Author's Note: I was purposefully vague in stating where exactly Remus is living at the moment, since I'm really not sure what he does after the events of Half-Blood Prince. This was written an hour after "The Saddest Lines" so I suppose that one could call it a sort of sequel, or reprise at least. Remus and Tonks were mucking about in my mind a lot that particular day, it seems.

Unfinished

He is scrawling, scrawling, words rushing out quicker now after the fact—after so many facts—and in his new and tangled grief and hope he does not know what to make of things. So he makes time in words, taking curious solace in the long, careful lines he makes across the page, because any semblance of order, in this sudden mess of a world, is a comfort.

He tries to put her into words, part out of retribution, and part in hope. He did not think, for several world-shattering minutes in the Hogwarts infirmary, that it was right or fitting for there to be hope, and it took longer still for him to believe that joy was now anything but obscene. But she bashed sense into him—or rather out of him, because sense is not always right after all—and now he fumbles clumsily between his emotions: the deep dull grief of loss, the thrill and wonder of finding. He thinks that perhaps now, in the stillness of night, his quill can find the words that his tongue cannot, but the blots and crossings-out on the parchment are testament to his remaining confusion.

So he attempts to describe her—she is incongruous and brightly coloured and very, very real, but these are merely surface things, and his words to him seem awkward and fragmentary, unfinished. He cannot capture life with his quill, vivacity and tenderness and steadfast loyalty and love. Because this is love—not mere blazing passion, or attraction—it is friendship, but deeper; it is, he finally scrawls, trying to make poetry and succeeding only in stark prose, a co-naturality of being, separate pieces fitting together where required and needed to form a cogent whole.

She finds his papers, when she is bustling about tidying his things and bossing him cheerfully, because they both know that it is good for him. She has burnt her fingers on her tea, and dumped too much sugar in his, but he loves her for this. She is stuffing his mess of papers together before he quite realises what she is doing, and she stops over one page and looks at him, fingertips tracing ink-lines.

"They are just scrawlings," he explains, embarrassed and somehow delighted. "Clumsy ones at that, and thoroughly unfinished—I didn't exactly mean for you to find them—just yet."

She smiles at him: tenderly warmly, brilliantly. "I am clumsy," she says, "not a sonnet-heavy woman of yesteryear, you know. I prefer these words, fragmentary but honest, Remus, to waxing ecstatic over my midnight hair and starlit eyes." And she grins, lopsidedly, from the mess of his papers.

"Not midnight—sunrise. Pink like the sunrise. I'm sure that would do well in a sonnet." He laughs. It feels good to laugh; it feels less heavy. "But it is still unfinished," he says, and reaches for her hand, or the papers, or both.

"Remus," she says, a little sternly and very tenderly, "we are unfinished. We will always be unfinished, though we'll always keep at the finishing until death ends things for us." She takes the papers, sets them on the desk behind her. One falls from the stack and drifts to the floor. "Being unfinished leaves much room for improvement," she says brightly, and there is wisdom in her eyes that is so incongruous with her youth. But Nymphadora Tonks is incongruity. This is, among many things, why he loves her.

"Improvement." He takes both her hands. "I am not wholly adverse to that." After a moment, he grows serious again. "Is there room for amending?" he asks softly, for he remembers (too well) brown hair and loneliness and hurt.

"There is room for forgiveness," she says, and there are inkstains on her fingers from his unfinished words; when she touches his face the inky remnants mark his cheek.