A.N.
I don't own Harry Potter. All the characters and plot associated with the series belong to J.K. Rowling.
...
It took her exactly eighty-nine days, three full moons, to swallow her Merlin-damned pride and realize that she simply couldn't go on like this. She needed help. Badly.
Hermione Granger loathed asking for help. And since that horrible night nearly three months ago, loathed took on a whole new meaning.
When she was a child, Hermione always felt the need to prove herself, and when she discovered she was a witch, this need only grew stronger. It's why she always hated asking for help and avoided it as much as possible: it made her feel like she failed, somehow.
Lycanthropy didn't help matters.
If she was the kind of person who believed in prophesies and divination, she would have called it a cruel twist of fate, but Hermione Granger, smartest-witch-of-her-age, Harry-Potter's-best-friend, war-heroine, never believed in that stuff. The war left scars on all of them, and hers was a profound realization that life is a gamble. Chance after chance, moulded by billions of individual decisions: and the worst part was, you didn't know how deep in you were until you were faced with every torrid consequence.
They won the war. Everyone was ecstatic - sure there were still many Death Eaters on the loose, and the Department of Magical Law Enforcement was working overtime to get through all the trials, and the Aurors - a quickly scrapped-together band of volunteers - were searching twenty-four-seven, but they won.
Of course, she, Harry, and Ron were right in the midst. They played sitting ducks at Grimmauld Place for a grand total of three days before deciding that they couldn't do it anymore. The house held too many memories, good and bad, for all of them. Ron, stricken by his brother's death, felt like holding back after everything was insult to Fred's memory. Harry… well, Harry was Harry. A day not spent saving someone was a day wasted.
As for Hermione, she had to move on. Do something - anything, as long as it meant she didn't have to stay trapped inside the old house avoiding reporters - they faced Voldemort, after all. She could handle Rita Skeeter.
She never mentioned the letter from one of Kingsely's contacts in Australia she kept in her bedside drawer. It wasn't healthy, she knew, but neither was wallowing in grief. The healthy thing for her personally was to get her arse of the couch and join the volunteers.
Especially since she found out that Antonin bloody Dolohov was still on the loose.
It was stupid. It was foolish, it was arrogant, and it was the same idiotic thing that nearly left her for dead the first time she faced the man.
She had to go out there and fight him. Even if in her pursuit she split off from the main group, leaving herself vulnerable to attack, Hermione followed Dolohov's trail - right into a trap.
To make matters worse, the bastard got away.
Looking up at the clear blue skies overhead, she wondered if she was making the same mistake looking for Greyback. He was probably even less fond of her than the Russian wizard had been, and considering how well their previous interaction at the Malfoy Manor went, Hermione wasn't altogether certain she should be opening this particular can of worms.
It was only that every bone in her body ached like it was on fire after her latest transformation that kept her following his scent along the gushing stream.
She was very aware of the fact that she was tired and half-starved, and less than a match to the other werewolf should he feel like making good on his promise to take a bite out of her. Lifting her wand took an embarrassing amount of effort these days. She was also very aware of the fact that with Remus dead, she was out of options.
Maybe she'll get lucky and not wind up as dinner. Maybe.
Oh, who was she kidding? There wasn't enough meat left on her to make a passable snack, much less a full on meal.
Scoffing at herself under her breath - she barely made it a mile and she was already panting - Hermione pushed on, her sensitive ears picking up on the sounds of the forest - birds up in the canopy, a mouse scurrying through the thick underbrush. But no wolf.
Greyback was legendary for more than his sheer brutality. He didn't simply accept his nature - he thrived being a werewolf. There were rumors that he could shift at will - which was fascinating enough from an academic point of view academically, and absolutely invaluable to her now that she was desperate for any semblance of control over her life. She wanted her life back - she wanted to rejoin society, and hold a job, and be able to spend an evening with her friends without worrying about accidentally hurting them. She wanted the bright future she fought so hard for.
She also wanted Dolohov's head on a platter. Hermione shook herself. It was the wolf speaking, and the thirst for violence that came with her affliction was horrifying. When she regained her senses in the Forbidden Forest, expecting to be on the brink of death from one of Dolohov's curses, she found herself fully healed. The only signs that the memories of the raid were real were the lingering ache in her muscles and a strange barely-visible scar on her shoulder, just above her collarbone. She didn't think much of it at first - truthfully she didn't think much at all - but when her consciousness caught up, she realized that her vision was too clear, her hearing too good, her sense of smell too strong.
With dawning horror, she remembered that the night of the ill-fated operation also happened to be a full moon.
Before Hermione was turned, she used to think that it didn't matter. For most of the time werewolves are just people. Humans. And with Kingsley as the minister, Umbridge-era restrictions won't last long anyway.
But as she stumbled through the forest, trying to get home before she ran into another werewolf, or Merlin forbid a centaur, and tried casting a point-me spell, Hermione found that she was in whole lot more trouble than she expected.
It wasn't a point-me spell that left her wand. It was a bloody Reducto.
The last straw was when she killed a poor, innocent squirrel in one of her panicked attempts to cast a simple spell successfully. Hermione prided herself on her rationality and (relatively) good ability to keep a cool head, but at that moment she had none of these things.
No, Hermione Granger fled. And that was how she ended up in a self-imposed exile, likely presumed dead or missing, seeking out Fenrir Greyback, of all the people.
Plopping onto the ground by the side of the stream, the witch tried to catch her breath. She had avoided mirrors successfully so far - it wasn't exactly difficult, what with living in a tent - but seeing her blurry reflection in the water, she was surprised by how bad it really was. There were dark bruises under her eyes, and she was paler that Nearly-Headless Nick.
Or course the most startling change was her hair. She cropped it short with a silver potions knife one day when it kept getting in her eyes as she brewed another batch of Wolfsbane, but the bright white color stood out anyway.
It wasn't normal, that much she knew. Not her hair, not the horrible urge to rip her body open during every transformation, not the inability to cast a spell. Whatever happened to her that night wasn't normal.
Books proved useless. There wasn't anything about werewolves that was actually written by werewolves, and what little literature she managed to get her hands on barely scratched the surface of what it really meant to be a lycanthrope.
Unfortunately, she though grimly, tossing a small stone at the water like Ron taught her, that only leaves Greyback.
Suddenly, she heard a twig snap. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Her head spun to face the sound - opposite shore, on her right - but there was nothing there. Sticking her nose in the air, she sniffed, using her nose to pick up what her eyes and ears couldn't.
Her eyes widened. Slowly, feeling as though there was something stuck in her throat, she looked back ahead, her lips instinctively pulling away to bare her teeth.
A massive, golden-eyed wolf mirrored her from a few feet and a bit of gushing water away.
If she was in her right state of mind, Hermione would have stayed right where she was. But as a chilling growl split the otherwise fine day, she could only do one thing.
Run.