Moonlight

She dreamed about him often, and she hardly ever dreamed about anything.

And it wasn't just that she dreamed about him, although that certainly was a big deal. It was the content of the dreams that caused her to wake, wondering, in the morning, as she recalled the images that had played across her lids as she slumbered. The details of the dreams were never the same; in this one they had sat on a dock and talked for hours, in that one they had waged a ferocious snowball war in one of the courtyards at Hogwarts, in yet another there had been quite a lot of kissing, nevermind where they were.

But always, always, they were together in the moonlight.

It was rubbish, of course. First, they weren't even remotely a couple. He was always polite, she always made a point to speak to him, even if it was a mere hello, but that was all there was. In fact, she hadn't said more than a dozen words to him the last time that she saw him, and he might not have even actually registered her presence; who knew? But for the goodbyes and hellos, what was there between them, really?

Second, the mere fact that she was dreaming aside, these were romantically inclined dreams. And everyone knew that Nymphadora Tonks, no matter what other crazy things she did do, didn't do romance. Not because she didn't like it; she cried at sad movies, wished on falling stars even though she knew that they were only meteors, and when the owl bearing a weighty bouquet of flowers had flown into the Ministry office, she had secretly hoped that they were for her. More accurately, her attempts at romance were like a duck trying to do an interpretive dance; she was clumsy, she was tactless, and these traits had never in her experience really meshed well with romance and candlelight.

But third, and most importantly, he couldn't be with her in the moonlight because he simply wasn't able.

Well, technically he could, except for one day each month. Occasionally two. But her dreams always featured a full moon hanging above them like a gaslight, bulbous and glowing; that orb that all poets pay homage to at some point, and that all good lovers stroll beneath. But if she ever attempted to take a walk in the light of the moon with him in truth, she would be gambling with her life, not her heart.

Nonetheless, she could see his face perfectly in her mind, lit by the soft, pearly light that smoothed away all the lines on his face and made the silver in his hair seem to shine from within. It looked a bit like a halo, she thought, and his face was certainly gentle enough to be an angel's. She could remember the way the moonbeams slipped across his lips as he spoke quietly to her and the way they lit his eyes, making them more grey than the green the sunlight brought out. She remembered everything about him.

It made it a little difficult to be around him, for she would invariably start to compare the way he looked in daylight to the lighting of her dreams. And every time, every single time that she would drift off, staring at him and studying the way a sunbeam picked out the crease at the corner of his mouth that the moonlight overlooked, he would look up at her and catch her in her daydream. Him, who hardly ever spared her a second look! The first couple of times she had been able to cover for it well enough, and nothing was amiss. But after the eighth time in one day he had definitely noticed, and she was embarrassed beyond words. Hastily excusing herself, she ran to the bathroom and locked herself in to beat herself up over her stupidity, and to longingly think back to the dream where they had laid side by side in a grassy field staring up into the starry heavens, watching the moon crawl across the sky and not saying a word.

When she finally emerged, still feeling faintly ridiculous, she made her way to the front door of the house with the intention of slipping off before anyone noticed her absence. Instead, he was waiting for her there, as if it were a commonplace event for him to help her into her coat and offer her his arm as he pushed the door open for her. Just like that, as if it were no big deal.

The sunlight outside blinded her momentarily, and she scrunched up her nose as she squinted into the bright London afternoon. As the world came back into clarity around her, his eyes, green in the sun, were on her and he smiled a little wanly, deepening the line by his mouth. "I wish that I could see you by moonlight," he said, as he slid his hand into hers.