A/N: "Hey readers! I can't apologize enough for the delay on this chapter. This story's been a huge challenge to write, and I spent a good couple weeks reworking the entire thing. Some new scenes have been added in previous chapters! Nothing massive but check it out."– E
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oOoOoOo
"Oh, Remus, here," Hermione called out as she marked her place in her book and turned to him. Leaning over the back of the couch, she handed him a piece of parchment as he walked out from his room, still getting ready for the day.
"Thanks again," she continued. "It's really great that you're doing this for me."
"Oh, it's no problem," said Remus as he took the paper and looked it over.
"I wish I could go. I just adore the library here! Rows and rows and rows of books—"
"Mhmm," he turned the parchment over, where her list continued on. A small smile grew on his face. "Oh, Hermione?"
"Yes?"
"You do know I only have two arms, correct?"
Hermione looked up, confusion filling her face for a moment, then she rolled her eyes. "It's not that many books!"
"I think Madam Pince may object if I check out the entire library."
"Oh please, don't be dramatic. Don't you have a class to teach?" she asked as Remus continued to smirk from across the room.
"I may have to cancel. Seems I will be all day at the library getting somebody's books."
"Oh, shut up! Give it back to me—I'll cut back on a few," Hermione sat up and leaned over the back of the couch, grabbing for the parchment. Remus laughed and stepped just out of her reach.
"No. No, it's fine. I'll manage somehow," he teased, looking over her list. "Quite the varied selection."
"Yes, well, I've been thinking. Since I'm going to be here for a while I may as well take advantage of the time, I have a little research I could do for work and there are so many other things I've been putting off over the years. I haven't done Arithmancy problems in ages—I just know I'm getting rusty—and my French really needs some work too. Really, it's the perfect time to study everything I've been putting aside."
"Always the student, Hermione," Remus folded the list and put it in his pocket, walking back into his room. "I bet you did excellent on your NEWTs."
He picked out an old maroon tie and, walking back into the office, he watched as Hermione stood and began to tidy up her tray from breakfast. An odd expression was on her face. She then turned to him, the light coming through the paned glass, lighting up her curls and pale skin as she suddenly smiled and laughed.
"What?" he asked, afraid she had noticed him staring.
Shaking her head, Hermione walked over to him. "Look at you!"
Remus looked down. His vest was only halfway buttoned up, but he had somehow managed to get the buttons one off from their correct holes.
"How are you always so disheveled?" Hermione knocked his hands aside and began to unbutton his vest, smiling to herself. "I swear, you are always missing belt loops and I rarely see you with a straightened tie."
"I suppose I get distracted," Remus chuckled as he watched her delicate hands carefully rebutton his vest.
"Skip the two Transfiguration books at the bottom of the list. There!" Hermione smiled at her handiwork, then adjusted his tie before looking up at him. "I'll have enough to work on without them, besides, I think one of them weighs around thirty pounds."
"You're too kind."
Hermione walked over to the tank that was upon his desk. "I can't believe you are going to leave me all alone with the Grindylow."
"Oh, you'll be fine," said Remus as he went back into his room.
"One got my ankle once while swimming in a pond. Scared me half to death, don't think I've been swimming there since."
"Well, just resist the urge to climb into my fish tank and you'll survive," Remus stepped back out into his office, his light brown robe in place. He grabbed some books off his desk then moved to the door.
"I'll try to remember that. Have a nice day at class!"
"Thanks, Hermione. Goodbye."
Remus pulled the door behind him, shutting with a click. The halls outside his office were already full of students on their way to class, taking their time and laughing in the warm sunlight, as one of the last nice days of autumn snuck in through the open windows. He stood for a moment, his hand on the old metal handle. A few students looked his way and Remus forced a calm expression on his face as he pushed his thoughts of her aside and continued down the hall.
Hermione.
Remus couldn't ignore how close they had become in the last few months or that their friendship had begun to change slightly. Just as Remus couldn't ignore the simple fact that he was a man, and that Hermione was young and very attractive. Many times he struggled to keep his eyes from following her as she moved around their office, sometimes wearing only a sweater and school skirt, her feet and legs free from stockings as she stretched for a book on the top shelf of the bookcase.
But it was inappropriate. Extremely inappropriate. Thanks to his lycanthropy, relationships were never much of an option for him in the first place and, besides, Hermione wasn't even supposed to be here in this time. To him, Hermione was this smart, beautiful twenty-three-year-old; to her, Remus was someone who had once been her professor and a man old enough to be her father.
It was an unsettling thought.
oOo
The hall was large and ornate. The walls were covered in expensive, Georgian wallpaper, the flecks of gold in the detail reflecting the torchlight. High ceilings stretched high above her, the space broken up by enormous, gilded chandeliers. Their candles were like those at Hogwarts, never ending or dripping, but the light was dim, the shadows taking over the room.
Hermione sat underneath one of the largest chandeliers in the very center of the room. Her breath was ragged. Her scalp ached from where Bellatrix had dragged her here by her hair. Behind her, Greyback was moving Harry, Ron, and the others to another room. "Reckon she'll let me have a bit of the girl when she's finished with her? I'd say I'll get a bite or two, wouldn't you, ginger?" The werewolf laughed, and Ron cried out her name as the door was shut behind them, his desperate voice ringing in the air.
Bellatrix turned back to her, and Hermione's hair was grabbed again as the witch forced her to look up and meet her eye. Dark brown met a deep, black nothingness for a moment, then the butt of the knife was brought across her head. Hermione was knocked back to the ground as a white pain flashed before her.
"Where did you get this sword?"
Hermione opened her mouth to answer, to lie, but her head was spinning too much, her vision blurry. The question unanswered, Bellatrix grabbed Hermione's arm. A moment later, a sharp, hot pain raced across it. Hermione screamed, her voice working once again as the blood flowed warm upon her skin.
"I'm going to ask you again! Where did you get this sword? Where?"
"We found it!" she gasped, her heart racing. "We found it—PLEASE!"
She tried to fight and pull away, but the pain, the cold sharpness of the knife as it dug into her arm, sent shockwaves through her, numbing her. Hermione screamed, and she heard Ron's voice shouting in reply. "Hermione!" His voice was distant, somehow muffled. "HERMIONE!"
Bellatrix dropped her arm, and Hermione curled into a ball, shaking. Fire coursed through her, and she looked down to see the a deep cut across her skin. The floor grew red and wet beneath her.
"Don't forget to save me some, Lestrange."
Hermione looked up. Fenrir Greyback had returned. He was standing near the door, watching her, waiting for his turn. A simple, ancient fear coursed through her at his expression, but Bellatrix wasn't ready to share just yet. Hermione was suddenly shoved onto her back as the witch stood over her, the knife shining red in the light. She grabbed Hermione's hand and turned her palm towards the ornate ceiling overhead.
"You are lying, filthy Mudblood, and I know it!" She placed the tip of the knife against her palm. "You have been inside my vault at Gringotts! Tell the truth, tell the truth!"
"HERMIONE!"
She had to lie! She had to protect them! But as Bellatrix pressed down again, the blood collecting, Hermione couldn't think. She could barely breath beyond the pain. "What else did you take, what else? ANSWER ME! CRUCIO!" The spell was unexpected, and Hermione fell back. It was as if every inch of her body was on fire. Her muscles spasmed uncontrollably, her bones breaking all at once. She writhed on the stone floor, screaming in agony. Within moments she wished for the knife again.
"Where did you get the sword?! Tell me!"
"HERMIONE!"
She tried to tell her that they had found it, that it was a copy, or something, but Bellatrix didn't listen. The spell hit her again and again, and the pain only grew worse as Bellatrix' anger increased. Just keep lying! Hermione told herself. She could taste copper in her mouth as she bit the inside of her cheek. Somewhere below her, she could hear Ron screaming her name. She had to keep lying.
"I'm going to ask you again! Where did you get this sword?!"
"We found it! We found it, PLEASE!"
"HERMIONE!"
"Crucio! You were in my vault! What else did you take?! Tell the truth! CRUCIO!"
Pain. Unbelievable pain. The screams pulled the air from her lungs as the torture continued. Hermione couldn't breathe. Again and again it hit her. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she choked on the blood that was filling her mouth. Below her, Ron was still screaming, but her name had lost its meaning. She couldn't last much longer. She had to end it… She had to end it…
"Hermione!"
She could still hear Ron, but his voice too was beginning to alter. He couldn't save her. He had left her once before, and then had abandoned her again now.
A pair of hands grabbed her, shaking her shoulders roughly. The pain changed, and Hermione felt as if she was being pulled through a vacuum, the halls vanishing and the dusty chandeliers replaced by moonlight. She looked up at the face in front of her, the furious, screaming face of Bellatrix Lestrange replaced by Remus Lupin.
"No!" She gasped and pulled back, desperately trying to wrench herself from his grasp.
"Hermione, wake up!"
Remus fought to keep ahold of her as she tried to wrestle her arms from him. Hermione was surprisingly strong and tears were on her cheeks as she shouted and mumbled, the words unclear and desperate.
"We weren't in your vault! We found it!"
"Hermione!"
She fought him violently, her panic completely overpowering her, and Remus feared Hermione would hurt herself. Thankfully, after a few moments, her eyes met his and fear shifted to recognition. She stilled, her brown eyes full of confusion. Then an unbelievable sadness swept her face, and Hermione threw her arms around him, her face buried in his neck as the tears finally came. Remus held her tightly.
"It's alright," he whispered as he rubbed her back. "I'm here. It's alright."
Hermione sobbed in his arms and Remus sighed as his heart rate slowed back to normal.
He had been asleep when her screaming woke him. Running across the office, he had pulled the portrait door open to find her thrashing on the bed, screaming as if she was being tortured. She pressed herself into him tightly and Remus shifted until his back was against the wall. He pulled her legs swung over his own, and wrapped his arms around her tightly. He felt the tears drip down his chest as the sobs were wrenched from her.
"It was just a nightmare. I've got you, you're all right."
Hermione was like a child in his arms, small and shaking, her shirt almost soaked through with a cold sweat. The woman Remus met in the lone corridor, so strong with her wand pointed at him, was gone, and it almost felt as if he were comforting the thirteen-year-old Hermione instead. And yet Remus knew this was more than just a childish nightmare. He held her and tried to organize exactly what she had been mumbling, as Remus tried to comprehend what sort of horrors this woman had been through.
Soon the sobs began to lessen and Hermione relaxed in his arms. Reaching up, Remus ran a hand through her hair, feeling the softness of her damp curls as her breathing leveled out. She stilled, her earlier movements so exhausting, and Remus soon suspected Hermione had once again fallen asleep. Relaxing his grip on her, Remus turned to tuck her back into bed.
"Please…"
Her voice was barely above a whisper, yet her hand that had snaked around his neck held onto him tightly. Leaning back against the stone wall, he squeezed her gently and closed his eyes.
"Alright."
oOo
The sun slowly began to rise over the mountains as Hermione opened her eyes to a blue-filled room. She glanced out of the frost-trimmed windows, the distant forest cold and still, and was perplexed for a moment by the odd angle and the cramp in her side. Then she looked around and found herself in Remus' lap, his eyes closed as he slept, his arms still around her.
The dreams from last night had not faded and Hermione knew they never would. Ron always knew what she dreamt about. He used to shake her awake too, fear in his eyes as he begged her back into reality. Then he would apologize, over and over again for everything that had happened at Malfoy Manor. She didn't get the nightmares as often as she used to, she had learned to fight them on her own, but still, when the panic finally receded Hermione had been so relieved to see him, to have him hold and support her.
Remus was still asleep, his chest steadily rising and falling, his grip tight on her waist.
She watched him sleep. Hermione still found it strange to see Remus so young. This Remus still had a sense of youthfulness that the Remus from her time was starting to lose. There was always that air of the intellect, or the professor, about him, the smart and quiet man in tweed with a book in hand. And while Hermione saw so much of that now, there was something else in him she hadn't quite noticed before. A current seemed to flow underneath him, the child, the marauder, coming through whenever he laughed or smiled, and especially as he slept.
Remus shifted in his sleep, tightened his grip on her before nodding back off once again. Gently, Hermione reached forward, her fingers brushing his bangs to the side before softly tracing the lines of his face. He was attractive in a classical sense, she noticed. He had a square jaw and a straight nose and Hermione suspected he probably would have been considered very handsome had he not been bitten as a child. Half of his left eyebrow was gone, replaced by a long scar that skipped over his eye and onto his cheek while another crossed the bridge of his nose. She traced the white lines before moving her hand along his bearded chin. Hermione was surprised by how soft the short blonde hair was. Then her hand moved to his lips, which were again scarred and uneven, and Hermione wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
She pulled her hand back.
Remus slept on, his heart beating slowly under her hand as Hermione watched him. She had never thought of Remus romantically before. He was twenty years her senior and had always been just her friend, her comrade, or her professor— yet, a strange curiosity started to build. After all, Remus was a man. And in this time their age was closer, he in his early thirties and her in her early twenties.
She looked down at the bare chest and the arms that wrapped around her. Remus was very different from what she was used to—Ron's polar opposite, actually. Remus wasn't as tall or athletic as Ron, but he had a sturdiness and a definite maleness that Ron lacked. He was thin, but with lean strong muscles that were covered with long, jagged scars. He was also much tanner than Hermione ever noticed, and her arms looked pale against him as Hermione gently ran her fingers through his chest hair. That was something else Ron lacked. And as Hermione felt the soft blonde hair between her fingers, her hand moving up his chest and along his neck, she decided it was something she liked.
No.
Hermione pulled her hand away. No, she had to stop; ideas like this had burned her before. Hermione looked down. She usually slept in just a t-shirt, while Remus, it seemed, just a pair of pajama bottoms. They barely had a single outfit between them, and she was suddenly aware what a compromising position that put them in.
She carefully pulled his arms from around her, and climbed out of bed.
oOoOoOo
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A/N: "Thanks for reading!"—E
