It ended that morning, November 1st, 1981.

Every bit of tenderness he had envisioned, every thought of smiling faces and nights of camaraderie and a future prosperous crumbled within him, floating away on a tremulous wind that smelled faintly of burning flowers, encircling their troubled graves and disintegrating into the earth in dying whispers soft.

Remus, with weariness worth a decade penetrating his bones, had no strength to chase them down. Nor did he have a wish to do so. Not then.

When they crumpled to the earth, when they fell, one dove shooting into the hunter’s fire and the other following suit in a spiraling plummet of downy feathers, they dragged him down with them, further than the welcome heat of the flames, into a world untouched by its straying sparks (or if it is, they are masked by the fog that nuzzles his ankles where the thread of his socks has worn through with delicacy overemphasized, the fog that purrs to dog ears and never lets him go).

It is not what they would have wanted, he knows, but in moments like those, when he refers to them as in the past, there seems no reason to care. This is who he is, Remus John Lupin, walking on a path unknown and dappled in various degrees of grey, unaware of the sparrow’s song or the tame brook merry, with the world, caught alternatively in stillness and spinning, casting a shadow on his step.

ii.

They still talk of him as a mellow man, mild-mannered and pensive, gentle in the way that he is not when the full moon blooms and a werewolf’s cry echoes from the clouds.

Some who do not know, were not there, did not see, could never tell the difference, or if they can, they sum up all the factions of the change to age and the price that it demands.

But the difference remains solely in that in his other life, as he thinks of it, he woke up in the dim mornings with the sun rising in his soul, awed and amazed and surprised at all that he had even with his condition. With every step he took there were always three others by his sides, and it was as though their laughs, their talks, their ways, were kisses pressed on old wounds of a boy with a drawn face and slowed gait and odd little scratches all over his arms.

(But of course, the axes flipped and the plates shifted, pulling those scars apart from the seams, and it was only made all the more painful by who they were and what they had done. For him).

And he relearned, once more, what he taught himself at nine, when the night left him alone to confront. He struggled, he distanced, he packed them away, like the Hogwarts robes and books with corners folded and scribbles smeared, their murmurs just in reach; trailed his fingertips in Lethe’s ripples and brushed them aside, those specters gliding on his skin (or pretended to, at least).

Pretended until the night when his fingers, in curves and contours of black ink, traced and extinguished that single, incredulous hope with harshly quiet words that jarred the waves of shadows in which the ghosts danced.

Nowadays – or nowayears, he thinks - there is no sunrise or sunset, within him or in the window where he stands with his wormwood tea and broken, jagged-edged chocolate pieces melting; staring, allowing himself three minutes to watch the dew sliding like sledding children before the wormwood slices his throat. Three minutes, and nothing more; because for him, happiness flickers like a worn light bulb, as though over his shoulder hovers a Dementor, thin and ragged, who reaches out to snatch the smile from his face.

Where his eyes were bright (a hushed sort of bright) with dreams of the coming years, there now churns the foul taste of bitterness and cynicism in his mouth, and mild-mannered has turned almost reticent. But most of all there is this keen sense of loss, of the crack that broke apart in prying fingers pulling all those years ago, overwhelming and exhausting and the only reason that he remains, on the outside, Remus.

iii.

He watches as they collapse in heaps, one by one by one in the corner of his vision, falling and failing like everything else he has ever known, rising only to succumb, bodies curled and awaiting the thud, to gravity.

But still he fights on, his wand twisting and flicking, his body turning and jerking in the mimicry of a puppet, because whatever strength he has within has yet to reveal itself, and in truth, he thinks, he has little will to live. For even his love seems like it would be better, easier, with strokes clean and simple and tinted with grace, were it to exist beyond this world roughened by war.

But he stays, slipping like silence from one frame to the next, perhaps, he thinks, because he is needed again. Here, and not there.

He catches a shock of red hair flying; a glinting gold; a hat tumbling and folding in on itself. He watches, dueling, as the boy he remembers as Frank’s son writhes, his body seizing and releasing, and his heart squeezes in pain for the screams that are swallowed whole by the tumult of battle, only the highest shrieks piercing into the firmament swept by dusk.

(He does not see, as he fights, how he looks, haggard and half-starved, searching.)

And as he spins and jabs and shouts and curses, without - without something – his eyes jump like a cut-timed metronome, to and fro, watching, hunting, widening.

And then he is running, vaulting, the life flowing through his muscles, knowing what no one else knows and what none other can see in the ashen evening awash in spell-light, and then he is skidding before the wand tip and claiming the curse as his very own.

In the heartbeat before the darkness flies forth, it is not a shower of light, but something akin to that, something a little like love, or like happiness, that makes the heart burst and the throat constrict, something, he thinks – knows – fleetingly, a bit like peace at finding what he had lost.

Fin.