“I know I never asked,” Harry said one day, seemingly out of the blue, “but you and Remus—” He left his words hanging in mid-air, unsure of how to finish the question.

“I’m not hearing a question,” Saturnine replied evenly from where she sat on the sofa, nose in a book on Wandlore.

“Well, there’s more to it, right?” he continued, vowing to avoid any word starting with an S, like snogging, shagging, or, heaven forbid, sex. He could feel his cheeks flame—no way would he say that out loud.

That got him only an “mm-hmm” from the dark-haired witch.

“Well, I was kind of wondering if you could tell me that story,” he mumbled. “Or parts of it, at least.”

Holding her place in her book with one finger, Saturnine looked up to meet Harry’s gaze with a questioning expression of her own. She studied him for a long time before coming to a decision. Then, she slid a bookmark between the pages before closing the book altogether and abandoning it on the coffee table.

“I’m surprised that you didn’t ask Remus about this,” she said, folding her legs beneath her so that Harry would have room to sit on the other end of the sofa.

“I sort of did when we were at the Burrow,” he admitted. “He told me that you were old friends and roommates a long time ago. But I didn’t press him further. It didn’t feel right to do that behind your back.”

She responded with a warm, kind smile. “Thanks for that, Harry.”

Once the boy had sat down, the dark-haired witch conjured up two glasses of lemonade and began her tale.

“I’m three years younger than Remus. So, we attended Hogwarts at the same time for a little while. I was sorted in Ravenclaw, and he was, as you know, in Gryffindor,” she started, weighing her words carefully. “We didn’t know each other back then. We might have passed by each other more than once in the hallways or the Great Hall, but I don’t think we ever spoke to one another while we were there.

“After your parents’ death and Sirius’ imprisonment, things got difficult for Remus, and he left the country. I won’t go into more details about that. You’ll have to ask him directly for that part of the story,” she explained, and Harry nodded in understanding. “Earlier that summer, I had to leave Britain for reasons of my own, and I moved to the north of France. I knew there was a small wizarding community installed in Normandie, some of which spoke a bit of English. So I went there. Remus must have had the same idea. We ran into each other at a pub one evening. He recognised me from Hogwarts and introduced himself, and we started chatting amicably. I think he was really glad to finally run into someone who spoke proper English—so did I. We drunk ourselves stupid for a few hours and, as my flat was really close to the bar, I offered to let him sleep on my sofa.” She chuckled, lost in her memory. “Truth be told, I don’t think I could have gotten up those two flights of stairs on my own. That’s how wasted we were. Anyway, that’s how it started. We became friends the next day as we nursed our respective hangovers.

“It took me about two weeks to figure out that Remus was all but penniless and about to be expelled from the dingy flat he rented on the other side of town. I didn’t have much money myself, but I offered to let him borrow my sofa. He refused at first. But winter was approaching, and he couldn’t get any more jobs at the nearby Muggle farms where he used to work. Sleeping outside was no longer an option, so he caved in. And we lived together in that matchbox of a flat for the next three years or so.”

“You knew he was…”

“A werewolf?” she asked. Harry nodded. “No, not at first. I figured it out, eventually—after the third month or so, the pattern was hard to miss. I had secrets of my own, and I was content to keep his while he kept mine.

“Those were really pleasant days, in the end. Remus got the jobs he could in the neighbourhood, and I worked in a local bookshop, which allowed me to do a lot of reading between customers. We’d have supper together at the end of the day, and then we would spend our evenings talking about mundane stuff. It was the simple life we both needed at the time.”

“Why did you leave Normandie?” Harry asked with genuine curiosity.

Once again, there was a long pause while Saturnine considered her following words. “There was something I needed to study that required I move someplace else, and Remus had heard back from an old school friend that there could be a long-term job for him in Yorkshire. I guess it was time for both of us to emerge from our self-imposed hiatuses and return to the world of the living. Life has a way of falling into place like that sometimes.

“We didn’t see each other again until I returned to Britain in 1989—though we wrote each other letters every now and again. By then, Remus still lived in Yorkshire, though he’d changed jobs a couple of dozen times since getting there. I joined the Aurors, which kept me busy a lot. So, we didn’t see much of each other again. Until Dumbledore welcomed him back into the fold, and well—you know that part of the story already, don’t you? And then it was my time to join, which takes us to now.”

Though her story had held a wealth of information, it had left Harry with a hundred more questions. But he knew better than to ask any of them. Saturnine had never before shared so much of her past with him, and he treasured that thought.

“Thanks for telling me all that,” he said as she reached for her lemonade. Harry had long since finished his.

***

It was later in the afternoon when Harry returned with another question. Saturnine was surprised he’d waited this long. She felt as if she had opened Pandora’s box when she told him about her time in France, and she foresaw dozens of little questions about what she and Remus had been up to back then. Some things she wouldn’t mind sharing with the boy, but some secrets Remus and her had promised they would take to their grave.

“There was no Wolfsbane Potion then, was there?” Harry asked as he stood near the coffee table.

Saturnine sat up straighter, completely taken by surprise. Never in a million years did she think he would ask her about that. She was cautious in her answer, knowing the dark and disturbing path in which it might lead the conversation.

“No, it was invented a few years later,” she replied. “And even now, not many people know how to brew it.”

“Bet you do,” Harry said with a confident smile, and she gave him an affirmative nod. Of course she did—she learned how to the moment she first heard it was successful, and whenever she could afford the ingredients, she brewed it and owled it to Remus.

“What did he—” Harry started, then stopped abruptly, looking down at his feet as if he were unsure whether to pursue that line of questioning or not. “I mean, there was no Shrieking Shack in Normandie—was there?”

“No,” Saturnine said carefully. “There wasn’t.”

A part of her felt like she ought to leave it at that. Harry had been traumatised enough as it was, hadn’t he? Besides, it wasn’t her story to tell—not really. But then she looked up at Harry’s face, and damn if it wasn’t James and Lily Potter looking back at her and wanting—demanding—to know what had happened to their friend.

“It’s not a pretty story,” she warned him.

“Tell me,” Harry demanded, and there was no denying the fierce determination in his blazing emerald gaze.

Saturnine beckoned him closer. He sat down at the end of the sofa and, as always, she told him the truth. She informed him that people suffering from lycanthropy only ever had two choices: to care or not care. Some went out willingly during full moons without minding what or who ended up between their jaws during the night. The others, those who cared, took every measure they could to ensure that no one got hurt. If they could, they locked themselves up somewhere secluded. If they couldn’t, they used ropes and chains to tie themselves to whatever they could find that was strong enough to hold back the wolf. And they did it every month for the rest of their lives.

“At first, Remus refused to tell me where he went on those nights,” Saturnine explained. “He just came back bruised and battered two days later. So one time, I followed him under an Invisibility Charm. He went to a nearby abandoned farm, and I discovered that it had a well in the back that had run dry.”

“He spent his nights in the well?” Harry asked, understanding where the story was going. Tears pooled in his eyes.

Saturnine nodded. “Tied himself down, too—with heavy chains so that the wolf wouldn’t try climbing out.”

“You didn’t let him do that again, did you?” Harry asked incredulously, and she could see the outrage he felt on his face. It broke her heart a little to have to tell him that, yes, she did.

“You have to understand that there was nothing else to do back then, Harry,” she explained. “We had no way to contain the wolf—it had to come out. So, I stayed there all night, and I waited while the beast within came out to howl and scream at the moon. And when finally the sun broke out, I levitated a very unconscious Remus out of that well. I tended to every last one of his injuries—and there were many—before taking him home.” She brushed away a few tears that had breached the barrier of her eyelashes. “I did that every month for the next two and a half years. And it broke my heart every time.”

“That’s not fair,” Harry said, brushing away tears of his own.

“No.” Saturnine shook her head a little. “Not fair at all.” But then, life rarely ever was.

***

For a long time afterwards, Harry kept thinking back over what Saturnine had told him. He forced himself not to think too much about Remus spending his nights alone in a well. Instead, he tried to imagine what his two friends had looked like a decade younger, living in the French countryside. Somehow, his mind kept picturing Remus with a dark-blue béret, sitting on an old tattered sofa, while Saturnine made sandwiches out of slightly-overcooked baguettes.

It had been hard to learn what Remus had been through before the Wolfsbane Potion was invented. It had been even harder to learn that not every werewolf had the means to afford to get the potion, even today. And then he thought of Professor Snape brewing it for Remus during Harry’s third year at Hogwarts. The knowledge that the Potions Master had gone through the trouble of doing that, month after month, despite his intense hatred for Remus, sure put things in perspective.

The following week, on Monday afternoon, a thought struck Harry out of the blue as he worked on one of his summer essays. The sheer shock of his realisation jolted him as if he’d been struck by lightning. Something had been staring him in the face for days on end and yet, he’d completely overlooked it, just the same.

Saturnine had been at Hogwarts at the same time Remus had—which meant that Saturnine had been at Hogwarts when his parents were.