"Imagine that you only exist in your entirety for a handful of nights in your lifetime. And the rest of it you spend as a fragment—a piece of yourself—all the while knowing that your wholeness is a crime against the very definition of humanity.

Eventually, you come to terms with living as an abomination. Or you die trying."

—Subject 37

I can tell you bearing witness to the change is the closest I've ever felt to god. There's something addictive about observing the moment in all its raw, visceral intimacy. Here the moon was just beginning to descend, a physical pull back to the horizon. The edges of the sky grew brighter, implying my safety but never guaranteeing it. And this is where I truly felt alive—these moments of extraordinary risk.

The wolf had been chasing the rabbit for miles. I've come to learn this is a hunting strategy, markedly human in nature—chasing an animal to the brink of exhaustion, till it collapses before you and you know irrefutably that you have won. The need for this confirmation is unique to the human species. I could tell the small creature had nearly reached this point, the muscles beneath its pale fur convulsing with overuse, ears quivering, eyes fearful and open wide. The animal would likely never understand it had never been in any danger. That the chase was just a game for the human inside the beast.

It bounded off into the trees as the wolf raised his head. I was close enough to see the textbook heaving overcome him—heightened oxygen intake in preparation for what would happen next. The body changes faster than you'd expect, once it's begun. The femurs and fibulas shorten, the ribcage contracts. The greatest modifications occur in the face, of course: the nostrils widen and the snout retracts, the teeth shrink and dull, and a full-body ripple through the musculature turns the wolf's fur once again to skin. The return to human form.

He collapsed to the forest floor, man again, and this is when I saw his face.

The next moment stretched to an impossible length as I stayed in my hiding place behind the ash tree and watched him lying crumpled there on the ground, the last of the tremors still moving down his bare thighs and up into his fingers, and part of me registered dimly that this was my last chance to go. Though I knew even as I thought it that the moment had branched off in two directions and I'd already made my decision. I watched the other iteration of me walk away, glancing back once to wonder what could have been.

The moon was gone. He raised his face and I stepped out to where he could see me, knowing better than to hide. I could see his eyes widen brightly as pale morning sunlight filtered through the trees. A deep exhaustion ringed them, but they were still the same earnest green.

"Remus, it's—"

"No, no," he laughed. Casually, as if I'd just waltzed through his office door. "Don't reintroduce yourself to me, Cora. Of course I know it's you."

There was a warmth coloring his tone that I hadn't expected. And then there were possibilities I hadn't given much thought to, realities that hadn't registered due to the shock of seeing him. Nudity was among them. I took off my outer robe and placed it on the ground in front of him, where he still lay prostrate.

"I—I'm sorry," I murmured, turning my back. The intensely personal aftermath of the change was washing over me and I felt guilty, like the voyeur I was. I wasn't used to it. Apologies were uncharacteristic for me.

"No matter," I could hear him say behind me. There was a shuffling as he arranged the robe around himself, a rustling of fabric. "And what is it you're doing out in the middle of the Scottish wilderness, Cora?" he asked, still with that tone of cheerfulness. It stood out in his voice, sounded unfamiliar. But maybe I'd just forgotten it in the two years we'd spent apart.

"Observational research." I tried to match the quality of my voice to his. "Read anything of mine lately?"

"Actually, yes." Fallen oak leaves crackled under his feet as he walked around to face me again, startling me. I hadn't expected him to dress so quickly. My black Ministry-issued robe fell at least a foot too short on him—I'd forgotten how tall he was, at six-two. "I've been keeping up with my former students' work, you could say, and yours is of interest for obvious reasons. I think you could also say I'm impressed."

Still keeping his distance, I observed. It struck me how alone we were, how empty the surrounding woods, the rabbit long since disappeared and all other animals silent. There were no birds here.

"That's kind of you, Remus." I cleared my throat. "And where have you been?"

"I was overseas for a bit, actually, after Snape outed me." He lowered his eyes, a gesture I did remember. "Needed to get away."

I had brief, unbidden flashes of a series of American women. Moonless non-wolf nights and dark rooms. The body I'd just seen atop a sequence of them, one after the other. Dominant, moving with an inhuman force. Eyes tightly closed, as if sealing the pleasure in. He wouldn't do that, of course. Not the Remus I'd known. But the images lingered in my mind, haunting the words that followed.

"Dumbledore asked me back last year," he was saying. "Things being the way they are, the Order needs all the help they can get."

"No more teaching?"

"I'm an out werewolf, Cora. What school would have me?"

"You loved it, though."

He shrugged. Trying, in that way he had, to avoid pity with a kind of desperation that almost made me look away from him entirely. "No one wants a werewolf teaching their children. You should know that better than anyone."

Another reference, again, to my work. Even if he was overstating his awareness of my research, I'd lobbied hard for the legislation that cordoned off a section of the Scottish wilds to provide a safe place for wolves to change. Wolfsbane was prohibitively expensive but the Ministry eventually realized that the death of innocents every full moon was worse. Separation from the rest of society one night a month was the temporary compromise, though my work was far from done. He had to have heard of this, at least; after all, here we were.

A breath of wind blew through, rustling the leaves and branches overhead. Remus pulled my robe tighter around his waist. "I should probably get back—"

"Where are you staying?"

"Just a room over some dingy pub back in the city. It's temporary." With Remus, I knew, it usually was. He stepped away, seemingly prepared to Apparate, then said, "I'd like to meet with you. At your offices, if that's possible."

There was a professionalism to his tone that couldn't go unnoticed. It felt too pointed, like he was trying to communicate something important to me without actually saying a word about it. I could imagine what that message might be. It wasn't what I wanted.

"Of course, Remus."

I was late to work again. Margaret snapped her gum at me when I came in, but I had a feeling she would've done that even if I'd been on time. I'd been required to take her on as an assistant a few weeks ago—a stipulation of the new grant received by the werewolf division. I, of course, didn't want an assistant, and my office had been last on her list, so we'd created a daily routine of mutually disliking each other until her assignment ran out. All I knew so far was that she was fresh out of Hogwarts, bored as a rule, and spectacularly clairvoyant.

"William's going to want to talk to you. Ten minutes or so from now. Something potion-related." She spun her chair to face the wall in our tiny office and pressed her black kitten heels against it. A cluster of scuffs around her feet spelled out a history of the habit. "Where were you?"

I threw my bag onto the desk across from hers. "Field work." The room already smelled of Droobles—a sickly cotton-candy scent reminiscent of childhood and nausea. "Any interviews?"

She slowly rotated back around to face me, revealing the gum's aquamarine hue on her tongue and lips. "No, but we've got someone to add to the registry as of this morning." Snap. "A four-year-old."

I sat down heavily, rubbing my hands across my eyes. As much as I'd gotten used to certain aspects of my job, it never got easier hearing about the young ones. They'd never remember their old life. Never know anything different. Even Margaret seemed almost fazed, pressing the wad of gum meditatively into her cheek for a brief and quiet moment.

"Greyback?" I asked.

"The mother wasn't sure."

"Who else, though?"

She shrugged and blew a small cobalt bubble. It detached from her lips with a pop and began its slow ascent to the ceiling as I watched.

"Well, I'll go talk to Will then," I sighed. "Let me know if anyone asks for me."

"There'll be someone around 11. Tall guy, hazelish eyes. Looks like he could use a good night's sleep."

No guarantees that this was Remus, of course—what visitors did we ever get to the department who didn't need more sleep?—but I had a feeling.

"Thanks, Margaret." I took my notebook from the top drawer of my desk and walked out the way I'd come, relaxing a bit into the sterile yet familiar scent of the Ministry halls. The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures was located on the bottom floor—of course, no subtlety there. We didn't have anything so fancy as a fountain near us, as they saved that kind of glamour for the lobby and the offices people were most likely to visit. But in the last two years there was something I'd come to love about our floor and that little room all the same. I'd worked hard for my job, every part of it. That couldn't be taken away from me.

Something whizzed by my ear as I walked toward the lift: a memo, of course, folded into the shape of a paper crane. Our office had no windows—an occasional source of panic for me—and so I loved these flapping imitations of wildlife, gentle reminders that the sky still existed every time I passed one by. I boarded the lift at the end of the hall with it, along with a few surly-looking goblins and a few more species of memo.

I'd been just casual enough, I decided. Last night technically hadn't been an assignment. If Margaret paid any kind of attention, she would've known that the moment I responded. It's true that my assignments occasionally sent me into the designated transition space to identify non-registered wolves making use of the area. More recently, however, I'd started Apparating into the forest even when I didn't need to, and technically wasn't supposed to. Almost every night. I hadn't told anyone about this, and until last night no one had ever seen me.

The goblins got off at the main floor, the cranes a few later, but I kept going up. Will's department—Experimental Potions and Charms—was as far away from my office as it was possible to be, on the top floor. After applying for over a hundred grants in the last two years I'd managed to secure the funds to contract another Ministry employee for the express purpose of creating the cure for lycanthropy. An impossible task on the tightest possible deadline: one year.

My father, at least, had been happy to hear about it, though not for the reason you'd expect. A prominent member of the Wizengamot, he viewed the focus of my job as a rather embarrassing distraction until I got on to what I was really going to do with my life. He'd been the first person I'd gone to when I realized we would need more money to even attempt reopening the cure project, and so he was also the first person to turn me down. Of course I'd kept asking, and of course he'd grown tired of it. Our relationship remained on thin ice, though this was far from the only reason.

After a year and the publication of several papers based on my werewolf interviews, I'd found another way. Dad had sent me a formal letter of congratulation when he heard about the grant, despite the fact that we worked in the same building and had lunch together every few weeks. His memos were folded from a thick, heavy parchment, the wings of which made great whooshing noises every time they moved.

Will's floor. As if to make up for the fact that the labs were entirely windowless, the hall that stretched out before me from the lift was capped by one long, enchanted skylight. Every time I looked up I was met with a sheer, bright blue. This was true regardless of both weather and the fact that the entire building was underground. Apparently the Ministry thought a constant sunny day was good for morale, though I personally found it a bit jarring at night. Never any moon.

The hall was half a mile long, at least, and the walls and floor were plated gratuitously in gold. I could see myself mirrored back in warm shades if I happened to look down. I often used this walk to imagine what I would do upon opening the door and discovering that Will had, in fact, created the cure for lycanthropy. At various points in the last few weeks I'd seen myself jumping, screaming, hugging, fainting, writing an announcement for the Daily Prophet, owling my father, ringing my mother, even running back to the lift and pressing every button out of sheer delirium and joy. But these reactions were so often tightly confined to my own feelings in that moment—perhaps intentionally, as a way of protecting myself—that I'd never thought of Remus until today.

As I walked closer and closer to the lab I imagined how I'd tell him, the look on his face when I did. The version of him in my head was mysteriously wiped of exhaustion, looked something close to happy. He touched me, wrapped his arms around me when I gave him the news. I thought, absently, of how long it had been since the last time we'd touched, and then the fantasy dissolved in my mind, as none of it matched up with the person I'd run into the previous night or the distance he'd kept from me. I'd never understood how he could undergo such a vulnerable transformation right in front of me and somehow still feel so far away when we spoke afterwards. As if I had no claim on him, as if I'd seen this secret part of him but still knew nothing, was somehow still a stranger. Though now, I suppose, I was.

In another universe—the one where I was good at potions, and so became a potions master—I could see myself working quite comfortably in a lab. Will's assignment allowed him to work alone in a relatively spacious top-floor room, which seemed ideal to me. The solitary, spread-out nature of the work. As I entered the lab I was met with an excessive bubbling, a series of strange popping sounds, then a muffled groan of frustration followed by a worrisome shattering. I hurried around a table clustered with beakers and found Will standing behind several industrial-sized bags of ingredients, staring angrily at the ceiling.

"It went up," he said, by way of greeting, and I joined him in his upward gaze, where I saw that the remnants of a test tube stuck firmly to the tile ceiling, a sticky purple substance dripping from each broken edge.

"It went up," I agreed, which I'd quickly learned is all you could say when Will has failed, which was admittedly what this year had the greatest probability of being—one failure after another.

He'd mentioned when I hired him before that he could use a second pair of hands, two being more efficient, but the grant only covered one extra employee. I didn't know him very well yet, but he seemed to me to be of two minds about the cure project—an innately social personality in combat with his undeniable desire for a challenge. In the latter case, there was something to working alone: if we did manage to create a cure for lycanthropy, he could take all the credit. There'd no longer be any question as to his abilities—and there were many people now who doubted him, the Muggle-born boy of 24 who'd broken ground on a permanent immunity draught for Veritaserum. A project that wizards much older than he had been working on for years. It was clear why he'd submitted his application in this case, and I knew the small possibility of success was what kept him going.

"That was the antimony," he sighed. "I know we agreed to start with the lowest-grade stuff, but it's really beginning to feel like I'm wasting my time."

"We aren't trying to make things more complicated," I reminded him. "The whole point of the cure is accessibility, if and when it's made. We want anyone to be able to afford it."

"You don't think they'd just give it to people? Free?" He looked at me, a brief disappointment crossing his face. "No, yeah, I guess you're right." Another disillusioned sigh.

I took out the notebook. "Anything else you need me to order?"

"Aconite. Lots of it. And I guess a couple pints of myrrh oil, some more valerian root. I'm not particularly low on anything, but we'll be moving through the aconite at a pretty fast clip." Even with my cursory potions knowledge I knew why. It was the main ingredient for the wolfsbane potion, after all. "And, uh… any chance I could get a 24-pack of Red Bull?"

I looked steadily at him. "You want me to pool together the grant money in order to fuel your Muggle energy drink addiction?"

"Hey, I'm here way beyond the maximum hour requirement," he protested. "It'll keep me from collapsing into my cauldron. Think of it as a safety measure, really." I shook my head, biting back a smile as I added his request to the list.

"And speaking of safety measures, we need more spoons. There was, uh, a fire. Just a small one. More of a nuisance than anything else." He didn't directly point out the pile of melted-together spoons on the counter adjacent to the sink, but I connected the dots anyway, nodding assent.

To the untrained eye Will might've at this point seemed incompetent, but I'd done my research. He was a little offbeat, yes, but indisputably one of the best young potion masters alive. He'd also slept in the lab a handful of times already, and I knew that kind of dedication alone was worth his appointment.

"I'll place the orders today. You're doing great work, Will," I told him. We both pointedly avoided looking at the ceiling or the spoons. "We're right on track." I was not completely confident of this, actually—even less sure that we'd be anywhere close to a cure by this time next year, given our unfairly limited timeframe—but it sounded like the right thing to say.

"Yeah, no one ever said the cure for lycanthropy would happen in a day." He rolled his eyes as a drop of purple glanced down the side of his nose, sizzling quietly. "Or a few weeks."

Attempt #4

2 c finely ground aconite

1/2 tsp essence of dittany

1/4 c diced valerian root

1 bunch fluxweed

1 tbsp molten antimony

1 tsp powdered silver

1 c spirit of myrrh

3/4 c starthistle, shredded

8 5-cm strips wiggentree bark

1/4 c wormwood oil

Notes: Failure of explosive proportions. Must consider the phase and placement of the moon going forward—this may be the key.