Fic: Asylum (Sirius/Tonks) Title:Asylum Author/Artist:ozma_katiebell Rating:NC 17 Prompt (the full prompt):#36 - "Lately I've been walking in circles, watching, waiting for something. Feel me, touch me, heal me, come take me higher" Pairing(s):Sirius/Tonks Word Count:4118 Warnings (if any): Minor Incest (see pairing) Author/Artist's notes:I enjoy this pairing far more than I should, especially as I started out writing R/T. I just love the dynamic between these two. This takes place mid-OOTP and doesn't necessarily contradict the canon that follows. A bit on the melancholy side. Mentions of possible Remus/Tonks. “He’s not here.”
Tonks spun around quickly, looking decidedly guilty. Or embarrassed. Or something. Anyway, she was bright red, and the color in her cheeks suited her, Sirius thought, then he shook his head. All well and good to appreciate that your cousin was pretty, but thinking about it in too much detail was inadvisable in his current situation.
He’d noticed his young cousin sniffing after Remus a few weeks ago and found it endearing, especially as he watched his old friend’s (rather entertaining) reaction. Not much less than he expected; after all, Remus was and always had been skittish due to his condition and a woman on the hunt was second only to a full moon on his list of things he’d rather avoid. But Tonks, it seemed, was no ordinary woman (well, that was obvious to anyone who had eyes, wasn’t it?) She had that famous Black stubborn streak and a very thick skin, apparently (no matter how changeable she was underneath it.)
Yes, stubborn, certainly, and tenacious, definitely, and lovely to boot, with a fiery spirit that might have done Remus a world of good if he’d only had the bollocks to take her.
Which thought had Sirius’ mind going in all the wrong places again.
Take her.
Because it had been a very, very long time since he’d got the chance to ‘take’ anyone. And as things stood, it was going to be a very, very long time before he’d get the chance to do it again.
Not that he hadn’t tried, mind you. He used to enjoy a great deal of success with the fairer sex, he didn’t mind admitting, but none of his old tricks were working here. Well, the puppy dog eyes were slightly less effective when you were beginning to resemble an actual dog more and more with each passing day. And not one of those adorable Labrador puppies so popular with the ladies, either—more like a jowly English bulldog or a mangy, flea bitten mutt who was the result of several generations of random, unregulated canine fornication. At any rate, the puppy dog look hadn’t made any headway with Emmeline (or perhaps that stick that seemed permanently lodged up her arse had made her unable to respond properly.) Her eyes hadn’t even softened a bit, and that elegant green cape of hers had remained firmly buttoned up.
And Hestia—well, she seemed to prefer her men much taller and much, much darker than he, and really, he didn’t blame her a bit. Who wouldn’t prefer a dashing, courteous, respectable (and apparently quite healthy) Auror to a sunken, wasted, escaped convict, right?
It was getting to the point where McGonagall was gaining appeal, and clearly, that meant that desperate times were here.
McGonagall, his cousin, or a man—those were his choices.
And his cousin, even if she hadn’t been family, fancied his friend. However hopeless it was, that was the rub, wasn’t it?
He assumed that his bald statement was going to frighten her off, or at least make her uncomfortable enough to leave, but he’d underestimated her tenacity. Or her boredom, possibly, because she sank onto the stool opposite him and said, “Never fails. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume he was avoiding me.”
Sirius merely arched a brow at that, and Tonks sighed and made sort of a half-laugh/half snort, and shook her head.
“Don’t take it personally,” Sirius said, and wondered if perhaps he ought to have kept his mouth shut.
She smiled and replied, in a very quiet voice, “Oh, I haven’t been, much.”
“He’s just-“ he began, but Tonks interrupted him and as he was more interested in what she had to say than what he did, he let her go on.
“It’s just that...I mean, he’s so kind and gentle, and has such lovely manners, and…”
Sirius didn’t reply, he was thinking that it seemed an absurd way to describe a man who turned into a murderous monster twelve times a year, but it did seem to fit him, in a way. Remus certainly tried to make up for those twelve days by being oh-so-very civilized and polite and non-offensive for the other three hundred and fifty three. Sirius often wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off being a little less apologetic and a little more bold, but he hadn’t lived Remus’ life and he was the only friend he had left, so he wasn’t about to complain. Besides, he suspected that Remus was the reason he wound up asleep in his own bed, perfectly tucked in (as opposed to asleep over Buckbeak’s droppings or face first on the cold tile in front of the toilet) more often than not.
“So you fancy his manners, then?” he couldn’t help asking after a while.
“No, I just—well, he looks at me, sometimes, like he’s sort of…hungry, you know, and I...”
“Surely he’s not the only person who looks at you that way,” Sirius observed, and looked at the ground, wondering if she’d ever noticed the hunger in his own eyes or just chosen not to see it, seeing him as beyond that sort of thing. Or off limits, because of the family thing, or maybe he was just losing his appeal. (As if he hadn’t known that the first time he came across a mirror in the Shrieking Shack.) And why did it matter anyway? He was off limits, or she certainly was, considering that one of his fondest and earliest memories was of her mother—looking lovely and elegant in fancy dress at a New Years’ Ball, barely old enough to put her hair up. Fortunately, he’d managed to avoid seeing this one as a baby or the occasional erotic dream he’d had featuring her over the past few months would have tempted him to Scourgify his own brain.
Tonks looked directly at him, saying, “Well, yeah, of course they look, but…” she shrugged. “Thought I was going to save myself for something special. And I reckon I’m glad I did because from what I’ve heard most of it had been fairly awful, even for those who claimed they were in love and all that rubbish.”
“Rubbish?” Sirius repeated, and laughed softly. “Aren’t you a bit young to be so cynical?”
She glared at him then, and he flinched a bit, having seen that look before, and on much closer relatives. “You try being romantic the five millionth time someone asks you to become something other than yourself.”
He nodded, acknowledging her point, but asked, “ So where does Remus enter into this if it’s not about love and all that rubbish you mentioned?”
“Experience,” she said. “And manners, and—well, you get the idea.”
Sirius snorted then, but he bit his tongue before he brought up the fact that advanced age did not always go hand in hand with experience, and in Remus’ case possibly more so than others. Also (and he was quite proud of himself for this, actually) he managed not to mention that if it was experience she was looking for, he’d racked up more than enough in his pre-Azkaban days than he probably had a right to. (Well, it was the seventies, after all, but still…)
But she was watching him speculatively, waiting for a reply, and he honestly had no idea where to go with it. As tends to happen in those sorts of situations, though, as his mind shut off, his body seemed to take over and instead of saying something foolish and impulsive, he actually did something foolish and impulsive and leant down to press his lips against hers briefly. In retrospect, it ought to have stopped there because her only response was to stay frozen in place, her eyes wide and her mouth gaping.
He honestly wished she’d hexed him as he pulled away, but she just kept staring at him until he walked to the cabinet to replace his (well-intentioned, actually) tea with (who are we kidding, anyway?) whiskey.
He stood there, waiting for the explosion, but she remained silent. Finally, he had to turn and face her, though he didn’t meet her eyes. “Sorry,” he muttered, and wanted to add that he was lonely and hurting, and just wanted a bit of a chance to feel human and possibly even more than that, but if she was as inexperienced as she seemed to be indicating she was, she might not understand that side of it. He certainly had only been beginning to understand before the choice of sex for sex’s sake and sex as an almost spiritual experience had both been taken from him as options.
On the other hand, if that was the sort of thing she’d been holding out for, Remus would have been the ideal person to give it to her, given that everything he did seemed to have a lofty goal behind it. Cursing himself inwardly for being a rotten friend, Sirius downed his drink and loped from the room, figuring she’d chalk it up to whiskey for breakfast, lunch and tea and cut him some slack.
What he hadn’t expected was for her to follow him down the hall to his room, with surprising stealth—beating him, in fact, to his bed. Of course, the house did allow for apparition indoors (those manic gingers had proven that often enough) though he was usually not sober enough to attempt it, nor was he interested in time-saving endeavors when he had nothing but time on his hands.
However she’d done it, there she sat on his bed, looking confused and vulnerable and entirely more appealing than she should have to him.
“Why did you do that?” she asked, and he shook his head in response.
“Don’t mind me, love, I’m just…”
She just sat there, waiting for a reply, and he wondered why she’d sat on the bed rather than elsewhere in the room.
Finally, he opted to finish the sentence with “Jealous,” just as she prompted; “Lonely?” and they locked eyes, each of them remaining motionless as they took the measure of each other.
“I’m tired of waiting for my life to begin,” she said after a while. “I thought, once I got qualified, things would start to fall into place, but with this war and everything…”
She shrugged. “Didn’t want to settle for anything less than miraculous. How could I, when I grew up under the influence of two people who risked everything for each other? How could the little fancies I got ever develop into something that important? And I wasn’t the type of girl who had blokes falling all over themselves to wine and dine and romance, was I? But I’m putting my arse on the line every day, more than I ever realized, and I see…horrible things…you can’t imagine, or maybe you can…”
Sirius sighed and looked away.
“I want the good, too. I want to feel and I want to live, and even if it’s not perfect, I want to know that at least I tried everything, you know?”
He knew—more than she could possibly understand, and he wanted to weep for that reckless young man who’d had no idea his chances were so precious and limited. There was so much yet that he’d never done, and he wondered sometimes if he ever would.
He walked over and sat down next to her on the bed, taking her hand. He wanted to tell her that it’d be okay, that some day she’d find someone who loved her and who was worthy of everything she was, but he couldn’t quite be sure of it himself, and she wouldn’t believe him anyway. At any rate, she had a perfectly good father to tell her that sort of thing. He was just a friend, and maybe not even that, and certainly in no position to advise her, especially when he was wrestling with the urge to throw her back against the mattress.
He ought to have told her to wait for the real thing, but he kissed her fingers instead, and there was nothing fatherly or brotherly or even cousinly about the gesture.
Her lower lip was trembling as she watched him, and her hand was warm and small and surprisingly soft underneath his lips. Still holding her hand, he reached out with his other hand to stroke her cheek, tracing the sharp angle of her jaw and the long, lovely line of her neck.
“You’d probably be better off holding out for Moony,” he said.
Tonks shrugged. “I thought maybe he needed me. Reckon I was wrong, eh?”
Sirius privately thought that she was right, but wondered if she had the patience it would take to get anywhere with Remus. His conscience buzzed in his ear again, telling him that was wrong to even think of touching her, but he did his best to ignore it.
“Reckon maybe you might need me, too,” she said softly, and reached out to run her thumb over the scraggly hair on his chin. He wished he’d thought to shave this morning, but she didn’t seem to mind.
He leant forward to kiss her again, putting a bit more thought into it this time, drawing that still wobbly lower lip of hers between his and stroking it with his tongue. He felt her body yield towards him and his pulse picked up in response.
Was he really going to attempt to seduce his favorite cousin’s little girl? But when she moved closer, burying her hands in his hair and nipping at his lip, he began to wonder if ‘seduce’ was an entirely accurate description. He somehow doubted that anyone could talk Tonks into doing what she didn’t want to do.
And when she reached for the buttons on his shirt, he actually flinched, like some bloody virgin schoolgirl, wondering if she’d be repulsed by the damage his years of starvation and abuse had wrought. But then she gave him this smile, and it occurred to him that she seemed to be trying to assure him, which amused him to no end and seemed to turn the world right side up again. That glorious smile of hers was sometimes the only thing worth seeing in this cursed house of his—and whatever anyone else wanted her to be, she was fairly spectacular just as she was, in his opinion.
How could he do anything else but grin in response, because suddenly rather than seeming sordid and wrong, she seemed to be letting him in on an adventure of sorts, and he’d always been up for that sort of thing, hadn’t he?
She laid back against the mattress, arching an eyebrow almost as if in a challenge, and he propped himself over her, wondering where to start. That ivory neck he’d admired whenever her back was turned seemed a good idea, and he couldn’t help a long lazy swipe of it with his tongue, one that got her wiggling and giggling and sending his blood south in anticipation.
Her t-shirt had twisted a bit as she moved, straining against her chest and exposing her stomach, and he just had to bend low to taste the strip of bare flesh between her waistband and the hem of her shirt. Soft and pale and fragrant and delicious, just as he had suspected, and apparently ticklish, because it got her squirming and laughing again, and he couldn’t help but laugh in response. She grew serious quickly enough as he began working her trousers down her hips and kissing each bit of flesh he exposed.
He’d imagined her knickers would be a bit unusual, possibly a bit zany, but he certainly hadn’t expected them to be this tiny and made of ridiculously feminine fabric. Nor had he expected that girls’ knickers would have changed all that much in twelve-odd years, but no one he knew would have ever worn something like this.
He traced the line of them over his hip to her backside, only to discover there wasn’t a backside to the knickers, and he wondered how that seemed almost sexier than having seen her naked. And then he thought about the fact that maybe, sometime in the next few minutes he was going to see her naked, which absolutely boggled his mind.
Not the first girl…he thought, but it had been ages, and this was Tonks, and this was really happening, and what the hell was he waiting for, anyway?
She, apparently, was either not content to wait or was insatiably curious, and she already tugging at his trousers. He wondered idly if he’d bothered with pants and if so, how horribly dirty they were.
Not bad, he realized and it occurred to him that he owed Molly Weasley at least half the contents of his Gringott’s vault for seeing to it that he had clean clothes in spite of her personal opinion of him.
He couldn’t quite make out what she thought of him as she took his clothes off, but he figured that as she didn’t flinch, she must be content enough, and he was more than pleased with what he was uncovering.
Sirius was determined to not make a fool of himself in spite of his traitorous body; she’d wanted experience, and he was going to make use of his by seeing to it that she had a mind-blowingly good time.
“Come on, love,” he said, gathering her up in his arms and feeling the warmth of bare skin against his own for the first time in ages. He’d forgotten bloody good it felt to be touched by another person. “Damn, you’re gorgeous. I mean, I always knew it, but never could have imagined the extent of it. This is all you, right? No changes?”
“Other than the colour of my hair…” she said, and laughed at his expression as his mind went into the worst possible place.
“Have to see for myself,” he said, and kissed his way down her body, pausing for a long time on her belly just to hear the music of her laughter again.
God, the smell of a woman, there really is nothing to compare to it—maybe it was his canine side, but it turned him on more than anything.
He tugged her knickers halfway, unable to resist the impulse to plant a kiss on the spot where her thighs met her hipbone and then darted his tongue between her legs, making her body arch off the bed as a hiss escaped her lips. “All right, love?” he murmured, tugging her knickers the rest of the way down and sucking hard on the soft flesh at the top of her thigh. He wanted to leave a mark there; he wished it could be permanent, so she’d always see it and remember this.
“Do it again,” she demanded, parting her legs and looking down the length of her body at him. Her eyes were almost black from this angle; there was something in them that he’d only seen when she was preparing for a fight.
“Beautiful,” he said in a whisper, breathing softly on the sensitive flesh between her legs, making her squirm underneath him and moan with impatience. He very desperately wanted to be inside her, but he suspected his body was too stirred up at this point.
“Merlin’s balls, Sirius,” she grumbled. “Are you trying to kill me here?”
He had to laugh, then, and his conscience eased a bit. He was still laughing as he lowered his mouth to her, making much more contact with his flattened tongue and her slick flesh this time. She cried out, and it was possibly the sexiest thing he’d ever heard.
At that point, instinct took over, and he lost himself in the sensations, the heat, the way she writhed under him, the scent of arousal that surrounded him, the way she tasted. Her fingers were buried in his hair, gripping almost to the point of pain, and he welcomed it. This was life, not just existing, and he’d spent so much time peeking out from the shadows that she, with all her colour and spirit, seemed to be infusing hope into him. He only hoped that he could give her something in return.
Before long, she stiffened, arching her back and crying out words that went straight to his cock, and he wanted to feel what he’d done to her, to feel the spasms of her climax surrounding him, so he scrambled up her body, pressing against her entrance, prepared to slam into her and make her see stars. At the very last moment, his conscience reminded him of her lack of practical experience, and he bit his cheek, pushing into her slowly, watching her face change as he filled her, from dizzy with pleasure to pure focus, as if she didn’t want to miss a thing, as if she was making note of every sensation for a test later.
Sirius himself was fighting for control; there really was nothing like it—the slick heat, the pressure, the welcoming warmth of a woman’s body. And there was something miraculous about her in particular, with her compact frame and her bright eyes, the mischievous smile that she gave him as she wiggled around him, growing accustomed to the invasion into her body, moving impatiently, reminding him that there was a point to all this and he’d better get his arse moving—literally, as a matter of fact.
“So fucking good,” he groaned, sliding in and out of her, feeling the blood roaring in his ears, racing through his veins and heating his skin almost to the point of discomfort. At the first slide of flesh against flesh her eyes widened and her mouth opened and the “Oh,” that she uttered seemed to speak volumes. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, and to Sirius, it seemed a sweeter gesture than anything else she’d done that night. He felt the strength in her body, somehow juxtaposed with the softness of her soul. He was surrounded, welcomed, cared for, and it made him want to weep with the joy of it all.
He leaned down to kiss her again, needing the connection, needing to feel that this meant something to her. She stroked his cheek, smiling warmly even as her eyes glazed over. “I feel—bloody hell, Sirius—so good, so…”
The words clearly weren’t coming, but Tonks had always seemed a girl—no, woman of action and she turned under him, rolling him over with an embarrassing lack of effort and straddling him. He could hardly breathe as he looked at her, testing out the movements, getting her body used to this new angle, feeling her power and embracing it. He watched her face as her smile widened and her eyes closed, as her body flexed and stretched, catching the light from the solitary candle on the bedside and seeming to glow like the skin of a Veela.
“Gods, you’re spectacular,” he groaned, perilously near the edge of control. He wanted to make her scream before he was done, so he reached between them to rub at her clit, his fingers finding the way on their own, it seemed. Her movements became more erratic, and he liked the loss of control almost more than he’d liked the embracing of her power. “That’s it, love; let it go, fuck me hard, so bloody beautiful, want to hear you scream so hard the Order comes rushing in with their wands drawn. Come on, love, let it go.”
And she did, and it was better than he’s imagined, because her eyes were looking directly into his as she flew, and he felt her body clenching around him, hot and wet, pulling forth twelve years of desire and loneliness, pulling his fractured soul out for display as he shouted out his release, fighting tears as he felt a small bit of his humanity returning to him.
Tonks actually laughed as she caught her breath, though it seemed a laugh of triumph in spite of the absurdity of the situation. He had no worries she’d done it out of pity, but still, he hoped that she’d got something out of it. It was nearly impossible to hope that she’d understand what she’d given him, but if she considered it a lark, he didn’t mind, much.
Later, she slept curled up against him and he never closed his eyes that night. Something told him that this was one of those chances that he might regret not savouring. He knew better than to treat them cheaply these days. It might very well have been the last perfect night he got, and it was far more than he deserved.