As much as he loved Nymphadora, she just didn't understand. She didn't understand why he was so afraid to marry her, to drag her into his whirlpool of danger and anguish and the tugging of the full moon. She didn't understand why he kept his fingers from touching her even when they longed to do so. But mostly, she didn't understand why some days his mood was blacker than the darkest storm clouds and it had nothing to do with "that time of the month." She didn't understand his past.
He was the last of the Marauders. When she asked him, tentative and confused and wanting so badly to understand, what drew the lines tighter about his mouth and dulled his eyes with pain, that was what he always answered.
She could never conceive what he meant. She couldn't imagine the bonds he'd shared with them, the boys who had rescued him from the deepest pit of despair. He had felt them so much more keenly than they realized, needed them far more than they'd needed him. That wasn't to say that he'd been like Peter—the tagalong, the one they tolerated and sometimes liked. No, they'd cherished Remus, for all his worrying and goody-two-shoes attitude, but they hadn't clung to him for sanity as he had to them.
And in one fell swoop, all three of them slipped from his world in a flash of green light.
He'd had nightmares afterward, imagining the scene behind closed eyelids, and woke up screaming in the fetal position, feeling as though he'd just transformed but was still trapped in the agony of the moon. He beat his pillow sometimes, imagining it was Sirius, his Sirius, and then hugged it close and cried in the night until he was too sick and dizzy with shame and guilt and pain to do anything but whimper.
Those nights were the worst of his life, unquestionably. Even the first transformation was inconsequential compared to the hell he experienced after Lily and James died. He took to firewhiskey to dull the throbbing ache and the straight-laced schoolboy in him shivered, but he suppressed the nagging voice as he so often had for his best friends.
After the torment, his life was a wash of blurred numbness steeped in alcohol, and he all but disappeared until one man with twinkling eyes Apparated to his doorstep. The man's smile was achingly familiar and it made Remus flush with shame, and the house was a mess and where had he put the tea kettle? The schoolboy reasserted himself all of a sudden and Remus Lupin stood before his Headmaster, eyes burning holes in the toes of his shoes, while the kind voice trickled over his crown and into his ears.
"Remus, I've come to offer you a job."
"What?" Merlin, did his breath reek of firewhiskey! Absently, he groped for a half-eaten bar of chocolate he'd left beside the couch and tried to take a surreptitious bite while Dumbledore fished in his robes for something.
"Yes, it's all right here on the parchment. I could've delivered it by owl, of course, but I wanted to see how you were doing, so I decided to drop by instead."
There was something like pity in the old man's voice, and not a hint of the recrimination that Remus deserved. He squirmed, reached out with a trembling hand to grasp the little scrap of hope. "Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor? Professor. Are you…are you quite sure? I mean, I…sir, I…" He found he could not quite articulate himself, and as he groped for words, some dam inside him broke, and a flood of tears came thundering out.
He fell to his knees on the floor in front of Albus Dumbledore, and when he was quite spent, the first thing he saw through eyes still swimming with tears was a monogrammed handkerchief. He accepted with a weak nod, and when he had composed himself as well as he was able, he forced himself to look straight in the old man's eyes.
"I'll do it, if you'll really have me. Of course I'll do it."
"I suspected as much," said Dumbledore with that too-forgiving smile.
Well, if he wouldn't despise Remus for what he'd become, Remus would have to do it himself. But first, there was something he had to do. "I'll be there straightaway, sir," he promised, every fiber of his being screaming with gratitude, "just as soon as I clean this house."
Albus Dumbledore chuckled, and with a jaunty wave, disappeared.
Remus fell into a precarious routine, tied to life and sanity by the now-tenuous threads that linked him to Hogwarts. As his students flourished, those threads grew slowly stronger. He oh-so-carefully rendered himself deaf whenever a certain star was mentioned, but it became more and more difficult as the whispers flew up and down corridors.
All too soon, it became impossible to avoid, and he found himself one night making the familiar trek beneath the willow—but this time, he was alone. There was no rat to freeze the branches, no stag or dog to guide him. He wished abysmally, stupidly, for the reassuring whuff of hot canine breath on the back of his hand.
And then he was there and Sirius was there and pain and rage and tremulous joy sprang alive in him in one instant, and before he quite knew what had happened he was suddenly embracing rather than threatening. And he was no longer alone. Instead of the full moon pulling, pulling at every cell in his worn body, there was a star, bright and gleaming and infinitely more beautiful.
He bent all of the rage he had harbored willingly, almost with relief, toward Peter, who cowered and sniveled and pleaded. He kindly overlooked that manic glint in the star's eye, and he would've happily murdered a piece of his own heart to avenge two others, had not Harry Potter forbid it.
Circumstance intervened and his star was not set free, free to light the sky, but Remus could still bask in his warmth any time, so he truthfully didn't mind. Even as the world darkened around them, he almost felt at peace. He had his star, and that was all the sustenance he needed.
But fate was cruel. Almost before he could blink, it seemed, his world was plunged into frigid darkness again, and only the tantalizing thought of sweet revenge (as well as a promise, the last one he'd made to James, and the last one he'd made to Sirius) kept him from leaping through that current to be extinguished, too.
At first, he had thought nothing of the pink-haired Auror with the bubbly smile and impish eyes. The idle thought struck him that her mischievous expression held something of Sirius—and why not? They were kin, after all—so perhaps that was why he reveled, ever-so-slightly, in her presence. (Sirius had always said he was a bit of a masochist, hanging about with the two worst troublemakers in school when he was obviously such a teacher's pet.)
He couldn't fathom that she actually returned his growing affections, just as he couldn't fathom that she would not take no for an answer. Sometimes, when he was alone, her face drifted into his mind, fierce and hurt at the same time, and he laughed the same hollow, hysterical laugh that had bubbled from him all those years ago when his three best friends supposedly killed one another.
Try as he might, he couldn't make her see that she shouldn't be with him. She had that same damnable stubbornness that he'd loved and hated in Sirius, and her defiance always brought a curious half-smile, half-frown to his face.
"Stop smiling at me, Remus! How can you reject me and smile? I know you love me, Remus Lupin! I know it!" And her anger crumbled away, and she stared up at him with the watering eyes of a wounded child. "Don't you? Don't you?"
Remus had never been able to lie. He was disgustingly bad at it, in fact. He didn't even bother to try. "Of course I love you," he replied, resigned.
"Then why, for Merlin's sake?"
She didn't understand.
In the end, he could no longer bear the hurt on her face, and he convinced himself (as he'd had to do when Sirius and James dragged him into their crazy schemes) that perhaps he was wrong after all and all would be well.
Her radiance on their wedding day took his breath away. Now, he had not a star, but he had the next best thing—his own bubblegum-haired river nymph. The days flew by, a conflicting storm of chilling expeditions and cuddling nights, and he decided it was all quite surreal.
The final battle came. He kissed his nymph and his son goodbye, and as he left his wife forlorn and waiting, he vowed that this time, he would kill Bellatrix Lestrange. He threaded through the halls of Hogwarts, dodging curses and slashing, stabbing, searing the air with his wand, following the sound of her crazed laughter which undulated now and then above the battle din.
When he found her, his heart constricted. For there was his nymph, fighting desperately, dancing and weaving, lighter on her feet than she ever was when not struggling for her life. But she stumbled, tripped over a fallen, masked body, and the curse hit her before he could raise his wand or scream.
He watched the last beautiful thing in life fall and fade away. Four steps, four shuddering steps brought him to her, and as he knelt to touch her fallen body, he didn't even register the curse that slammed into his back. No, she didn't understand, but he realized with his dying breath that she accepted (like no one else in his life but a stag, a dog, and a rat), so in the end, it didn't matter.