Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any of its characters. Just borrowing them for a story and my own imagination.

Chapter 8

Hermione's eyes fluttered open, finding herself surrounded by concerned faces—Harry, Sirius, and Remus hovered close, their expressions etched with worry. She was in her room, and she was alarmed to realise that her clock showed midday. Had she been unconscious for so long?

"Hermione," Harry said urgently, gripping her arm as she tried to sit up. "Are you okay? You just…passed out, and we couldn't wake you."

Her cheeks flushed bright red, embarrassed about the weakness she displayed, but she steadied her breath.

"I think I'm fine. It was… I had another dream. Only, now I'm pretty sure that it wasn't just a dream. It felt real. Not a vision, but maybe…maybe a memory." She rubbed her temple, trying to piece together the fragmented vision.

"I saw the man again, the same one. He's a werewolf, I'm sure of it. I don't know how I know, but I do. But more importantly, he had this really familiar mark on his back. I know it too, from somewhere. I just can't place where."

Sirius and Harry exchanged a glance, clearly worried, but it was Remus who knelt down beside her, his gaze sharp and searching.

"Can you describe the mark? If it's familiar to you, maybe we've seen it too?"

Hermione hesitated, then pulled a scrap of parchment from her bedside table and began sketching. Her hands trembled slightly, but the shape took form—curving lines that twisted into jagged edges, a swirling outline that felt both chaotic and deliberate. The image from her dream pressed insistently against her thoughts, guiding her hand. She paused to examine it, tilting her head as the pattern deepened in detail, yet still remained elusive. She handed it to Harry.

His brow furrowed as he studied it. Then his head snapped up. "Hermione, this is your birthmark."

Her stomach dropped. "What? No, that's impossible. I've never seen it, not in person, but I know what other people have told me about it. My birthmark looks like a wolf howling at the moon."

Harry didn't say anything else, merely placing the image she had drawn on the sheet across her legs and then rotating it until the realization struck her—a wolf, mid-howl, its silhouette etched against the arc of what could only be the full moon. Her breath caught as the image seemed to come alive on the page, whispering secrets she couldn't yet understand.

"Let me see," Sirius insisted, Remus' grim face beside him showing that he wanted to see it too.

Hermione hesitated, then turned, pulling her hair aside to expose the nape of her neck. Sirius leaned in, then stepped back with a sharp intake of breath.

"It's identical," he said grimly.

Remus hesitated, then reached out. "May I?"

She nodded, her breath catching as his cold fingers brushed against the mark.

Then the world shifted again.

Hermione was no longer in the room with the men. Instead, she was staring up at the man from her dream—or memory. He loomed tall above her, his eyes bright and filled with warmth.

"My sweet baby. I swear to protect all that is you with all that is me until the very moment in which I breathe my last breath," he said, his deep voice soft, yet resonating loudly throughout her head. He smiled her with so much emotion, Hermione knew that he loved her and truly meant the vow he made. The men then pulled out a beautiful, ornate silver dagger and used it to make a shallow cut on the palm of his right hand, hissing sharply as he did so. Then he moved his bleeding hand to the back of her neck, pressing firmly against her nape.

A rush of heat and magic surged through her body as he murmured something in a language she didn't understand. Their connection solidified in an instant, as though their very beings were bound together, and Hermione's felt what she knew to be her birthmark forming on her skin where he had touched her.

Hermione jolted back into the present with a gasp, clutching her chest.

"Mia!" Harry's terrified shout snapped her attention to the men still in the room with her.

"It's not a birthmark. The man, he did this. He vowed to protect me and marked me with his blood. We're bound together, for life."

Remus frowned. "Bound? As in…"

"I'm not sure, but I don't think he means me any harm. I think…I could feel his love for me. Clearly, I was important to him. But why can't I remember?"

Sirius knelt beside her again. "Kitten, we need answers. These visions, memories, whatever they are, they're starting to escalate. We need to figure out why. And I have a suggestion for how we could do that."

Hermione looked up at Sirius, worried about the implications but knowing she could trust him to not hurt her. She nodded at him to continue.

"I could use Legilimency to see what's happening in your mind. My wonderful mother - may her soul never find any peace - taught us Occlumency as part of our 'basic education', and made Regulus and I practise on each other. So I can try and look into your head a little and see if I can't find something. Maybe it'll give us a clue as to why these feel like memories and not visions. And if they are real memories, why you don't remember them."

Remus spoke up then.

"I think that would be good idea. It might be the easiest way to get at least some real sense of what on earth is happening here."

Hermione looked to Harry for his thoughts. While his face was tight with tension, he gave a short determined nod, telling her to go ahead.

"Alright kitten, just look straight into my eyes. I promise to be gentle."

Sirius sat close to her, making direct eye contact that made her squirm a little with discomfort, but she gritted her teeth and forced herself to relax.

"Legilimens."

For a moment, Sirius' expression was neutral, but then his features twisted with alarm.

"There's some sort of a wall in your mind," he said, his voice strained. "And I mean a literal one. All your normal memories, I can see fine, but when I try to get to some of your older ones, the large grey wall keeps getting in the way. It's fractured though - there's a large crack in the middle of it, but it's still holding. I think that's where these memories are leaking from. Let me see if I can try to—"

Before he could finish, a pulse of wild magic erupted, throwing him backward. He hit the floor hard, while Hermione gasped, clutching her head as a sharp pain exploded throughout.

Sirius groaned, sitting up with Harry's help. "That's some powerful magic," he muttered. "Whatever's in there doesn't want to be touched. As soon as I got near it, it straight up threw me out."

Remus helped Sirius to his feet, his expression grim. "We can't ignore this. That kind of a wall in your mind - it's not normal. It means that someone at some point went through your head and locked away some of your memory for whatever reason. We need to break the wall."

Hermione swallowed hard. "But you saw what it did to Sirius when he got close. How could we even go about breaking it?"

"We need a powerful Legilimens. Sirius may have known the spell, but he's rusty and is a much better Occlumens. No, we need someone more experienced. Dumbledore would have been ideal, but with him gone, the only other Legilimens I know with that kind of power would be…

"Snape," Harry spat out, his features twisting into a nasty snarl.

Remus nodded reluctantly. "Exactly. But since that's not an option for obvious reasons, we need to do more research. I promise you, Hermione, we will find answers to this."

Hermione was glad for Remus' reassurance, but the worry still niggled at her. This was an unexpected complication, one that they really didn't need, not with everything else going on.

"Are we still going to the Burrow?"

Sirius was the one who answered. "We are. But this changes things. We need to be prepared for whatever this is. And I think, maybe we should keep this between just the four of us, for now."

The group exchanged uneasy glances before agreeing. The Burrow will be a hive of activity over the next couple of days, and the last they needed was to drag someone else into this mess. Even as she nodded along though, Hermione couldn't shake the feeling that something truly unexpected was hiding behind that wall. And that the man from her memories might be making another appearance quite soon.

Author's note: Hello my lovelies! As promised, one more chapter for 2024. I hope you all had a great Christmas, and I hope this makes for a nice belated gift.

Just a quick announcement, I will be away for a few weeks. I have state exams (Yay), so those will be priority for a little while. So while I will try to use any spare time I can for this story, I'm going to be realistic and say it might possibly be the end of February before you see me here. Again, I will try to be here before that, but end of February will be the latest. I'm really sorry for the long gap, but I promise I will make up for it somehow once I'm back.

One more thing, I am currently without a beta for this story and all my others, and I don't really know about how to go about getting one. So if anyone has any tips/suggestions/advice, I'm all ears.

I hope everyone has a great New Year. See you all in 2025, I love y'all.