I don't own Harry Potter.

Remus,

I stared at your name for a half an hour until the ink was well dry on the parchment, and in my mind it looked as though it was cracked and aging. I feel cracked and aging.

I have so many things to say to you that I don't know where to begin. I don't write letters that I won't send, but this may be the exception. Or perhaps, I'll gain momentary courage/idiocy and attach this to the leg of an owl, and shoo it out the window and into the moonless night, before I change my mind. If I do that, most likely I will stare out at the sky, the stars blotted out by the sea of artificial London light, and silently beg it to come back. I'll plea. But it'll be long gone, well on its way to your ragged little bed in a dark little corner, so far away.

And then you'll read my ink-blood.

Maybe I'll keep my letter secret, my veins unopened, and allow it to exist in my drawer of knickers, proof, even if I am killed tomorrow, that I loved you.

And therein lies the beating heart of the problem, Remus, I love you. I won't let you drown in yourself. I can see you sitting there, reading this by pale wand-light, and saying to yourself that I'm an idealist, a fool, a child. You think that my thoughts, my emotions, are still too green, not frayed yet by the overwhelming and merciless onslaught of time. You think that I don't truly know what I am getting myself into. You think that I don't possess the necessary experience to allow myself perspective in the situation that is embodied by the word 'us.'

Excuse my presumptions, but that's what you think, isn't it.

The crux of the matter is that you're convinced that I'm not introspective enough for you. That after ten years of sharing your fate, I will hate you, I will hate myself, and I will blame you. I will say that I didn't fully understand the consequences of my choice to be with you. I think that's what you were getting at when you dropped me as you left for the wolf den, wasn't it, Remus?

You are a martyr through and through. Eventually, you want to die to atone for the sin of being a werewolf, as if it were your fault. I think you share a view with Dolores Umbridge on that. Personally I think martyrdom is overrated. However there are worse vices, I suppose.

I think, however, that if some wondrous cure for lycanthropy would appear on the market, you wouldn't know what to do with yourself after you've taken it. You've spent so much of your life on your knees begging for forgiveness from the world. It's hard to pull your mouth from the breast of suffering, isn't it?

But I'm more observant than I look. I'm more introspective than you think I am, and I don't care. I don't care about your lycanthropy.

You regret our relationship, I think. At the very least, you said that you regret sleeping with me. I think what you regret the most is that I won't just disappear into the annals of your memory, a wisp of pink hair and moans, something that you could treasure as a reminder that you're human in your darker hours, but without those cloying strings of attachment. You want me far away, you want me to forget about you, to assuage your guilt. Perhaps in the deeper parts of your mind, the ones that you barely acknowledge, you wish me dead and buried.

I am alive though. Very much so. I am still here. You cannot push me away that easily. I am the ex-lover that everyone dreads, the one that just won't go away.

The truth is that if I thought you didn't care for me, I would have gone away. But I remember your eyes when you told me you loved me. I remember hearing my name on your tongue, never had it sounded so lovely before, and I don't think I am finished hearing it spill from your lips.

Mull over that for a while, my achingly beautiful martyr.

- Nymphadora