Author's Note: I finally got Microsoft Word downloaded on my new computer. Things should look a little bit cleaner now accordingly.

Sweet.

The first half of this chapter feels forced to me, even after major editing. I hope it doesn't suck as much as I think it does. The second half I wrote awhile ago, which helps. Ha.

Anyway. As you were.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Marked

So much glass. There was so much glass.

It took Remus and Rosmerta two hours to sweep the floor to satisfaction. Without the mediating barrier of the window, it was cold inside the Three Broomsticks—horribly cold. Remus's hands were numb around the broom handle as he made one last trip around the perimeter checking for pieces they'd missed. His eyes lighted on a tiny shard half-embedded in the wall, a forlorn little fragment that glimmered like a full-fledged diamond. Rubbing a bit of feeling back into his fingers, Remus picked it out and dumped it into the bin with all the others.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and the only word he could think of that described what he saw there was "defeated."

"That should do it for now," Rosmerta sighed. For the past half hour, she'd been trying to get an estimate for the cost of replacing the window. There was a man out fixing the window at Zonko's—a man who had tripled his rates the moment he set foot in Hogsmeade and saw how desperately his services were needed—and she hadn't been able to get ahold of anybody else. "I'll try to get this sorted out in the next few days," Rosmerta went on wearily. She'd been in the store since just after Remus had talked to her by Floo. Her hair spread in intricate tangles over her shoulders, thick and dark, unkempt and untamed, and her clothes were wrinkled. She hadn't slept. "I'll send you a note when things are back to normal," she promised.

Remus knew that was his cue to leave—to leave her to the desolate ruin of her life's work, swept clean now but painfully wretched all the same. He leaned the broom against the counter and walked out. The hastily-scrawled sign taped to the door read Closed for Repairs.

He had tried to sleep the night before. He'd closed his eyes; he'd counted sheep and other livestock; he'd thought peaceful thoughts about clouds and butterflies and sea breezes. Once he'd even managed to doze off for half an hour, to a dream of smashed windows and hungry green flames licking at his feet.

Utterly unsurprisingly, that half hour hadn't helped much.

The Great Hall was filling up as he trudged in and found his seat next to Peter. James and Sirius were watching him from across the table.

"How does it look?" Sirius asked.

Peter shoveled scrambled eggs onto Remus's plate, and Remus mustered up a smile to thank him.

"Abysmal," he said in answer to Sirius's question. He fumbled for the fork with fingers that still weren't responding very well and poked at the food Peter was still diligently piling onto his plate.

James opened his mouth to say something just as Dumbledore tapped his wand on the podium at the head of the room. The sound was imbued with a magical ability to resonate, and the room quieted obediently.

"In light," Dumbledore remarked, "of recent events in the town of Hogsmeade…"

Throaty chuckles rose from the Slytherin table, but Dumbledore silenced them with the closest thing to a glare that Remus had ever seen him give. That gesture alone scared him more than anything the Slytherins might have done.

"I regret to announce," the headmaster continued, "that we have little choice but to announce that Hogwarts will be operating under a ten o'clock curfew."

Groans and cries of outrage filled the Hall so loudly and vehemently that Remus's ears rang. Calmly, his hands folded, Dumbledore waited for them to fade away before he spoke again.

"I agree that this is a deplorable turn of events," he told them calmly. "But, given the circumstances, I believe that it is necessary. I hope that I can rely on all of you to help me in this effort, and I hope that you can understand why it is so important."

Horror curled in Remus's chest like wire in a flame as he realized just what that curfew meant.

As Dumbledore stepped down from the podium and returned to his seat—fielding questions from the other professors, by the looks of things—Peter peered at Remus.

"What's wrong?" he prompted. "You look like you just ate something funny."

Viciously Sirius stabbed a piece of bacon, which cracked where the tines of his fork hit it and split along the fissure, foiling his attempts to spear it. "That curfew is bullshit, Peter," he explained patiently. The patience was very odd given the way he was victimizing his breakfast. "That's what's wrong."

"And our little monthly star-gazing excursions are going to be a bit more difficult," James commented quietly.

Peter's eyes went wide and round. "Oh," he said. "Oh, you're right."

Remus pushed his plate away, feeling ill.

Restlessly Sirius's fingers drummed on the table. "We've still got the Cloak. It won't be as easy, but it still won't be too hard."

Nodding slowly, James took a tremendous bite of a muffin. Crumbs adorned his face and rained onto the table as he added, mouth brimming, "Yeah, we'll figure it out. I mean, it's not like Dumbledore would expel us for that, even if we did get caught. What else are we supposed to do?"

What else, indeed? Remus thought miserably.

People had been filtering out of the Hall as they talked, and, after making a final comment to McGonagall, Dumbledore went to exit as well. Seeing it, Remus leapt up and slipped between the people in the aisles, dodging them narrowly, colliding with a few shoulders when he gauged the distances wrong.

"Professor!" he called as he came close, aiming his voice at a glint of silver that he detected in the midst of the crowd in the hallway. "Professor Dumbledore!"

Beard swinging in a way that would likely have been quite comical in other circumstances, Dumbledore turned. He smiled. "Yes, Remus?"

Trying not to let his light panting obscure his words, Remus began, "The curfew—I—"

"—will be exempt once a month, for a medical contingency," Dumbledore finished for him, smiling a fraction wider. "The remainder of the time, I expect I can depend on you to uphold your duties as a Prefect even more punctiliously than usual."

Remus blinked, closed his mouth, and nodded. "Of course, sir."

Dumbledore clapped him on the shoulder. "Good boy." Then he strode off down the corridor, and Remus was left standing in the middle of the rug, students flowing around him, trying to figure out how he felt.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

At a quarter to ten, Remus, James, and Lily left the Gryffindor common room to make a quick survey of the halls. A few young Ravenclaw girls accepted their warning with emphatic nods and sincere smiles—so emphatic and sincere, in fact, that the trio of Prefects resolved to come back that way, knowing it was virtually guaranteed that the girls would still be there when they did.

"Little idiots," James muttered. Remus had the distinct feeling that it was the censored version of the comment he would have liked to make. The edge of James's tongue tended to be significantly duller when Lily was around.

It was just one floor higher that they happened upon a conspiratorial huddle of five Fourth Year Slytherins. Heads rose, and eyes sought out the intruders and sharpened antagonistically. Remus found himself calculating quickly—they were outnumbered, but they had more experience; he could probably Stun or Disarm two of the Slytherins before they could retaliate; if James and Lily were just as fast, they'd be fine. He found his fingers itching for his wand and almost snatched it out of his pocket before he realized that he didn't yet have a reason to suspect the Slytherins of anything at all. The tension was undeniable—no one would have contested that—but he had to be fair. It was just about all their side had left.

"Curfew's up in just a few minutes," James noted, faking casual down to his posture and the hand he ran lazily through his hair.

One of the two girls opened her mouth, but the boy in front took a moment from glaring at the Gryffindors to glare at her instead, and she shut it again. It was immediately clear that this boy was the ringleader. Remus felt a distant pang of unpleasant regret. The boy had cherub's hair—an endless array of bouncing golden curls—and a child's round, innocent face. At the moment, that face was pulling a scowl that looked very wrong there—a scowl that looked misplaced, misguided, and mistaken.

"What're you doing there, Potter?" the boy asked then, a derisive sneer twisting pink lips Michelangelo might have labored over for days. "Flanked by a Half-Blood and a Mudblood. You can do better than that."

All Remus could think was, They've got us catalogued already.

James was a few steps ahead of him. In the blink of an eye and the intake of a breath, James's wand was jutting into the boy's throat just under his chin.

"Say it again, you little bastard!" James was shouting. "I dare you!"

Gold-fringed eyelids lay low, half-concealing the delicate ice-blue eyes. "Are you going to kill me, Potter?" the boy inquired, sounding vaguely interested. James hesitated, faltering, and the languid smile tugged at the rosy lips again. "James Potter," the boy said, "you don't have the fucking balls."

As one the Slytherins turned and swept down the hall, disappearing around a corner in seconds. Little more than a final flick of black robes betrayed that they'd ever been there at all.

Remus discovered James standing stock-still, his knuckles white where his fingers gripped his wand, bewilderment painted in gaudy colors across his face.

Gently Lily set a hand on his arm.

"Let it go, James," she said softly. "Just let it go."

"How long are we going to keep letting it go?" he asked, a quaver of uncertainty in the words. "How long can we afford to?"

Lily looked to Remus imploringly. He wished he had something to tell her.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It might as well have been an eternity later that they plodded up to Gryffindor Tower. Mutely, James offered Lily a chivalric hand through the portrait hole. Even as she accepted it, Remus glanced out the window nearby. He glimpsed a bit of lawn, and he wondered. Then he saw that Lily and James were waiting for him.

"Go ahead," he told them, the words sliding off of his tongue so easily that it was somewhat frightening. "I'm going to make one last circuit really quick."

It wasn't entirely a lie.

He waited at the bank of windows, just in case. The dew on the grass winked like the carpet of glass had that morning at the Three Broomsticks, and Remus wasn't sure whether to find the resemblance amusing or mortifying. He waited.

Even as the moon progressed in its stately path across the sky and he began to doubt that his caution would be vindicated, he heard footsteps and a high, clear whistling.

"'Dies Irae,'" he called out. "Mozart."

The whistling halted so abruptly that the vacuum of sound after it was oppressive. "Very good," Severus remarked, his voice tight.

Remus turned and looked at him hard. A single glance confirmed what the voice had made him suspect—that Severus was paler even than usual, that there were smudges of circles under his eyes like dark half-moons. There was a haunted quality to his face, his eyes flicked uneasily from one subject to another like a fox's when the animal caught the hunters' scent, and his hands shook faintly.

"You've done it," Remus said quietly. It was a statement of fact without so much as a hint of a question.

Severus's features twisted into a familiar scowl. "What?" he snapped. "Are you disappointed? Did you think better of me?"

Remus turned back to the window and set a palm flat against the cold windowpane, as if he could plunge his fingers through it, pluck the white moon from the sky, throw it to the floor, and stamp it out beneath his heel, dimming its mocking light forever. "No," he responded softly.

There was bitterness in Severus's accusing voice now. "But you hoped, didn't you?" He snorted. "Your biggest fault, Remus; always was—optimism."

A ghost of a smile crossed Remus's face. "True. Quite true. But you know what they say, don't you?"

"That an optimist thinks that this is the best possible world, and a pessimist fears that it's true?" A humorless laugh peeled off from Severus's lips. "A comforting platitude, isn't it, for people like you?"

Remus watched his finger trace the shape of a five-pointed star on the window. "You'll regret it, Severus. I don't want to sound like a nagging parent, but—"

"You do."

"—But I think that you will wish you hadn't done it. Maybe not now, maybe not soon, but someday. It's permanent, Severus. It isn't going to go away."

"As if I'd want it to go away."

Remus shrugged. "People change. And people change their minds."

"I won't."

Remus watched moonlight dance on the wide lawn. "If you say so."

"I know so. This is what I want—what I've always wanted. I just didn't realize it."

The moonlight, the taunting rays that bathed the world in ethereal silver even as they whispered of blood and misery in a voice only he could hear, disappeared as Remus closed his eyes. He hadn't come to argue, and he wasn't going to do it. Silence settled for a moment.

"What's it like, Remus?" Severus asked in a low voice.

"What is what like?" Remus responded, still taking solace in the oblivion before his eyes.

"What is it like being a monster once a month?"

Remus was looking again before he knew it. No one had ever asked that question. Not Peter, not James, not Sirius. Not his own parents.

"I—" There was a bottleneck in his throat as a hundred insufficient words tried to bubble out at once. He hesitated, took a deep breath, and fumbled to select the right ones. "It's…" Rarely was he so unsettled and unseated. "It's—not—easy, of course." He sounded like a fool. He, Remus Lupin, whose only claim to fame beside James and Sirius was his ability to articulate his ideas. He, Remus Lupin, who talked slowly and thought quickly, like the proverb. "I—I catch myself watching it. All the time. I'll be out somewhere, having a nice night, and then I'll look up and see it, and all the niceness is gone. It—" he realized it as he said it and hated the self-pity that wormed its insidious way into his voice. "It ruins everything." The words boiled and overflowed again. "I mean, I'm always thinking about it—always. In the middle of tests, at work, when I'm just sitting around, I always know, and I always remember that in just a few days, I'll completely lose control of everything, of all my facilities—of my mind. I won't know who I am, what I'm doing, won't know anything except that I want to—to kill something, to destroy something, to seek out something small and defenseless and hunt it down and rip it to pieces." He clenched his fists uselessly, trying to stop his hands from shaking. "It's just—wrong. It's wrong. These things shouldn't happen. The world—" He was finding this difficult; his voice was sticking; why was this suddenly so hard? "—shouldn't… have… people like me."

Remus heard something. It took him a moment to realize that it had been Severus sighing.

"The world," he said, "ought to wish it had a few more."

Before Remus could assemble a reply, Severus patted him once on the back, wearily, and then turned, buried his hands in his pockets, and wandered away like a drifting storm cloud.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There were a few halfhearted questions when Remus returned to the Gryffindor common room, but he ducked most of them.

"See anything unusual?" James wanted to know.

"No," Remus lied.

"Good," James decided.

Somehow, it had been.