Prologue; A Knock At the Door
[On a mournful day in the nineteen nineties Remus Lupin was in his office at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry packing up his things. It wasn't that he had been sacked, he just recognized the strain he had put on the school and the headmaster by taking the job there. Now that the secret that he was a werewolf was out it was only right that he should resign and allow them the benefit of not having to deal with angry parents and liability suits on his behalf.
It's true, he knew, that Dumbledore would have readily done whatever necessary for him to stay on as a professor, and he would have loved to, but he couldn't do that to the old man. Albus had already done so much for him in his lifetime, Remus had no right to ask him to keep making sacrifices for his sake. And so he was in his dim office, almost finished packing up his things into one small suitcase and a chest that stood near his desk. That was when the first knock came at his door.
It was a soft sound, barely audible and had he not been immersed in silence previously and had his senses not been heightened because of his…condition…he probably wouldn't have heard it at all. Things probably would have been better that way, none of the complications would have come then. But he'd heard it and he'd thought nothing of it. "Come in." He'd called, unaware that admitting the person on the other side of the door entrance into his life would change the course of his fate, complicate his existence until his death. Looking up from the suitcase he had just snapped shut, he watched as the door opened and there stood Hermione Granger, the brightest young witch of her generation.
And from then on his life was never the same.
