AN: read, enjoy and drop me a line if you feel so inclined.

Disclaimer: yep, you guessed it, I stole it all (apart from Freya)…I stole Blondie's 'Heart of Glass', too. Merlin forgive me…

4

She drifts away into a beautiful sleep, with her hand resting delicately on my chest, almost hesitantly, as though she does not feel she has the right to touch me – although she knows me better than almost any other (but he is busy keeping secrets, he has moved on to bigger and better things than making wretched Remus Lupin howl).

Her insecurity is something touching. I see myself in her, in the sheets held up to her chin to preserve, futilely, her modesty, in the biting of her lip to prevent any excessive whimpering.

'I could stay like this forever…'

I cannot help but agree with the words I barely catch as she slips into comforting dreams in which I am not a disappointment and not an enigma waiting to vanish. I feel…floaty…as though there is nothing before or after this. I touch the hand curled on my torso, thinking Muggle thoughts of Alpha and Omega.

Because she makes me forget.

With her hands cupping my face, pulling at the ends of my hair, her breath hitching and making my heart leap too, I cannot help but think of her, and how she represents a naivety untainted by the Dark Lord, or by green death.

Once I had a love and it was a gas, soon turned out I had a heart of glass. Seemed like the real thing only to find, much mistrust, love's gone behind

It is all I can do to stop myself from sobbing, to think that her wish will be left unrequited. At most, I will stay like this for another three hours before I must report to Professor Dumbledore and risk my life and my dignity to save people I no longer care for. Maybe, if I keep my wits about me, I will return for nights and nights of forever, conveniently visiting my mother every 28th day, but I know that we will not lie side by side in harmony and peace as in Muggle churches with war still raging invisibly beyond the veil.

I want that mediaeval love, but it is taunting me with its hopelessness. I would be content never to talk, never to cook for her or exchange loving gifts, or bend on my creaking knee, or hold her hand through waves of bloody pain. I would forsake these and more only for the chance to lie here beside her forever, feeling needed and loved.

And I am preparing for it.

But there is noise outside, on the landing. A sharp crack, a musical swish of velvet cloak, and my mind begins to awake from wasted dreams. The Dark Lord, chasing the spares, the remnants. I wonder if Peter is already dead, slaughtered because James and Sirius, the real prizes, are hidden away from those who hate them, and those who crave their presence.

I confess I am honoured, hearing a voice that I do not recognise whisper 'Alohomora' and feeling the presence of another in the flat, that I am also deemed dangerous enough, at my age, to be extinguished.

And I suppose I will die happy, and young, and I will never have to face Freya and tell her 'goodbye, my lover.' I will not be forced to see a flash of confused, suppressed hurt taint her face as I make my graceful exit from her life.

Once I had a love and it was divine, soon found out I was losing my mind. It seemed like the real thing but I was so blind, much mistrust, love's gone behind

The figure is in the room now, and I squeeze her sleeping hand gently, hoping, praying to a Muggle god that she may be left lying there, with her quiet breath lifting a wisp of hair across her mouth rhythmically. I suppose I regret, if she too is to blaze out in green light, that I am the monster that led her unwittingly to her death, but it is a comfort to know that I will not die alone. It is almost as though we have spent our lives together and are now ready to end them together, too. A night is as good as a lifetime.

A Muggle car passes on the street outside, and two white floodlights scan the room through a chink in the curtains. The searching beams hurt my eyes, and bathe her thin body beneath the sheet in white, and she is a marble, cold statue on the Parthenon, lounging immortally.

And it throws shadows everywhere, and on the long white beard of the man creeping closer, and his half-moon spectacles, and the silver tear trickling into his moustache.

And once again, my fantasies of martyrdom and an eternity with Freya are shattered. For Albus Dumbledore is in my room (my room - funny how I am trying desperately to blend myself into her life, when I know I am being wrenched away), crying, pulling me back into a world of fear and danger.

He puts his finger to his lips, and beckons to me, and even though he can only be here with news to make my heart chill and my world implode, I am ashamed of something as trivial as standing naked before my old headmaster.

Nevertheless I stand before him briefly, with the navy pall of night accentuating the hollows and dimples in my flesh, and a look like pity floods his face.

Once clothed, I slink out of the room behind him, with a brief glance at Freya, who is still lying as though dead. She looks very alone, with one bare shoulder rising above the sheet.

Lost inside adorable illusion and I cannot hide - I'm the one you're using, please don't push me aside

We are in my flat in a matter of seconds, and I feel the smell of abandonment pervade my skin. Already it is a foreign place for me. There is nothing human about this geometric set of walls. Even my possessions seem to belong to someone else, someone with cares. But cares are returning to stab me in the back, now.

'I had forgotten…how young you are, Remus,' the Headmaster says slowly and sadly. I wonder if this is a reproach for forgetting my friends and tumbling into passion with a Muggle I happen to encounter, with no regard for anyone but myself.

But somehow, the weight in his voice, and the tears still falling from his red eyes, spell something worse than my reprehensible actions. And I already know, I can feel my life inverting before he rubs his forehead, removes his glasses and speaks.

'I have to tell you, Remus…I have to tell you that…Lord Voldemort went to Godric's Hollow last night.'

Yes, it is morning now, I suppose. Already my days are falling about me, and this is the first that I must face without them. Is my breath bated? I hardly care. It seems too much effort to say anything; I let him proceed, the words washing around me like acid.

'I think you must guess, Remus. They are both dead…there was nothing to be done. I – I cannot tell you how…sorry I am.'

And oddly, shivering in my thin shirt, with the scent of her perfume still pungent in my hair, I care little for James, nor even for Lily, even though my life seems to be defined by my love for her. I cannot bring myself to contemplate the finality of death.

No, no, instead I feel a dull, pounding ache in my teeth and a tremble in my knees as I think of what these strangely impersonal murders mean for me – for the whispered nothings I truly, truly meant and would have honoured to the grave…which now I know were answered by lies.

Oh, God it hurts.

Now I know what Julius Caesar felt in his dying moment, looking into the eyes of a friend. And he was more than a friend to me, and as I die inside (as I fade into some limbo existence) I can see into his eyes too. The one constant, the one man I have always leaned on, has black fire at his soul, and although I know it is selfish to think that he has betrayed me rather than the Potters, I still damn him and his treacherous heart on my behalf.

How odd, that only a brief span of days could drive me, steady, dependable Remus Lupin, to such a violent diversity of emotions. Emotions I have scorned and curbed throughout my life are bubbling up in threatening clouds now…lust, unbearable solitude and melancholy, a taste for the blood of this Judas.

I suppose there must be hints of my inner torment surfacing, marring my love-softened eyes. Dumbledore is still looking at me, as though I am dying.

I am so…different now. The days of studying in the library, of surging Quidditch crowds, of moonlit chases through the castle grounds, are all passed away. Now, to the disappointment of Dumbledore, I am a deadened twenty-three year old with things pulling me apart painfully. I would prefer, and I do not suppose for a minute that I am ashamed, to crawl back into bed and feel Freya turn to press herself subconsciously against my body.

But there are things I need to do.

Because Sirius is wielding a giant knife, is plunging it mercilessly, repeatedly into the threadbare tapestry of my life, and if there is any chance that I might sneak back into the picture of domestication I have painted for myself, I must restore the balance.

I am a coward.

I never had the courage to tell my best friends what I am. I never steeled myself to capture Lily for my own, and was forced to watch James slide under her veneer, I was never brave enough to ask Sirius to live with me…

There are words left unsaid, and they haunt me now. They tease me with what I could have become, and mar my stupid, immodest picture of myself.

And for myself, if for no one else (if not even for Lily and James, and Peter dead somewhere by his friend's hand, and Freya, her body chilled without me there beside her) I must be going now.

I am almost out of the door when the Headmaster quietly speaks.

'What about Freya?'

And nothing has changed, in reality. He is still the same great man, who knows everything and sees the desperate intent in me. I do not question how he knows her name, how he knows that I am making my way into the night with murder in mind. But I question why he wants me to become such a man with nothing but myself (a poor prize, by anyone's standards) to fight for.

Yet, he is right. I cannot leave her sleeping while I hunt down my best friend – my lover – and duel until he is dead and mutilated in the dirt at my feet, then return and slip into my Muggle façade and live with her forever and a day.

Dumbledore is bringing me back to earth, and I am steeling myself, wrapping my trembling hand around my wand, bending over her lovely face. And there was so much hope last night, and it is so unfair that it has vanished, that it is forgotten now in the face of human mortality.

And for this alone I will kill him, for taking away my hope and trust in anything in this wretched, sordid world.

A kiss, above her eye socket.

And a word, a single quavering, hateful word that makes my eyes pulse with loathing.

'Obliviate.'

We could have made it cruising, yeah, riding high on love's true bluish light

AN: Raaaa…why is it that I cannot write a single happy word! I mean, I just watched an hour of ER, munching on my mum's cookies…what's not to love? Ah well, we know it all comes right in the 6th book…until JKR decides to kill dear old Remus (or even Tonks)…life sucks. I wonder what could possibly cheer me up….ah yes, reviews, no? I love 'em almost as much as Kovac. Just one more installment left, I hope you've enjoyed it :) dd xx