AN: it continues…shoot me down if this becomes at all MarySue…I don't think I am guilty of such a heinous crime, but then I'm a poor judge. Guess what? Remus is still depressed and self-loathing. But we love him…

Disclaimer: yaddayadda I am not worthy even to mention the name of she who crafted these characters (apart from my own dear OC, yay!) and ideas. And Bob Dylan, of course, don't own him, his songs or his harmonica, either.

3

I am still missing them already, hating myself for causing suspicion, hating them for abandoning me so unfairly, the next day, when I return home from a walk through the park. The pale white light of the streetlamps glowed gently in the blue night and made the stark black branches of dripping trees soft. Round and round the glossy lake I walked, hearing dark things move in the rustling reeds, watching smoky clouds chase across the crescent moon.

And I watched as the inky sky streaked itself with rosy light and caught the twigs and remaining leaves in its grey sunlight. I felt no tiredness, walking through the night and morning, through the city with litter blown in giddy circles around my feet.

The streets are empty, and cars speed past only very infrequently. But the girl across the hall is awake, is struggling with piles of books, when I climb the stairs, feeling the smell of urine and the flickering neon strip light mar my wonderfully melancholy thoughts.

And although it is against my better judgement, although I have no appearances any longer to maintain, I pretend that I am back in the world, where I am a gentleman.

'May I help you?'

I may imagine the blush that flits across her face, layered upon the redness of exertion. I may fabricate the downcast, shy eyes and hopeful hesitance in her 'y-yes…thank you' to make myself feel good about myself. It may be courtesy that invites me in for a coffee, cold that causes her hand to tremble when she hands me a chipped mug.

But for once, even if her pale blond hair and her icy eyes do little for me when Lily is so fiery and so nearly tangible in my dreams, I feel a little start of pleasure to think that, at twenty-three, I may not be entirely burnt out.

And I imagine that it would be an…easy way out to involve myself in another world, where there exist only Chinese takeaways and discarded clothes and blandly read poetry and flowers that die. And there would be no war, with…Freya. Freya Hunt.

But I would be the worst kind of person to immerse myself in this when I seek only distraction and escape. She is sitting hunched on a kitchen chair, far away from me; her hands clenched tightly together, almost wringing with cold or nerves. Her face has faded to grey once more, and her blue eyes are darting, darting, flickering over anything but me. I could break her. It seems one touch of my hand would shatter her.

She is watching me slowly as I cross the landing to my own flat, rephrasing her tumbling words as I left… 'I – thank you, th - thank you, I – have a…er…nice day, um, Remus.'

And unintentionally, I give little back. Little thanks for a sudden flash of feeling – I have not felt alive since I heard Sirius' motorbike growl into life on the street below, and pulled back the curtain to watch him speed away from me. Funny then, that a Muggle with so little to say and an aversion to eye contact, is offering me (obliviously, I think) some form of human comfort.

And all I can do is thank her dumbly for the coffee and skulk back to my flat and damn myself for being a ridiculous, cursèd fool. It is stupid to think of this Freya in any context…when my walls are covered in moving posters of the Cardiff Magpies, my few shirts are currently being ironed and folded by invisible hands, and the floor is littered with cuttings…doom laden headlines from the Daily Prophet.

Yes, I hesitate to meddle with another world.

For I am a monster, this much is true, but I am captivated by the crescent sweep of her eyelashes across her face as she avoids my eyes, and the twitch of her hand as she brushes her wispy hair away.

I suppose, as is the norm in my damned life, that I am lost now.

And I am feral, and I have no Padfoot to restrain me. Somehow, with an unnamed throbbing pain, I realise that, even if the world reverts to right, if the sun deigns to weakly rear its head, he will not be there to restrain me, to break my fall, ever again.

It is moments like this, with hot tears slipping silently down my face, that I feel truly old. As though a tunnel stretches away from me, and a silhouette stands at the end of all the darkness – and the shape shifts: Lily, Sirius, myself. I never reach it, though I run and run and stretch out despairing hands.

It turns, and blue eyes glitter in the darkness.

And so it is that, against my better judgement, knowing that hearts will break, I let myself meet her again and again…coincidentally, I tell myself. There are a few days, two at most, during which I pretend that it is not her stuttered welcome and Muggle clothes that make living isolated from everything I thought I knew seem bearable.

But they are soon over, and when she offers me another coffee, her fervent smile flashing, cocooned in her chunky scarf and sloping beret, it is so easy to smile back – not a smile that would charm the world, like Sirius', but a smile nonetheless, riddled as it is with sincerity and meaning – and agree eagerly.

Her flat (for I know, even when I am charmed and cursed into insanity without my friends, but bewitched by a girl who reads Homer for fun, that I must never let her set foot in my own impersonal home) is warm and inviting.

I try to look as though I have seen…televisions before, as though it is nothing new to see her painstakingly boiling water in a silver vessel attached to the wall and measuring out milk.

For the most part, I am happy to watch her little fingers pick bits of fluff from the furry brown cushions, and flick them towards a waxy cheese-plant, rather than try to engage with talk of something called 'Eastenders' and a man named Bob Dylan.

She is warming me, not only through her endearing tentativeness and her fragrant coffee, but because she never reminds me of the isolation I feel when I am mouldering across the corridor.

When I sit alone at night, forsaking my bed for a more romantic pose silhouetted in blue against the finger-smeared window, I feel the solitude press against my back and hiss maliciously in my ear.

And here, listening to breathy harmonica Muggle music, sharing glances that increase in intensity with each flickering, fleeting look, I can silence the demons that the others have left me floundering with.

Go lightly from the ledge, babe, go lightly on the ground, I'm not the one you want, babe
I will only let you down

I want to feel Sirius here beside me, I want to vent the fury I have never voiced upon him now, for turning me into something I hoped never to become. I am a manipulative, selfish, less than human being drawing myself ever closer to this Freya who is in love with me, though she knows nothing, nothing at all.

I stare at my congealing coffee as I remember all those times I could have said a word and stopped him in his foolish antics.

But no, spineless Moony, relying on his friends for everything, and now that they are gone away I find myself so helpless that I turn to a stammering Muggle girl who puts too much sugar in coffee even for my taste to drag me away from Hades.

You say you're lookin' for someone who will promise never to part; someone to close his eyes for you, someone to close his heart

Night is falling.

I can see street lights fuzzed through condensation on the glass, orange orbs seeming so unreal outside the neon lights of her kitchen. I am sat on a stool, watching her pull down books and photo albums and press them on me, not caring that I offer no opinions, no memories of my own.

When she looks at me, with the edges of her irises almost purple, I am suddenly released from whatever chains held me fast before, and I am racing barefoot down my tunnel, panting for breath, crawling into her loving arms.

Someone who will die for you an' more, but it ain't me, babe, no, no, no, it ain't me babe, it ain't me you're lookin' for, babe

We are both standing silently, so close, and I kiss her forehead reverently, and her trembling eyelids, and finally her chapped lips.

I know, with my blackened heart, I do not deserve such tenderness.

I have never been so needed. Girls I have known, kisses that have smashed and lunged into my face and left me dazed and disappointed.

Lily kissed me, once.

It was not perfect, tainted as it was by guilt. And it lasted such a brief second, and I could feel the lid of the piano dig into my spine and her fingers brush my face sadly as she pulled away.

I was drunk, when Sirius and I ended up with our lips sloppily exploring each others' for the first time. I cannot remember what I felt. I do not wish to, when Freya's warm body is pressing against mine, and her eyes are closed peacefully, and her breath is sighing in…relief. Certainly the others never needed me.

But I get the feeling that pulling away now, returning into my magical shell, would flash an unbearable look of hurt across that fragile face.

I will not inflict that on her.

Not until the last moment.

It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe

AN: taddaaaa! One more chapter in the terrible answer to the question 'why is Remus' life so rubbish?' Although it's not ALL bad…anyhoo, the next chapter promises further heartache etc ad infinitum. Come back for more, ok? Until soony…dd xx