Beneath the moon, there was no Remus Lupin, not in any meaningful sense. Oh, he had Remus's memory, and sometimes even loved Remus's loved ones (if they were very, very careful), but he was just a flickering candle in a raging storm.

The Wolfsbane Potion helped. It calmed him--somewhat--and made the pain more bearable. But it didn't change the basic fact of lycanthropy.

Human thoughts were elsewhere.

Tonks was wrong. Her mother didn't make sure she slept after lunch.

In fact, as soon as she walked through the door, Mum whisked her upstairs to her childhood bedroom and ordered her to bed. "Until I decide you've had enough sleep, young lady."

Tonks didn't bother to argue, even with Mum's tone. Her babying often drove Tonks quite mad, but it was also familiar and comforting, in its own frustrating way. Argument would have been pointless in any case, but in this case, Mum was right. She fell into her bed and pulled the covers over her, and slept dreamlessly until it was nearly dark. When she awakened, the housecats who had claimed her bedroom in her absence--nearly identical littermates--were on the bed with her. Bludger was sleeping on the pillow, his paw resting on her forehead. Quaffle had draped himself over her ankles. Snitch was a warm spot curled up in the curve of her knees.

She smiled to herself and blinked lazily at Bludger for awhile, then gave in to temptation and moved her arm to scratch his ears. Bludger woke up with a surprised purr, and the other two stirred with more disappointed sounds. Tonks sat up and scratched each of them in turn, the other two always angling for a better spot. By the time they were satisfied, she was fully awake and night had fallen.

She glanced at the window. The full moon was riding high in the sky, unhindered by clouds, and she thought of Remus, there in his shack--only she couldn't bring to mind the Wolfish form she'd imagined for him long ago. She could only see him there as he'd been at noon, sprawled beneath the blanket she'd Conjured for him, dreaming his alien dreams.

She'd nearly forgotten the kiss he'd dropped onto her fingertips, but somewhere in his dream, he muttered "Dora," and there was something in his voice that had thrilled and terrified her, and embarrassed her in some way. She had been very, very careful not to look at the loose blanket draped over him. That he was a monster under the moon was something she had long ago accepted as a fact of life. That he was a man beneath his robes was something she rarely thought about, despite nearly two decades of fuzzy-edged daydreams about living happily ever after at his side.

She'd known her face would be flushed and her breathing too rapid, so she'd gone back outside until it was time to wake him for his Potion.

It didn't mean anything. It hadn't even necessarily been that sort of dream. This close to the moon, maybe he'd dreamed he was chasing her in the woods. Or maybe he'd been scolding her for bossing him around.

But it hadn't sounded like that.

And he hadn't smelled like that.

Tonks shook her head. Vapors.

"Dora? Are you awake up there?" Mum called from downstairs.

"Yes. Thank you."

She pulled herself out of bed, stretched catwise, and headed down to the kitchen, where Mum's Sunday roast was filling the house with comfort.

Outside his Smeltings residence, Dudley Dursley didn't even glance at the full moon.

He flicked his match into the gutter and took a deep drag on the cigarette in his hand, then leaned back against the wall with his eyes closed. "Git gave me detention," he muttered, for the sixth time since Friday. "I'm not going."

Piers Polkiss, who was sitting on the rail smoking his own pack, shrugged in a noncommittal way. "Don't see how you can avoid it. Skip enough detentions, they'll suspend you. And they'll pull you from the boxing team."

"Not when I'm their best chance at a championship."

"It's Baden in charge, not Levinson."

A creepy, panicky feeling rose up in Dudley's midsection every time Joe Levinson's absence came up in conversation, and it did so now, making the tip of the cigarette tremble in the darkness. He pushed it away, as he always tried to, and almost always succeeded.

Except this summer, when his miserable cousin had pointed a wand in his direction, and the stars had gone out.

The whole thing reeked of Harry's world, from the beginning to the end, and Harry was going to get a beating for it one way or another. And this new bloke, Lewis... he reeked of it as well. And if Dudley found out that he'd had anything to do with... what had happened... he'd--

Do something about it.

They couldn't use magic in the middle of Smeltings.

Wands were breakable.

And Lewis didn't look like he'd last long in a fair fight.

He shrugged, not letting any of this out. He'd tried to tell Piers once, but found that the moment he started speaking, his mind started racing in circles, and he couldn't remember what he meant to say. "Fine," he said. "I'll go. We'll see how well he likes the visit."

Piers laughed. "Wish I could watch, Big D."

The Levinsons and the Garveys had a long-standing bridge club that met on Sunday nights, much to the annoyance of Alan Garvey, who loathed playing cards, and had been unsuccessful in convincing his wife and friends to try a medieval role-playing game that his students had introduced him to--one of the variants of G.U.R.P.S.--at which he had considerably more skill. But with Joe's failing health, he didn't complain about the game anymore. He wasn't sure whether any given visit would be the last, and he didn't want to waste it. Whatever game they were playing was mainly a cover for conversation, anyway.

"I think she's adorable," Miriam Levinson said, looking suspiciously over her fanned cards and squinting at Joe like she was trying to read his mind. "A bit on the loopy side, but so cheerful. Can't you just see her in the sixties, dancing around barefoot on some hillside with bangles on her arms? I'm half-surprised that I don't remember her from one gathering or another."

"I wonder if Raymond noticed the sixties," Anna said. "Can't you see him with his nose in a book, wandering through a festival and not even hearing the music?"

"Hmmmph." Joe rearranged his cards and made a bid. "Don't mistake Lewis. He's got his eyes open. Observant fellow, if you ask me."

"You like him because he smells like chalkdust," Anna said.

Alan frowned. "Don't you like him?"

"Oh, yes." Anna waggled her eyebrows lecherously. "But it has nothing to do with chalkdust."

"It's the eyes," Miriam agreed. "A girl could drown." She reached across the table and touched Joe's hand so he'd know she wasn't actually planning to flirt or making a comparison. (Unlike Anna, who Alan loved specifically because no topic was off limits for jokes, Miriam always made a point of not joking about other men.)

"Did he have good eyes?" Anna asked breezily. "I wasn't looking there."

Alan shook his head. "When I leave you, it'll be for a blind girl."

Anna considered this. "No," she said. "Too easy. I'll let that one be." She grinned, and under the table, she ran her toe up the inside of his calf.

"Is he a good teacher?" Joe asked.

Alan nodded. "I'd say so. The boys like him, at any rate, and they're talking about history. That's a good sign. I've never heard them having an argument about Algebra after my class."

"Good. That's good." Joe sighed heavily and squinted out the window at the full moon.

Alan frowned, and they finished out the rubber speaking of different matters. Joe and Miriam won it, and the deck passed to Anna for a new hand.

On Privet Drive, Petunia Dursley was in her nightdress, scrubbing the kitchen sink with an old toothbrush. She'd woken up with this urge several times since her house had been invaded by Lily's people, and Vernon no longer bothered trying to stop her. She would be certain that things were sparkling again, then discover a fingerprint she'd missed, or a strange film line at the edge of a glass. She'd come home that night to find a half-full drinking glass with some bits of pink tissue floating in it.

That glass had gone straight to the dustbin. She hadn't even emptied it into the drain, not wanting whatever the tissue was to get into her sink. Instead, she'd poured it over the fence into her next door neighbor's garden, then pinched the glass and taken it to the bins. After that, she'd scrubbed her hands for fifteen minutes.

She stopped after awhile, the hot water throwing steam across the window, and looked up at the moon in the sky.

Werewolf night.

She hadn't told Vernon when they'd seen the letter signed from one "Remus J. Lupin," but she knew the name. At the end of Harry's third year, a letter had arrived by owl to "all concerned parents," stating that one of the professors at That Place (it always rated capitalization for her)--a Remus J. Lupin--had been revealed as a werewolf.

What sorts of things were they exposing the boy to?

She shook her head.

At least her Dudley was far from that sort of horror.

Andromeda Tonks gave Dora several boxes of leftovers to take to Sirius, as well as a scroll with a long, chatty letter for him. It contained nothing of note, and had no direct address--it could as easily have been for Dora herself--but she wanted him to feel... thought of. She doodled flowers along the edge of it, as she always had when they were children, and charmed a clumsy bee to fly up and down the margin. It was certainly not her common style of communication (at St. Mungo's, she was known for being brusque in her memos, and deadly serious with her patients), but she thought it might make him happy.

She owed him that much. She'd given up on him for more than a decade, and now, she couldn't make it up to him.

Dora kissed her good night and hugged her, then kissed Ted and disappeared down into a shadowy part of the garden, screened from the neighbors' view by a large willow tree. A moment later, they heard the pop as she Apparated back to her flat.

Snitch wandered outside and wound around Andromeda's feet. She picked him up absently and held him as he purred. "She works too much," she said. "She's so tired."

Ted put his arm around her shoulders and led her inside. "I know. But she's doing what she needs to do. And at least Sirius has some family there."

Andromeda nodded and leaned into Ted's embrace. For all of Sirius's ravings about the family--from the time he was old enough to understand it--he'd also been tremendously focused on it. He'd loved his brother ferociously and quite unwisely, and of course he had cared for Andromeda herself. He loathed Bella with a great passion, and held Narcissa in contempt for having petty ambitions and shallow goals, unworthy of her status (though he never worded it as such). And his mother could hurt him as no one else in the world could.

At least Auntie was gone, Andromeda thought. At least Sirius didn't have to deal with her.

A thought came into her mind, one that was quite literally Unthinkable. She saw Sirius, she saw his childhood home, she saw Auntie screaming into the dusty silence.

Then, as though someone had put a Summoning Charm on her very thoughts, she found herself thinking of something else entirely, of walking with little Sirius in the winter streets of London, of seeing Muggles pouring out of a church on Christmas Eve and wishing one another Happy Christmas as they stood together in the shadows.

What had she been thinking of? What had almost come together for her?

"Andi?"

"What?"

"You looked like you were reaching a conclusion."

"I was. Tip of my mind's tongue. But it's gone now."

As she turned to go into the kitchen to begin cleaning up, another word crossed her mind, a word with which she had never had any good associations.

Fidelius.

Sirius had been fighting with Kreacher since two hours after Remus had left last night.

The house elf had secreted away a locked box that Sirius knew perfectly well had been in a wardrobe in the attic, a green-velvet lined box containing a silver dagger, a silver basin, and a silver chalice, all engraved in medieval French. It was used for truth-scrying, and Sirius had a thin scar on the palm of his left hand, a souvenir of his mother's absolute conviction that he'd helped Andromeda elope at the end of his third year.

The method had been frighteningly accurate.

Objects like that tended to defend themselves strongly, so he'd decided to wait until everyone was out of the house for a solid amount of time before he attacked it and melted it down. Unfortunately, it was already gone. Kreacher swore that he had nothing to do with it, but Sirius knew better. He had that obsequious "keeping Mistress's secrets" look about him.

So far, he'd found nothing, and was in a foul temper by Sunday afternoon when he decided to quit looking for the nonce.

Very, very briefly, he considered trying to draft a reply to Harry's letter--Hedwig was still flying around upstairs--but the idea of coming up with a code and writing a letter had no appeal.

He hadn't precisely promised not do what he was thinking of. Remus would be furious, of course, but Remus, no matter what he thought, was not Sirius's keeper.

At nine o'clock, Sirius began to stick his head into the kitchen fire.

The night wore on, and one by one, they dropped to sleep, leaving the world in the realm of dreams, madness, and instinct.

The Wolf prowled its tiny prison, swiping savagely at the Charmed walls, howling his frustrations at the welcoming moon. At last, even it wore itself out, and curled into one corner of the shed, dreaming its increasingly human dreams as the land moved back toward the light. It fought the change--after so many years, it knew better, knew it couldn't win, but the instinct to just survive for one more day always got the better of it.

But in the end, the moon set, the sun rose, and the man inside the Wolf ascended once again.