Thicker than Water (Marauders Era) PART II

19 June, 1996 - Hesitations

Lavinia paced as she waited for Remus to return from the apothecary, counting her steps just to have something to occupy her head other than the worry and anger that seemed to be all her mind would voluntarily stick on. And she didn't want to think about that because this was Remus. This was Remus and this was a sensitive subject and she needed to be gentle, needed to squash the awful anger boiling away in her that she didn't at all want to think through.

So counting it was. Over and over as she wore a line across the living room, beating back the thoughts in her head.

Twenty two, twenty three, twenty four...

Why hadn't he told her? Didn't Remus trust her with this sort of thing? True, of course, her first instinct was to tell him to get his head out of his arse and for the love of Merlin just believe her. She wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him for the thousandth time that it didn't matter. It had never mattered. He had an illness. A disease. And nothing about that diminished what he was worth. He wasn't a monster. He wasn't a burden. He was just... him. And he deserved love and joy and all of it. And she had told him that a million times over and she didn't know how it hadn't stuck yet.

And besides, it wasn't like she would have run right into the lecture. She still wasn't going to, no matter how certain she was that she was right and he needed to hear it. Because maybe he really didn't think of Tonks that way and if that was true then that was that and Lavinia wasn't going to try to meddle in his love life. She was just... well she was just trying to make sure he didn't throw anything away because of this stupid fear of his.

And she thought that was perfectly reasonable. Right? Was that really overstepping any bounds? Was that response really so awful that he wouldn't want to tell her about this for the fear of that response? Or had she somehow fucked up something else? Had those silences in this house not been as comfortable as she had imagined? Did he really not trust her like she thought he did? Because Merlin knew she trusted him with her life and more so why, why didn't he trust her with something as stupid and simple as Tonks asking him out?

Which was a wildly uncomfortable line of thought, so...

Thirty nine. Fourty. Forty one, forty two, forty three...

And if Lavinia was indeed right and Remus was throwing this all away not because he didn't love Tonks but because he was so horribly afraid of himself, then what did she say? How could she possibly phrase this in a way she hadn't already found? How did she convince him when in nearly twenty years she had apparently never managed? After all, if he didn't even trust her enough to tell her about this, then what was going to make him trust her when she promised for the millionth time that his condition didn't define him. That if Tonks knew about it and said she didn't care then he had to trust that. He had to give her a chance. Had to give himself a chance.

Fifty one, fifty two, fifty three, fifty four-

The door opened and Lavinia's feet halted abruptly, her head snapping to the side as Remus walked in, a brown paper bag with the apothecary's logo on it hanging from his hand. "They were having a sale on root of aconite so I got extra," he informed her as he shed his shoes and tucked them in their spot against the wall. "Merlin knows it won't go bad at the rate we use it."

Lavinia nodded, finding herself completely and frustratingly without words now she was faced with actually having this conversation. So she merely took the bag from him and brought it to the kitchen, pulling out the little bottles and jars and filing them in the potion's cabinet, shuffling things around until it fit. It took her more time than it should have thanks to her nervous rearranging of the entire shelf, her artificially busy hands putting off the moment she had to close the cabinet and talk to him. But eventually, satisfied with the organization and knowing that any more fiddling would make Remus start worrying, Lavinia sighed and shut the door.