I never minded the moon much until I joined the Order. Sure, it annoyed me some on Stealth and Tracking nights. The light always made it even more difficult to be good and sneaky like an Auror should know how to be; the moon gave the other trainees enough light to catch sight of me (that is, when I hadn't already tripped, yelped, and given myself away, but that's a story I'm still a bit touchy about telling, if you read me).
Nowadays it's different. It's hard to look at something you once loved, and still love, as a sort of enemy. But it doesn't change the fact that I don't get much of a choice in the matter anymore. Things have changed some as of late. Things change in general, whether you ask them to or not. Rather, you change. People change you. Give you a new perspective, as it were. Granted, it's not always a better perspective than before, but the wider view's the same. It's always the view that's most important.
Do you have any idea how agonizing it is, waiting and watching that slip of silver get larger by the day? Watching the stars get swallowed by its borrowed light? At times I wonder how I let the thing get such a hold on me; it's still the same moon I used to sit outside and stare at as a girl, isn't it? The same moon I watched one rainy night at school 'til Professor Sprout scolded me for "trying to catch my death of pneumonia." The same moon my silly six-year-old self told my dad would someday magically transform me into a princess, like in my storybooks.
In a way, it has made me a princess. A princess to a man who seems to carry the moon like a ghost upon his back. A ghost that follows me as it does him.
Some months, as I watch him wilt under the waxing light, I'll go so far to wish the moon would own me, too. For the longest time, I wanted his curse. I wanted to trade the morph magic in my blood for the warped enchantment that would make me as he was. A were-bitch. A creature that could know him as fully as my human self could not. So I could take his pain and make it mine. So I could take the burdens he will never let me bear and carry them alongside him.
I know better now. He doesn't need to have me cursed as he is for us to have something in common. To use his words, why would I give myself up to a pain that would break him if he ever knew I felt it?
"You are my hope for salvation," he's whispered in my ear on nights leading to the full moon, when he thinks me asleep. "What would be the sense in damning us both?"
Funny how he's even practical while being romantic, but that's beside the point. I want him happy, and my becoming a werewolf could never make him so. For a long time I was at a loss for what would make him happy. I'd been of a strong conviction that it couldn't possibly be me, in any form. He needed more than what little a clumsy young witch could give him. Someone who wouldn't trip and break whatever she was carrying or walking past. Someone who was poised and could do the householdy spells to repair whatever it was she'd just broken. Someone who could walk in heels, could stand to keep her hair one hair color for more than three days, could brew the Wolfsbane potion for him. Someone who could match him as I couldn't.
I still stand at the windows and watch the moon like I used to. Now he watches it with me. He'll stand behind me and slide his hands down my arms, kiss just behind my ear. And he'll smile against my hair and whisper, "It's beautiful, isn't it?" I'll smile back and tell him to go relax, the full moon is only days away. He'll laugh "yes, mother," and not move an inch.
He doesn't need me to stop loving the moon because of him. He's never looked to me to change anything for him. He wants me as I am. As his complement, not his match, for what I can and cannot be. That much I can do.