Dora’s hair has gone from a brilliant shade of pink to a mousy brown. She’s standing directly in front of Remus, like she’s afraid he’ll barrel down the hallway and leave Grimmauld Place at any moment. Which he’ll have to do, eventually.
The problem is that he’s already tried to end it with her two other times, and both times she managed to stop him. She’s crafty like that, or maybe he’s just weak.
“Get to the point,” she says crossly. “And it better not be about bloody crossbreed politics.”
“It’s not only that. We’ve gone over this.” They have, many times, but he’s becoming more sure there’s nothing he can say that will convince her to just stop, to go home and feel gutted for a while, and then go out and meet someone young and sweet. To just stay away until the war is over, if it ever ends.
She taps her foot on the ground impatiently.
“We were better off as mates,” he says. It’s a bad cliche, he knows, but he’s desperately hoping that she’ll just listen, for once. She narrows her eyes at him.
“Mates? That’s—you’re not—that’s the bloody stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! We were never mates—we were colleagues, and then we were shagging!” She’s yelling now, but her face is tight, her brow furrowed.
“Fine, alright—colleagues, then.”
She shakes her head, her mouth opening and closing, like she can’t quite find her words for a moment. “What—what’s this really about? You’d still be a werewolf, and I’d still be around you. We’d be partners on missions. It’s all the same!”
She couldn’t understand, of course, that being a werewolf isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to him. There was that horrible incident with Snape at school, and there were a few close calls, but it’s nothing compared to the death and destruction that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named brings. That war brings. She’s young, and she believes she’s invincible, with all her fancy defense spells and her grit.
Remus knows by now that no one is invincible. Even Sirius, who managed to escape Pettigrew and Azkaban, who was in an uncharted safehouse for the last year, is gone.
“You’re going to get hurt, Dora!” He’s yelling now too, his voice raising on its own accord. “You’ll be hurt, or you’ll die, and—don’t you know it’s dangerous out there?”
“Don’t be daft,” she says flatly. “I’m an auror.”
Which is—he wants to shake her. He wants to shake her and scream that she’s stupid, so stupid, and lock her up somewhere they’ll never find her.
He can’t do that, of course. But he can’t be with her, either—not ever again. He sees it now, sees that she won’t stop running after him when he inevitably stands at Harry’s side, the way he should have stood at James’s side all those years ago. That she’ll fall just like the rest of them, picked off one by one. She’ll be a shadow of a memory, a character in a picture frame talked about with fondness, and she’ll be just a Member of the Order because no one who knew her will be left.
She’s still standing there, resolute, and plucky, with the bright pink flush she gets across her cheeks when she’s angry. She’s dirty and disheveled from tailing Rosier all day, her arms crossed furiously across her chest.
Remus wants, so badly, to kiss her.
But if he kisses her and keeps on kissing her she’ll end up lying dead on the ground, her eyes as lifeless as James and Lily’s.
“I don’t love you,” he says.
It takes her a minute to understand, a minute while shards of glass flay into his measly little heart.
“You—but you said—“
“I never said.” His voice is harsh, too loud in the quiet hallway.
She’s blinking at him rapidly. Her heart-shaped face looks very young in the dim hallway light. Remus suddenly feels very old, and very tired.
“I don’t love you,” he says again. “We have fun together—we always do. But it could never be more than that. Not for me.”
“I see,” she says. She’s looking at the wall now, breathing heavily, hugging her chest.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and shrugs like a callous fool.
She says something else, something he can’t hear because he’s too busy watching her mouth move, trying to imprint the picture of her face in his mind, to remember the way she looked when she cared for him.
He watches as she turns and leaves slowly, all hunched over and small. The most horrible part of him wants to run after her, to beg her to stay, to make her hair turn all sorts of brilliant colors again.
But she’s better off with that mousy brown hair, with her first tragic heartbreak that she’ll look back on one day and laugh, than six feet in the ground.