[A/N: Happy New Year! I think it's time to get back to posting this story now that I have enough built up (probably) to see me through finishing it. Thank you to Calamity Owl, Darsynia, GaeilgeRua, GenericName404, and Liquid-Water for beta-reading this chapter! To any new readers that have stumbled across this chapter for the first time: this story is AU AF and I strongly recommend starting with the first chapter.]


Chapter 3: Trapped in an Unfamiliar House with Half-Naked Men

"Well, bollocks," Harry thought as he watched Hermione perform a textbook-perfect Levitation Charm on her unsuspecting ballpoint pen. "I'll have to Obliviate–"

The pen floated gently into the air.

"What the actual f–"

The TV screen exploded, peppering the room and Hermione with little shards of glass and cathode ray tube. Harry barely noticed, though, because of the wave of magic washing over him, over the whole room, and probably over the whole damned building.

Someone, somehow, had warded her. Some bastard wanted to know if Hermione ever cast a spell and hooked a Merlin-damned beacon into her core. Whoever it was, they were probably on their way right now, and a part of Harry desperately wanted to stick around, meet the person, and do some truly horrific things to them in the name of "self-defence." The better part of him knew that would involve putting an innocent woman in the crossfire, though, and nothing was worth that.

She was screaming now, more in terror than pain from the glass shards, and looking at the wand like she was holding a snake that would bite her if she let it go and strangle her if she didn't. She barely resisted when he plucked the wand from her hand, and only stopped screaming when he pulled her into a tight embrace with his free hand.

"I'm sorry," was all he could think of to say, and that was truly inadequate for what he was about to do to her.

Hermione Granger had her first side-along apparition while drunk as a judge, and as soon as they arrived at their destination, she threw up all over Harry's shoes and the floor beneath them.


Hermione was so desperate to stop the world from spinning around her that she didn't even open her eyes when she bent over to vomit. How could being drunk be this bad? She'd never even read anything about it being like this, and she'd read more descriptions of drunkenness than she could count. It was practically all the Angry Young Men ever wrote about, for crying out loud!

Between emptying her stomach and Harry's comforting embrace, the spinning in her head quickly subsided to a manageable level and she risked opening her eyes. Two things immediately jumped out at her. First, the wooden floor was no longer light-colored, but ancient walnut so dark it was almost black. Second, it was completely devoid of vomit.

While Hermione would have been the first to admit she was still quite drunk, she was equally certain that inebriation could in no way supersede the laws of nature. "Where are we?" she croaked out.

"We're safe now," Harry said soothingly as he gently lowered them both to their knees. "Please trust me. You're safe here."

"But…my pen…my television…" She ran her hands over the floorboards with drunken gentleness. "My floor…"

Pounding footsteps and shouts of, "Harry, what's wrong?" announced the arrival of new parties. Hermione turned to greet them and promptly fell back on her arse. Not so much because of the alcohol this time, but because she was clearly no longer in her apartment. The dark wooden walls of what looked like a foyer rose up around her, decorated with the heads of animals she didn't recognize and sputtering gas lamps that cast a hesitant, flickering light over the scene.

The two men were both clad only in boxers, but otherwise built very differently. One was a tall man with light brown hair that seemed to have gone prematurely grey compared to his relatively young age, wiry of build, and was covered in scars of various shapes and sizes. Another man would have looked terrifying or horrifying, but the genuine concern in his kind brown eyes didn't seem like something she could ever fear. The other man was similarly tall, both more muscular and with more of a gut, and long, wild black hair streaked with grey falling to his shoulders. It was sort of like she imagined the body of an aging rock star would look. His face was harder and more haunted, as if he'd awoken from a nightmare into something he feared was a different one.

Both carried those little sticks like Harry had. Some part of her analytical mind was screaming to her about that, but the alcohol still coursing through her brain was muddling whatever her analytical side was worried about. It definitely had something to do with those sticks, though. Seriously, sticks?

She shook her head and tried to focus as Harry spoke. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I had to hide her and this was the only place I could think of."

"Bloody hell, Harry," Scarred Man said, "her magic is shining like Merlin's own beacon. What happened to her?"

Harry made the universal "shut up shut up shut up!" gesture, a horizontal hand back and forth rapidly across his throat, which did nothing to lessen Hermione's worries. Did he knock her out and take her here to kill her?

No. Even drunk, she knew there was no world in which Harry would hurt her like that. But how did she get here?

Harry took a deep breath. "This is my friend Hermione Granger, a postgraduate student at University College London." He was speaking slowly and emphasising those words for some reason.

Old Rock Star raised his eyebrows. "You mean she's a mug–"

"That's what I thought," Harry said, cutting the other man off. "Then she stole my disillusioned backup wand and cast a Levitation Charm. That set off some sort of ward on her core and turned her into the beacon you're seeing now."

"Merlin!" Scarred Man said. "There are at least four impossible things in that sentence."

"Not to mention incomprehensible," Hermione muttered.

They all stared at her.

"I said that out loud, didn't I?" she asked.

Old Rock Star laughed, an odd, barking sound. "I like her!" He paused and his gaze turned shrewd. "How drunk are the two of you?"

Harry blushed. "I was a bit, but I sobered up damn fast when I realised I had to get her out of there. The wine hit her a lot harder."

"Hey!" Hermione said instinctively.

They all looked at her.

She sighed. "Fine, you're right, I'm a lightweight."

Old Rock Star gave Harry a thumbs-up. "Nice going, Pup! A cheap date!"

Hermione felt a blush rising to her cheeks as Harry glared at him. Scarred Man also shot him a glare and smacked him on the back of the head for good measure. "Just get the poor girl a sobering draught," he said.

"Fine," Old Rock Star said and disappeared off to presumably make some coffee or something.

Scarred Man turned back to Hermione. "I'm sorry about my husband," he said. "He's an idiot."

"I heard that!" Old Rock Star shouted from around the corner.

"I know!" Scarred Man shouted back. "Anyway, welcome to our home, my dear. My name is Remus Lupin, and the overgrown man-child coming back with your potion is Sirius Black. I apologise for greeting you undressed like this, but we weren't expecting visitors."

"It's alright," Hermione said. "I didn't mean to break into your home in the middle of the night. In fact, now that I mention it, I don't even know how I broke into your home. Shouldn't I know that? It seems important."

"It's a long story," Remus said.

"And you're definitely going to need that sobering draught for it," Harry added as Sirius returned. Instead of a coffee cup, though, he had only a slim vial of glass with an iridescent liquid swirling inside.

"Here you go, kiddo," Sirius said. "This'll make you feel better. Well, except for your throat. It burns like a bitch going down."

She stared at it sceptically instead of accepting it. "So why is this better than coffee? Coffee helps sober you up, too, and it doesn't have side effects like that. Well, it would mess up my sleep, I guess, but that's shot now, anyway, so I don't care. And the jitters, but I think being jittery is perfectly reasonable for someone trapped in an unfamiliar house with half-naked men, don't you?"

Sirius grinned at her. "Oh, we are so getting her drunk again. This is fun."

Harry sighed. "Damnit, Pads, you're not helping." He took the vial and handed it to Hermione. "Please take this. I need you back to one hundred percent because, while you're in no danger here, you are in danger and we can protect you better if you're sober."

"Fine." She stared at the vial. "Even though I know I'm going to regret this."

She threw it back, trying to swallow it all before the burning sensation Sirius described set in. She mostly succeeded, though she did cough a few times after she got it down. What little she could taste beyond the burning on her tongue was a disturbing combination of motor oil, lavender, and slug. "Ugh." She shivered. "That was awful."

A tingly sensation began in her stomach and spread rapidly through her limbs. Remarkably, she felt the alcoholic cloud lift away from her brain. As soon as it did so, the analytical part of her mind started screaming, "The sticks, you idiot, they're magic wa–"

"There you go." Sirius plucked the vial out of her unresisting fingers. "You'll be right as rain in a moment. Creature!"

A goblin popped into being directly in front of her. "Unusually sober Master called creature?" it said in a raspy voice.

"Please dispose of this and buy half a dozen more tomorrow morning." Sirius handed it the vial. "We're running low."

The creature nodded and popped away again.

Harry and Remus simultaneously said, "Damn it, Sirius."

Hermione glared at Harry and could practically feel her heart shrivel up in her chest. "That was a hallucinogen, wasn't it? Very funny. Give the drunk girl a hallucinogen and watch her make a fool of herself. That's just cruel, Harry. I trusted–"

The words died on her lips as he turned back to face her. There was no mirth in his gorgeous green eyes, just hurt and sorrow. "I'm sorry," he said, "but that wasn't a hallucinogen. You're stone cold sober right now."

Horrifyingly, her body told her he was right. She felt completely, instantaneously, impossibly sober. "But he gave that creature the vial and it appeared and disappeared," Hermione said, lamely attempting to reconcile her senses to reality.

"Yes, he did," Harry said, "because he's an absolute prat sometimes."

"I'm sorry," Sirius said. "I genuinely wasn't trying to mess with you there, Hermione. I'm just so used to asking Kreacher—that's his name, Kreacher with a 'k'—for help that I did so automatically. I forgot that you…wouldn't be used to that."

"Harry…" she said tentatively, "what's going on?"

He rose to his feet and helped her up. "It's a long story. Come on, let's sit somewhere more comfortable and we'll explain as much as we can."

"Alright," she said, and allowed him to lead her down the entrance hallway and into a large, dreary old dining room. Ornate old wallpaper covered the walls and the table could easily seat twenty people, and at the far end of the table was a large mahogany dresser that seemed to serve as storage for china and linens.

Harry led her to a seat near the head of the table and pulled a chair out for her. She sat, somehow comforted by his manners amid the insanity of the evening.

"Sirius, the spiders haven't come back, have they?" he asked as the two men followed them in. Somehow, they were now wearing bathrobes. Hermione had no idea where those had come from, but she didn't know where the goblin-thing had come from, either.

Then her brain processed the rest of what he'd asked and she immediately checked under the table in fright. There was nothing unexpected there.

"It's alright," Sirius said gently. He seemed genuinely apologetic about frightening her. "They tried last month, but Remus and I killed some and chased off the rest, and Kreacher disposed of the mound of corpses."

"Oh, good," Harry said.

Hermione was not convinced the situation Sirius had described was in any way "good," but she decided to focus on more pressing matters. "Harry, what's going on?" she asked. "Why am I here? How am I here? What did I drink? What was that…Kreacher? Why do you all have–"

He put his hand over hers. "I know you have a million questions," he said, "and I know Remus and Sirius do, too. Please let me explain this systematically and I think I'll be able to answer most of them."

She nodded.

"OK." He took a deep breath. "Hermione, I've been lying to you about something since the day we met, and my only excuse is that it was literally against the law for me to tell you the truth. You were right about everything. In the late 1600s, a concerted, international effort was made to vanish an entire field of human knowledge, and it succeeded. That you found the traces of it you did is simply astounding."

She stared at him, fury pooling in the pit of her stomach. "You knew. I was right this whole time and you knew. You've just sat there as I poured my heart out to you about how my advisor thinks I'm insane and my parents think I'm throwing my career away and you knew!"

"I couldn't tell you!" Harry said. "I would have gone to prison!"

"He's telling the truth," Remus said. "Men have gone to prison for life for breaking the Statute of Secrecy by revealing the existence of magic."

"What?" Hermione heard the pitch of her voicing rising into outrage and couldn't find it in herself to care. "How could anyone outlaw knowledge?"

"Because of what it's knowledge of," Harry said. "It's the knowledge of magic, and magic is horrifying."

"Harry!" Sirius said sharply. "Don't scare the poor kid off."

Harry glared right back at the man. "Try being on the receiving end of all three Unforgivable Curses and telling me magic isn't horrifying. It's wonderful, sure, but it's bloody horrifying at the same time."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked.

"Imagine someone placing you under their control," Harry said. "They could make you do anything: sign a contract, kill your parents, or jump out a window, and no one could tell that you were under such control. Or another spell that instantly kills anyone it touches by severing their soul from their body. Or a spell that tortures you with literally the worst pain your body can feel. How would you feel knowing there are people out there who can do those things to you…or your head of state? Could you ever trust them?"

She stared at him. "That really is horrifying."

"That's why the Statute of Secrecy exists. Witches and Wizards of that time period were worried they were on a collision course with non-magical, or muggle, society. They were afraid magical/mundane war was inevitable, with the loser being exterminated and the winner forced into committing monstrosities to survive. Instead, they chose to separate, and used complex magic in the late 1600s to hide knowledge of themselves from the rest of the world. Anything printed that specifically mentioned magic was either destroyed or had pages 'coincidentally' destroyed by fire, floods, bugs, or toddler-related accidents."

"Magic can do that?" Hermione asked.

"Yes," Remus said. "In fact, this house itself is protected with something similar, though much less complex, called a Fidelius Charm. If you aren't formally told by Sirius that the house is at 12 Grimmauld Place, you would never be able to find it. You could try to paint a red stripe starting on 11 Grimmauld Place all the way through to 13, and you would simply forget to paint where 12 is and you'd never notice the difference."

"That's…I don't even know what that is," she said. "I never imagined magic could do something like that."

"It's an amazing bit of magic," Remus agreed. "Do you understand now why Harry couldn't tell you the truth, though?"

She locked stares with him. "My life was a slow-motion disaster, and Harry was standing there letting it happen."

Harry slumped next to her and released her hand, which she forgot he'd been holding.

"He hadn't gotten to the prison yet," Sirius said. His voice was hollow. "If he'd told you, he would have been sent to an island in the North Sea called Azkaban. You get one bowl of thin soup per day there and, every few months, a new rag to wear. You wouldn't care, though, because it's guarded by wraiths called 'Dementors' that suck away your happy memories until all you have in your head is your pain and misery, and you scream your throat raw every night because the noise is the only thing you have to remind yourself that you're not yet in hell."

Hermione couldn't find her voice for a moment, and when she did, all she could say was, "Good God!"

Remus pulled Sirius into a quick hug. "It's alright, Pads. You're out, and neither you nor the Pup are ever going to see one of those damn things ever again."

She grabbed Harry's hand again and he jolted upright at her touch. "You've seen one of those?"

"A few times," he sighed. "Sirius knows about Azkaban because he was wrongly accused of sending the guy who killed my parents and tried to kill me when I was a baby. The Minister of Magic at the time didn't want to admit there'd been a huge judicial cock-up, and his solution was to send a Dementor after the real betrayer and Sirius. The spell to stop them is incredibly difficult, and he'd lured away the professors in the school who could cast it by calling an impromptu meeting. He didn't realise my friends and I were guarding the room they had Peter and Sirius unconscious and locked in."

Hermione's mouth had gone dry. "How did you all survive?"

"Because Remus taught me to cast it." He raised his stick…no, his magic wand, closed his eyes, and said, "Expecto Patronum."

A silvery mist shot out of his wand and coalesced into an ethereal stag that stood in mid-air about six feet off the ground. It glowed so brightly that it was hard to watch, but it was so beautiful, so peaceful, that she couldn't tear her eyes away anyway. The stag trotted around the little group before coming up to Hermione and nuzzling her cheek. She didn't even consider flinching from it, and its touch was warm and calming. Somehow, its simple existence made her entire life better, and when it finally evanesced, it left her with feelings of profound serenity and hope.

When her focus returned to the room around her, she found Sirius and Remus crying silent tears and Harry smiling sadly.

"Prongs," Sirius whispered.

Remus held Sirius's hand tightly. "Harry's Patronus is remarkable in many ways," Remus said. "Very few wizards can cast one, and I've never heard of one who could do so at thirteen. It's also the animagus form of his father, who was our best friend."

"That's amazing, Harry," she said. "But what's an animagus?"

Harry's smile flipped from "sad" to "amused." "Go ahead, Sirius," he said. "You know you want to."

"He always does," Remus said as a suddenly smiling Sirius rose from his chair.

"Ms. Granger," Sirius said with a bow, "please allow me to introduce Padfoot."

The large man seemed to spin into himself and back out into something else–good God a giant dog.

A giant dog, with broadly the same build as an Irish wolfhound but bulkier, taller, and with wilder eyes stared at her from across the table, panting happily. Before she could think of anything coherent to say, the dog crawled under the table to her, stuck its head into her hand, and licked it. Instinctively, she petted it, and it panted happily, sniffed her crotch, and pushed itself backwards under the table. A moment later, Sirius was sitting back in his chair in front of her.

"It doesn't smell like you and Hermione have gotten up to anything naughty yet," Sirius said. "You need to work on that. I need grand-godchildren to spoil at some point."

Hermione's jaw dropped as Remus's guffaws echoed around the room. Harry blushed bright red and waved his wand at Sirius in a complex pattern, and a white jet of light lanced out from Harry's wand and froze Sirius in place. Only his eyes moved, blinking annoyedly at his godson.

"I'll unbind him in a minute if he promises to behave," Harry said.

"You realise he can't talk while he's bound," Remus said drily.

Harry didn't look remotely apologetic. "Oh, silly me."

"Anyway," Hermione said in an attempt to drag the conversation toward productive topics and away from reproductive topics, "that was incredible. So you can turn into animals?"

"No, that's actually a very rare skill," Remus said. "I was lucky enough to have friends in high school who were crazy enough to undergo a dangerous ritual to develop the skill in order to help me. You see, my dear, I'm a werewolf, and only animals could safely stay with me on the night of the full moon."

Hermione raised her eyebrows. "You mean not only does magic exist, but werewolves do, too? Are you serious?"

Remus and Harry stared at each other for a moment and burst out laughing. Sirius's blinking grew rapid, almost frantic.

She glared at them. "So you were just taking the mickey with the werewolf thing?"

"No, not at all," Remus said. "I was being entirely serious."

"Completely," Harry added, forcing down his laughter. "He could not have been more serious."

"Then what was so…wait, did I just unwittingly say Sirius's favourite straight line?"

Harry and Remus started laughing again, heedless of Sirius's glare.

"Oh, Lord," Hermione said. "You're all mentally children, aren't you?"

"That's a fair cop for Remus and me," Harry said, "but he's very Sirius."

Hemione hit him hard on the arm.

While Harry rubbed his arm, Remus smiled and continued, "Anyway, yes, I am a werewolf. There are some nasty magical creatures running around the country, one of which attacked me when I was a boy. Many werewolves just want to be allowed to live normal lives, but some of us have chosen to embrace a violent path and spread the curse as a way of dominating others. I make it my life's work to ensure those violent ones meet a fitting end, and I'm fortunate enough to have a family to help me with those efforts."

"In a way," Harry said, "that's why you and I met, but that's a story for another time. Right now, we should probably explain more about what happened to you."

"And free Sirius," Remus added.

"And free Sirius." Harry sighed and waved his wand at Sirius, who immediately sprang to life again.

"Damn it, Harry, she handed me that straight line on a platter and I couldn't take it!" he said. "How could you do that to me?"

"Pretty damn easily," Harry said. "You're getting slow, Old Dog."

"And you're getting cocky, Young Pup," Sirius said.

"You two settle this later," Remus said. "We have a guest who's probably still incredibly confused."

"Guilty," Hermione admitted.

"Sorry," Harry said. "To you, anyway. Sirius totally deserved that. So, you've now had a roundabout and probably thoroughly confusing introduction to the Magical World. How does that relate to you? Frankly, I'm not entirely sure, and that's one of the reasons I brought you here. You're a witch, Hermione, just like we're wizards, but someone should have contacted you on or around your tenth birthday to tell you that and arrange for you to attend the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry just like the three of us did. However, I know they haven't because you're a witch with non-magical parents, and there hasn't been one of those found in the UK for two decades."