"Love doesn't make the world go round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile." -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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i. Bianca Lupin

She had six miscarriages before she finally carried a child to term.

When she held her son in her arms, held those tiny, five pounds and seven ounces of sweet, sweet baby in her arms, she knew there would be no one in this world she would ever love as much. She named him Remus, because she thought it was clever, and she imagined that he would be clever, too, and he would love chocolate and books as she did, and he would be her beautiful boy.

He grew from that precious baby into a boy loud and full of energy. He bounced from room to room around the house and ran outside until his knees were skinned and his lovely brown hair was matted to his head with dirt and sweat and goodness knows what else. She would only laugh and smile and scrub his six-year-old skin raw in the tub.

And then one day he ran out of the house with his beloved pet Crup, and he didn't come home for lunch. He didn't come home all afternoon. Evening came. The sun set. He still didn't come home. Finally, Jacob went with her brother and the next door neighbour to find him.

Bianca Lupin was not a sentimental woman. She did not believe in flaunting one's feelings or opinions or making a great deal of anything. She detested conflict, and she abhorred overly dramatic shows of emotion.

But when her husband, brother, and next door neighbour returned to the house a little past three in the morning with her beautiful boy in their grasp, his face pale and his arm broken and blood smeared across his face and clothing, she couldn't stop sobbing.

They explained it all to her, even as they held her back and examined him. A werewolf had bitten him. Greyback had warned that he would make Jacob pay for slighting him. But to go after sweet, innocent Remus. . . .

Her son was a werewolf. She tried to suggest that perhaps he was only hurt and that he wasn't actually — but they grimly told her otherwise. When the next full moon came, he would transform. He was a werewolf. Sam, their neighbour, suggested a mercy killing. "Of my son?" Bianca cried, aghast.

"Do you know what sort of life he'll have?" Sam challenged. "It won't hurt him, and it'll be better for everyone if —" But she wouldn't listen. She wouldn't let them touch him. She broke out of her brother's grasp and crouched over her son. She would nurse him back to health, and she would take care of him every month, no matter what.

She did nurse him back to health.

But they were forced to move. The neighbours didn't want him near. She didn't care. They didn't understand. She took Remus by the hand and she led him away from their fearful, judging eyes. She read everything she could on werewolves, she learned how to tend for him, and she told him every night that she loved him.

But he stopped playing outside. He stopped bouncing from room to room. The energy left him; she watched it go, watched it slowly seep away until he was so quiet he seemed the most well behaved little boy in the world. She hated it. But she loved him still.

When he was nine, he attacked her, and for the rest of her life she had scars on her arms, thick like cords spiralling around her elbow and up to her neck. She swore to him she didn't care, that she loved him still, and that he was hers and that was what mattered most of all.

They were forced to move again.

And then her husband left. He couldn't handle it.

Bianca didn't care. She could handle it. She would handle it. Dumbledore, blessed man that he was, allowed Remus into school. Her boy made friends, began what promised a chance at future happiness.

He was quiet. He was reserved. He didn't like emotion or conflict. He was like her. She supposed that's how he survived it all. That's how they both survived. Perhaps wars weren't fought and won by the quiet people like she and her boy. They didn't become famous; they didn't endear the hearts and minds of followers. For the most part, they were seen and then forgotten.

But it was people like she and her boy that survived it all.

He remained thin and pale into adulthood. He remained sweet and quiet and uninterested in much beyond his handful of loyal friends and his books. He was cursed and he was abandoned by his father and he still couldn't look at the scars on her arm without flinching, but he survived. And for that he was perfect.

He was only eighteen when she got sick. He sat with her every day through it all. He fed her the pain potions the Healers had given. He broke her off small pieces of chocolate to eat. He read her books aloud. He told her he loved her. He took care of her.

He was such a good boy.

And she clutched his hand in hers and stared at him until the blackness overtook her. He was such a beautiful boy, her boy. He had overcome so much, and he still did every day. She had lost six babies before him, but she had made sure he survived.

What would he do without her?


ii. Lily Evans

He was her friend.

There were no conditions. He didn't expect anything of her or ask anything of her or try to make her something she wasn't. He didn't criticise her choices or her other friends. He didn't try to change her opinion. He didn't try to flirt with her. No other boy in her life could say the same on every count.

He was her friend.

She went years without knowing him very well. He was too private a person for her to grow close to easily. He was kind enough when they worked together in classes, and he had once lent her his notes, but they never really spent any time together until they were assigned rounds with one another in fifth year.

Before then, she had always written him off as like his friends. Perhaps he wasn't as loud as James or Sirius, perhaps he wasn't as fool-hearty or self-assured, but he certainly didn't try to stop their behaviour, and she didn't really care to learn any more about him. When they spent three evenings a week together, however, she couldn't help herself.

And she liked the boy she got to know.

He had read everything, and his humour was the soft, dry, witty sort that her father had, and he always knew the right thing to say. They talked about books and assignments and they talked about their futures and their favourite things to do. The only thing they didn't ever talk about, really, were their respective friends.

Not once in fifth year did the names Severus Snape or James Potter enter their conversations. The truth, Lily realised, was that she couldn't hold it against Remus that he was friends with Potter and Black and Pettigrew. People didn't always approve of the things their friends did. She knew, didn't she? After all, she certainly didn't approve of the sorts of things Severus had begun doing, yet she remained his friend.

After the disastrous end to fifth year, she wasn't sure of anything when she returned in sixth year. But she was given rounds with Remus again, and one thing hadn't changed: he was her friend. That was that. She grew closer to him that year.

She told him about her deteriorating relationship with her sister. She told him about how inferior she sometimes felt about being Muggle-born, despite how silly she knew it was to let pureblood mania undermine her confidence in herself. She told him about Severus. She talked to him about whatever came to mind, and he listened. He was good at that.

And sometimes, very occasionally, he talked about himself, too.

One night that Spring, he told her was a werewolf. She took his hand in hers. He was her friend. She was his friend, too. And she didn't care.

Lily didn't truly understand Remus Lupin, however, until she became close to his friends. It wasn't until seventh year, when she went out with James Potter and learned to tolerate Sirius Black and found a running joke with Peter Pettigrew, that she finally realised who Remus Lupin was.

He was her friend. But he was a lot more than that, too.

He was fiercely loyal. It wasn't always the right kind of loyalty. Sometime he let his friends do terrible things because he was too afraid to offend them, to lose them, and that fear — that was one reason that however much she cared for him, even loved him, really, she could never fall in love with him. Still, when it mattered most, his loyalty was the right kind.

And he so firmly believed in what was right. For all intents and purposes, Remus should have hated the world. It had done nothing for him. But even when half the Order began to suspect him of being the spy, he still fought and risked everything.

He wasn't like her. He didn't have a temper like she did. He didn't have old, festering anger towards prejudices like she did. He could handle the hits that came to him and still be a good person who fought for what was right, and that amazed her so much.

When Peter first admitted to James, Sirius, and Lily that he was suspicious of Remus, Lily was furious. She shouted at him to get out of her house. Sirius told her to calm down and maybe they should listen. Lily started throwing plates at them both. How could they do that to Remus? Remus, who was smarter than all of them, who was so loyal to all of them, who put up with them when they were fighting or moping or drunk, could never be the spy.

How could they not know that?

Five weeks later, Remus disappeared. Lily didn't know the circumstances. She was worried.

"Maybe," James began quietly in bed one night. "Maybe Pete was right." His voice was slightly broken. Lily knew he didn't want to believe it. And he shouldn't. She didn't.

"No," she said. "No."

"How can you be so sure?" James demanded desperately.

"Because," she said, leaving no room for argument, "he's my friend."

She never saw him again. But she never doubted him.

He was her friend.


iii. Dorcas Meadows

He was her salvation.

She met him for the first time in a pub. She had only drunk a little when he slipped into the seat beside her. She didn't look at him. She pulled out a cigarette and was just pulling out her wand to light it when his hand darted forward and lit it for her with some Muggle contraption. "This is a Muggle pub," he told her quietly. His voice was soft and warm.

He looked as tired as she felt. "Thanks," she said, taking a deep drag. She traced a water stain on the counter with her finger. Her nail polish was chipped, she noted carelessly. She took another drag. She had only recently begun frequenting places like this.

"You're Dorcas Meadows, aren't you?" he asked.

Dorcas sighed. "Unfortunately." She really didn't want to have small talk. She hated small talk. She hated most things these days, actually.

But it turned out that he didn't want small talk either. His name was Remus Lupin, and he was a werewolf. She choked on her drink. His gaze didn't waver. He told her that he knew what had happened to her family. He knew about her brothers. He knew what her father had done. And if she ever wanted to talk, he was around.

It was only a matter of time before she ended up in the Order. He probably meant to recruit her. But she found herself alienated from most of the members. When Alice Longbottom and Lily Potter would sit with their expanding stomachs and whine to each other about swollen ankles, Dorcas felt out of place. She wasn't like these people.

She was only fighting because she had nothing else to do. Right?

The only person she ever felt she could talk to was Remus. He was broken in a way much like she was. She felt a kind of sick solidarity in that.

As the months passed, she realised something. Remus might be broken, but he wasn't alone. She had thought when it first happened that she could never be close to someone again, not when she'd lost everyone she cared about in one way or another. She had lost her faith in humanity.

Remus had all the reason in the world to lose his, too. Somehow, though, he still had it. He still had friends, if even only a handful. He still put his hand on Lily's stomach when her baby was kicking. He still smiled and laughed and lived.

The world had always done wrong by him, but he was doing right by it. She finally demanded why. "I'm not doing it for the world," he told her softly. "I'm doing it for the people in the world who are worth doing it for." He didn't say anything more. He didn't have to.

And she realised that she was doing it for the people worth doing it for, too. After all, if it hadn't been for the mindset of Death Eaters, for the prejudice against people who were completely innocent and different in ways they couldn't control, then her brothers would still be alive. And she looked at Remus and she knew he didn't deserve that prejudice, either.

Remus took her out for dinner one night. He kissed her afterward. His lips were warm and dry and when he pulled away from her, there was a smile on his face.

She had been raised in a wealthy pureblood family. Remus was nothing like the men she had always been surrounded by. He was so much better. He was an idealist, and she grew to love hearing him talk about those ideals, and it would make her laugh at the way his eyes shinned. She traced the scars on his arms, and she thought of her little brothers, and she cried, and she knew that she was crying for Remus and she was crying for her brothers and she was crying for herself.

They were still kids, really, fighting in a war that was destroying the wizarding world, and they were both the sort who were meant to live their lives alone. Somehow, though, they had found each other. Still, that didn't mean they had a future.

It happened on a Thursday.

It was morning, a hot, bright day. She was in her flat, packing for a mission. The door flew off its hinges, banging into the far wall and sending her pictures crashing to the ground. There were eight of them.

She managed to beat them all. Nobody could say Dorcas Meadows wasn't good with a wand. But when it was all over, when she was sure at least one or two were dead and the rest would be on their way to Azkaban, she lay taking gasping breaths on the ground. She had never fought so hard in her life. The magic had drained her, and she knew she had to get up, that this ambush could mean nothing good for the Order, and then — then Voldemort entered the room.

She saw it all the moment she saw his face.

She saw her little brothers playing. She saw them fighting to sit in her lap. She saw them being carried into the house after a werewolf attack. She saw her father killing them both before anyone could stop him, because death was better than the shame of having two werewolves in the family.

And she saw Remus, lighting her cigarette in the Muggle pub, his face kind and his eyes knowing. She hoped he found a girl who wasn't broken, so that she would be able to fix him.

The last thing she saw, of course, was Voldemort's face and a brilliant stream of green.


iv. Hetty Bayliss

He was like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings.

Hetty loved Lord of the Rings, and when her mum asked her when she would find a nice fellow and settle down, Hetty replied that she was waiting for the man, for her very own Aragorn. It was hard, Hetty believed, to find men like Aragorn in the modern world. It took patience. One couldn't simply throw herself at the first bloke who wandered past.

When she met Remus Lupin, Hetty found herself head over heels in a matter of moments. Chivalry was not dead and there was such a thing as a modern Aragorn. Remus was tall and thin, he carried himself like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it was a wonder Hetty didn't swoon the first time she saw him.

He came to work at the primary school at which Hetty taught, and it took her a while to muster the courage, but she did eventually speak to him, and he was as pleasant as she'd imagined. Most boys didn't much care for Hetty; her hair was too bushy and her fingers were too fat and she had an awful complexion. But Remus liked her.

He took her out to a little Italian place, and they talked about books and food and theatre, and he kissed her on the cheek goodnight afterward. When they went out a second time, she wanted him to kiss her, really kiss her, afterward. But he didn't.

And after that, he avoided her gaze at work and seemed to find a reason to leave a room whenever she entered it. She wanted to phone him, but she didn't know his number. She thought of stopping by his house, but she didn't know where he lived. She considered speaking to a few of his friends, but the only friends she could think of were her friends to whom she had introduced him.

It hadn't been a misevaluation, it seemed, for her to have said that he looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He obviously had a secret, had a problem, much like Aragorn did, and it was up to Hetty to discover it and to help him, and the day after she resolved this, a rainy Wednesday, she put on her best dress — the purple floral print her cousin Sistine had bought her in France — and arrived at the school with her mind set.

She cornered him and she demanded answers. He told her he only liked her as a friend.

Four months later, she finally admitted to herself that Remus Lupin no longer wanted anything to do with her. She was a little angry at him, but more angry at herself: she expected too much. If Remus was today's Aragorn, how could she have ever been foolish enough to imagine he would like her?

She probably never would have spoken to him again if it hadn't been for the car accident. It was a nasty incident, and she received cards and flowers and visits from all of her friends and family, but she had still been shocked when he came to see her. He gave her a small card. "I would have brought flowers," he said, not meeting her gaze, "but I'm a little low on funds these days. . . ." His voice went so quiet she had to strain to hear him.

It was then that he, at long last, gave some sort of explanation.

"You're the first person who's shown me any real kindness in years," he said, "and I . . . you deserve more than the way I've treated you. I'm sincerely sorry. I never went to university, I've never held down a job for more than a year, my family are all dead, as are my close school friends. And I'm . . . sick."

She didn't know what to say.

"You don't want someone like me, Hetty. You deserve someone so much better. I know you don't think it, but you're beautiful, and you're smart, and you're unimaginably kind, and you should never let anyone tell you otherwise on any count."

"Remus . . ."

He kissed her cheek and left. When she returned to work, it was to find that he had been fired. He had, apparently, missed too much work without explanation. "He's gone for three or four days if not a full week every month," Jenny explained. "I'm sorry, Hetty dear, but he had to be let go."

Hetty never heard from or saw Remus again. Perhaps he didn't have his own kingdom like Aragorn, but he did have his own story, one that she had never really been told. She wondered about his dead family and friends, about his sickness, about his inability to look her in the eyes.

When Hetty met Fred, it was clear he was no Aragorn. But maybe she couldn't handle her own Aragorn. She wished the best for Remus, and she remembered the way he had looked at her before it had all fallen apart, and she remembered his soft, certain words, and maybe it was that which gave her the courage to ask Fred out. After all, the daft duck was too shy to make the first move himself.

She wanted to invite Remus to the wedding.

She didn't know his address. It didn't matter. She only thought of him on rare occasions, when she was driving into town early in the morning or at the market in line or hanging her wash out.

She never did understand why she couldn't simply forget him. She guessed, in the end, that tall, thin Remus Lupin was an unforgettable man, much like Aragorn.


v. Ginny Weasley

He taught her to be her again.

In a way, the start of her second year was a new beginning; it was almost as if she were starting her Hogwarts career for the first time. She had never really become friends with any of the girls in her dorm, and she felt so awkward around them. Her nightmares had mostly abated, but not entirely, and she bit her lip to try to stop herself from turning too red when she asked Hermione to teach her a silencing charm so that her roommates wouldn't hear her scream at night.

When she first stepped into Defence Against the Dark Arts, she was terrified. Everything about the Dark Arts terrified her now, and surely this new professor would know what had happened to her and would know how weak and silly she was. She was nearly paralysed when he approached her at the end of that first class.

But he only asked her what she thought of the class, and he asked if maybe she'd like to have tea with him. He said he had nobody to talk to in the castle. She didn't know how to say no, and he was actually pretty nice. He even gave her a block of chocolate as she left. He didn't seem so scary after that.

Her second year was hard. She slowly made friends, though, and her nightmares became fewer and farther between, and she learned how to loosen up and to have a little more fun. She started having tea with Professor Lupin more often, and they talked about everyday things, about books she'd read and the pranks her older brothers had pulled and how much she liked the Weird Sisters.

Then they talked about cursed objects in class. Ginny ran out as soon as it was over. She retched in the nearest loo. She was trembling. She couldn't handle this. She brushed off all her new friends and she had the worst nightmare she'd had in weeks that night. The next day, Professor Lupin saw her in the hall. He wanted to talk to her. He asked her if everything was okay.

It rushed out of her in a flood, and by the time she was finished, she could barely speak for all her tears. He hesitantly rubbed her shoulder. He gave her a piece of chocolate. "You say — you say you threw the diary in the loo one day?" he asked quietly.

She nodded. "Harry somehow got a hold of it. And I got it back from him, but then I. . . ." She wiped at her tears.

"That's quite amazing, you know." At her look of confusion, he added, his eyes warm and sincere, "Not many people could have the power to resist magic that strong. I doubt I could. And look who won in the end?"

"The only reason I'm not dead is because of Harry," she murmured. "I'm useless."

He reached forward and covered her hand with his. "You're not," he said, "not if you don't want to be." He paused. "If you'd like, I can help you. And the next time someone threatens you, you'll be ready. I know you have the power. You just have to learn how to use it."

Her training began. They would do it in off hours, early Sunday morning or late Wednesday afternoon. He never seemed to grow frustrated with her. He taught her Expelliarmus. It took a little while to get the hang of, but she was so proud when she disarmed him. He was, too. He taught her the shield spell, and he taught her the Stunning spell, and there was nothing she loved more than her few hours with him each week.

The lessons happened less as the year progressed. She spent more time with her friends, and she got to know Hermione a little, and she had a terrific Christmas at the Burrow. She knew that Lupin was helping someone else, too, and she kind of thought he was amazing. She suspected someday Harry would be like him. They were both quiet but kind. They were both heroes in their own right, and they didn't even know it. They both saved her.

And someday she would save herself. He gave that to her.

When she learned he was leaving, she went to see him, and she couldn't help herself: she hugged him fiercely. "You're the best professor I've ever had," she said.

He smiled. She was at the door to leave when he called her name. "Don't give up on Harry," he said. She felt the heat rise in her neck. "I happen to know on good authority that Potter men love redheads." She only nodded and fled, her face flaming.

When her third year dawned, Ginny was so excited. She was excited to see all her friends, to go to Quidditch matches, to perform magic again. It was going to be a great year, she knew. It might have started off terribly with the attacks at the Quidditch Cup, but whatever happened, Ginny was ready.

She didn't much care for Mad-Eyed Moody. She preferred Professor Lupin. After all, he was much more than a professor. He was her mentor. He was her advocate. He was her friend. He was the person who taught her that being Ginny Weasley was something good.


vi. Andromeda Tonks

He was to Nymphadora as Ted was to her.

On first meeting him, Andromeda had reserved judgment. She made it a point never to take a liking to someone on a first encounter, as doing so was surely setting oneself up for later disappointment. Yet immediately disliking someone with preconceived notions was something Andromeda had sworn never to do, not after she had so often been the victim of such. How many people had thought she was just like her sisters, judging her before they even knew her?

He was immensely polite, clearly well read and intelligent, and he had adoration in his eyes when he looked at Andromeda's daughter.

As he sat in their living room, talking politics with Ted, Andromeda silently watched on, and she heard her sisters' voices in her head. Cissy spoke of the patches on his coat with disdain and how old and thin and unattractive he was, and how he could never care for a girl. Bella sneered at his manners, at the fact that an animal would pretend to be human, to sit and chat and have tea.

No matter how old she got or how far she grew from her sisters, they would always be with her. And having their thoughts in her head was a sure way for Andromeda to evaluate others: someone who received her sisters' contempt was most likely a worthy person.

Andromeda did not care that he was a far cry from wealthy or that he was several years older than Nymphadora. And though a part of her was against the idea of her daughter with a werewolf, his affliction was not too terribly bothersome to Andromeda. It was not a reason to write him off, at least. She prided herself on not dismissing people based on what they could not help.

The world was not a fair place, something she knew well and had for years. If life was fair, then Andromeda had done something wrong in a past life, and she did not believe in past lives. She believed in tea brewed bitter, symphony music, and raspberry smear on toast.

Still, she stopped short of forming a concrete opinion on Remus Lupin.

And then she realised what he had done to her daughter.

He had done for her, for Andromeda's clumsy, rash, beautiful daughter, what a young, overly ambitious and idealistic Ted Tonks had once done for Andromeda: he had taught her that one could be as idealistic as she wished but that to make a difference required more. He had taught her what it meant to be responsible for more than herself. He had taught her what it meant to fight for what you believed in.

Andromeda had always seen herself as different than her sisters, as understanding what they did not, as ready to take on the world in a way they refused to, but she never fought for her own beliefs or her own future or to be different than the prejudiced, insidious Black family until she met Ted.

And Nymphadora, despite becoming an Auror, despite wearing her ratty shirts and gallivanting all around with her hair such bright, gaudy, awful colours, had faced the same problem. She could make speeches, but could she fight battles?

She could now.

Remus Lupin, with his graying brown hair and his thin face and the patches on his coat, had taught her how.

"Nymphadora," Andromeda said, as her daughter and Lupin stood to leave. "I left some things for you in your old bedroom. Some clothing. Take it or dispose of it, I don't care, but get it out of my house."

The moment Nymphadora had left the room, Andromeda turned on Remus. "I would never have imagined my daughter with someone like you." She paused, her mouth thinning to a line. "And I can't say I'm thrilled that she is so endeared to someone who, however unintentionally, could hurt her so much." That was as close as she would come to outright mentioning his sickness.

"I understand," Remus said quietly.

"But you love my daughter, yes?"

He nodded.

"Do right by her, then," Andromeda instructed, glaring at him firmly to ensure he was listening, "or I will do wrong by you, Remus Lupin."

Nymphadora returned, and he had no chance to reply, but Andromeda did not care what he had to say, as long as he had understood. She was sure he had. It was not easy to misunderstand her, something else in which she took pride.

When Andromeda saw something of her daughter in Teddy, it made her heart break a little. When she saw something of Remus Lupin in her grandson, it gave her a kind of peace. Because her daughter might have died so young, so tragically, so undeservedly, but at least before dying, she had experienced something wonderful.

She had experienced the rare kind of love that makes a soul so much better.

And for that reason, she supposed, Andromeda Tonks loved Remus Lupin.


vii. Nymphadora Tonks

She closed her eyes and tasted peach butter.

The first time Tonks found herself talking to Remus Lupin in more than passing, she was in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place. An Order meeting was in full swing, but Tonks was tired of listening to everyone snipe at each other, and she'd escaped to the kitchen. Who knew joining a secret organisation to fight the forces of evil could be so boring?

Apparently, she wasn't the only one who thought as much. Remus Lupin stood leaning against the kitchen counter, an open jar of something in his hand. He gave a small, polite smile.

He was tall and thin, neatly dressed and with soft features. She knew this. It wasn't as if she had never met him before, and she certainly knew of him, knew that he was Sirius's friend, knew what he had done for the Order, knew about his condition. But standing with him in the kitchen, she noticed for the first time the slight slant of his nose and how dark his eyes were and it occurred to her that he was attractive in the way she imagined the heroes of the sordid romance novels she had read growing up were.

They talked for a few minutes, and then she asked what he was eating, and it happened: he dipped his finger into the jar and scooped out a helping of the orange goop. "It's peach butter," he told her. "The sweetest thing on Earth. It's terrible for you, but the best things in life usually are." And he held his finger out to her.

Yes, the whole scene was very much like her old romance novels.

But she pressed her lips to his finger, and she tasted the peach butter, and it was as sweet as he'd said. There in that kitchen, they finished the contents of the jar, and though she knew she would probably be sick to her stomach later, Tonks was never one for thinking about the future. They talked, and he asked her to dinner, and she said yes, because there was something about him.

She never did pinpoint it. There was never one, concrete reason she fell in love with him.

She could try to describe it, and she did once to Ginny, when the bright eye girl asked her as she visited Tonks and newborn Teddy. Remus was quiet and calm and unassuming, yet he didn't hesitate to fight for what he believed in, to say what needed to be said when Order meetings were growing chaotic, to ask out a loud, clumsy girl with bright pink hair that made most people his age frown.

His kisses were warm and soft and knowing, and at first she thought that the feel of him was so amazing because he was older, because he knew what he was doing, but it wasn't long before she realised it had nothing to do with his age. He was Remus, and that was all there was to it. As their relationship grew, it felt different every day. Sometimes she felt as if she were thirteen years old and enamoured with a boy for the first time. Other days, she felt like an old soul who had finally found her match after years of searching.

And he could make her laugh. "Don't underestimate that," she told Ginny. "He doesn't have to be loud or obvious or have that kind of humour that makes for a show, but whatever he does, it has to make you smile." Remus's humour wasn't loud or obvious or the kind that makes for a show; in fact, it was as quiet and calm and unassuming as he was. But it was wry and smart and she had never met anyone quite like him.

"It sounds like you love him so much, and it doesn't matter why," said Ginny, a kind of wistful sigh in her voice. It was very unlike bright, courageous Ginny to sigh over love, Tonks thought, but she supposed love made fools of all girls. It certainly made her a right dolt.

It was like peach butter. There. Nobody could say Tonks wasn't as poetic as the next tosser.

Peach butter was sweet and addictive and it didn't so much matter that it left you with a stomach ache, not really. Remus was sweet and additive, and she didn't care that he had threadbare clothing or greying hair or an inescapable sickness. What she cared about was his wry humour, was his ability to command a room but never the need to do so for his own ego, was the look on his face as he held out a finger covered in peach butter.

When he pushed her away, she tried to explain that to him. She wanted it all, even the stomach ache, because something didn't mean anything if you weren't willing to sacrifice for it. The good in the world didn't mean anything without the bad, too. He didn't listen, not for a long time. Because he didn't deserve her, he said. And she deserved more.

That was his tragic flaw, Tonks knew. He denied the idea of himself as anything other than a martyr, than someone not good enough, not good enough for friends or a settled future or love. But she would have none of it. He was good enough for all of that, for so much more, for her, and Aunt Bellatrix would repent before anybody could convince Tonks otherwise.

Remus Lupin might know how to go after what he wanted, but he refused to let himself keep it, and that was where she had him beat: she could hang on to a good thing, and she would hang on to him. It wasn't easy convincing him that she just didn't care about his age or condition, but she did. It took a little growing up to do, she thought. Her mother told her as much, at least. She did it because he was worth it.

When he returned to her, when she sat on her childhood bed and he kneeled in front of her, her hands in his, he put her heart back together again, the heart he had broken. "You let me leave," he said. "You let me push you away, like I always do everyone eventually, and like everyone always lets me. But then you . . . you stopped letting me. You fought for me. Nobody . . . nobody's ever done that for me before."

The look on his face made it seem as if it was too great a concept for him to grasp. She kissed him fiercely. She would help him grasp it. Weeks later, she married him. When she became pregnant, he tried to run again. But she got him back. He was there when their son was born, and that was the sweetest thing in the world.

"We did good," Tonks said, cradling that little bundle. "He's cute, right?"

Remus looked at her with those old eyes, much, much older than he was, with that old soul she fancied herself to posses sometimes but that only he really had, and he told her, as if it were the one true fact of the universe, "He's perfect."

Maybe that was why she loved him despite it all, despite the bad, despite his tragic flaw, despite the stomach ache.

And she tried to tell that to Ginny. She tried to explain it all. She hoped the younger girl understood. She probably did. After all, Tonks doubted loving Harry Potter was any easier than loving Remus Lupin. Then again, as her father had once told her, laughing, it probably wasn't very easy to love her, either. "You're both a little crazy," her father had said.

She knew half the Order thought it crazy that loud, clumsy, pink-haired Tonks and quiet, graceful, polite Remus Lupin were together, but maybe that was what made them so right for each other — they were both crazy. They were crazy to put up with each other and crazy to love each other and crazy to eat a whole jar of straight peach butter knowing how sick it would make them.

Tonks had always taken pride in considering herself a little crazy.

In the end, of course, that didn't matter. Pride didn't matter. How very crazy she or he or anyone else was didn't matter. How or why she loved him didn't matter. All that mattered was that she did love him, and she wasn't going to let him fight alone.

When green shot forward, Tonks closed her eyes, and in that single instant in time, that brief, fraction of a moment, one so short that it could never be felt or realised at any other time except when it was the last, she saw nothing and heard nothing and felt nothing, but she tasted it.

She closed her eyes and tasted peach butter.

When she found him again, he was holding a jar and smiling.

Fin.