Chapter Text
“Forest of Dean?” Ariadne suggested, and Hermione looked up sharply at her sister, her face going as pale as someone with her complexion could. “We went camping there for a bit once, remember?” she added pointedly.
IF YOU CAN SEE THIS TEXT, THEN EITHER YOU HAVE WORK SKINS TURNED OFF, OR THIS WORK HAS BEEN STOLEN AND POSTED ON AN ALTERNATE PLATFORM WITHOUT ITS ORIGINAL AUTHOR'S PERMISSION. If this has messed with a screen reader, my apologies. “Of course I remember it, Ariadne,” Hermione replied, scowling at her big sister. “It’s not a night I’m likely to forget,” she snapped, rubbing the old scar on her forearm. Because Hermione very much remembered the night of the eighth of August 1998.
It was the night she’d become a werewolf.
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Saturday, August 8th, 1998
As far as activities for the school holidays went, camping in the woods miles and miles away from home was not one of Hermione’s favourites. The woods were full of too many noises, too many textures, too many bugs, and too many gross things. And then, the tent itself had an awful texture, as did the sleeping bag, and it all made noises just as awful.
In all, Hermione was looking forward to going home again in the morning. So was Ariadne, their Mum and Dad had sorely overestimated how easy it would be for Hermione’s little blind trans sister to navigate in the woods, the underbrush did her collapsible white cane no favours. And so both of the sisters had opted to stay in their little tent nook, where their Mum and Dad had one tent and they had the other. And as the sun drooped past the horizon, painting the edges of clouds pink like marshmallows as the sky to the west went inky blue, their Dad sat by the crackling campfire, cooking as Hermione read to Ariadne.
“Hm-Her-Hermione?” Ariadne stuttered when Hermione finished a sentence and paused.
“Yeah?” Hermione hummed, looking up at her. Ariadne had grown her curly black hair out in the near-year since she’d come out to them before Christmas the year before so now it hung around her head and framed her murky-white eyes in a way that Hermione thought was actually quite pretty, and Ariadne had been eagerly wearing all of her dresses ever since their Mum and Dad had told her she could go to school as herself now - in that moment, she was wearing the light blue one adorned in pink flowers their Mum had made her.
“Wh-wha-what-what-whatmm-what is- what-what is-what is Dad making?” Ariadne asked, her stammer catching and catching as she spoke like a stuck CD player. But Hermione was used to that. Ariadne was learning and at least she was speaking more in those days. The confidence boost coming out had given her, combined with her getting ever more ready to talk ever since they’d adopted her two years ago, was really showing.
“Oh. Baked beans and sausages,” Hermione replied, making a face and curling her lip. She didn’t like baked beans, they were always a little too floury, and the sauce left a crusty texture on her lips that she hated. Ariadne only nodded - she didn’t have particularly strong opinions on food, and even when she did they had to be coaxed out of her because of how strong her instinct to just take what she was given without complaint was. Pursing her lips, she went back to the book. “The next day, he had almost forgotten about Gandalf. He did not remember things very well, unless he put them down on his Engagement Tablet: like this: Gandalf Tea Wednesday. Yesterday he had been too flustered to do anything of the kind,” Hermione read, ignoring the twittering of birds and the flowing of the nearby River Wye. “Just before tea-time there came a tremendous ring at the front-door bell, and he remembered! He rushed and put on the kettle, and put out another cup and saucer, and an extra cake or two, and ran to the door.”
“All right, grub’s up,” their Dad announced, and Hermione sighed loudly enough for Ariadne to hear as she fetched the bookmark she was sitting on and put it into their place in The Hobbit. “Oh don’t give me that look Hermione, it’ll be just like normal,” he grumbled, pouting playfully as Hermione sulked. Yeah I don’t like it normally, Hermione thought, as her Mum came out of their parents’ tent gladly.
“Finally. I was almost beginning to think you’d never get the hang of cooking on a fire instead of the oven,” their Mum snickered at him as she sat down cross-legged on the leafy forest floor. At that, their father just laughed and handed her a plate of food, which she took gratefully as she picked up some cutlery from the bag beside her.
“Ha! No, the technology that predated an oven didn’t defeat me darling,” Dennis replied amusedly, plating up some more. “All right, Ariadne, I’m handing you your plate, careful it’s hot,” he said as he carefully gave Ariadne her dinner, which Ariadne felt for before she took it gingerly. “And a fork. Most of the plate’s beans, and there are a couple of sausages at nine o’clock,” he said, describing the layout for her dutifully.
“Th-tha-thank-thank you Dad,” Ariadne replied politely, taking the fork and feeling its end to check which way up it was in her hand. As Ariadne carefully held the plate in her lap and found the beans to scoop up, their Dad plated up Hermione’s dinner and gave it to her. Hermione made a grumbling noise under her breath as she took it and grumpily took the fork.
“It’s just beans, Hermione,” her Dad pointed out matter-of-factly, and Hermione still scrunched up her face at him even as she sullenly stabbed her fork through the beans to scoop some up, before she forced herself to eat the baked beans, her face twitching with her revulsion at the weird way the beans squished.
“Oh don’t be rude, Hermione,” their Mum said as she did, and Hermione frowned.
“M not,” Hermione protested weakly, looking between her parents.
“Your father’s gone to some effort to cook you that. You could at least pretend to halfway appreciate it,” Valerie pointed out, and Hermione elected to just sulk. Lying was rude, she didn’t see why they wanted her to pretend when lying was rude. Why couldn’t they just follow their own rules? But nevertheless, she elected to eat the beans first and get them over with before she ate the sausages which she actually liked, in part just because she didn’t like eating everything all at once and in part to save the good stuff for last. It’d get the bean texture out of her mouth. That and she was hungry enough to tolerate beans - it was late because it had taken their Dad so long to get the fire going and enough to get things to cook over it, the sun had set and Hermione was pretty sure it was past nine o’clock in the evening. Not that she had a clock, to her chagrin, but a bright full moon was ever so slightly cresting over the horizon. As she sullenly ate, Hermione glanced at the sight of her sister straightening up slightly, her eyes unmoving but her attention clearly shifting as she rested her fork on her plate and her brows furrowed over her eerie white eyes.
“Who-who’s-who’s that?” Ariadne asked, tilting her head a bit. Hermione jumped, looking around - she saw nobody, had Ariadne caught someone’s ‘colours’ in the trees much like she’d repeatedly caught Hermione in hide-and-seek when they’d met due to her strange ability? Their Mum and Dad too instantly turned their attention to their surroundings, scanning the treeline.
“Who’s who?” their Mum asked sharply. Ariadne paused, no doubt getting her bearings, before she hooked her thumb over her shoulder at the trees behind the tent.
“You hear someone talking or something little princess?” Dennis asked curiously, peering past the tent. Ariadne shook her head.
“Colours,” she replied simply. Their Dad relaxed and went back to his dinner, dismissing the matter - he wasn’t quite sure what to make of their adopted trans daughter’s insistence she could see colours in people and some places despite her blindness. Hermione wasn’t either, but she’d seen more of it and it usually seemed quite reliable. “Weird,” she added, and Hermione frowned at her.
“Weird?” Hermione asked.
“White stuff in it. Lik-like-like forks,” Ariadne explained slowly, like she was unsure how to describe what she was seeing, or sensing, or whatever. Frowning, Hermione got up and put her plate down on the log she’d been sitting on and stepped around Ariadne and the tent to look into the trees. It was getting dark, so she could see nothing in amongst the branches and brush of the woods. She put her hand flat over her eyebrows, as if it might have helped even though there was no glare for her to block, and squinted into the trees.
“Hello?” Hermione called curiously. Behind her, her Mum told her to eat her dinner and ignore it, but Hermione was busier gasping as something moved in the underbrush and looked up at her, its eyes shining in the light of the fire. “Oh. It’s a dog,” she said, loudly enough for her family to hear. As she said it, Ariadne instantly stiffened up, her breath getting shaky as she stopped eating - they knew very well now that Ariadne was very afraid of dogs. Frowning, her Dad got up from where he was sitting, put his dinner aside, and stepped over to shine his torch at the dog, which flinched and emitted a tiny, almost irritated growl. Hermione could not see the dog in its entirety - it was among some bushes, hidden in part from them, but she could see it was a large breed. Perhaps a particularly large Husky or a German Shepherd. Its mangy brown and grey fur was mottled and rough, patchy like some horrible disease afflicted it, and its eyes were a shining blue around the pale yellow reflecting from deep behind them.
“Oh for crying out loud,” her Dad muttered. “Oi! Whoever’s dog this is, didn’t you see the signs?” he yelled into the darkening twilight. “Supposed to be on a bloody lead,” he grumbled. Looking at them with an almost calculating expression, the dog padded out of the underbrush to get a bit closer, and Hermione wasn’t sure if her Dad had seen too but the dog wasn’t even wearing a collar. Had it escaped? Given its health, maybe that was a good thing Hermione supposed. At that, Hermione looked back at her little sister. The lightning-bolt shaped scar under her fringe that she could only assume had come from a knife. Her murky white eyes and the red scarring on their eyelids, how tiny Ariadne was even after two years of being well-fed. Behind her, their Mum stepped up as well, primarily putting herself between the dog and Ariadne. But Hermione’s attention was back on the dog. Its matted, muddy fur that betrayed its illness, its stubby tail… had its tail been cut off in the middle? Making her Dad jump, Hermione stepped forward cautiously - even with sympathy brimming in her mind, she still didn’t exactly like dogs. Wiggling her left hand with her worry, Hermione held out her right.
“Nice dog,” Hermione murmured, smiling at it. It tilted its head at her curiously, almost squinting at her.
“Hermione…” Dennis said softly but worriedly. Hermione ignored him.
“It’s okay,” Hermione told the dog. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, and it looked up at her, right in the eye, as if it had somehow understood her. But what she saw in its eyes wasn’t necessarily gratefulness. There was something wrong, she knew, her heart beat faster in her chest as it approached her and she realised just how big this dog was. It was enormous, standing almost level with her little eight-year-old body.
“Hermione get back!” Valerie barked, lunging for something behind her, but Hermione was frozen in shock and fear as the dog got closer to her. Even as Hermione held out a hand for it to sniff, alarm bells were blaring in her head. There was something deeply wrong with this dog, it was far too big, it was moving all wrong, its legs were too long… it was like a monster out of a fairy tale. A dog insofar as the wolf who ate Little Red Riding Hood’s granny was a dog.
And what big teeth it had.
“GAHH!” Hermione screamed as the dog’s silvery blue eyes shot to her mother and, as if knowing it didn’t have time, it lunged forward and before Hermione had even comprehended what had happened, its fangs had rent into her outstretched arm, the arm she tried to tug back from its jaws as it held on and her scream pierced the night. Blood was on the dog’s snout before, like an angel, white-yellow light exploded through Hermione’s vision and a WHACK! echoed through the clearing and a shower of sparks and embers erupted around her arm and the dog’s head as her mother smashed a burning log from the fire over the dog’s head, making it let go. Hermione fell back instantly from her own force pulling away, crying as her arm burnt in agony from the wound, and she dimly noticed Ariadne having jumped from her scream, having spilled her dinner on the forest floor and then fallen over herself. Thankfully, none of the embers caught on the forest floor, but the log didn’t seem to have made the dog scared. It prowled back out of range, yes, but its eyes were locked solidly on Hermione and Ariadne as Hermione shuffled desperately away from it, sobbing as she kept close to Ariadne.
“Away with you!” Valerie yelled, swinging the flaming log at the dog and making it back off, but it didn’t go far. Instead, it padded to the side curiously, looking to see if it could get around the tent to the girls. “OH NO YOU DON’T!” she roared, before again she bashed the dog’s face with the flaming end of the log. The dog snarled at her viciously, but Valerie Granger was just as vicious as she snarled back. Squinting at her, the dog glanced past her at the girls and the wailing, bleeding girl that was Hermione. And then it did something that, if Hermione had been focusing on it, Hermione would have thought extraordinarily strange. It grinned. Then, as if satisfied, it departed for the woods again.
Instantly, Hermione’s Dad shot to her side.
“Hermione, are you okay?” he asked, though the question was rhetorical even as Hermione shook her head, barely able to see through the tears in her eyes as she bawled and her Dad gently pulled up her torn sleeve to get at the wound the dog had left in her arm. Hermione whimpered as he turned her arm over, examining the bite. “Doesn’t look too deep, it’ll be okay ‘Mione darling. What the hell kind of dog was that?!” he assured her, before he called over to their Mum who was rummaging through their tent.
“I don’t know and I’m not sticking around to find out,” Valerie replied urgently, tossing Dennis the red first aid kit they’d brought. “You see to Hermione, I’ll pack up. We’ll report that thing to the site warden on the way,” she said, and Dennis nodded once he’d caught the kit. Among the chaos, Hermione didn’t even pay attention to anything but the pain screaming through her arm as her Dad cleaned and bandaged her forearm, while their Mum packed up camp and they quickly got back to the car and went on their way. The dog was reported, but their destination was Bristol for some A&E department she didn’t catch the name of, who too treated her arm wound, stitched it up, and sent her on her way with a course of antibiotics. Thankfully, it hadn’t broken her arm when it had bitten her - dogs could do that, apparently.
Within a few weeks, the scar was just that; a scar. An ugly one, in Hermione’s opinion, that wrapped around her right forearm, but when they went back to school that year she just chose to wear long sleeves over it. The dog bite faded from Hermione’s concerns as a bigger one arose; Ariadne’s safety at school now she was actually out as a girl - the bullying hadn’t taken more than ten seconds to start anew. But it would be thirty days after their abruptly cut-short camping trip, after a week of increasing body aches and nausea that that scar would be thrown instantly back into the spotlight.
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Sunday, September 6
On Wednesday, Hermione had felt ill, yes, but not so ill that she didn’t want to learn. So she’d gone to school when term had begun anew for the year, but that hadn’t lasted. The pounding headache in her skull had only intensified with her fury when two boys at the back of their class had called Ariadne a sissy the instant they’d learned her new name, and she’d been quick to yell at the first one to taunt Ariadne directly. But she hadn’t been able to keep protecting her little sister for long - by the end of the day, Hermione had been well and truly sick, and the doctor’s verdict had been food poisoning. From what, they had no idea, but she’d been eating nought but crackers and toast since, when she could keep it down. Which was the most awful thing. Come Sunday, Hermione didn’t feel as nauseous anymore, but she was ravenous. It felt as if her Mum and Dad were starving her she was so hungry, and the smell of dinner being cooked downstairs for the others who weren’t on a diet of crackers just made her stomach roil and rumble angrily.
Not only that, but something was very wrong with her ears, not just her nose. She’d been able to smell her Dad’s socks when he’d come in to check on her before, but that was nothing to how it sounded as if the family were just outside her door talking to each other at the dinner table, not downstairs while she lay in bed, lying on her side into the wall and holding her pillow over the ear that wasn’t mashed into the mattress as she kicked her feet at how bad it was making her headache. Strangest of all was that something had to be wrong with her eyes - it hadn’t been as bad when she’d seen the doctor so she hadn’t thought to mention it, but hindsight was needling her that she should have. It was like she’d gone colourblind, all sorts of things were the wrong colours, like all the red had been drained out of the world. Hermione was truly certain that her head was going to split in two if this kept up. Maybe Ariadne’s theory that she’d gotten something from that dog had been accurate, she thought - she couldn’t imagine many other reasons for her to feel so sick. After all, Ariadne had started saying, after about a week after their failed camping trip, that Hermione had had some of the dog’s colours in her own, but blue not white. Hermione hadn’t known what to think when Ariadne had said it was growing.
Eventually, however, after the cacophony of clattering plates had surely shattered her eardrums on top of the hiss of the latest shower of rain that evening, and the sound of their Dad telling Ariadne to leave her plate if she was full and he’d deal with it later, the toaster popped and she heard her Dad trudge up the stairs to her door.
“Knock knock,” Dennis said jauntily as he poked his head in her bedroom door, and Hermione only groaned painfully into her mattress as he stepped in. “You okay kiddo?” he asked concernedly, walking over, his every footstep THUMPing into her head.
“Stop yelling,” Hermione whined, still holding the pillow over her ear. Her Dad sniffed, almost amused if it weren’t for his worry for her.
“I’m not yelling, you’ve just got a headache,” her Dad replied, though he did say it much more softly than when he had come in. “Hungry?”
“Mmm,” Hermione hummed, nodding on her side as the smell of the toast hit her nostrils. How did toasted bread have a smell, and why was that smell so good?! “Starving. Hurts,” she whimpered. As she sat up - and regretted it, because it made her dizzy - her Dad frowned at her as he put her pillow behind her for her.
“Where’s it hurt?” he asked gently.
“Everywhere,” Hermione replied in a half-groan, wincing as she put her hand to her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Tummy hurts,” she added, pressing her other to her abdomen. If she was honest, it was her stomach that hurt the most, deep inside close to her back. It had gotten worse and worse by the minute for the last hour, as if something inside of her was squeezing all of her organs together down there, twisting her guts and pulling them in like a magnet. Her Dad put aside the plate of plain toast and brushed Hermione’s hair out of her face to put the back of his hand on her forehead. As Hermione leaned into his cold hand for the mere fact it was cold, she glanced about her room through the crack of her eyelids she could allow before the throbbing headache got too bad. The sun had gone down, so her room was lit only by the light her Dad had turned on when he’d entered, but the curtains were still open. Her alarm clock, as she took a second or three to read it, read 08:21. Her Dad sighed.
“Well, you’ve still got a hell of a temperature,” he said, dropping his hand. “We’ll take you to the doctor again tomorrow, this…” Dennis trailed off, but Hermione wasn’t listening. She couldn’t. Her whole body had frozen, and terror had filled her veins along with the chill and ice that were spreading from her eyes as all she could see was what her father’s arm had hidden. The moon, hanging just over the rooves of their Surrey neighbourhood, dominated her sight, shadow creeping through so it was all she could see as yellow and blue versions of it spread through her vision. The moon was all she knew as her father’s voice cracked through her ears, yet she could not move to acknowledge him.
“JESUS CHRIST!”
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