The Stars and Forbidden Cigarettes | Professor Remus Lupin

Doomsday

Lupin knows it'll only be a matter of time before Reverie connects the dots – what she had heard that night, what she had seen, the bits and pieces he had told her – and he forcibly distances himself from her.

Perhaps the encounter with McGonagall reminded the both of them of how fragile everything really was, how there are serious and severe consequences, and how inconceivable anything would've been.

Perhaps it serves to diminish the pain of the inevitable fear, and at times even disgust, that comes when anyone finds out about his condition.

Perhaps the end is near and he's just adopting the animalistic tendency to break off and hide away, to sever the pain of death and die huddled alone somewhere, anywhere but near her.

Perhaps he cares for her more than he'll care to admit and wants to spare her the shock and betrayal, when the time comes to tell her, if he goes against all of his instincts and gets any closer.

And so, the sun rises and falls, day in and day out, nights on end, and Reverie is left with mere guesses and inevitable, onset insomnia. The circles under her eyes darken, and she can hardly talk to Oliver about anything anymore, as she finds that most everything, from the books she reads to the places she goes and the things she does, revolves around Lupin.

On the particularly sleepless nights, she contemplates telling Oliver about it all – the Winter Ball, Hogsmeade, the Christmas dinner, the lake, New Year's Eve, that last night – but when she shuts her eyes, she can still feel the way her heart beats powerfully against her chest when he's near, when he touches her, and she's terrified that, if she lets go of the only thing she has left to herself, even her heartbeat will weaken and feel sullied and impure.

So she keeps quiet, and she lets Oliver talk about the important things and leaves the bits and pieces for her own, and her arm stays down in Defense Against the Dark Arts because she's scared Lupin won't call on her if she does raise it, and that would be too overwhelmingly final for her to bear.

—

Every night at midnight, Reverie can be found sitting in that spot on the floor in the corridor, her legs pulled tightly to her chest, her chin resting on her knees, watching the stars as they shine tauntingly down at her, watching over her body as she slowly feels herself fade into the earth.

She watches as the moon wanes to blackness and then begins to wax. Every now and then, she'll whisper secrets to the stars that she hopes only her mother will hear. Sometimes, she'll close her eyes and let a tear escape against her will. Less often, she'll tell them that she misses them and beg them to forgive her.

Some nights, she watches the clouds part and pull together, and some nights, she only feels herself breathe when she closes her eyes.

—

Lupin's office is perpetually cold these days, but Reverie's note sits on the corner of his desk, hardly touched. He isn't sure how one should cope with knowing the exact date of his incoming and inevitable unbearable pain, akin to dying and pulling himself out of the womb. He'd gotten unused to the transformation, a privilege that he knows he should feel thankful for.

His fingers twitch instinctively for his flasks every day of the week before the full moon, and he replaces his wolfsbane potion with firewhisky. It doesn't help that the crystal bottle he pours it from is the same one Reverie had held, and he forces himself not to wonder if he's drinking from the same glass she'd drunk from that night.

From drastically different spots of the Hogwarts grounds, they both watch the night sky at the same time with dread and self-inflicted loneliness, but their hearts still beat in their chests and their breathing is normal, and perhaps this is the essence of the human condition: a deep-seated, hidden hope that the walls might just cave in or that the stars and the moon still have time to fall out of the sky or that one will throw caution to the wind and find the other, drunk off their own despair, and make them better.