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"You don't black out. You're conscious of every terrible thing you do, and you don't even have the relief of forgetting it all in the morning. I can still picture the face of every person I've ever hurt. And the man I killed, too: I see his face."

—Subject 56

St. Mungo's again.

The waiting room again.

The pattern of the couch pillows, the jarring quiet of the room.

A healer said they'd send someone out when they knew. The blood loss, she'd said. A cause for concern.

No one had come out yet. That meant they didn't know.

Once every half-hour I got up and walked around the little room, practicing breathing exercises. One of the healers had suggested this after witnessing my first panic attack of the evening not long after I pulled Remus' broken body through the glass doors.

Inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight.

I mapped my steps to the inhales and the exhales. I tried to lose myself in the patterns around me. The Calming Draught had helped a little. The same healer had come out with one a few hours later, after I threw myself against the door, sobbing hysterically, begging them to fix him, to make it better, to take me instead.

It wasn't supposed to be touch and go like this. Not for people like us. Magic was supposed to fix everything.

Dad arrived around three in the morning. I don't know how he knew I was there, although I vaguely remembered showing my identification when I brought Remus in, moaning, bloody, incoherent. He'd continued to rave as they pulled him through the double doors, to the place beyond, where I could not follow, still protesting.

Ruined, ruined, I'm ruined—

Dad found me and sat beside me. I wondered at the isolation of the bite ward waiting room, how every time I was here it seemed I knew the only person in the entire wizarding world who was hurt. I was alone in my grief and the room, all of it—but was it grief, yet, if we didn't know whether Remus was dead or alive?

I cried into my father's shoulder anyway. He seemed to welcome it, the chance to be useful after the fight we'd had only hours prior—had it been so recent? It went on like this: the crying, the standing, the walking, the breathing. The rest of the night we sat there, my father and I, waiting for news.

And sometime around sunrise Dad turned to me, opened up that gold locket I'd come to equate with the comfort of his presence. A single window in the wall behind him framed his head in a soft golden glow as he offered me a deep, sad smile. My eyes trailed next to his hands, where a small portrait lay framed against his chest.

It was a picture from my childhood: a baby I almost didn't recognize, who I dimly understood to be myself. I gazed in mute amazement at this tiny, happy version of me, as she giggled and pawed at the frame in her white dress, looking winningly up at my father, who smiled down at this tiny portrait girl with a look on his face I'd only seen a handful of times before. Her eyes were lavender.

My hand went instinctively to the edge of my own eye, the iris now a soft blue. They must have faded over time, I realized. The picture must have been taken before then. Before my mother left.

"I've worn this your whole life," he told me. "Even in the years I didn't speak to you. Didn't see you. I don't know what it's worth, or how much it matters now—" he sighed shakily—"but I want you to know that I'm proud of you. And I'm sorry for the things I said earlier today—yesterday—whatever." He shook his head. "I've let myself forget justice. Become too concerned with my reputation. No more. I promise, this time—" he bit his lip—"that I'll do everything I can to help you. Help them. Your—Remus—he didn't deserve this. None of them do."

I found that I could not speak; I was still staring at the tiny version of myself dangling there from his neck: so small, so hopeful, those beautiful eyes. He closed the locket gently and tucked it back into the folds of his robes, breaking my gaze at last.

"And this Remus, Cora—" he paused briefly—"he's a good man, isn't he?"

There was a soft creak behind me, the opening of a door, and a healer gently said, "He can see you now."

It was so horrible to see him lying there in the hospital bed that my instinct was to turn around and walk out. I resisted. He looked so small, so crumpled, the blood still dried in places on his face and fingers. I was reminded of what he must have looked like as a child, the day after he was bitten. Small and hopeless and defeated, so much pain.

We had the room to ourselves, at least—there seemed to be no other werewolf victims in the region at the present moment, mirroring the emptiness of the waiting room, which was its own dark kind of relief—no names to add the registry, or the list of casualties. I crossed the room hesitantly. Remus' eyes were open but he had not yet addressed me, as if he was afraid to.

He was in a hospital gown that hung open at the chest, so I could see the thick swirls of hair that grew there, but also the deep gashes that Greyback had carved into his body which could not be healed with magic, which I knew would leave scars. Someone had washed most of the blood from his hands but traces still remained on the backs of his fingers, a dark rusty red now hardened into the skin, staining it. I rubbed at the blood instead of meeting his gaze. I knew he was looking at me wearily, with an expression on his face I had not seen since the day of the boggart attack.

"Were you afraid?" he asked in a low voice.

Of course I'd been afraid.

Being so close again, to a predator I'd spent years studying, and then of course there'd been the matter of Remus, the violence I'd witnessed from the very last person I'd ever expected to enact it, the way he didn't recognize me in the instant before disapparation. That may have been the most frightening thing of all.

"No."

He frowned, not in an angry or suspicious way, but in a way that implied he was trying to figure me out. He pulled on my hand, so the rest of my body followed and I was standing as close to him as I possibly could, so that my hips were grazing his ribs.

"You're lying," he said, and then he reached out with the hand not holding mine, wound his fingers through the hair at the nape of my neck, and pulled my face to his. I'd been afraid I'd taste copper on his lips, a reminder of the violence and self-hatred I'd witnessed just hours prior, but there was nothing like that. Only him.

After a moment he released me, kissed my upper lip and each corner of my mouth before pulling away. And for the first time I saw no uncertainty in his eyes, only a brash, irreverent confidence. He opened his mouth to speak, but I held up a hand.

"Wait, Remus. I have to tell you something." I swallowed, the truth of his forest encounter clinging to the insides of my mouth, my throat—I was afraid to speak it, afraid what he would say, but I knew I had to.

"They found Greyback in the forest."

He stared at me unblinkingly, waiting. My voice trembled slightly.

"Remus, they found his body."

"Whose?"

And I thought next of what the healer said, some memory loss possible, and I wondered fleetingly if this was better, if I should leave it all alone and let him carry on not knowing. Only for a moment.

"You know who, Remus." I cleared my throat.

He blinked. "They found his body…"

"He bled out. He… he died in the forest before the aurors found him." I hadn't been sure how he'd take the news, and now watched him nervously.

"I… I killed someone," Remus said slowly.

"Not directly," I amended. But he wasn't listening.

"I've never killed anyone before." He wasn't looking at me, wasn't looking at anything, really, just staring blankly out at the wall across from his bed.

"It was Greyback, Remus. Everyone knows you were only defending yourself. And… I was there, too. I saw it all."

"Everything?" He was clenching and unclenching his hands, looking at them as if he was seeing them for the first time. I couldn't answer and so reached out and covered one of those hands with my own, the swollen knuckles, and we sat there together in uncomfortable, contemplative silence. I knew Remus was thinking about what he'd done.

"He was the wolf who bit you, maybe it's for the best—"

"Sometimes I wonder, though, Cora, if he ever would've been like that—how he was—if he hadn't been bitten all those years ago." Remus swallowed. "Maybe he never had a chance. And now he's dead. We'll never know."

"He was killing children, Remus." The werewolf casualty list flashed through my head, all those names—"You've got to have perspective—"

He looked up, at last, and I saw his face was streaked with tears.

"Yes, but he got what he wanted in the end, didn't he?" Remus croaked. "Now there's blood on my hands, too."

He looked beyond me. "And I'll have to live with that. I'll never forget him, for two reasons now instead of one. And I'll have to find my own way to make peace with what I've done."