NOTHING GIRL || Remus Lupin

-Forty Seven: The Beginning of the End-

Night air stole it's way into the Hospital Wing. Helia had managed to avoid sneaking in all day, but the night had always been a time where she let herself feel the things that she couldn't when she was smothered by everyone else's feelings and thoughts, all so much more intense than hers. His bed was at the end, she could see the soft rise and fall of his chest in the moonlight.

She padded gently over the tiles, the book that she had spent all day pretending to read clutched in one hand. There was an empty chair set up next to his bed that she took hesitantly, perching on the edge of the seat as if she expected to jump up at any point. She placed the book in her lap, and folded her hands formally on top of it.

She didn't look at the boy. She wouldn't be able to say the words if she did. But she needed to say them out loud, needed to know that they had been said at least once, even if he couldn't hear her. Even if he would never hear her again.

"I'm scared." she started, "Am I allowed to say that? Am I allowed to be afraid?" She laughed hollowly, "Or maybe I'm supposed to tell you that I'm ready to die, that it's for the greater good and that makes everything okay. It doesn't. I don't want to die. I can feel it inside me like this living, clawing... thing, telling me to stay alive. Just for one more minute. Just for one more day. But that voice can only keep me here for so long. I'm so, so scared. I don't want this to be the end. There are so many things I have left to do.

"You made me realise that. You made me realise that I wanted to live. And I did want to live. But I didn't know until you were there and you were so alive."

She didn't know where the words were coming from, but she couldn't stop. She just let every emotion pour out into the empty air of the room, covering the silence with the sound of her voice.

"I know you have the whole world telling you how I'm an arrogant prick only using you for my own agenda. I know that I am definitely those first two things. I know that there's only me, I know it's just a whisper in your ear trying to convince you that I want to be here. It's so hard to open up to anyone, and to you as well. Like cutting open my own arm, but talking to you has always been like that: terrifying and addicting and likely to kill me someday, but I don't care. I stopped caring some time ago.

"Maybe I don't deserve you, but people get things they don't deserve all the time. And I'm not selfless enough to wish you'd let me go already."

Helia looked up at the ceiling, trying not to let a sob tear at her throat. She stood up, and put her book on the bedside table. Helia gave Remus one last look before she left.

"The stars are coming out tomorrow tonight. They're going to be beautiful. Just... Notice them for me, alright?"

.............

Professor McGonagall arrived back in her office that night, sighing heavily as she wrung her hands. The serious injury that Remus Lupin had suffered today only underlined the serious flaw in security that the Forbidden Forest represented. And the reports that a group of Snatchers were responsible only made her feel less confident in whatever plan it was that Albus Dumbledore had for the children they were supposed to protect.

The last thing she expected from that day was the man with weasely black eyes and wrinkled skin to be tied up, gagged and knocked out in the chair behind her desk. On the desk was an unusually short wand, snapped perfectly in two. Around his neck hung a note on a string with some scrawling handwriting on it. After her initial shock, McGonagall had to squint to read it's awful script:

A present for you. I hope you find some use for it.

P.S. just threaten him a bit. He squeals like a pig.