Remus Lupin sat at his desk, strewn with papers so that the surface could no longer be seen. He sighed heavily, removed his reading glasses, and brought his hand down over his face.
It had been a tough week. Meetings with the Order had been getting more frequent as of late and now they almost always ran deep into the night. Any one of the Order, or anyone, for that matter, could anticipate something big was coming. Voldemort was gaining power day by day. New people, both strangers and friends, were disappearing routinely. Remus himself had taken to checking the obituaries every day for people he knew. A war was on the horizon, greater even than the last time, and they all had to be ready when it did come.
The stress was wearing on everyone involved. Nymphadora Tonks, Remus's wife, had just the other day commented on how her husband seemed to be getting more grey hair and lines on his face all the time. Though she was only joking with him at the time, her comment really got him thinking. He thought now as he sat in his desk chair. He was alone in a sleeping house. It was late.
Remus thought about how he wasn't so young anymore. His Hogwarts years were long behind him. The long afternoons on the grounds, goofing around with James and Sirius, that was, sadly, all in the past.
For, even though Remus knew he was not old by any wizarding standards, he was wise enough to understand that he was not immune to anything that was going on in the world. Remus was old enough to acknowledge the fact that he was not immortal. Any day, any day at all, he could die. This was a fact he was reminded of every day now.
Remus had that day heard word that Peter Pettigrew, his old friend, fellow marauder, was dead. He let that truth sink in now. For although Pettigrew, or Wormtail, as they called him, was a traitor of the worst sort, he still had a strong place in Remus's school memories, and to hear of him dead was startling, to say the least.
Another thing occurred to Remus, as he sat there in the low light of his flickering desk lamp. He came to the odd, but very true conclusion that as of today, he was the last of the four marauders.
James was dead, betrayed to Voldemort by his own friend. Sirius was dead too, killed by his deranged cousin in the name of Voldemort. Pettigrew, though he had served Voldemort, was dead by his own hand, which, coincidently, had been given to him by his Lord.
All three had died for the same cause, the same cause Remus was fighting for at this very moment. As Remus sat and thought, he grew not less, but more determined to fight this war to the finish. Too many people had died because of Voldemort, and Remus was sure in his thinking that it needed to end soon, whatever it took.
For Remus Lupin was the last of the marauders, and if he had to die, he wanted to go down fighting for the cause, just as his fellows did.