Ink: An Epistolary Romance

"Why do you write those things?" she asked him twelve notes later, softly enough not to disturb the portrait of Sirius' mum. She hadn't mentioned it all through dinner, or while they - the seven members of the Order who'd shown up that evening - all told each other stories, but she finally blurted it out as he was about to leave. She wondered if she should regret bringing up the subject, but she decided that whether she should was irrelevant, because she didn't.

Things he'd written, like long, slow kisses, sometimes on your lips, had become permanent fixtures in her mind. She couldn't remember when their descriptions of their respective fantasies had dropped the pronouns "he" and "she" in favor of "you."

"What things?" he replied innocently, buttoning his old, worn cloak over his robes.

Things she couldn't stop thinking about. Things like the feel of your hands on my skin.

"You know what things," she said, her eyes narrowing slightly as she tried to find a reaction in his infuriatingly mild-mannered countenance.

Things like inside of you.

"The things you write," she explained when he didn't reply right away. "They're... and the things I write back. You know. It's all a bit strange for letters."

Things like my fingers in your hair.

"A bit strange," he repeated with a small chuckle, as if trying the words on for size. He blinked down at her, smiling. "I suppose it is."

"Yeah," she said, feeling herself blush a little under his gaze.

"But there's nothing wrong with a bit of love," he said thoughtfully. "Wouldn't you agree?"

Before she could put her reply into proper words, he had already kissed her forehead and gone out the front door.

Her forehead. You kissed a small child on the forehead, not a grown woman with whom you'd been writing about... things.

On the other hand, it was a lingering sort of kiss. One that might have been a promise of sorts. After all, there were still other people in the house, so who knew what sort of kiss it could have been if they'd been alone? He'd said "love," after all.

But what he'd said was "a bit of love." And it was her forehead....

"Bloody stupid man," she muttered under her breath.

"Who's stupid?" came a new voice from behind her.

"You, Shacklebolt," she said without even turning around.

Kingsley smiled at her on his way to the door. "Right," he said with a shake of his head.

"Right," she repeated sourly and headed back toward the kitchen. Forehead indeed.

*

Maybe one night, she wrote a day later, you'll come to me with questions about why I do the things I do. Maybe you'll want me to answer those questions, and maybe I just won't feel like it. Maybe instead of answering you, I shall kiss you on the forehead and go to sleep.

And I will savor the kiss and wait for the next one, he wrote back.

So she did.

The next one was not on her forehead, but on her cheek. She silently tried to will his lips just a few inches to the left, but to no avail. Just as before, the kiss was chaste but lingering, and just as before, he left with nothing else for her but a smile. They hadn't even talked about the notes.

The third kiss was on her other cheek, which she thought was a serious lack of progress. After he left yet again, she stormed up to the bedroom, still half-hoping that he'd found time to leave a note for her in the five minutes he'd been at Grimmauld Place.

He hadn't, and this only served to make her angrier. Who was he to leave her hanging on his every word, and then suddenly stop leaving words for her to hang on? Who was he to say such delicious things in writing, but in person behave as though nothing at all was happening between them? Who was he to make her think in angry questions that began with "who was he"?

When she finally forced herself to calm down, a new question presented itself to her; not an angry "who was he" sort of question at all, but the kind of question that slinks into your mind through the backdoor and then waits quietly in the shadows for you to notice it.

It was this: what if there wasn't anything going on between them? What if Remus Lupin enjoyed playing these games with her on paper, but had no desire to duplicate them in the flesh?

This new idea made a horrifying amount of sense. It was sort of like reading a dirty novel. You always loved reading the bit where the princess came down to see the stable boy, and then (after a minimal amount of protest, if only for the look of the thing) gave in and let him ravish her right there in the hay. But somewhere in the back of your mind, you knew she would never really let him do that, because who knew what sort of things lived in a big pile of hay, and besides, wouldn't her bed just be that much more comfortable?

Maybe this was just like that. Maybe she was Remus' version of the haystack: appealing in theory, but out of the question in practice. She turned the thought over and over in her mind, and with each turn she wondered why she hadn't understood it sooner.

"I'm a bloody haystack," she murmured to herself, and then she heard the words as they came out of her mouth and laughed bitterly at how ridiculous they sounded.

Well, fine. She could be a haystack if that was the way it was going to be. She could live knowing that Remus would never want her as much as she wanted him. She could read his letters and store the information away for future use on someone else. She could write her letters in return, the way she'd always done, pretending that she'd known all along that nothing would ever really happen.

But first, she decided firmly, she was going to get good and drunk.

*

By the end of her first drink, Tonks was feeling pleasantly tingly.

By the end of her second, she was giggling at inappropriate moments.

By the end of her third, she was casually eyeing the blond gentleman two seats away.

By the end of her fourth, the blond guy had left the pub and Tonks was quietly bemoaning her fate as a woman destined to remain single for the rest of her life.

"I'll die alone," she mumbled into her empty glass.

"You won't die alone," said April Gregory, patting her awkwardly on the back with an inappropriate giggle. (April was in the process of finishing her second drink.)

"I will," insisted Tonks. "I'll die alone with cats and cats and so many cats."

"That's not dying alone," said April, draining her glass. "That's dying with cats."

Tonks didn't even bother glaring at her friend as she should have done, for another thought had already entered her mind. "I told him that!" she wailed. "I told him I'd die alone with cats and he thinks that's what I want and that's why he doesn't love me." She felt that she should sob to punctuate this statement, but all that came out was a hiccup.

"Who, the chap who wrote you all those letters?" said April, who was one of the three people in whom Tonks had confided about the letters. No self-respecting woman can, after all, keep such things to herself.

"Yes," said Tonks. "I hate him. The bastard."

"Oh," said April, and proceeded to put two and two together remarkably quickly for someone who'd just had two large drinks in a short amount of time. "So you're in love with him. I thought you might be."

"I'm not," said Tonks with a scowl. "I hate him."

"That's love," shrugged April.

Tonks looked mournfully at her friend. "I know," she conceded.

"So that's why we came out here tonight?" said April, running her finger idly along the rim of her glass. "You love this guy and he did something stupid and now you're going to hate him for a little while?"

Tonks considered this. "Yes."

April nodded approvingly. "Good. Now, what did he do?"

"Nothing," said Tonks. "That's the problem."

"Nothing?"

"He kissed me."

"Oh!"

"On the forehead."

"Oh..."

"He doesn't love me."

"He's not worth your time," said April, tapping her palm on the bar with the air of someone who's just come to a brilliant conclusion and who, given a moment, would very soon come to another one.

Tonks, vaguely indignant, looked at her friend and waited.

True to form, April donned her familiar All-Knowing Smile and presented her solution: "Look, we've been friends for quite a long time, right? And you trust me, right? And you - another round over here, please! - you know I know what I'm talking about where men are concerned, right? Don't look at me like that. You know I do. Anyway, you need to get yourself a nice good-looking guy and have a bit of casual fun and just forget about Mister He Doesn't Love Me tonight."

Tonks stared at April for a moment and pondered the absolute impossibility of forgetting, before coming to her own conclusion: "You're stupid sometimes."

April smirked. "No, I'm not. I saw you looking at that guy who was sitting over there before, and don't you dare try to deny it."

Tonks tried and failed to suppress a sheepish smile, and her friend laughed and leaned in, lowering her voice to a whisper. "And my dear Miss Tonks... did you notice that he came back?"

April pointed, Tonks looked, and both women grinned.

Before Tonks knew it, her friend had caught the blond guy's eye and was gesturing him over.