Paraesthesia, or Love for the Undiscerning

Paraesthesia, or Love for the Undiscerning

Chapter One: Tingling

Evening.

It used to be four of us out on the back patio of Number 12. Well, it's not a patio so much as a cleared patch of tiling that Sirius erected baby gates around to keep out the vicious greenery and Kreacher. But it holds four of us quite comfortably. The petty thief and sporadically amateur stripper, the convicted felon, the lass with pink hair and pink cheeks and... well, me.

And now it holds three. His chair sits off to the side. Sometimes, when it's hot, Mundungus pulls it over and plops his feet up on it, and sometimes he sets his ashtray down on it. But mostly he looks at it strangely. When he's had a bit too much lager or kerosene, he turns around and starts talking to it, and then he realises that Sirius no longer occupies it, and he goes all quiet again.

Our little party meetings are considerably more sombre now. We all sit about in silence, with Tonks occasionally trying to start up conversation, but shying off when she looks at Dung and I. Back in the day, we usually pulled out some cards, or set up a dart board, or even the CD player Tonks pilfered from Arthur and listened to some thoroughly horrible music at the selection of Sirius.

Dung is lighting up a cigarette. I reach my hand out, and he looks at me strangely, as if I'd just propositioned him for something far less innocuous than a simple fag.

"You don't smoke, do you Moony?"

I shrug. "Yeah, well, I hear it's damaging to your health."

Tonks snorts, and I light up. My lungs and throat then remind me I haven't done it in twenty years or more, and I cough spastically, trying to rid my respiratory system of the foul smoke. Tonks picks up her can, and drains it.

"Anyone want another one?"

I nod, as does Dung, and she lazily 'accios' the rest of the carton.

"Cripes, you off work tomorrow?"

"No, I'm not. I figure that my line of work is improved drastically by a busting headache and a queasy stomach."

"Come off it, Tonks."

She cracks a can open, and swills directly from it. I open mine, and start pouring it into my glass.

"Look at Remus. You'd think a bloke sitting about in a singlet and his trousers wouldn't be bothered with such classy things as pouring their beer into a glass."

"Well, I'm a classy kind of fellow."

"Huh. Sure you are, Moony."

I stub out the rest of my cigarette, and motion for another one.

"What's got into you?"

I touch the tip of my wand against the cigarette, and for a brief second my face is illuminated in orange light. "Apparently, Tonks, one cigarette cuts down your life expectancy by one minute. If I start now, I could live to a thankfully young age."

"You're an ideas man, Lupin."

Dung is looking restless. "Know what, gents? I'm finkin' that this is just TOO excitin' here, and I've got to get out and get a little less action. Anyone up for the Dead Donkey?"

"You're going back there after last time?" Last time, of course, insinuating him throwing up in the women's toilets and having the audacity to laugh at Harry for getting sick.

"Well, if youse two are 'appy just sitting about with your thumbs up your arses, I'll be off. Catch you, chaps."

We wave him off, and I reach over for the pack of cigarettes he left out. They're pretty bad cigarettes, to be honest. They're not quite as bad as the pack James brought me back from his holiday in Greece when we were fifteen, which were made entirely from pine needles, but they're nonetheless shoddy.

"Didn't Madam Pomfrey say that too much grog or smoking would prevent your potions from working effectively?"

I look over at her. "You're not my mother, you know, and thank god you're not, either."

"Yeah, well, you're not taking care of yourself."

"I appreciate the sentiment, but you don't have to take care of me, either."

She kicks out at my leg, as if to prove a point, and I wince.

"Yeah, well, someone's got to. Otherwise you get dirty great rats like Snape getting away with murder."

I take another swill of my beer. The beer wasn't all that great, either. Dung had accepted it in exchange for the essence of comfrey he'd made off with from Snape. He said it was as punishment for my wolfsbane not being strong enough, but I guessed it had to do with the fantastic narcotic properties of the aforementioned herb. (To be honest, we all reckoned that he was short-changed, but it was funnier laughing at Dung than it was laughing with him.)

"Remus, are you happy?"

I set my glass down, and look at her intently. She's wearing the dressing gown again. I had a dream a couple of nights ago that she was walking up to me, stroking my face and holding my hand, and she took off that gown and started comforting me in her underwear. It was a thought that made me curious, and rueful that all the small bones in my right hand were fractured.

"That's a silly question, Tonks. Why, you not happy?"

"Well... don't you reckon we're stuck in stasis a bit? I mean, this is all we do. We get drunk, we laugh at Dung, we sit about and mope. Then I work in the most tedious fucking environment in Britain, you sit about the house all day writing angry letters to newspapers and re-reading Joyce, and Dung hangs about until I go pay his bail down at the Ministry. It's pretty fucking depressing a life, if you ask me."

"Yes, well, you're just biased because you've never experienced the excitement of writing self-righteous letters to the Daily Prophet." My letters had never been published. I think that's discrimination.

She pulls her chair in closer to mine, and reaches down for another beer. Her seventh for the night. She doesn't drink as often as Dung or I, or even Sirius, but when she does she can pack them away fairly easily, which is surprising because she's only about 135, dripping wet. I remember one of Sirius' mum's parties, where the four of us would sit up in his room trying to teach her how to get drunk. Then we'd all get yelled at, Peter's mum would threaten to stop him playing with us again, James' mum would look at us all disappointingly and my dad would get seemingly very stern with me, but would still fix me a beer with our dinner that night. She looks at my drink, my tenth for the night, and pulls it away from me.

"Hey, come on, was that really necessary?"

"Yes, it was. Here."

She throws the rest of her can, and mine, out into the lawn, and the thicket of vines and creepers snaps it up in the dark. I can hear growling, the crunching of aluminium cans and what sounds distinctively like the shrubbery getting drunk.

"Don't you ever stop and think that this point right now, sitting right here, might be the lowest point in our lives and we may never experience anything this depressing?"

"I'm sure I can go far lower, Tonks. Just introduce me to the wrong type of girl, and I'm sure I can exceed even your lowliest expectations of me."

"You ever been with a woman, Remus?"

"Not really. Not for lack of trying, initially. Gave it all up after a while. But to answer your question in the most direct possible manner, no, I haven't."

"Would you want to be with one?"

I try not to sound condescending. "It's not really an option for me now, is it? I mean, I know there are plenty of women who find middle-aged unemployed virgins attractive, but it's just not practical... you know, the whole werewolf thing and all. I mean, not to mention that I'm boring as batshit and practically in Depends, for crying out loud."

"I don't find you boring."

"Yes, but you're also friends with Dung."

She scrapes her chair in even closer to mine. She's either trying to hog my arm-rest, or rub her arm against mine, and last I checked neither of us are eight year olds. Well, she is, comparatively.

"Tonks, what are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"Your arm is clearly on my side of the chair."

"No it's not." To prove her point, she pushes it even closer to my arm, and laces her pinky over my arm. "Now it is."

I swallow, and my face starts getting really hot. My arm starts to burn where her finger lies on it, and I'm sure that if I were to move her hand there'd probably be a small, hand-shaped singe mark on my skin.

"How's that Mark fellow who follows you round at work?"

"Mark? The waxed gorilla from Control of Magical Creatures who starts nearly every sentence with 'I'm not racist, but...'?"

"Yes. Lovely young fellow, I hear."

She pulls her arm away, and starts laughing. "Christ, Remus. You aren't Juliana Hatfield's sister, you know. You're as obtuse as a sawn off dildo." She's now folded her arms, and is still laughing. She brings a hand up to her face to rub her eyes, and when she pulls her hand back she breaths in sharply, and looks away from me.

"You don't want someone like me, Tonks. You'll catch something cruel."

"Fuck you."

She reaches out for the box of fags, and I catch her her hand. "Don't. Don't ruin your life, all right?" She tries pulling her hand out of mine, and looking away from me, but I get my screwed-up hand and tilt her face towards mine. "You are far too young, and smart, and decent, to waste your life on a dirty old bastard like me."

"Bullshit."

"No. I'm not, okay? There is nothing wrong with you. You're fantastic, you know that? You're the greatest girl in the world."

She wrenches her hand from mine, and with it goes the box of cigarettes. She pulls one out, and lights up, tucking a short, mousy brown strand of hair behind her ears.

"You know, here I was, stupidly thinking that you'd actually show some bloody emotion about anything, or that you'd even be up for a snog and a handjob."

"Am I that transparent?"

"No, you're bloody not, and that's the problem!"

I tap my fingers against the glass tabletop, and wish that she hadn't thrown my beer into the garden. "What do you see in me anyway?"

"I like guys with limp hair and miserable thin little moustaches. No, really, what do you think?"

"I don't know. I'm tired, Tonks. Night."

I stand, and as I do I catch sight of white bandages stuck to her back, just poking out of the top of her dressing gown.

"What happened to your back?"

She takes a puff. "Bumped my back into the china cupboard, scraped it a bit."

"Oh. Good night."