Things always seemed to speed up at the end of the year. A lot had happened in 1973 and 1974: now that Remus was over the hump of getting poisoned, being accused of terrorism by the Ministry, sabotaging multiple Animagus attempts, watching deadly Death Eater attacks unfold in the papers, and getting over multiple horrific injuries (not necessarily in that order), the year seemed full. It seemed finished. How could anything else interesting possibly happen? Remus' life was already packed with events both good and bad (mostly bad), and there was nothing more to be done.

Remus almost longed for a boring end of the year, especially since it had only been around this time last year that Dumbledore had called Remus into his office and told him that the town next to his house had been the subject of a massacre, and Remus' favorite first-year professor, only next-door neighbor, and long-term confidant had perished in the flames.

Yes, Remus wanted to close out the 1973-1974 school year calmly. He didn't want anything big to happen. He just wanted to finish out his final two exams, finish out his detention with Dumbledore, and do some things with his friends. That was all. The universe had dealt Remus a bad enough hand—couldn't he just make that simple request?

Sure enough, Remus' remaining detentions with Dumbledore weren't that bad—mostly boring. And best of all, Dumbledore had indeed found a mostly uninjured Marlene McKinnon under the trapdoor. "She's all right, thanks to you," Dumbledore assured Remus. "A little bit hungry, but she will be fine, and her family is very happy to have her back."

The History of Magic exam was decent, although Remus certainly hadn't spent enough time with the subject to get a perfect score. The Arithmancy exam, however, was so incredibly easy that Remus would have been surprised indeed if he did not get every single question right. After all, he'd spent hours reading the textbook, had gone far enough ahead to get every single extra credit question, and understood the topic thoroughly.

And now Remus and his friends were finished with their exams. The stress was over. The only thing left to do was wait until the year finished, and then Remus could go home, see his parents, and then come back to school for his fourth year with a fresh start.

Fourth year.

Remus had never imagined making it to fourth year, but now it was expected. He was going to start his fourth year, and he was probably going to finish it out, too—and what was next? Fifth year? Was Remus really going to get his O.W.L.s? And then sixth year, when Remus would be starting N.E.W.T. level classes… and then seventh year, which was his last year of Hogwarts… and then what?

And then Remus would no longer see his friends every day. He'd have to find a job. How would he do that? He'd end up as Questus said he would back in first year… homeless, friendless, jobless, hungry and alone on the streets….

Remus vowed to appreciate every moment of Hogwarts that remained. He was more than halfway through, and it was a terrifying thought. Perhaps, if he tried hard enough, he could make the time stretch out for ages, for centuries, forever. Anything was possible here at Hogwarts, right?

"We're nearly done with our third year, lads," said James in the dormitory one evening. "And Andrew hasn't quit yet. I wonder when that's going to happen."

"Maybe the position isn't cursed," said Remus. "There's always a possibility that it was just coincidence."

"Don't be thick, Moony. The position is cursed. I wonder if Andrew's gonna die a grisly death sometime."

Remus fell silent. "Well, that's what happened to our first-year DAD professor," he said quietly, but no one heard him. That was probably a good thing.

"He says he's going to keep teaching no matter what," James was saying. "Says he'll come back even if he loses every single one of his limbs. The way to break the curse, he says, is willpower."

Peter smiled. "He's usually right. Maybe he really will be our professor next year."

"Merlin's beard, I hope not," said Sirius with an eyeroll. "Switching out the DAD professor every year is just about the only thing keeping this place from being a borefest, don't you think? I can't wait to get out of here and do bigger and better things."

"But what if this is it?" said Remus quietly. "What if there's nothing better after Hogwarts? I can't imagine things getting better than this, so there's really only one place for them to go…."

"Things will get better," said James firmly, winking a bit at Peter and Sirius in a way that was not quite inconspicuous enough to pass by Remus. "You're gonna be just fine, mate. We'll fix everything, and then we'll go on a massive adventure to bring down Voldemort once and for all."

A laugh bubbled up in Remus' throat, worming itself around the twisted lumps of Animagus-related anxiety therein. "Right."

"And for now, we're going to keep mapping out Hogwarts! We've got plenty of free time now, haven't we? We've all finished our exams, our detentions…."

"That puts me at seven, by the way," interrupted Remus. "You said I had to get seven detentions before school lets out. It was a condition of joining the Marauders. You lot have far surpassed your seven…."

"By a lot," chuckled Sirius.

"Yes, by a lot. And I've just completed mine. I had one with Professor Questus in first year for falling asleep in his class. Professor Dumbledore gave me one after we decorated his office." That had been a fake detention, but Remus' friends didn't need to know that. "Now I've had five more from Dumbledore, so I've reached seven."

"Hmm," said James. "I vote no. What say you, Mssrs. Padfoot and Wormtail?"

"I vote no as well," said Sirius.

"Me too," said Peter.

Remus' mouth fell open. "What…? How can you vote no? You gave me a task, and I completed it!"

"You need to be assigned detention on seven separate occasions. Those are the rules."

"Those were not the rules! You said seven detentions!"

"Well, the rules have changed to better suit the circumstances by way of popular vote." James grinned. "Don't worry, Moony. You're just as much a Marauder as we are. But if we don't give you this task, then you'll be a total fun-sucking Dementor of a swot. Keep getting detentions, and then we'll talk."

Remus groaned. "Idiots," he said, but he was smiling.

To finish out the year, the Marauders decided to do something very dangerous (which didn't help Remus' post-detention jitters). They decided that it was a wonderful time to map out Dumbledore's office.

"He just gave us detention," said Remus. "He'll be horribly angry if he catches us."

"Have you ever seen Albus angry?"

"I've seen him disappointed, and that was bad enough."

"He won't be angry. He won't even be disappointed. He'll say, 'O those silly Marauders' and shake his head lovingly before walking away."

Remus stared at James incredulously who had taken every single elective and hadn't revised a lick. "Uh-huh. Right."

"Glad you agree. Now, let's go find Peeves and ask him to cause a headmaster-worthy distraction!"

Dear Mum and Dad,

I thought I'd write to you. This is going to be a very long letter, so please make sure the owl is still alive and give him bed rest as needed. A lot has happened recently.

My friends and I are trying to make a map of the school. It was James' idea. We all have to do a project for Arithmancy, and James' is going to be making a moving map of the whole school. He calls it a "Marauder project", but that's really just a fancy way of saying he's trying to get us to do some of his schoolwork for him.

We've mapped out about twenty rooms, including but not limited to: the library, the Great Hall, the Hospital Wing, our dormitory, the Gryffindor common room, pretty much all of the teachers' offices, the courtyard, and the Kitchens. Recently, James decided that it wasn't enough for him, and he brought up the suggestion of doing something much more dangerous: mapping out Professor Dumbledore's office, even though Professor Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world and seems to be pretty much omniscient.

I told them that, if they were really insistent on doing that, then we could just… I don't know, ASK. I'm sure Professor Dumbledore would let us take a few measurements. But James said that, if there was some sort of secret passage in Dumbledore's office, then he would hide it. So James wanted us to do this undetected, unexpectedly, and very quietly.

You should also know that James bribed Peeves with Zonko's supplies to get him to cause distractions while we were mapping out the teachers' offices. He's done some awfully despicable things. In order to keep him from targeting me so much, I started annoying him back—and then Professor McGonagall joined in, and we've been subtly teasing Peeves for ages (and sometimes not-so-subtly). Anyway, now Peeves respects me a little, and he's not targeting me so much now that he doesn't see me as an easy target. He's also laid off all the Hogwarts professors a bit in honor of McGonagall.

So we asked him to cause his biggest distraction yet, something worthy of distracting the headmaster himself. Peeves rubbed his hand together, said, "I've got something perfect!", started giggling maniacally (which is never a good thing), and flew off. About a minute later, Hogwarts started disappearing.

I'm not kidding! The roof went first, and then it started slowly spreading down the walls—we could see everything outside. Eventually, the walls were gone everywhere and only the floor and furniture remained, except for in the three places. The only three places that remained untouched were Dumbledore's office, McGonagall's office, and our dormitory. Clearly, the war on Peeves worked out for Professor McGonagall and me.

A couple of minutes later, the school was completely invisible. The walls and floors were still there, of course, but we couldn't see them at all. Hogwarts appeared to be a vast expanse of field rather than a massive castle. The only things in the area were students, many of them standing and lying on nothing, and three boxes of stone that were McGonagall's office, Dumbledore's office, and the Marauder dormitory.

Everyone was shocked. Professor Slughorn ran to get Dumbledore, but he couldn't see the stairs and ended up tripping a couple of times. Students in lavatories hurried to pull up their trousers. People were afraid to move for fear of bumping into furniture and getting bruised up, or maybe falling off an unseen ledge to their deaths (there are hardly any death ledges in Hogwarts, especially in classrooms and dormitories, but I guess you never know).

Finally, Slughorn managed to get to Dumbledore's office, and Dumbledore stepped out. He blinked a couple of times, and then he looked around. "Well, this is certainly new," he said.

He started walking around the school, casting a Dust Charm on the floors so that people could see where they were stepping. He taught the spell to the Prefects, and they started leading students out of the school with the other teachers. There was enough pandemonium that no one noticed James, Sirius, Peter and me casting Disillusionment Charms on ourselves and sneaking into Dumbledore's office.

We spent a lot of time looking around in it, and I managed to convince my friends not to pull back the curtains and talk to the portraits. We tried to stay as silent as possible so that they wouldn't know who we were and tell Dumbledore. We didn't find any secret passageways, but we did get accurate measurements. Fortunately, we didn't have enough time to snoop and stumble across something important, because Dumbledore very quickly figured out that Peeves had managed to stick Invisibility Powder in a Duplicating Machine (both Zonko's products), and the castle became solid stone and furniture once again.

I'd thought that Peeves was being a little quiet lately, and I was right. He'd been pouring this powder on things for about a month now, going into every single room he could, and the powder was activated by a snap of the fingers. The only people that Peeves didn't bother was Dumbledore (for obvious reasons) and McGonagall and the other Marauders. I can't believe annoying Peeves so much worked! It's all thanks to you, Dad, and the poltergeist wisdom that you've passed down to me.

Anyway, that's what happened yesterday. My exams went well, of course, as I've already told you. All healed from the full moon. Bufo's fine. Tell Garrison I said hello.

Love you both (and still having a great time at Hogwarts),
Remus Lupin.

It was June twelfth.

One year ago, Remus' world had fallen apart, and he hadn't even known it until June thirteenth. Over the past year, Remus' world had been stitched back together slowly and sometimes painfully, and it was clear that the stitching would never be as it was—an important piece was missing, and patching up broken fabric was never quite the same.

It had been a full year, and Remus was still alive. It had been a full year, and the world was still intact. It had been a full year, which was about half the time that Remus had known Professor Questus in the first place.

Remus sighed. He hadn't quite gotten up the energy to get out of bed yet, and breakfast was over in about ten minutes. He placed both palms on the mattress and pushed himself into a sitting position, brushing the hair out of his eyes, and slid out of bed to get changed.

"Way to give me another February sixteenth, Professor," he muttered. "I already had one traumatic day to deal with, and now I have another, thanks to you. Sometimes I really hate you, you know."

Feeling's mutual, but in an affectionate sort of way, since I know you'll beat yourself up if I don't make my sarcasm perfectly clear, said Professor Questus' voice in Remus' head.

Remus slid his gloves over his scarred hands and pulled on some robes, doing his daily check to make sure that no skin was showing except part of his neck and face. Then he ambled down the stairs slowly, trailing his hand across every surface.

He would skip breakfast, but he would not skip classes today. He'd only known Professor Questus for two years. He'd been a family friend, a next-door neighbor, a lonely old man who'd eaten their food. Nothing more. This shouldn't affect him as much as it did….

But the town. And the children. Children had died in that fire, not just Professor Questus, and families and the legacies of so many people and possibilities, too, because perhaps those people would have grown up to do great things, and now they were dead. Gone. And they'd been that way for a year.

Remus sighed and started walking back up the stairs, and then he sat on the floor of the lavatory, next to the toilet, and wondered if he was going to be sick.

He wasn't.

He started walking back down the stairs. The Gryffindor common room wasn't empty, unfortunately: Puttle, the Gryffindor prefect, sat on one of the couches. "Morning," he said.

"Morning."

"How did your exams go?"

"All right. How about you?"

"Pretty well, actually. It's hard to believe I'm leaving Hogwarts soon."

Remus did a double-take. Right, of course. He'd known that Puttle was a seventh-year, but he'd never really thought about it before. "What are your plans?" Remus asked, trying not to be bitter about the fact that Puttle could have grand future plans and Remus could only be a werewolf when he grew up.

Stop being so ridiculously self-pitying, said Professor Questus' voice, but Remus ignored it.

"I have an internship in the Ministry. Foreign relations. I'll see where it takes me."

"Ah."

"You skipped breakfast."

"So did you."

"Nope. I ate quickly. Came back here."

"Why?"

"Well, I'm… saying goodbye." Puttle stared into the flames for a moment. "It really is stunning how attached I am to this place. I basically grew up here, after all. I hate the thought of leaving, but there's less than a month left of school. Madness, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

Puttle looked at Remus and smiled. "Gonna miss the Marauders, believe it or not. Even when your pillow fights got so loud that I couldn't focus on my studies. Even though dealing with the four of you was the worst part of being prefect. I'll miss you."

"We'll miss you, too."

"Have no doubt. So… why'd you skip breakfast, then?"

Remus sighed and took a seat on the couch next to Puttle, staring into the flames just as intensely as Puttle was. "I miss something, too," he confessed. "Or rather, someone. And something."

"Hm?"

"A family friend died exactly one year ago today, and my family moved houses not long after. Everything's changed a little, both for good and bad, and I wish I could tell him about it. The family friend, I mean. Especially today."

"Oh. Well, my problems seem trivial now."

"They're not. When I think of leaving Hogwarts, it upsets me just as much, and I'm only a third year."

Puttle laughed. "Right. Well, do you mind if I give you one last little bit of prefectly advice?"

"I'm listening, O Wise One."

"If you focus on the past, you'll regret things. If you focus on the future, you'll fear things. The only way to stop both is to focus on the present, and eventually, the past will be nothing but a memory, and the future nothing more than a faint possibility."

"That's… surprisingly wise."

"Yeah. It wasn't me who came up with that. Remember Professor Questus from two years ago? He was my fifth-year Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and I was panicking about OWLs in his class and beating myself up for not working hard enough. He told me that, and it just sort of stuck with me. It's something you hear a lot, but it's a nice way of phrasing it, don't you think?"

"Oh," Remus tried to say, but the word didn't really come out right. Thankfully, Puttle didn't seem to notice.

"Right after that, he told me that the world was going to break out in a war soon, and that we'd all probably be dead in about five years, so there was no use worrying about anything anyway. The Dark Arts wait for no one, he said. It's just a fact of life. Accept it and move on."

"Oh," said Remus again, and he couldn't stop the smile from invading his lips. "Yeah, that does sound like him."

"You know?" said Puttle, still staring at the flames, "I liked Professor Questus."

Remus could very nearly hear Questus' voice, laughing at the awfully coincidental twist of fate, shaking his head at the sheer, palpable sappiness in the room. "Yeah," said Remus quietly, "so did I, most of the time."

AN: Happy Christmas Eve (or Happy Christmas, depending on when you're reading this)! Also, you'll not want to miss the next chapter... something big will happen ;)