Chapter Text
They've been doing this thing for weeks—this thing where he wakes up in her bed to the clamourous avalanche of all the mystery-bottles of potions and creams falling off her bathroom sink, and her voice hissing shhh! shut it! at the bottles like it's their fault, and then she cracks the bathroom door and peeks out at him, with that half-guilty quarter-smile she does and her wet fuschia hair smeared over her forehead, and he climbs out of bed, all his joints crackling so loud he's sure she can hear from across the room, steps back into last night's trousers, limps down the stairs from her flat, apparates back to headquarters. And then ten minutes later they're sitting three chairs apart at the Order meeting like strangers. She's good about not looking at him too much, but what's humiliating is that—increasingly—he isn't, and he catches himself staring at the little pink ovals of her nails as she slides them along the whorling woodgrain grooves in the table (she's always having to do something with her hands—she's a peeler of beer-labels and a ripper of napkins and she plays with her food like a little kid, weird cairns of chicken bones and stripping the ribs out of a bay leaf), or the way the shadows of her eyelashes on her cheekbones flicker and move, because her eyes make little saccading motions across the faces in the room when she's concentrating. He isn't sure if she's aware of it. She has a peculiar interest in faces. Last week, when they were sat on a ledge above the Ministry visitor's entrance all night, she pointed out some old woman dragging her rattly grocery cart down the street and said, isn't she lovely, you can tell she laughs a lot, she's got those deep lines around her mouth and on her cheeks—funny how happiness leaves marks on you, eh? I hope I look like that when I'm old —and then she stopped talking and looked up at the slice of starless sky between the tall buildings, and he felt compelled to ask, for some reason, if she thought she'd age and wrinkle the same as everybody else, being a metamorphmagus, and she let out a long breath with a little shudder in it and said, I really hope so. If it doesn't happen naturally I'll do it on purpose. Then she turned to him and changed her face to an old woman's face, with those spidery laughter-lines carved around her sparkling brown eyes, her hair still electric pink, and she was right; it was lovely.
Lupin! Moody barks from the head of the table. Across from him, Sirius coughs into his mug. You get all that?
Remus opens his mouth, but before he can come up with anything Tonks jumps in with we've got it, Mad-Eye, next Saturday at Lots Road Power Station, document handoff from Mockridge to Yaxley—piece of piss, and from down the table Minerva makes an exasperated huff, and Moody moves on down the agenda, and Remus can tell Tonks wants to wink at him but he's asked her not to so she just wrinkles her nose and goes back to studying everyones' faces. And Remus folds his hands in his lap and stares down into the dregs of his teacup, because he has got to get this under control, this thing where she looks at him and his heart flops over like it's giving up—this wasn't the arrangement, and frankly it's pathetic, a man his age leaving damp palmprints on the thighs of his trousers because he heard her say his name, giggling, in the hallway (or stammering like an idiot after she caught him looking through the gap in her button-up shirt at the tiny bow on the front of her bra—Sirius witnessed that one and didn't stop smirking for days). A couple of weeks ago Remus spilled half his tea down the front of his jumper because she opened her little quilted-leather pocketbook to rummage for a quill and the sweet powdery scent that plumed from inside it was so intimately like the smell that lives inside her ridiculous purple sheets when she pulls them over their heads and lies there with her legs still looped around him and her breath still coming in big jagged gasps, looking at him, looking hard at him, in a way that makes him so uncomfortable and so stupidly, effervescently giddy at the same time—he played it off and joked with her that he was just clumsy, that she must be rubbing off on him. She did that one-eyebrow twitch that meant she was thinking of something dirty, and he had to stay sitting at the table for a few minutes after everybody else had left. She took her time picking up all the shreds of picked-at napkin she'd left all over her spot at the table, not looking at him, humming to herself with just the faintest smile, and in his mind he just begged her to stop, to stop all of this, to stop letting him in her bed, stop wrapping her warm fingers round his wrist to make him bend down so she could murmur something silly in his ear, stop throwing her head back and cackling with her mouth huge-open and her eyes squeezed shut at the stories she'd rope him into telling about his days at school—just stop. But he can't imagine her stopping. The thought turns his whole body cold, and it makes the strangest phantom pain start lancing through the center of his chest, like he's having a coronary, like he's actually going to die—
—anyway, that's what they've been doing. Nothing serious, really.