A/N: *Pops out of the snow (like daisies!)*

*Flings the chapter in through your mail slot*

*Follicks off into the wilderness*

xx-Kitten.

Get Me

By Kittenshift17

Chapter 5

He didn't come back for months. Hermione had tried everything since he'd left to be rid of the literal doggy-door he'd magically installed in the back door to her cottage that led into her garden, but it had all been to no avail. She'd tried warding the perimeter against him, too, but she wasn't so certain that had been any more effective than her attempts at vanishing the doggy-door if she was being completely honest.

It had taken three days for her to recover after what he had done to her. For three days, she'd limped and hissed and whined her way through seeing to her basic needs and little else, finding that she was more exhausted than she could ever recall being up until that moment, including when she'd been recovering from Dolohov's curse in her fifth year and when she'd been tortured during the war.

The scar on her shoulder didn't fade as the days trickled into weeks and the weeks swept into months. It stayed dark red and scarred, an angry bite mark upon her skin that she was nervous someone might see. Indeed, she'd been so concerned about someone spotting it that she'd forgone several offers for dates from various would-be paramours and Hermione was ashamed to say that in the seven months since Greyback had invaded her home and blackmailed her into fucking him, she hadn't shared her bed or her body with anybody else.

As such, she was horrified when she was out in her garden late one evening in the lead-up to May's full moon and an enormous grey wolf leaped over her garden fence.

"Don't even think about it," she warned the beast immediately, clutching her spading fork aloft to threaten the wretched pest. "I will use this, I swear to Merlin."

The wolf eyeballed the minuscule weapon for a long moment before he padded up the path toward her.

"I mean it, Greyback," Hermione warned him icily while she fished her wand from her pocket and leveled a hex at him.

It did no good.

Transformed, a werewolf was practically spell-proof and the vicious Stinging Jinx bounced right off him. He snarled at her in warning even as the spell rebounded and hurtled back towards her. Hermione dodged it sharply, lifting the fork higher in silent threat.

"Not another step," she warned him angrily.

He jumped at her, his massive front paws colliding with her chest and knocking her to the ground. Hermione swung the fork, burying the tines in his shoulder with a sickening thump and Greyback snarled in pain, his jaws going for her throat. Hermione barely got her arms up in time to keep from having her jugular torn out.

His fangs tore into her forearms instead and Hermione screeched at the sting of his bite, hoping to high heaven that it was still long enough until the full moon to keep such a bite from infecting her with lycanthropy. The last thing she needed to add to her already complicated existence was having to get furry once a month, thank you very much indeed.

"Get off me, you wretched prat!" she snarled when he withdrew his fangs from her flesh to bite at the garden fork lodged in his shoulder, trying to yank it out with his teeth.

He spat it on the ground like it was a fishbone he'd come across in his dinner and her turned cold yellow eyes on her accusingly.

"I warned you," she pointed out spitefully. "You're crushing me. Can you get off?"

He narrowed his eyes on her and snapped in the direction of her face before stepping off her even and leaving her sprawled on the grass, staring up at the stars.

"If I end up a werewolf from this bite, I'm going to tear your throat out the very first time I transform," she warned him quietly, clutching her bleeding arm to her chest and trying to catch her breath after he'd winded her in the fall.

He snarled from beyond her and Hermione felt the shift in the air as he morphed from wolf to man, the magic shimmering over her senses like humidity and making her shudder.

"Get up," he growled angrily without offering to assist her.

The creak of the hinges on the backdoor and he let himself inside suggested he had no plans of helping her up and Hermione scowled to think what he might be up to, entering her house.

"Get out of my house!" she growled, rolling to her hands and knees and pushing to her feet despite the blood pouring from the bites he'd given her.

"Eat me, girly," he growled as he padded barefoot and naked across her kitchen and up the stairs.

"Don't go up there!" she cried, hurrying after him as she let herself into the kitchen behind him.

"Shower's up here," he said without stopping. "Don't reckon your human nose will appreciate the scent of an unbathed werewolf after seven months a wolf."

Hermione recoiled at the very idea, stopping on the stairs and not about to follow him if he hadn't bathed in that long. She'd just as soon donate a bit of hot water and soap to keep from offending her poor olfactory senses if it'd really been that long.

Turning right back around, Hermione marched back to the sink and ran the water to wash out the bite he'd given her, drying it off with the dishtowel and scowling at the blood staining the fabric. She was going to need to bandage it.

"Such a vicious twat," she muttered to herself as she doused the wound in disinfectant and slathered it with a healing gel before wrapping it in a thick bandage to stem the bleeding. "Stupid, fucking werewolf. Life is better without you!"

She was certain he could hear her from the upstairs bathroom, but if he said anything in response, she certainly didn't hear it. At a loss of what to do that didn't involve hefting a heavy silver knife with which to stab him, Hermione put the kettle on to boil and dumped some fresh tealeaves into the pot on the sink.

"Merlin, Circe, and Nimue!" she exclaimed a short while later when he came up behind her as she was pouring the water into the pot, frightening the living daylights out of her. "How do you do that?"

He didn't say anything as he pressed up against her back and buried his nose in the nape of her neck, trailing it lightly across her shoulder and pulling aside the neckline of her shirt to expose the bite mark he'd left on her during his last visit.

"You still smell like me," he rasped after a little while when Hermione held perfectly still, not about to startle him with any sudden movements.

"Excuse me?" she asked. "You just jumped me in the yard. Of course, I smell like you."

"Not your clothes, girly," he chuckled, reaching into the cabinet in front of her face and retrieving two teacups as though he already knew the layout of her house without looking.

"My skin?" she guessed. "You just bit me, so that's not surprising."

He reached around her to pour the tea from the pot into the mugs when he determined it'd steeped long enough.

"Your blood," he corrected her quietly, his mouth hovering over the scar on her shoulder where he'd bitten her. "You ain't fucked anyone else while I've been away."

Hermione's mouth dropped open, her cheeks heating rapidly as he stepped back from her and crossed to the fridge for the milk.

"You can smell that?" she asked with her back still to him, not wanting him to see her face when he could probably hear the stutter of her heart.

"Can still smell me all over you, girly," he confirmed. "You ain't touched a man since I've been gone."

Hermione dropped her head forward into her waiting hands, shaking her head.

"I hate you," she told him through her fingers.

"Missed you too, Granger," he laughed, doctoring their cups of tea before putting away the milk and sugar.

He took his into the living room and Hermione shook her head, noting that it was only the sense of him – the power and magic and ferociousness he radiated – that she could feel had left because she didn't hear the pad of his bare feet on her floors.

"I'm going back out to finish my gardening," she told him, not about to take tea with him.

"Mmmhmm," he hummed from the living room as he picked up the remote of her muggle television.

Hermione didn't want to know how he knew how to use one. He didn't follow her when she returned to the garden with her cup of tea. She collected the garden fork on her way down the path, wiping the blood drying upon it onto the leg of her trousers with a shake of her head. The stupid thing hadn't even slowed him down.

She wanted to know why he'd come back. She wanted to know why he'd been gone so long. She wanted to know what he'd ever come at all. But she didn't want to talk to him to get her answers, so for now, she would settle for planting the rest of her cosmos seedlings in the oncoming dark. She stayed out until it grew too dark to continue, the almost-full moon playing hide-and-seek behind the heavy clouds drifting across the sky.

"Smells like rain," Greyback warned from the doorway and Hermione jumped, startled to find him leaning in the doorframe watching her over the rim of his mug. "You won't need to water those in tonight."

"I'm still going to," she told him.

"You'll flood them," he assured her.

"They're seedlings and they'll have transplant shock. They can do with an extra drink. And if it doesn't rain and I don't water them, they'll die."

She crossed to the garden tap and filled her watering can while he watched her.

"It will rain," he promised solemnly.

Hermione knew his werewolf's nose could probably smell the rain on the air – she could almost smell it herself – but she was being stubborn. As such, she poured the water over the seedlings she'd planted until the can was empty before putting it back where it belong and wiping off her garden fork before putting it back in her potting shed. She washed her hands while she was in there, and ran them through her hair.

She didn't want to go back inside. Not with him there.

"Why are you here, Greyback?" she asked when she'd gathered her courage and strode back out of the shed, finding him still leaning in the doorway and looking out over the moors beyond her back fence.

"Going to rain," he shrugged.

"So?" she asked. "It's rained plenty since the last time you were here."

His mouth twitched.

"Been seven months," he frowned at her.

Hermione wasn't sure she liked the way his eyes trailed over her from head to foot.

"So?" she repeated.

"Thought you'd be days off whelping, to be honest," he admitted quietly.

"Excuse me?" she stumbled on her way up the back-path. "Whelping?"

He raised one eyebrow as if to ask if she didn't know what the word meant.

"You thought I'd whelp?" she asked in horror. "That I'd be… Merlin, did you call on me last time hoping to get me pregnant?"

He shrugged his shoulders again.

"Did you?" he wanted to know.

"Do I look pregnant?" she waved her hand to her taut stomach, knowing he'd imagined if she had been, she'd be ready to pop because the gestation for a baby with a lycanthropic parent was seven months instead of nine.

"Did you get rid of it?" he asked in a low voice that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

Hermione shook her head in mute horror to think that he'd come calling last time with the intention of getting her pregnant. Was he insane?

"I was never pregnant," she informed him coldly. "But I can assure you that if I had been not having any intention of having children at this point of my life – and especially not with you – I would have had the problem taken care of."

He growled at her viciously, his top lip curling back from his too-sharp teeth in a threatening display that had Hermione backpedaling away from him and back down the path, deeper into the garden.

"Why you always got to make this hard, girly?" he asked, taking a menacing step after her.

"I'm not doing anything," she argued. "You're the one showing up and barging into my life uninvited, Greyback."

"You think I'm going to stop?" he raised his eyebrows at her.

"That would be nice," she nodded emphatically.

"Never gonna happen, girly," he shook his head.

"Why not?" she asked, still backing away from him, even though she could see the way it awoke the predator that lived inside his skin.

He gave her a patronizing smile.

"You're mine, Granger," he rasped as his eyes brightened to lycan gold in the dark.

Hermione's blood ran cold.

She mutely shook her head, her heart hammering painfully inside her chest.

"I'm not," she denied in a whisper. "I'm not."

"You think I'm wrong?" he raised his eyebrows.

She nodded rapidly.

He smirked, shaking his head.

"Can't be wrong, girly," he admitted. "Got my mark in your skin, don't you?"

"So does everyone else you've ever bitten," she argued.

"Got my scent in your blood, witch," he told her.

"Because I haven't shagged anyone else. I don't want them to see the mark you left…"

"You don't want to touch them because they're not me," he disagreed.

"But I hate you," she said. "I stabbed you."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Any she-wolf worth her salt savages her mate every now and then."

Hermione's mouth opened in mute horror.

"Don't use that word," she shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. "I'm not that. I can't be that."

The breath huffed from her lungs when her back hit the garden fence, preventing her from recoiling any further and she realized he'd hunted her the full length of the garden.

"You're my mate, Hermione," he assured her quietly. "Known it ever since I first smelled you in that forest."

"But…" she whispered hopelessly, trying to think of some reason that he might be wrong. "But I'm not… I… that was years ago."

"Took me a long time to find you again after the Aurors started hunting me. You stay off the radar of most within our world."

"But… you left… you hurt me and you bit me and then you left."

"Can't stay when they come hunting unless you want to get done for harboring a fugitive, baby," he reminded her.

Hermione trembled as he closed in on her, his arms boxing her in as he pressed his hands to the garden fence on either side of her shoulders.

"No one came here," she argued.

"They did," he assured her. "Had to lead them away, far to the North. And I'm a wolf. I'll always roam where I choose."

She was shaking her head.

"I'm not your mate," she insisted quietly, her eyes lowering to his bare chest and the fresh marks on his shoulder where she'd stabbed him with the fork.

"You are," he promised.

"But…"

"There is no 'but', girly," he interrupted. "You're stuck with me."

"But you're awful," she said. "You hurt my friends."

"We were at war."

"You fought with the maniac trying to wipe out people like me," she argued.

"Thought I'd have a better chance of overthrowing the Ministry with him," he shrugged unrepentantly. "Don't care what kind of blood you've got, girly. Going to change it for you, one day soon."

Hermione's head jerked up at the threat.

"You're not infecting me," she insisted. "No. I won't let you. I won't be like you."

"You will," he promised. "But not yet. Not until we've had as many pups as we want."

"I don't want any pups."

He scoffed.

"I mean it," she reiterated. "You're never knotting me again. I couldn't move for three days last time."

He silenced her when his lips claimed hers, evidently not planning to hear any more of her protests.