooooo…" Tonks drawled, as Remus drained his cup again. "You promised stories…"
"Right, er… stories…" Remus thought for a bit. "Well… oh! Did you know that your big, bad cousin is afraid of stuffed animals?"
Tonks looked at him, eyes narrowed. "You're fucking with me," she said flatly.
"No, I swear!" Remus exclaimed. "It's partially my fault, which is why I'm mentioning it."
"Go on," she said skeptically.
"Well, when we were in our third year, most of the younger girls had decided that, in order to prove that they were liberated women, it was their job to let anyone they were interested in know that they had a chance. They couldn't ask them out, of course –that would have made it easier for us to know what was going on inside their heads," he added indignantly.
Tonks smirked. "Remus, if men were perceptive enough to know what women actually thought, you'd be too nervous to ever get lucky."
He tilted his head and looked at her. "That's probably true. At any rate, somehow, sending stuffed animals as tokens of affection or attraction or whatever it was they were supposed to mean –Heaven forbid they actually explain or sign anything –became 'the thing to do'."
Tonks grinned, beginning to see where this was going.
"Well, Sirius was always something of a flirt, and he was, so I'm told, very attractive, and our dorm was always getting flooded with the damn things. James ended up with several himself –although not nearly as many, which I'm fairly certain did no small amount of damage to his pride."
"Do you really expect me to believe that you didn't have a fair few admirers yourself?" Tonks asked, one eyebrow arched.
Remus looked away, his cheeks slightly pink. "I, ahm, may have received one or two as some sort of jest."
Tonks's eyebrow arched higher.
Remus did his best to ignore her teasing expression. "The main problem with the stuffed animals wasn't the amount of space they took up –although because Peter and I both had horrible dust allergies, the sheer numbers were a bit daunting –it was the fact that some of them were charmed to recite or sing the most awful poems."
"D'you remember any of them?"
"Yes, and there is no chance I will recite any of them where there's a chance Sirius could intentionally misconstrue it to be coming from me. Do you want to hear this story or not?"
Tonks closed her mouth and mimed turning a key.
Remus chuckled, before continuing. "Sirius viewed the stuffed animals as trophies, and flat out refused to get rid of any of them. He had them all lined up in a cabinet across the room from his bed, and he knew exactly which one was which and when he'd gotten it –not that he'd ever admit any of that."
Remus was quiet for a minute, remembering, before shaking himself out of his reverie. "After a few weeks of them piling up on every available surface Sirius could claim, and Peter and me constantly sneezing and blowing our noses, James had had enough. He recruited us for help looking up animation spells in the library. Within three days, we'd found all the spells he needed. I will never learn how he got Peeves and at least one of the ghosts to help him with his plan –he took those secrets to his grave, but somehow he did."
By this point, Tonks was already giggling in anticipation, and shaking from the effort of keeping in her laughter.
"That night, everything was normal when Sirius went to bed. But around three in the morning, he was woken up by the chill of one of the ghosts passing through him –just visible enough to make things even creepier. He was about to go back to sleep, when a weight landed on his feet, and a pair of glowing eyes looked right at him. Terrified, he raised his gaze to see the entire army of stuffed animals advancing on him, eyes glowing red. They were totally silent –everything was, when suddenly, Peeves's voice started hissing at him from them. The whispers were totally unintelligible, but they kept on coming, and then the ghost flew through him again, and that was when Sirius decided he'd had enough."
Tonks was laughing even harder now, but Remus wasn't finished.
"He woke up almost half of Gryffindor tower when he yelled. Of course, since we were in the same dorm, none of us could pretend to have slept through that, so when everyone ran in, we were clustered around him, asking what was wrong, why he was screaming, what the hell he thought he was doing. In a stroke of genius, James had had the stuffed animals go back to their normal places when we rushed over, but Sirius hadn't seen them move. He kept babbling about 'the evil demon teddy bears.' Of course, we feigned confusion, and finally the sixth year prefect –Erik Johnson, I think his name was –yelled at him, "You bloody idiot, if you're so damn afraid of the fucking things, then why the hell do you have so many stashed RIGHT ACROSS FROM YOUR GODDAMN BED?" He then went off, shooing everyone else back to bed, muttering things like 'stupid git,' 'not a lick of sense', 'how could anyone be that witless'. Everyone else drifted back off to bed, and by the next evening, all of Sirius's trophies were gone –we never saw them again, and I still don't know what he did with them. James threw a teddy bear at him about a week later, and I saw a look of blind panic cross his face before he hit it with an incendiary spell."
Tonks was rapidly turning the color of a ripe strawberry, she was laughing so hard. Tears of mirth rolled down her cheeks. "If only…" she gasped "the …Ministry knew…."
It took Remus a few seconds to grasp her meaning before he started laughing along with her. "If you see notorious mass-murderer Sirius Black, threaten him with a nearby teddy, then run while he shrieks in fear."
They kept laughing for a few more minutes, until Tonks finally brought herself more or less under control.
"That's one story, Professor, and I'll admit that it was a pretty good one. But was it your only one?" She looked at him, a challenge gleaming in her eyes. "Or will you not be earning my recipe after all?"
Remus felt the marauder sparking back to life inside himself. "Well," he began, "how much do you know about Lily Evans?"