It had been an unspoken understanding between the three of them that Ron would not be assisting Remus in preparing for his monthly transformation. The responsibility fell instead to Hermione. In the last few years it seemed there were a few prejudices Ron had slipped back into with disappointing ease, and his former disgust regarding werewolves remained one of the strongest. Hermione would've fought with him if she'd had the energy, but at this point she was mostly just focused on keeping everyone alive.

Besides, privately she didn't mind taking care of Remus. The task made her feel useful, offered her something to focus on, and it also gave her an excuse to be alone with him.

It was decided that once a month the two of them would walk together to the edge of the enclosure created through their various protective enchantments, crunching twigs and autumn leaves underfoot. Once there, Hermione would use several spells to create what was more or less a temporary cage in which Remus could transform. Then she would leave him alone for the night, with a promise to return with the sunrise.


The sky was gray when Hermione came back the next morning; the air had a bite to it. Faint wisps of cloud hung in the distance, like the delicate edge of a bird's wing.

She saw Remus from a long way off, his silhouette vivid against the pale sky; the enchantments had dissolved of their own accord as the moon disappeared under the horizon. He was sitting on the very edge of the cliff with his legs dangling off above the ravine, seemingly unaware of the morning chill and completely lost in thought.

Hermione began to walk faster, a soft gray knit blanket of Molly's tucked into the crook of her elbow. She couldn't explain it, but she was worried that he might fall.

Remus didn't turn to greet her as she approached. She slowed as she came closer, not wanting to frighten him, full of questions. What had happened last night? How had it gone? What was he thinking? She watched his back, feeling the chill all around her, before finally kneeling beside him.

"Remus, you must be freezing," she admonished quietly. Hesitating for a second they both clocked—she could see it in his eyes as they flitted to hers—she reached out and rested a hand on his bare forearm. He'd put his pants back on after returning to human form, but for some reason hadn't bothered with the shirt. It was like he'd forgotten it altogether.

"You're like ice," Hermione murmured. And then, without thinking about it, she sat beside him, throwing the blanket over both their laps.

"The addition of my body heat will warm you faster," she explained, blushing, before quickly turning and looking out across the ravine, where he had been gazing not a moment before. It was, indeed, quite a beautiful view, even on an overcast morning like this one. A few birds flew by in a misshapen V, calling to each other in the quiet.

She could feel the outline of his body, completely still beside her own. Their shoulders were touching, the length of their arms, hips, and legs all pressed together. She hoped her own scant warmth was helping. But still Remus said nothing, staring off into the distance, his copper hair tousled. Though he was right beside her, it seemed somehow that his mind was very far away.

"Are you all right, Remus?" she asked aloud.

He didn't respond immediately. She traced the strong line of his jaw with her eyes, waiting for him to speak. Finally, he cleared his throat.

"Hermione… I have to tell you something."

Her heart skipped a beat.

"Yes?"

His voice was gravelly, rough.

"Tonks… Tonks is dead."

Of all the things she'd imagined in the space of the moment that he might possibly tell her, this hadn't been one of them.

"Oh, Remus," she said, "I'm so sorry. But, how…?" Her mind raced. "How did you find out? No owls can find us here; I thought I made sure of it. How did you—?"

"The radio," Remus continued quietly. "They said her name during a broadcast. When they were reading off the names of the dead."

Hermione winced, wondering if he'd discovered this at the moment that she and Ron were having sex. His wife. Dead. Was it possible that, awash in his grief, he had been met with that image of her upon his return to the tent?

"Remus, I'm so sorry," she said again, unsure what to say but nevertheless hoping to offer some meager comfort. "I know you loved—"

"There's more."

"Oh." Hermione fell silent again, abashed.

"We… we weren't living together anymore. By the time your letter came, it'd been about a year. We'd separated. No one knew, really, except Tonks' parents. She was living with them."

"Oh." Something popped into her mind. "So, Teddy—"

Remus shrugged helplessly. "I can only hope he's safe with Andromeda." The look on his face was wrenching. "He'd been staying with Tonks anyway, by the time I left. I didn't see him often. I didn't have much that I was… leaving behind." His voice broke.

Me either, Hermione thought but didn't say.

"I've been going over it in my head," Remus said, still looking away. "Trying to figure out what went wrong between us. We had our differences, you know. And I'm not sure that we were ever in love as much as we were just two lost souls in need of comfort." He glanced over at her, his expression now inscrutable. "I didn't say anything—didn't tell anyone. Because I was embarrassed about it." He turned away again. "It felt like I had failed."

Hermione bit her lip. "Sometimes… sometimes people aren't meant to be together. Even if the world tells them they are."

"I feel responsible. I feel like if we had stayed together, then—"

"No," Hermione said quickly. "It's not your fault, Remus. I… I feel the same way about Harry, sometimes. Like I should've known he was going to leave. Like I should've been able to stop him. That night."

She knew he remembered it, too. He turned to look at her.

"But Harry made his own choices, Hermione."

"Of course," she said simply. "And Tonks made hers."

They fell silent again, sitting in the quiet together. Hermione found that she was taking a gentle comfort in the mere fact of his presence, and wanted to give him something in return. So before she could second-guess herself, before she could think twice about it, Hermione reached for Remus' hand on top of the blanket.

She was thinking only of providing comfort, solace. Helping him to feel less lonely.

Remus looked at her in surprise, clocked her earnest expression, her wide eyes. And then, gently, he looked back into the distance. His hand, finally, was warm beneath her own.


Hermione began to feel like there was a buzzing beneath her skin all the time. Days passed where she wanted to ignore her body altogether, forget it existed, deny that it had any needs. But this only proved to be more challenging as time went on.

To distract herself, she spent her free time poring over biographies of Voldemort, searching his history for signs and possibilities. Hermione knew that she had to give herself tasks, keep things very ordered in her brain, because if she let herself stop and think for a moment—if she considered, for example, that Voldemort could have spread the horcruxes all over the world, each one buried deep in the earth on its own secluded island—if she thought about how small she was and how big the task was and how things were getting worse every day and the three of them would probably be discovered…

She couldn't let herself think like that. It wasn't productive. So, she simply chose not to.

Instead, increasingly, she found herself thinking of someone else. Remus. Sometimes she would stare at the same page for minutes, realizing only too late that she had not actually processed any of the words her eyes had glanced over, with no choice but to go back and start from the beginning.

Concentration was even more challenging when he was actually in the tent with her, sitting across the way on his own bed, his six-foot-two frame stretched across the length of his small mattress. She could never tell whether those gray eyes were on her, but she was beginning to hope they were. He trusted her now, she knew. Since that moment they'd shared on the cliff's edge, something had begun to change.


Ron was on watch that night. They always took it in shifts, careful to ensure that someone was on the lookout for unwelcome visitors at any given time. All three of them were fairly high on the Undesirable lists at this point—Hermione probably most of the three, as she was a known muggleborn. Now that he had vanished from his Ministry job, Ron was reconsidered a blood traitor due to his involvement with the Order, assumed to be on some secret mission for their purposes. And Remus, of course, was a werewolf who had two options under the new regime: join the Death Eaters or find himself in a cage.

Hermione found during her own watches that there was a part of her that still hoped—somehow, impossibly—that she might see someone they recognized walking toward their encampment. Someone from Hogwarts. Harry himself. Optimism could be an embarrassing thing to admit these days; there was so little reason to hope, so little cause for solace, but somehow she still retained it. Hermione was finding she could never quite give up on hope, for better or worse.

On this night in particular, Hermione was having trouble sleeping. This was happening more and more now, as attempting to rest in the same room as the person who consumed much of her waking thought was quite a challenge. Certain moments printed themselves indelibly across her longterm memory, no matter how small, and there was one in particular that she'd recently found herself unable to shake.

It was common practice for Remus to join her in the makeshift kitchen, offering help with the peeling and chopping, or just company if she wanted it. He never said much, seeming content enough just to be with her, even if they were saying nothing at all.

They'd been making a red sauce and Remus asked if he could taste it. Without thinking, she'd raised the spoon out of the pot and put it to his lips. He opened his mouth obediently, his eyes on her as she did, and that was all it took. She had brought the spoon to her own lips as well, after, imagining the taste of him had somehow mingled with the taste of the food.

And here she was, still thinking about it days later.

Surely she'd made eye contact with Ron thousands of times over the years. She'd even had sex with Ron. Yet it was Remus who consumed her—his hands, his voice, his smile. She felt as if she were going mad. She was flushed all the time lately, blushing at nothing, as if caught in a constant, low-grade fever. There was a current she could not explain or understand that pulsed through her veins whenever he was near.

Tonight, the two of them were alone together in the tent. It was well past midnight; she wondered if he'd managed to fall asleep yet. She turned on her side and squinted into the semidarkness, trying to make out the now familiar shape of his body on his bunk. The fire burned on, casting a gentle light across the rough wooden floor below them.

Hermione turned onto her back abruptly, staring at the ceiling. Just that evening, the tips of his fingers had grazed her own at dinner while passing the potatoes. How small, how silly! And yet. She could count on one hand the number of times Remus had touched her at all. She wanted to know what it would feel like if he touched her in other places.

Was he was watching her now? He seemed to be turned on his side, from what she could see of the faint outline of his body in the almost-dark, but she couldn't tell if he was awake. Whether his eyes were open, too.

She threw the blankets back impulsively, a slight chill meeting her bare skin. She slept in nightshirts mostly, no pants. She unbuttoned the shirt now and let it splay open to the sides, revealing her bare breasts and white cotton underwear. There was just enough firelight to gently illuminate her body, its shape and slender curves. If Remus was awake now, he'd be able to see her. All of her.

Did she want him to see her? Her body, her desire—they were accelerating beyond her conscious thought, stealing her ability to make rational decisions.

So be it.

She ran her fingers across her bare skin, glancing the soft, plump edges of her breasts, and began to imagine that it was Remus touching her—that her hands were his hands, that these were his fingers. The very idea of being touched by him almost made her moan out loud; she bit back the sound just in time, looking over to gauge whether she might've woken him, but there was still no sign of movement from his bunk.

She couldn't help what happened next—the vision continued unbidden. She closed her eyes and imagined his fingers trailing south, beginning to feel her through the flimsy cotton fabric of her underwear, rubbing her slowly, deliciously, back in forth in the place it felt best, that warmest part of her.

A short, shaky gasp escaped her.

"Is this how you like to be touched?" this dream version of Remus asked softly, and she nodded.

Opening her eyes, Hermione looked down and saw her hand had moved to the same place of its own accord. She was already wet, but too mired in her desire to feel embarrassed. The fantasy of Remus was turning her on more than the last time she'd actually had sex with Ron.

In the fantasy, Remus peeled back her underwear. Hermione did the same to herself, dropping them discreetly to the floor beside her. Remus continued to move his hand between her legs, using his middle and ring fingers to rub her clit with building intensity. His fingers now slick, he dipped them inside of her next, picking up speed.

In reality, in the bunk, Hermione matched these imagined movements, reaching up to grab one of her breasts with her free hand, toes curling and uncurling with the pure pleasure of each fresh sensation.

When was the last time she'd given in to desire like this, allowed herself to feel so good?

Had she ever?

She was, at this point, almost impossibly wet. In the fantasy, Remus was impressed by this.

"Such a good girl," he murmured, moving to kiss her shoulder softly, rubbing her faster still, applying a little more pressure with each new brush against her clit. Just how she liked it. Merlin. She gasped again as he pressed his fingers back inside of her with tantalizing leisure—first one, then two, but only after she whimpered for more.

Hermione moaned aloud, finally, unable to quiet herself in time. She opened her eyes instinctively and saw, as her vision adjusted, the real Remus was watching her.

She could see his eyes properly now, fully open in the increased firelight. He was lying on his back, turned toward her ever so slightly. And she could see, even from across the way, that he was hard. The shape of his cock was now more than visible than it ever had been as it strained against his pajama bottoms in the gentle firelight.

Her breath quickened. He was big. Somehow she'd thought he might be.

And she had done that to him, Hermione realized with a jolt of surprise. She'd had that effect. With her body alone, and what she'd done with it.

He wanted her.

I should be embarrassed, Hermione thought, in a fleeting moment of rationality. I should stop.

But she didn't. She knew how to finish herself off, after all, and in the fantasy… so did Remus.

As he worked her with his fingers, he leaned over her, whispered, "I want to watch you come, Hermione. I want to see the look on your face when you come for me," and she opened her eyes and looked into the real Remus' eyes and thought, He wants this too, and then she came.

Great waves of pleasure shook through her, emanating from the place her fingers pressed insistently, spreading throughout her body. She was helpless to the rippling thrill as it passed through her; she moaned unrestrainedly now as her chest heaved with the feeling, cresting wave after wave as the orgasm took her body over.

And still Remus watched her, silently, his eyes drinking in the view of her breasts, her fingers, her thighs—before returning, always, to her face.


It felt like a dream. And indeed, when Hermione first woke the next morning, she wondered if she had dreamed it.

But when Ron returned after finishing his watch on the outskirts of the camp, he asked how their night had been.

Though Remus did not immediately respond, his gray eyes shifted fleetingly to hers. The gentlest hint of a smile flickered there before he cleared his throat and looked away, taking a sip of his coffee.

Hermione could only blush and say she'd slept quite well, thank you.