The Stars and Forbidden Cigarettes | Professor Remus Lupin

The Day After

She's sprawled out on the emerald floor of the Ministry, and a man with a shapeless face stares down at her, watching her squirm without making a sound. At the end of the empty, dark, emerald hallway is Cornelius Fudge's office, and she waits and waits, as her breath leaves her and her body paralyzes, praying for someone to walk through the doorway, to find her and save her, and she can't breathe, and nobody is coming, and –

Reverie feels jilted when she wakes up once again in a foreign place, but, as her eyes get adjusted to the light, she realizes it's her own bed in her dormitory. She has no idea how she got back here, what time or day it is, and worst of all, whether the events of yesterday truly happened or were all part of a sick, twisted dream. Her heart is pounding from the nightmare, the shapeless face ingrained at the front of her mind, and she isn't sure where real life ended and the dream began. She feels like she's suffocating as she tries to think back, to grasp at any possibility or hint of reality, and it all imperceptibly blends together.

Golden light streams through the windows of the dormitory, and she hopes it's morning, but the beds around her are still empty, and she's still alone. She sits up on the bed, legs dangling over the edge, and she touches her mother's locket, still around her neck. Her heart is pounding, and she paces back and forth as she tries to think about who the man in the dream could have possibly been, if she had some subconscious idea of who could want her dead, recalling all the faces of wanted Death Eaters in the Daily Prophet over the past 7 years. But then she shakes her head, realizing it couldn't possibly be someone the Ministry knew to be a wanted Death Eater, and she groans. She's determined to find one that slipped through the cracks.

~~~~~

As Reverie descends to what she hopes is breakfast, she's almost scared to see Lupin, scared of his reaction, terrified to figure out whether what she hopes to have been a dream truly happened. She walks into the Great Hall to find the few students still at Hogwarts eating and reading the Daily Prophet, and the teachers, along with Lupin, along the Head table, doing the same. Reverie sits down and, as she places food onto her plate, tries to read Lupin, but he doesn't look towards her, even when McGonagall stands up and clears her throat.

"If I may have your attention, please," McGonagall says, extraordinarily loudly. The already dim noise falls to absolute silence, and McGonagall smiles.

"I am very happy to say that yesterday's Christmas dinner party went quite, quite well," she says, and Reverie could swear she was blushing. "So, the other professors and I are in agreement that a New Year dinner is very much in order – of course, for those of you who would prefer to celebrate around others. So, if this is of interest to any of you, please do come to the Transfiguration classroom any time after half past nine in the evening on the thirty-first of December. "

She glances around the room, and when her eyes fall on Reverie, her brows furrow almost imperceptibly, and Reverie isn't sure if she just imagined it. Lupin has yet to look anywhere near the Gryffindor table.

With a final "Very well!" McGonagall sits back in her chair, and with the morning light streaming through the Great Hall windows, Reverie is still left in the dark.

~~~~~

Reverie – in no way, shape, or form – has the energy for confrontation, so going to Lupin is out of the question. She tells herself she is scared of looking foolish in the probable case it was just a dream, but she isn't sure how she'd react if it were true, if she did in fact break her topmost rule of never breaking down in front of someone, if she had truly been in a room in the Shrieking Shack alone with him outside of Hogwarts, and if she had really asked him to kiss her.

So, instead she goes to the library.

She spends most of the day in the more recent sections, which housed the books that had so far been published on the First Wizarding War. She scours through the available accounts and information, searching for some unnamed perpetrator during the war, some unsolved crimes, some unexplained phenomena, but ends the day with nothing except a worn out mind and intrusive thoughts spawning in her tired brain.