Through the Woods
It was utter chaos. Entire bookcases had fallen, their shelves bare and the books lying in a tangle of covers and torn pages. Whole sections still smouldered from the hexes that had missed their target, Classics were singed, History was smoking and, judging by the smell, some portion of True Crime was still on fire. If Hermione was there she would have been horrified.
The fact that she was nowhere in sight horrified them.
Tonks tore through a pile of books, digging out a young woman who looked nothing like Hermione Granger. Remus was no better, casting spells at random in the hopes of finding that the girl was just unconscious and Disillusioned. Only Alistair Moody had a modicum of sense; his magical eyes swivelling around a full three hundred and sixty degrees, seeking out spells that were invisible to his other normal, human eye. It took only two passes before the shining blue orb came to rest on a book that sat open on the floor, pulled seemingly at random and left on the floor when the attack began. The book glowed in his enhanced vision, magic radiating off it like steam off a loaf of bread fresh from the oven.
"Here," he said gruffly, calling their attention down to the innocuous-looking book.
"Oh, my god, that's it!" a woman cried, pointing with a shaky hand at the book. "That was where it happened! That woman just vanished into it."
She was in hysterics and Obliviating her would have been so much easier than having to listen to her screaming and hyperventilating, but she was the only witness left alive and conscious to what had happened. They needed her.
"Tell me," Moody demanded.
"Please," Remus added.
The woman ran a hand through her hair, tugging slightly as if testing to see if this was all a mad dream. "It was normal," she insisted. "Like any other Saturday. Kids and their parents browsing for books. It was normal."
"But…" Remus prompted.
"That woman came, screaming and cackling like a witch in a panto," she shuddered. "Started shouting all these nonsense words and shooting off a laser gun or something. The books were flying and catching fire… Everyone started to scream and run, but Hermione was shooting back… it looked like a game of pretend the kids always play… but things kept blowing up…"
"You know Hermione?"
She nodded. "Everyone does. She's in here every other week most summers borrowing more books than most people will borrow in a year."
He chuckled softly. "Yes, she is memorable like that. What happened after that?"
"More people came, raving like that woman," she shivered. "They didn't look human some of them." Her eyes grazed quickly over Moody's scarred and mutilated face. "That was when Hermione vanished. She ran over here, I was hiding just there and could see her duck down. She pulled out that book, pointed a stick at it and made it glow. Then she touched it and disappeared. Those people blew half the children's section apart trying to find her, but she was gone."
"They just left then?" Remus said sceptically. It was not the Death Eaters style to leave Muggles alone even when their target had vanished.
"No, the woman grabbed the book and disappeared," the librarian shivered. "The others panicked and disappeared… It was different, though. They just turned and were gone."
Moody made a noise deep in his throat that indicated he was deeply displeased.
"What do you think?" Tonks asked. She looked ready to cry with worry, but was holding it in as best she could.
"Sounds like she tried to make a portkey," Remus said looking down at the book. "She's clever, but that sort of magic takes practice."
"Let's take this and go," Moody said. The book rose from the floor with a wave of his wand, floating a few feet in front of him as he walked through the chaotic battlefield that the Westgate Central Library had become and out the front door. A wordless spell had the book bound to him and he Disapparated to Order headquarters at Number 12, Grimmauld Place.
Since Sirius's death just weeks earlier, the place had grown even gloomier than before. Kreacher was gone, so dust continued to build. It was hard to believe that the decrepit House Elf actually did anything with his day beside mumble insults and plot how to escape his bounds, but the evidence was clear. Remus shivered as he stepped back into the house. He still expected to find Sirius alone and depressed, drinking heavily in the library, but ready with a smile when his friends arrived. For all his flaws, he had been a good friend, the best.
The house was dark, despite there being more than the average number of residents at home. Molly Weasley had everyone busy in the kitchen in the hopes that their minds might be occupied if their hands were. It wasn't working. They jumped at the noise of the door opening.
"Was she there?" Harry demanded in lieu of the more commonplace 'hello'.
"No," Moody replied, gesturing the boy away from the book as he let it fall onto the table.
"What is that?" Ron asked, looking down at the thin book with its colourfully illustrated cover.
"A book," the man said.
"I can see that!" Ron glared.
"Why aren't you carrying it?" Ginny questioned.
"Hermione tried to make a portkey," Remus said quickly, pulling the girl away before her hands could touch the book. "We think she got pulled into it by mistake."
"Hermione doesn't make mistakes," the girl replied, a disbelieving and sad smile on her face.
"Exactly!" Ron declared. "She's just waiting for us to tell her it's alright to come out." He darted forward, reaching past his mother and grabbed at the book.
"Ronald, NO!" his mother cried, but she moved too slowly to stop him. They all did. His fingers gripped the spine of the book and he disappeared, falling headfirst into the book like a child down a rabbit hole.
"Shit!" Tonks stared, horrified, at the empty space where Ron had only just been and at the book sitting on the table.
Harry questioned the adults who looked far too worried. "If we can't touch it, how can we get them out?"
Moody and Remus set to work without responding, casting incantations on the book to find out what exactly the book had become. Harry and Ginny raced up to the girl's room to tear through Hermione's sizable summer reading collection, thinking they might find the spell her friend had used. Fred and George came minutes later to help, their joviality temporarily set aside and the genius they generally put toward pranks fully displayed for all to witness.
By the next morning no one was any wiser.
"What do we do?" Arthur asked.
Albus Dumbledore hummed quietly to himself as he considered the book. "I can see only one solution," he said. "Someone must go in and retrieve them."
The response was immediate and overlapping outrage:
"What?"
"Crazy old fool!"
"How can you say that?"
"We've no idea what's in there!" Remus said, jabbing his finger angrily toward the book.
"On the contrary, Remus, we know precisely what rests in this book," he replied. "A Muggle morality tale."
"Fairy tale," Harry corrected.
"Much the same thing," the old man smiled.
"Who cares?" Remus practically shouted. "They were pulled into the book, what makes you think whoever we send could get out?"
The ancient wizard's eyes twinkled brilliantly as he replied. "Have you never been drawn into a story before, Remus? I have. I once read all three-thousand-thirty-seven pages of The Journeys of Javlin the Jaundiced in a single sitting. I couldn't put it down. It held me captive until the very end. I suspect much may be said for Mr Weasley and Miss Granger."
The man pinched the bridge of his nose and clenched his eyes tight against the headache that was already throbbing across every inch of his skull. It was fruitless to argue. Sighing, he nodded. "Who's going?"
"Me!" Harry insisted.
"No, I'll go!" Ginny volunteered.
"You most certainly will not!" her mother cried. "Nor you two!" She pulled her two sons back from the table. "I've already lost one son to that book, I'll not risk another."
"Quite right, Molly," Albus agreed. "Assuming there are dangers to be faced, we must have someone skilled in the way of defence." His eye travelled over the three figures opposite him – Tonks, Moody and Remus. All three had their jaws set and determination on their faces. "Alistair, I believe you would be best kept on this side of the cover should anything go awry. Miss Tonks, you will be late for work if you remain."
Her mouth fell open as if he were giving her detention again. "But—"
"Remus," Dumbledore said, speaking over her protest and looking to the werewolf, "are you familiar with these type of stories?" The man nodded. "Excellent, then you will be prepared for anything that might happen once you are caught up in one. Whenever you are ready, Remus…"
The mild protest at his jumping into the task immediately was silenced with a simple gesture and Remus stepped close to the table. One steadying breath, a hand to the childish illustration of a little girl in a red cloak and he was gone.
oOo
It was not what he had expected.
Admittedly, Remus Lupin had never put much – make that any – thought into what it would be like to be pulled into a work of Muggle fairy tales. It felt rather like Apparition, being squeezed through the pages into the book.
Dumbledore had been right. He was in the story. Outside Grimmauld Place it had been dark, hot and noisy with the sounds of the early morning congestion in London. The world was suddenly quiet. He was in a tranquil wood full of large deciduous treed naked save the snow piled on their branches. It was winter. A few birds sang, though most had flown to warmer climes months ago. The change was almost too much to be believed, even for a wizard. If he could not feel the cold seeping through his leather-soled boots or the tree's rough bark through his thin shirt, he would think it all a dream.
He pushed himself off the tree, or rather he tried to. Hermione and Ron were here somewhere in this wintery forest, and he needed to find them. His feet and arms and legs, however, thought otherwise. His arms remained folded across his chest; his hip and shoulder still leaned casually against the tree. He tried again to move, but couldn't.
'Oh, fuck,' he groaned internally because his mouth would not move when he tried to make it speak. 'I'm not caught up in the story. I'm a goddamn character.'
He racked his brain while he leaned idly on the tree, but without more information he could have been in any of those old Muggle tales. He had read them ages ago, knew the basic stories. Good little boys and girls lead astray by magic or smooth-talkers and were punished for it. They were morality tales, but they were not all rainbows and redemption. If Hermione was cast in the wrong role, she might be killed.
'Move your arse off this tree, dammit,' he cursed at himself, but his body refused to move even with the surge of anger and fear.
This man, whoever he was, just stayed propped against the tree, watching the dirt trail with boredom. He turned his head, looking up the path, then down it. Nothing. No, there was something. A girl moving slowly along the path some distance away. He stood up a little higher to see her better, but she wandered off to the right, leaving the path for the woods. It took quite some time for her to return to the path and move closer. As she drew near enough to identify as a teenaged girl, she left the path again.
'Dammit!' Remus swore.
She was back on the trail again, close enough for him to see her face beneath a deep red hood. Hermione. It was her. She was alive and unharmed, though looking rather vacant as if she were a dim-witted girl more interested in pretty things than in fighting evil and rescuing escaped convicts from death.
As if she heard his thoughts and wanted to prove him right, the girl smiled and cried "Ooh, pretty!" and hurried off into the woods to collect something that had struck her fancy.
When she came back to the path, he stood up and smiled.
'Why are you smiling?' he asked himself. 'There is nothing for you to smile about. That is Hermione, your student and friend. You don't get to smile at her, not like that.'
Remus would have stood out of respect and smiled because she was his friend. This man, stood to get a better view of her, smiled in a leering way as he eyed her frame. He didn't know who he was supposed to be, but he could feel the man inside him. He was wicked and wanted to eat the girl up. There was only one other time he ever known this urge to tear into such sweet flesh, felt this deep-seated bloodlust uncurl in the pit of his stomach – the full moon. He was the wolf.
"Don't you know it's dangerous to leave the path?" he said, his lips moving without his permission. His voice was not even his own. It was low and seductive in a way he knew he could never sound.
Hermione stopped on her trek down the well-trod path and looked up at him. She smiled sweetly. "I couldn't help it, there were early flowers blooming through the snow."
The desire to attack her filled him, but he resisted.
'Wait…' he said to himself as he felt the Herculean effort being used to hold back the feral instincts of the wolf. That wasn't him resisting, that was the wolf. It was holding back all on its own. Why?
He heard it then, the sound of men calling to one another. He heard one he recognised, Ron's shouting. "Put your back into it! We need to fell this tree before I'm an old man!"
Looking over his shoulder, Remus could see the woodcutters marching together toward a thick oak tree. Ron's flaming hair leading the way, a gleaming axe over his shoulder. That was why the wolf held back. He knew the woodcutters were close. They would have heard her screams and come to kill him if he attacked her here.
'What story is this?' he scowled, though it didn't reach his face; that stayed calm and unassuming, a slight smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth as he studied the girl before him. 'Think! Woods. Wolf. Girl in a red cape.'
His eyes roamed the girl's body, taking in her thin frame wrapped in a suggestively vibrant traveling cloak, a basket on her arm. "And where are you going all alone?"
Hermione looked up at him, no recognition on her face. She did not know him, yet she had no fear of him. Surely, even a girl half as clever as Hermione should know to be frightened of a stranger in the woods; should know better than to talk to a strange man in the woods. Yet she answered. "Just to my grandmother's house," she replied and gestured to her basket. "She's unwell and my mother sent me with cake and butter for her."
"Is it far?"
She shook her head. "Oh, no, just along the path and past the old mill. The first house in the village."
'A stupid girl in a red cape,' Remus amended his list. 'How could she not know how dangerous he is?'
While Remus berated the girl's foolishness, the wolf smiled and slipped around the girl, his hands on her shoulders as he leaned closer. "I'll go there, too. We can call it a race," his hand travelled the length of her arm. He gripped her wrist and lifted her hand to point to the left fork in the path ahead, which he somehow knew to be the short path, "I'll go this way," he said, then he used her arm to gesture to the right fork, which wound through the forest, over the stream and around the hill, "and you go that." His villainous hand skipped teasingly up her arm again, grazing over her collarbones and settling on her other shoulder, his arm trapping her warm body against his. "And we'll see who gets there first."
"What do I get if I win?" she asked, staring down the path he selected for her.
Remus fought with everything he had to step away from the girl, his former student, his friend, but all his efforts did nothing until the wolf elected to step back. He strode around her, studying her face. "Anything you like," he offered seductively.
She closed her eyes as she imagined her heart's desire, but a frown crossed her face, "And if you win?"
"The same," he whispered.
The girl smiled brightly at the thought of winning and agreed.
The wolf smirked as she hurried off down the longer path, almost immediately growing distracted by a hedgerow filled with hazelnuts. She stopped to collect as many as would fit in her basket. Remus growled at her, but the wolf just grinned and took off running. He was barely out of breath when he reached the first house in the village.
Remus fought him, but the wolf still knocked gently at the door.
"Who's there?" a voice called from inside.
"Your grandchild, Little Red Riding Hood," replied the wolf in a voice eerily like Hermione's.
'Little Red Riding Hood?' Remus repeated. 'Little Red Riding Hood? Shit, I remember this one. He kills the grandmother and then the girl. Shit. Shitshitshit.' He tried to hold the wolf back, but nothing worked.
"I've brought you cake and butter," the wolf continued.
"I'm too ill to leave my bed, my child," the woman called weakly. "Pull the bobbin and the latch will release."
The wolf did as he was instructed, pulled at the bobbin and the door opened for him. He closed and latched it behind him before turning slowly to the bed, where the old woman lay beneath a mass of blankets, propped on a mountain of pillows. The woman did look ill. Her face was gaunt and pale; her eyelids so heavy she could barely keep them raised long enough to look at the man who had entered in her granddaughter's place. The wolf smirked and so did Remus.
The woman pushed her black hair off her face, her eyes growing huge as he fell upon her.
Remus was not a violent man. The werewolf was its own being that happened to take over, but that did not make him ferocious. On this one occasion, though, Remus revelled in the blood that flowed at his hands, the bones that broke and the scream that came as the woman in the bed died painfully. Bellatrix deserved every second of agony and fear that came to her. Sirius was dead because of her and if Remus could revenge his last remaining childhood friend, then he would do it; even if the mad witch was trapped in the role of a frail old woman incapable of defending herself, she deserved it.
Using the woman's nightgown to wipe the blood from his hands and face, he shoved her body off the bed. Throwing off his bloody clothes, he lay down in the bed himself. Remus was too busy enjoying the fact that the killer of his friend was dead to care why the wolf was covering his naked body in the blankets and pulling the pillows down to hide his face. He didn't care what the wolf did now. He didn't care… until the tap came at the door.
"Who's there?" the wolf asked, his voice feigning age and weakness.
"It's your granddaughter," Hermione called through the door.
"Pull the bobbin, my child," he said. "The latch will go up."
She did and the door opened easily.
The wolf watched her come closer, admiring her figure in the firelight. Remus could feel what the wolf felt and tried once again to push his own words through its mouth, to tell the girl to run, to escape back to the forest where the woodcutters and their axes could protect her. He knew what the wolf wanted now and it wasn't blood. The bloodlust was sated from killing Bellatrix. This was a different sort of lust he felt now.
"I've brought you cake and some butter," Hermione said gently.
"Set them on the stool there and come into bed with me," the wolf instructed.
The girl looked down at herself and saw her shoes and dress were wet and muddy from her journey along the path and into the woods. Being a well-bred, though foolish, young lady, she could never get into a bed so filthy, so she took off her clothes and lay down beside her grandmother. Her eyes grew enormous when he pulled her closer.
'Let her go!' Remus shouted at himself, hating how wonderful she made him feel.
"Grandmother, what big arms you have!" she exclaimed.
"All the better to hug you with, my child," the wolf said softly and tightened his grip, pulling her flush against his body.
Remus groaned as her skin touched his. She was so soft, so warm, so perfect. 'NO! She's not perfect! She's sixteen!'
"Grandmother," she cried. "What big legs you have!"
"All the better to run with," he said, hooking his leg through hers.
"Grandmother, what big eyes you have," she said, staring into his face.
'All the better to see that you're too fucking young,' Remus shouted, though no one heard him.
"All the better to see you with, my child," the wolf smiled.
"Grandmother, what big teeth you have!"
The wolf smirked even as Remus begged him not to, "All the better to eat you up with." He fell upon her mouth, taking in the gasp of surprise as he tasted her sweetness. He groaned in pleasure as he rolled his weight onto her, feeling the heat of her body beneath him; Remus groaned, too, and not for very different reasons.
oOo
He felt constricted and thought for a moment that it was her thighs squeezing him tightly, but it was magic. The story had reached its ending, the moral had been learned – that attractive young ladies should never talk to strangers or risk providing dinner for a wolf – and they were ejected from the book. Remus was standing exactly where he had been in the kitchen, arm reached out as if to touch the cover. Ron was across the table from him.
"Hermione?" Remus asked, terrified that it had all been for nothing.
"I'm here," she said, standing up from where she had been hiding, crouched low in the same position as when she had touched the book.
"Hermione!" Ron cried and wrapped the girl in a tight hug. "I went in after you, but all I did was chop down trees."
A strangled scream broke apart their reunion. Molly covered her mouth and protected her daughter's eyes from the sight of Bellatrix's dead body at their feet. It was difficult to know it was her for all the blood covering her face, but the wild tangle of black hair was unmistakable.
"What happened to her?" Hermione asked.
"I did," Remus replied, face set to stony indifference both of his actions and toward the girl asking the question. "She deserved it."
She looked away quickly, her cheeks turning a deep pink as she, no doubt, relived the last moments of their storybook encounter. He had taken her, forced himself on her. He blinked back to the present as she started explaining to Moody and Dumbledore what she had done. Ginny had been right, Hermione did not make mistakes.
"I read a book of old enchantments and saw the spell to pull people into stories," Hermione explained, her eyes focused intently on everyone but Remus. "I thought that since I was outnumbered, I might trick them into a book. I didn't want to risk their escaping, so I thought that a fairy tale would be best. The bad always die in the old fairy stories."
"Clever as always, Miss Granger," Dumbledore applauded. "Now that you mention it, I do recall that I was briefly trapped inside Twelfth Night, oddly enough cast as Viola… I was quite a handsome youth and could easily have passed for a girl pretending to be a boy," he chuckled. "Try as I might, I could not break free from the play until I had kissed Orsino."
A low chuckle ran around the room before he continued, looking earnestly at Hermione and Remus. "I know full well that you were not yourselves once you entered that book. Anything you did was not of your own doing." His eyes lingered on Remus as he spoke.
The man fought to keep thoughts of pleasured moans from his mind as he held the old man's eye. "We know, Albus."
"I do not wish for you to feel guilt over Bellatrix's passing," the old man said. "You did not kill her."
"I wanted to," he replied.
"Wanting and doing are two very different things, Remus. Wanting does not make a man villainous," he said sagely. "You three have had a difficult day. Some rest is in order, I think. I can clean this up easily." He ushered them around the dead woman no one mourned and away from the kitchen.
"Merlin's beard, I'm knackered," Ron yawned. "Do you have any idea how hard it is being a woodcutter? Blimey they were a fit lot. I was winded after ten minutes!"
"Go rest, then," Hermione said none too gently, pushing him toward the stairs and chasing after Remus, who was shutting himself in the library. "Remus! Wait, we need to talk."
"There's nothing to talk about," he replied harshly.
"I think there is," she insisted, all the sweetness of Red Riding Hood gone.
"Fine," he grunted and threw himself down into the chair and position so often occupied by Sirius, complete with a glass of scotch in his hand. "Talk."
She sighed and stood in front of him, so close that he could smell her shampoo, feel the heat of her. "Don't," she said, making him jump slightly. "Don't do this to yourself. It was the wolf, not you. I know that. You weren't him any more than I was that moronic girl."
He smirked slightly at the description, but it fell as she kept talking.
"I know you didn't want to do that. I know you didn't want—"
Remus stood abruptly, shattering the empty tumbler on the floor and glaring down at her, his eyes as dark as his thoughts. "Don't think you know what I want."
She stared up at him wide-eyed and silent, and he knew she understood. The wolf may have made him do it, yes, but that didn't mean Remus did not want it, too; it did not mean that he didn't enjoy the taste of her naked skin, the feel of her around him, the sound of her desperate attempts to regain her breath because of what he was doing to her. No, he wanted that. He wanted all of it, all of her.
"Get out," he said roughly, turning away to pour himself another drink.
Her smell lingered long after she left, and he wallowed in it, knowing he would likely never smell it again. She knew what sort of man he was now, what sort of thoughts writhed in his head; he was not the sort of man she would stay close to. He was the wolf. Wolves cannot be trusted, especially not around young women such as her, beautiful and soft and so delicious.
Some hours later, possibly some days later for all he knew, the library door slid open. The fresh air that came into the room smelled of her.
"Shut that damn door," he growled, glaring over the wing of the chair at whoever dared bring that smell with them. He stopped, mouth falling open as he saw her standing in the doorway, saw her turn and close the door, saw her daring to stand in the same room with him alone. "Why are you here?"
"I've brought you some cake and butter," she replied with a smile.
"Cute," he said, turning away. He clenched his eyes shut against the sight of her but he could not turn off his other senses. Her intoxicating smell grew stronger, tickling his nose and making him dizzy. The sound of her feet crossing the carpet filled his ears before it was drowned out by the rush of his own blood. Why was she doing this to him?
"Why, Professor," she said softly, innocently as that idiot girl had spoken to the wolf in bed, "what big hands you have."
He looked down at his hands, large and long-fingered; perfect hands for playing an instrument or strumming deep inside a woman to make her sing. He wanted to play her, to make her sing. He wanted. Daring to glance up at her, his heart stopped. No one had ever looked at him as she did now, with a smile like that on such delicate lips. She looked more the wolf than he ever had, and he knew. She wanted it, too.
"All the better to touch you with, my dear."