Chapter One:
Sorry Kid.
Is there a wolf,
A wolf in the park,
A wolf who wakes when the night gets dark?
Is there a wolf in the park?
Is there a wolf,
A wolf who creeps
From his hidden den while the city sleeps?
Is there a wolf in the park?
Is there a wolf?
No one knows,
But I've heard a howl when the full moon glows . . .
Is there a wolf in the park?
~A Wolf in the Park by Richard Edwards
II
It was an entire fortnight before Fenrir spotted the pup again on the edges of Godric's Hollow, loitering in the outer reaches of his periphery. He thinks, idly, that it's his existence that draws her back in, as much as it's her existence that keeps Fenrir there in the dilapidated house. He doubts she's ever met another Werewolf, as he's never met a female capable of the change.
How she exists is anyone's guess, but it was Fenrir Greyback's duty to find the answer.
Their kind my depend on it.
If he could figure out how she had survived the first change, then more females could be bitten or born, and if more females could be bitten or born, Werewolf numbers wouldn't be so bloody low, and if they weren't so low, the Wizarding world couldn't keep its mangy boot on their neck and-
Game Over.
Fenrir needs to know her truth, and the truth of his own was Fenrir should have moved on long ago, packed his meagre bag and hit the proverbial road after a few nights rest. It would have been the smart thing to do. Aurors were still on his back from his last failed attempt at gaining ground in the North, declaring he was causing 'civil unrest' and 'inciting violence' when all he was trying to do was to unite British Werewolves into one cohesive front that couldn't be so easily subjugated by their wand wielding genocidal government.
The House Elves had once renounced their own sovereignty and autonomy a couple of centuries past, and look how well that had ended for them.
Indentured servitude.
Fenrir Greyback should have left, the last thing he should do was to become wrapped up in the return of the Potter child. He should leave-
Fenrir doesn't leave.
Instead he stays in the ruined home of a dead family, perhaps not so fully gone as everyone believed, and he fixes the front door, patches over the hole in the roof, clears out the dust and decay, and he keeps an eye on the forest out back.
He found the pup sitting in the treeline early one morning exactly two weeks after trying to chase down the feral thing, losing her in the woods she had clearly made her home for many years. Nearly two decades, Fenrir suspects.
She was in her wolf form that morning, hunched down underneath a low hanging tree, and it was only seeing the matted fur, lumpy in places with dried dirt and river mud, that he realized the bloody thing didn't have black hair at all.
She was a redhead.
He could see the copper shine powering through the grime in places, tiny patches of sunshine in the muck and the mud.
Fenrir didn't move off the back door stoop, giving the pup all the room it could want.
She'd run again otherwise.
"You're curious, aren't you? Ain't never scented anything like yourself before, I bet."
And Fenrir does bet. If any other Werewolf had come stumbling across this sorrowful sight, the girl wouldn't still be in the woods. She might have been dead of course, Witches and Wizards loved a good wolf head for their pikes and a female one's would have fetched a pretty price, or worse, she was a girl and there were some downright nasty Mutts out there, or better off depending on the Werewolf who found her, but definitely not left in the woods for Fenrir Greyback to stumble across.
Fenrir watches as she snuffled the ground, snorting in the snow and his own scent blowing in the wind.
Yeah, he thought. She was curious alright.
Curious and, Fenrir's gaze drifted up to the pale light of the morning sun hidden behind thick grey clouds, unusual.
She didn't need a full moon to turn, and her wolf form wasn't as… Mutated as Fenrir's own, as a typical Wizarding Werewolf was. There was no half-pressed snout or awkwardly hanging limbs or lumbering two-feet gate. She looked like any other wolf, small definitely, dirty too, a bag of fur and bones really, but like those glossy pictures from a Nature magazine about preserves and parks he had seen littering Muggle shops.
Fenrir Greyback didn't need the full moon for a shift anymore either, but that had taken him decades to master.
Then again, this pup likely had a lot of time to master shifting herself if, as he guesses, she was the Potter child, had somehow shifted when Voldemort had attacked eighteen years ago, possibly how she had survived the killing curse that had stolen her parents, and had been in these woods ever since.
Fenrir dumps the roast chicken on the patio, stood, and headed back into the house.
Two hours later, when he went to check on the plate, it was empty and the pup was gone from beneath the tree.
III
"Feeling brave today, are we?"
The snow was beginning to melt now, sloshing off hills and rises and into the ground in pools of heavy clay and sleet, and the first blooms of spring were just beginning to bud on the berry bushes by the church.
Fenrir Greyback, cleaning his clothes in a bucket out back, untrusting of the Muggle metal contraption in the kitchen, sat on the stone steps, hands sudsy and stalling.
The pup, naked and, mostly, in human skin to bask in the spring sunshine unhindered, had come up from the treeline that afternoon, crouched on all fours, incapable of walking on her two feet alone Fenrir believed from what he had seen so far, to squat not ten feet away by the bird bath, now upright and fixed, watching him cautiously.
The smear of blood across her mouth and the black feathers caught in her hair told him she had a good morn hunting done herself. Yet, most of the dirt from her pale skin was gone, leaving the copper in her dreadlocks to shine through in streaks, though she was by no means clean.
"I'm guessing the ponds have unfrozen and you've finally had a wash?"
The pup blinked at him, head cocked, still cautiously watching his hands scrubbing at the sopping clothes in the bucket.
Magic would have been easier; a flick of a spell and the clothes would have been sparkling clean… but magic wouldn't have caught the pups attention so aptly.
And it wouldn't have goaded her up the garden for a closer look, and afforded Fenrir the same opportunity to do to her.
"You still bloody reek, girly… And you don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?"
As if to highlight his point, the pup's nose sniffled, and she must have got a good whiff of the scented soap he was using on the clothes because she, rather dramatically, began sneering, shaking her head with a huffing noise as if trying to dislodge the smell by brute force alone.
Not a fan of lemons, then.
"I overheard the neighbour leaving out nibbles for local foxes in her backyard yesterday. Ain't no bloody foxes around here, though, is there? I'd smell them. That how you've been getting fed? Ain't enough game in those woods of yours to keep you a year let alone twenty. Convinced the locals you're a little fox and been gobbling up the goodies when they're not looking? Rooting through the neighbourhood bins at night? Chomping up the dog-food left at doorsteps? I think I spotted a missing cat poster just down the road, that your work?"
Wringing out the last of the water from his shirt, Fenrir stood, lifted the bucket with one hand, and regarded the pup underneath his keen amber eye.
"What the fuck am I meant to do with you, aye?"
The pup doesn't answer him, because of course she bloody well doesn't, instead she's lost interest, realizing, with the bucket in hand and the wet clothes thrown over his shoulder, the show was clearly over, and she was already bounding back for her woods.
Fenrir sighed deeply.
He was walking a very, very thin line.
He shouldn't care what the hell happened to the pup beyond what her existence could tell him. He shouldn't care that she was far too thin, telling of a rough winter weathered alone in a rather small hunting ground. He shouldn't care that the chit was naked, dipping into bins and eating dog food put out by old biddies, and house cats that crossed her path.
Fenrir Greyback shouldn't care about any of that.
None of it would tell him how she had survived the shift, only that the change had left her hardier than most.
Nevertheless, Fenrir tells himself he doesn't care a lick, tells himself he's got to keep the kid alive until he can figure out how she lives, and then he goes and leaves out a hulking plate of cured ham, sausages, bacon and raw steak... And a pile of soft blankets.
He tells himself he doesn't care.
He almost believes it.
IV
The pup freaks out the moment she sees a wand. She'd been eating the sausages, apparently a favourite by the speed they disappeared with, Fenrir had left underneath the kitchen window out back, content with her rumbles to hoover in the meat and the fat and the herbs, and Fenrir had been far out back by the fence fixing the broken off panel.
He'd reached for his wand to stick the wood in place-
The growl that came shattering through the air was black, mutilated, a terrifying roar of rage and fear, the noise an animal gave when it was dying and it had no other option left but to fight till the bloody end.
Fenrir had snapped around but-
But his wand had flew out his hand with a supernatural, unseen force, right to the pup who, between shifted claws, bit the wood in half with a rather vicious chomp, and bolted for the woods on all fours without a backward glance.
"Oi! My fucking wand!"
Yet, it was too late, the wand was in pieces on the floor, the pup was gone in her woods, and Fenrir was left confused and startled by the still broken fence.
At least he knew the pup did know magic now, taking the wand as she had.
She was definitely a Witch.
A Witch terrified of wands.
A Witch terrified of wands who hadn't had a single magic lesson in her life, and had still pulled off a nonverbal and wandless Accio.
Impressive.
Impressive and worrying.
Later, however, when Fenrir had time to fix his wand and get over his momentary annoyance, he understood what had happened. The last time the pup had seen a wand, and maybe a Wizard, had been the night her parents had died, the night she'd been left orphaned, the night she had ended up in those woods and became the wolf lost in a human face she was now.
More beast than man.
Fenrir doesn't know how much she remembered of that night, can't even begin to imagine what thoughts crossed her mind if any, how much humanity was left in that tiny skull of hers, but she must have remembered at least something of that night to feel fear at the sight of his wand.
Fenrir understands, and most of all, he stays.
He still tells himself he doesn't care. It's more of a gimmick now. An inside joke no one is laughing at.
V
The pup refuses to come inside. It took her a while to come back around after the wand incident, and Fenrir had no hope of tracking her in the woods she had spent nearly two decades memorizing. It took her even longer still to get comfortable enough again to get close, but eventually she does.
Eventually.
Fenrir, for his part, makes sure to keep the wand hidden, and to make his movements deliberate and slow, and to take it one step at a time.
She starts coming up the back garden patio, but refuses to come near the door. No matter what Fenrir tries, trails of chicken nuggets towards the entryway, her beloved sausages, waiting until she showed her face, human or wolf, and trailing inside to see if she'd follow, trying to gesture inside, the pup refused to step foot through the door frame no matter how bright or warm Fenrir made the entrance look.
"Not a fan of roofs and walls, huh? Can't say I blame you, don't much like 'em myself, either."
She was in wolf form today, spread out flat on her belly against the damp stone slabs from a midnight drizzle, muzzle resting on her front paws, green eyes staring deep at him.
She was an observant little thing.
Bite-y too, from that time Fenrir had pushed his luck and went to pat her head only to end up with two broken fingers and an impressive scar on his palm, and another two week wait before the pup showed her fur in the garden again.
Fenrir's been using his own time wisely.
"I've been looking into your mother's family."
The ears above her head prick up, but Fenrir thinks its just the cadence of his voice that has caught their hook.
"Potter's don't have a drop of Werewolf blood in 'em. Got me thinking where the hell something like you could come from. You're not infected, not like me, and you're a little more wolfish than most. Got me looking sideways in your tree, right?"
On the pup keeps watching, and Fenrir slips his hand into his robe pockets.
"Your mum wasn't as Muggle as she was made out to be. Did some digging, and found out your grandma had a little affair on the side. He stuck around long enough to stick his name on your mother's birth certificate, and to see his new child was a girl, and then dipped when he realized she wouldn't turn. And she didn't, Lily Evans was no Werewolf, but she had the blood… The blood you've somehow tapped into."
Dragging his hand out of the pocket, the syringe glimmered in the morning light. The pup didn't jolt or bolt. She hadn't seen one of these before.
Good.
Good.
"You see pup, I need to know how you are what you are, and what you are is hidden somewhere in that family of yours. I have a name, you have the answers, so how about me and you go on a little road trip?"
There was silence before Fenrir leapt. The syringe sank into the back of the pup's neck before she could scrabble to a stand, the plunger down before she could shirk him off, and she was down and out cold before she made it lumbering and jerking for the tree line, bones snapping and fur peeling back to human form in her sedated slumber.
"Sorry kid. Trust me, this is for the best. You stay here any longer, and some Muggle will eventually spot you, and then you'll have the town out with pitchforks... Or worse, a Wizard will get his hands on you, and then you'll wish for the hate mob. No. This is for the best. Let's get you cleaned up before I get you in the cage. It's going to be a long ride."
Next Chapter Preview:
It could have been a passer-by, Jeremy supposed. Those who drove through Bear Valley to a bigger, fluorescent lit city often saw the woods comprising the Stonehaven land and would come toddling up to his door to ask if they could hike through his property. Jeremy always made sure to keep a polite smile on his face when he let them down gently. Generally an excuse of a blown sewage pipe was enough to steer them away from the grounds.
He hoped the same excuse would work for today.
The front door eased open just as a large truck came stalling on the asphalt of his drive, the engine cutting of with a sputtering hum. It was a substantial truck, dark with a hooded cabby and an open back-
An open back that had a sizable metal crate stashed in its bed, fashioned from heavy sheet alloys, the kind without bars or windows but a thick door with several locks on its face.
The sort of enclosure used to carry large beasts that often proved unpredictable.
Jeremy made it down the stone steps of his veranda before the truck door flung open and the driver came out into the midday sun, and he halted a few feet away when he got a good peek at their visitor.
The man was large, at least seven foot and as broad as he was tall, big enough to give Clay, the largest wolf in their Pack, a good run for his money. His well-worn clothes that had seen better days doing nothing to hide his extraordinary edge. He had long hair, Jeremy noted, braided in places, left loose in others, waves of chestnut streaked with grey, a splattering of it weaving silver thread through his trimmed beard, and a vicious looking scowl hooding his amber eyes.
The man reminded Jeremy of what Mortals believed Werewolves were, the pictures in the story books of men lurking in woods hunting girls in red hoods. Big, brutish, and bloody.
This man fit the caricature well.
Jeremy sniffed inconspicuously, and had his suspicions confirmed immediately.
Oak, smoke, the heavy smell of rain about to fall, and-
Wolf.
Jeremy's polite smile fell from his face, just as a grin began spreading on the man's own as the gargantuan Werewolf slammed the cab door shut behind him, speaking across the distance.
"You Jeremy Danvers?"
A.N: I have a terrible thing for big, brutish, old bastards having a soft spot for small feral things. I can't help it, and I won't apologize for it lol. On that note, I have a few points for this story just to clear up, just notes of this AU that are important to keep in mind and that will be explored in the fic. Firstly, Fenrir was not loyal to the Dark Lord during the First Wizarding War. Don't get me wrong, he was involved, he's not a good guy, but he wasn't a Death Eater. He was more just out there for himself, using the civil unrest as cover for his own machinations, which is mainly Werewolf Dominion, and exactly what he was up to during the First War will be explored in this fic later as we go on. Secondly, Elena Michaels didn't get turned. She never went to Clayton's University, and therefore never met the Werewolf to be bitten in the first place. She is in this fic much, much, much later, but she's human... For now ;).
Lastly, and most importantly I think, I would also like to quickly say that there will be no romance until Hemlock is fully cognizant, aware, and out of the completely feral behaviour/mindset she's currently in. Having romance before that point just feels a little icky to me, as there would be a clear power imbalance in any relationship formed, and I doubt anything remotely healthy would stem from such circumstances, and we ain't about that in this fic sis lol.
Once again, thank you to my Beta GoWithTheFlo20, you rock!
And an even bigger thank you to all of you who have taken the time out to read this fic. I hope you are enjoying it and are looking forward to the next chapter. If you have a spare moment, don't forget to drop a review, and I will, fingers crossed, see you all soon! Until then, stay beautiful ~AlwaysEatTheRude21