The moon rose, round and deliberate, like guilt caught in a crystal glass—cold, sharp. The night smelled of silver and wet bark. Remus was running, and it wasn’t a human run: it was the relentless, demanding roar of blood beneath the skin, it was paws tearing through moss and leaves—his whole body frozen and wild at once. The wind caught in his fur, his ears picked up sounds—not words, not steps, but a rhythm, a pulse calling something old and buried.

Behind him moved shadows, familiar by scent, by instinct: James’s stag, Sirius’s dog, Peter’s lumbering form—they ran in perfect sync. The pack was a single living thing, and in it there was a place for him, like a heart that beats too fast. They didn’t think, because thought belonged to people, and tonight there was only the beast, and the beast knew one thing: hunt.

The stag veered left. The dog peeled away. And somewhere in that tearing darkness came a scent that slammed into him harder than a blow: not just blood, but something different—cold, sweet, metallic. Inhuman. Other. And yet familiar, etched into the scars of his memory.

The river glittered like scattered moonlight. She was sitting on a rock, her Hogwarts robes smudged at the knees, hair catching the silver light, hands clutching her kill. She was eating a squirrel like it was the most natural ritual in the world, her lips wet with blood, gleaming in the dark. Crimson eyes lifted and widened—fear, or maybe surprise—and in that single heartbeat, everything human and everything feral in him locked into one sharp, irreversible thought: he knew.

He knew her from the way she watched: silent, deep, always half-hidden. From the way she left little offerings on the table, from the way her gaze found him in the Great Hall without saying a word, like she was collecting pieces of him bit by bit. He remembered the small things: a crumb on her palm, smudged mascara on a cuff, the way she bent over her book like she was hiding her face. He hadn’t expected to see her here, in the night, blood on her hands. But now that he had—he couldn’t look away.

The wolf circled her, paws silent on the ground, and a low, drawn-out sound broke from his chest—not pain, not threat, but recognition. A monster recognized a monster. Every nerve in him answered that pull, every hair on his body stood on end, straining toward her like toward something inevitable, something that couldn’t be explained.

He could smell everything: night dampness, moss, and her—iron and sweetness, ice and color. In her presence, everything else faded; all he could hear was his own breathing, suddenly shallow and steady. Inside him pulsed not only the animal hunger but a stunned, almost human awe at how beautiful she was when she wasn’t afraid. Brave—or just unafraid. Something in him clenched tight: wonder, threat, the quiet understanding that the world was not what he thought it was.