Prologue - Under the Same Moon
Author’s Note
Welcome to Grimmauld Place.
All Our Quiet Hoursis a domestic Wolfstar story set after the war — a house where you learn how to stay, when the war is over and the memory of those we lost is still loud.
✦ Warnings ✦
🕯 Grief and loss
🕯 War trauma & memory loss
🕯 Occasional swearing
🕯 No explicit or graphic scenes
🕯 Canon characters and setting, but the events and the quiet mystery of learning to be a family are entirely my own
✦ Tropes ✦
🗝️ A house that repairs itself
📻 Radio on and voices in the kitchen
🕯️ A mystery solved one day at a time
🖤 Father-son bonds
📖 The power of staying
🚪 A door that finally stays open
✦ Note ✦
Harry Potter and its characters belong to their respective creators. Cassius Black-Lupin is my original character.Original work written in Italian by me, English translation done with AI assistance and fully revised by me.
The story is complete and will be posted chapter by chapter. Tone is melancholic, at times intense, with a bit of irony to breathe.
He was five the first time he was afraid of the moon.
Not the dark. He knew the dark. It was the soft kind from his little bedroom, smelling of Hope’s wool as she knitted late into the night and the ticking of Lyall’s alarm clock in the other room — the one that always ticked a second later than you expected.
No, it was the moon. The one outside the window, too white, too round, too close. It looked straight at him, as if it had drawn the curtains just for him.
Lyall put a hand on his forehead — large, warm, smelling of ink and old paper — and said in the voice he used when he wanted something to be true:
“It’s just a moon, Remus. The same for everyone.”
And at five you believe it, if your father tells you like that. You believe it because you want to. Because if it’s the same for everyone, then it can’t want only you.
He fell asleep like that, with Lyall’s hand still there, and the moon left outside.
The second time he was afraid he was six, and summer was over.
Hope had called him for dinner but he stayed rooted in the garden, knees scraped from the grass, eyes fixed up. It wasn’t just white anymore. It pulled.
He felt something tugging at his bones, like an invisible thread hooked behind his neck, forcing him to look. It didn’t hurt, not yet. It was just strange. As if the sky was counting for him, in a low voice, and he was the only one who could hear the number.
“Remus!” Hope called, but her voice seemed to come from very far away.
That evening Lyall didn’t say it was the same for everyone.
He took him by the shoulders — harder than usual — brought him inside and closed the shutters. All of them. Even the ones in the kitchen, which never closed. Then he knelt down to his height, so their eyes were level, and said quietly, the way you say a secret you don’t want the house to hear:
“We have to learn not to let them watch us, little one.”
Remus didn’t understand at first. He understood that winter.
He understood when Lyall started marking a calendar with tiny little X’s, always on the same days. When Hope would put an extra blanket over him even though he wasn’t cold and then ask him in a whisper the next morning if he had dreamed. When he learned that if you can’t breathe you must not gasp, if you tremble you must not hug your knees, if you’re afraid of something that to everyone else looks only beautiful, you must not say it. You just lower your eyes and pretend to look for something else.
Don’t let them see you when you can’t breathe. Don’t let them see you when you tremble. Don’t let them see you when you’re ashamed.
Later, much later, at Hogwarts, that sentence had become shorter. Sharper. A rule that wasn’t written anywhere, that wasn’t on the notice board in the common room.
Never let yourself be fully known.
It worked. It had always worked. It was like closing the shutters from the inside.
The moon, though, had stayed up there. The same. White and indifferent and beautiful. The same for everyone, even for those who feared it.
Even for someone who, without knowing it yet, on the other side of London, in a house where the stars were nailed to the ceiling with black paint and never really shone, where the curtains were heavy even in summer and only opened halfway, was looking at the same moon from a window that was too narrow and thought it was too big to fit all in there. Too free. A boy with black hair and knees dirty with soot from the fireplace, whose mother had told him not to look at the moon because the moon is for wolves and dreamers, and in that house they did neither.
Two children. Two different windows. The same moon in between, choosing no one to watch.
Under the same moon, without knowing. Yet.
