"Theoretically it's incredible. I have the ability to physically transform into another animal—do you know how few animagi there are? How rare that is? If it weren't for the dire consequences, the hunger… In rare moments I still try to give myself the room to be amazed. My body always comes back to me, in spite of everything."

—Subject 29

I should talk about the day I found him.

Of course to know Remus is to spend your life finding him over and over again, to uncover new parts of him endlessly, and be willing to search him out once more when he disappears. He is a man comprised of buried pieces, always partially obscuring himself from the view of others.

After the night on the staircase—Black's night—we grew closer in ways we both actively avoided addressing. First we were meeting so he could walk me through extra credit assignments, allowing for my accelerated improvement in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Then we were meeting so he could help me with regular homework—Ancient Runes, NEWT-level Charms, Arithmancy (though I was arguably more skilled in the latter than he)—until eventually we were just meeting. For lunch or in his office, wandering through the shops of Hogsmeade on a quiet weeknight. I'm not sure what we would have said to anyone who asked why we were together. Through all of this, it seemed crucial to make him laugh. And in those early days we laughed often.

I didn't allow myself to examine the relationship too closely. Whether it was strange for us to spend so much time together, if anyone else had noticed. Time with him always felt too good to be true, like the version of myself I was when I was with him eclipsed any of the others before it, and I began to think of our connection as a bird with delicate wings: if you got too close, tried to examine it for flaws, it would fly away. I came to realize that even the idea of such an absence was the last thing I wanted.

Even then I did know, on some level, that Remus was sick. Not just sick but chronically ill, over and over. He'd only just seem to come back into himself again before weakening once more. It was something about him that I'd gotten used to over the course of fall term, though this was another thing I never examined too closely. He seemed embarrassed by his weakness, and over time I realized the greatest kindness I could offer him was simply pretending not to notice it at all. Though this became difficult as the months waned and the air grew colder and he was still so pale, growing thinner.

When he was sick we stayed in, drinking hot black tea in the confines of his office or gazing out of windows in whatever quiet part of the castle we found ourselves, talking quietly. I was keenly aware of the distance between us in those moments. He always kept me removed from him to some degree, seemingly as a measure of self-control—or perhaps self-protection—that never wholly dissolved. When he was sick the gap between us widened. He began to feel unreachable in ways I couldn't explain, even as we spent more time together.

December of my seventh year was cold on multiple counts, as Mum and I still weren't speaking. An obsessive through and through, she'd settled upon a particularly unsavory boyfriend earlier that year. Leonard masked his unscrupulous nature with a thin veneer of charm I'd learned early on to see right through, despite my mother's inexplicable passions for the type. He dressed expensively, excused any questionable behaviors with a flashy white smile, and got his friends to do his dirty work for him. In fact, that summer he'd taken to meeting with his entourage in the parlor of Mum's boarding house—I would've assumed they were Death Eaters if not for the fact that their bikes were consistently falling apart in ways magic could've resolve in seconds.

If the very nature of him and his no-good friends wasn't bad enough, Leonard had unsuccessfully tried to trap me in an unoccupied bedroom with him the week before I left for school. I loved my mother unconditionally and wanted her to be happy—find love or whatever the hell she was searching for—but she didn't seem as in control as she once was. Her past lovers would never have tried something like that with me, knowing Magdalena Sweeney as well as they did. But the people in her life were increasing markedly in their volatility. I couldn't tell whether she was turning a blind eye to certain unsavory behaviors or just helplessly letting them unfurl. I was pretty sure, in any case, that his meetings were of a crime-planning nature, and they were scaring away the law-abiding clientele. I said as much to her after squirreling out of Leonard's grasp and escaping to her room in the attic. I'd never expected that she would side with him—call me a liar. Call me jealous.

So yes, I was staying with my mostly absentee father for Christmas my seventh year. And this was before his parental epiphany at graduation, so I could be fairly certain it'd be a lonely holiday.

Maybe all of this goes to motivation for why I spent so much time with Remus. Maybe I'm just trying to curry favor or sympathy by telling you the story of Leonard, though I've never had much patience for either. But the point of all this is that I'd grown more and more comfortable going to my professor in times of distress. When I had questions, when things happened that I couldn't understand—or didn't want to on my own. His presence became a salve, a safety, a fixture. Remus could make sense of the world when I failed to, or at least make something up that was good enough to convince me in the meantime. Yet not until this night did I consider that Remus might have his own anxieties, his own fears. You can imagine how it all crescendoed when I found him.

Packing was what did it. Seventeen years with my mother had been equal parts an adventure and a master class in repression. Holding a pair of ripped jeans there in the seventh-year Hufflepuff house dormitory I felt a sudden wave of futility sweep through me in a rush, an overwhelming feeling that my mother would never leave this man, and that if she did there would be another, that she would always choose someone else over me, that I had been the only constant in the whirlwind of her life and yet, somehow, this was not enough. Trelawney had never conclusively told me whether I possessed the Sight but this sensation felt the way I'd always imagined a premonition would. Certain in a way that was physically painful.

Suddenly I ached. The tremors followed quickly. At this point at least I was accustomed to them—my body's rejection of a reality it deemed too extreme. I abruptly laid face-down on my bed, atop my neat piles of clothes. Face in my shirts, a hand on my underwear, pants beneath my thighs. My thoughts jittered and raced. Classes had finished today, at least, and I was the only one left in my room that night. I began to inhale deeply, trying to ride out these bodily sensations of abandonment, but my mind refused to accept the idea of my mother's rejection as temporary. I remembered what Remus had said to me about voicing these moments, reaching out when panic struck. Jolting upright, still shaking, I decided I would look for him.

It was late—after curfew—but Hogwarts was mostly empty at that point and I'd lived in the castle long enough by then to know how to avoid being seen. Lumos was a rookie's mistake; you had to feel your way through the castle, know which halls to avoid, always looking out for the two vindictive red beams of a certain cat's eyes. Of course there was still the problem of my breathing, having to muffle it, the tingling sensation caused by hyperventilation sending pins and needles down my legs and into my numb feet. After a while I was running on anvils, not heels and toes.

The classroom door was never locked. I'd never come this late before, but it didn't even cross my mind at the time that I might be unwelcome, that Remus, private as he was, might not be disposed to entertaining visitors. As I walked to the back of the room, gazing up blankly at the enormous skeleton that hung suspended above the neat rows of desks, I thought of my mother. My father. And for the first conscious time in my seventh year, I let myself acknowledge the searing loneliness I felt. How disconnected. How different. I couldn't think of what to do with this feeling. How many of us do, at seventeen?

The first time I knocked on his office door no answer came. No noise at all, in fact. I'd never felt scared in that classroom before but as I stood at the door and looked behind me I felt haunted, somehow, struck by the ominous slant of moonlight through windows that were never fully shuttered. I knocked again, filling with a trepidation I couldn't explain. A growing sense that I should not be there, should never have left my bedroom. But at this point, of course, it was too late.

There are only a few things I remember clearly after opening the door. Certain details crystallized at that moment in my mind, became permanent fixtures and never left.

I saw him. The werewolf. At first I couldn't connect what I was seeing with any explanation that made sense. The werewolf is not simply a wolf, of course—nothing that could be mistaken for a dog. Crouched underneath Remus' desk was another version of him entirely. A being with a canine, elongated face, pointed ears set back in the skull, limbs too long and all folded up into the concave torso to fit within his hiding place. Not like any animal I'd seen before, yet I knew instinctively what it was.

I stared blankly, not knowing how to react. Where was Remus? I thought desperately. Where was he?

But maybe I'd always known. In any case, I know that night he looked out at me from beneath the table, those green eyes—and this was how I recognized him, the eyes—and we both realized that whatever existed between us had fractured into some new form. I knew unequivocally that we could never go back, that this was the reckoning we'd been gravitating toward for some time.

There was no real need for it, given his wolfsbane state, but I ran anyway.

In the weeks that followed my father's party I threw myself into researching the cure. When I wasn't in the office I was in Will's lab, often relegated to a wooden stool in a musty corner of the room to read lengthy debates on whether silver actually had any effect on wolves, as well as the origins of the three different names for wolfsbane. (Will, it seemed, didn't actually trust me to help when it came to the brewing process.) I bought ingredients in the largest amounts we could afford, amassing frayed burlap sacks and tinted glass jars until one day he looked around the apothecary I'd created and said, "Enough, Cora."

Will couldn't understand the sudden fervor of my efforts, often illustrating this with quirked eyebrows and the occasional great sigh. Margaret, I think, could at least discern that my long hours were not generating from a healthy place.

"You need to take care of yourself, Cora," I remember her saying to me one evening. It was cold for September in London and she was sliding a manticore fur coat around her shoulders, staring hard at me across the tiny room we shared. I was in the middle of a draft for—against my better judgment—a Quibbler column on the subject of werewolf employment in metropolitan spaces.

"Why do you care?" I asked, though the question did, in part, come from a place of genuine curiosity. With the ceasing of my quill's scratch came an obliterating silence—the sound of neglect, idleness, dawdling. Not working felt integrally wrong.

Margaret shrugged, as if annoyed that I'd asked. "Maybe I'm just tired of watching you die in my head all the time. Constant visions of you slumping over your desk after a straight week of work." She shook her long, curly black hair behind her shoulders. "Don't you have a life or something to occasionally return to?"

I wasn't sure. All of the things that mattered most to me seemed to also fall under the umbrella of "work." Even Dad, for example, tended to have lunch with me at one of the Ministry's in-house restaurants—an overwhelming place with extravagant lace tablecloths and full-motion abstract paintings hanging from the walls. His next invitation didn't come until a full seven days after Remus' incident with the white-haired man.

"Why didn't you do something?" I asked, frustrated. Thirty minutes we'd been sitting there and my fish and chips lay untouched on the plate before me. Dad made a habit of eating slowly, telling me it was important to chew your food with intention. I had other things on my mind.

"It was your home, your night." Not the first time I'd reminded him of this. "Those people were looking to you for a response."

"I did respond," Dad protested. "But you both took off in such a rush, before you could see. I was just as shocked as everyone else, Cora. Do you think I want people like that in my home?" He shook his head fervently. Bouillabaisse dripped off the edges of his airborne silver spoon. "It just took me a moment to react. Obviously we escorted Mr. Webster and his guest from the premises." He waved the spoon to illustrate this departure.

I had to decide whether or not this was true on my own time. Dad had displayed no overt signs of prejudice—I knew he disliked my job, but that could arguably have been an issue of prestige rather than topical focus. From a public standpoint, he'd managed to gracefully dodge the topic of werewolves for the entirety of his time in office. Xavier was nothing if not a purebred politician, not wanting to give the appearance of falling on one side or the other about, really, anything. I did wonder if having such an outspoken daughter had affected any of his working relationships, but ultimately that was not my concern.

Once Remus and I resolved our differences, I told myself, we would begin strategizing a campaign to eliminate existing wolf-prejudiced legislation. But weeks passed, October came, and every day I woke up feeling like I'd lost something, the power to reverse injustice remaining just out of my grasp. Later I would discover Remus had been pulled away on a series of intelligence missions for the Order of the Phoenix, each night sleeping a hundred feet from a Death Eater's door.

But for now I knew nothing. The isolation was complete.

Attempt #11

1 1/2 c diced aconite

1 tbsp essence of dittany

1/8 c powdered root of asphodel

1 bezoar, stewed separately

2 tbsp molten antimony

1 tsp powdered silver

1 c spirit of myrrh

1/2 cup daisy petals

6 5-cm strips wiggentree bark

2 bunches fluxweed

1/2 tsp cinnamon

Notes: Brewing at full moon may correlate with absence of explosion. Still, keep Cora away from cauldron.