... Hermione went very still.
"You can smell what?"
He looked at his bleeding hand.
So did she.
Then, slowly, carefully, Hermione said, "Did something bite you?"
CHAPTER 2...
Harry stared at her.
The question opened a hole in the morning.
For one awful moment the answer sat there between them, half-formed and waiting.
Then pain hit him again.
It folded him in half. He made a sound he had never made in his life, some broken thing between a gasp and a growl, and the room reacted with him. The curtains snapped outward. The washbasin cracked down the middle. The air itself seemed to shudder as a wild pulse of magic burst out of him in every direction.
Hermione threw up a shield charm so fast it was almost reflex. The force of the magic hit it and slammed her backward into the wardrobe with a hard thud.
Harry gaped at her, horror cutting through the pain for one thin second.
"Hermione!"
"I'm fine," she snapped, though her voice was breathless. She pushed herself upright at once. "Stay where you are."
He laughed once, half hysterical. "Brilliant idea. I'll just tell my body that."
She ignored that and lifted her wand higher.
"Did something bite you?" she repeated.
Harry tried to remember. Tried to think past the heat and the noise and the sickening, crawling wrongness under his skin.
The battle came back in fragments. The way everything had blurred together. The press of bodies. Giants. Smoke. Shouts. Flying curses. The feeling of being dragged in five directions at once by duty and rage and sheer survival.
And yes.
Something else.
A shape lunging through smoke. A flash of teeth. A tearing pain high on his side that had seemed small compared with everything else. He had hit it with a spell and kept going. There had been no time. No room in his mind for one more injury. He had ignored it because he had to.
He looked up at Hermione.
Her face lost its color.
"Oh no," she whispered.
"No," Harry said at once, though he heard the fear in his own voice. "No. It can't be."
She did not answer.
That silence was answer enough.
Harry staggered back until the backs of his knees struck the bed. "No."
"Harry, listen to me."
"No."
"We don't know exactly what happened."
"You know."
"I know what it looks like."
"And what does it look like?" he asked, too loud, too fast, the words breaking apart under the strain. "Go on. Say it."
Hermione said nothing.
His heart was pounding so hard he could hardly breathe. Werewolf.
The word did not merely frighten him. It hollowed him out.
It came with every story he had ever heard. Every whisper. Every recoil. Every rule. Every look of pity or disgust. It came with a whole future collapsing in on itself before he could even see it clearly. Harry Potter, who had survived everything, brought down not in battle but afterward, in the quiet, in his own room, like some final joke the world had saved for him.
"No," he said again, weaker now.
Another convulsion struck him. His back arched. His hands clawed into the blanket and ripped straight through the fabric. Harry stared at the torn cloth in stunned disbelief.
Hermione saw it too.
Now there was fear in her face, though she was trying desperately not to let him see it.
That hurt more than the pain.
"Don't look at me like that," he said.
"I'm not."
"You are."
"I am trying to figure out how to help you."
"You think I'm dangerous."
"I think you are in danger."
The room seemed to sway. Harry's skin felt too tight. His breathing was no longer right. Each breath came in through his nose with the sharp, invasive flood of scent that told him everything he did not want to know. Dust. Wood. Lamp oil. Hermione's soap. The faint ink smell of parchment on her sleeve. The iron scent of his own blood, stronger than everything.
His mouth filled with saliva.
He turned and vomited onto the floor.
Hermione did not move back, though he saw the instinct in her.
Harry stayed bent over, one hand braced on the floorboards, shaking hard enough that the room trembled with him.
When he tried to speak, the words came out shredded. "Get out."
"No."
"Hermione."
"No."
He lifted his head and looked at her, truly looked, and found that same infuriating expression he had seen a thousand times before. Fear, yes. But underneath it, iron. Once Hermione Granger decided something was a problem, she turned into the sort of person who stood in front of a hurricane and demanded it justify itself.
It was somehow the worst and best thing about her.
"You can't stay in here," he said.
"Watch me."
"I mean it."
"So do I."
He tried to push himself to his feet and failed. His hand slipped in the water and blood on the floor. Hermione made another small movement forward, then checked herself again. That tiny hesitation lodged in him like a knife.
There it was.
He had imagined it before. Wondered when it would happen. Wondered what it would feel like, that first flicker when someone he loved weighed helping him against the possibility that he might hurt them.
Now he knew.
It felt like falling.
Hermione saw something change in his face. She must have, because her own expression shifted at once.
"Harry," she said quietly, "that is not what this is."
He gave a short, broken laugh. "You don't know what I'm thinking."
"I know exactly what you're thinking."
"You don't."
"You think I'm afraid of you."
Silence.
Hermione drew one slow breath. "I am afraid for you. I am also trying very hard not to do something stupid while you appear to be halfway through an unknown magical collapse, so yes, I am being careful. That is not the same thing as leaving."
He wanted to answer. Wanted to say something sharp enough to drive her out before whatever was happening got worse. Before she had to see more. Before she had to decide, beyond doubt, whether he was still Harry.
But his thoughts were beginning to slide.
That frightened him in a deeper way than the pain.
He could feel it happening. His mind was no longer a straight line. It jerked. Stalled. Caught on pointless details. Hermione's left sleeve was wrinkled. There was a scratch on the wardrobe where she had hit it. A bird outside had flown away. The blood on his palm was drying at the edges. The room smelled wrong. Everything smelled wrong. No, too right. Far too right.
"Hermione," he said, and heard the plea in it.
Her face softened. "I'm here."
"I can't..." He swallowed. "I can't think."
"All right."
"It's all mixed up."
"All right."
"My magic won't listen."
"I know."
"Something's happening to me."
"I know." Her voice broke very slightly on the last word, but she steadied it at once. "Listen to me. Whatever this is, you are still you. Do you understand?"
He stared at her.
Did he understand? He did not know. He barely understood what his own hands were doing anymore.
A low sound tore out of him.
Both of them froze.
Harry clapped a hand over his mouth as if that could stop it, stop the room, stop the morning, stop the shape the day had taken.
Hermione's eyes widened.
He felt his face change under his own palm. Not all at once. Not like a spell. Like a terrible decision being made slowly somewhere inside his bones.
"Oh God," Hermione whispered.
Harry shook his head wildly.
"No. No, don't."
"Harry."
"Don't say it."
"I'm not saying anything."
"But you're thinking it."
She was. Of course she was. So was he.
The pain came in waves now, each one dragging him farther out of himself. His shoulders locked. His spine jolted. His teeth ached as if pressure were building in them from the roots outward. His fingers dug into the wood and for one revolting instant his nails seemed to lengthen, darken, sharpen. Then they were normal again. Or almost normal. He could not tell.
Hermione began casting, quick and precise, every spell chosen from reason and desperation both.
"Immobulus."
It hit him and slid off uselessly.
"Incarcerous."
Ropes snapped into existence, whipped around his arms and chest, and then tore apart as he jerked once in blind panic.
Hermione's breathing quickened, but she did not stop.
"Somnus. Protego. Calming draught, no, no time, think..."
Harry lurched sideways and struck the wall shoulder-first hard enough to crack plaster. The impact knocked a grunt out of him. He heard himself snarling at the pain and the sound chilled him to the core.
Hermione stopped moving for the briefest moment.
"Harry," she said, very slowly, "look at me."
He turned toward her.
For a heartbeat, her face sharpened with real terror.
Then he saw her master it.
That, more than anything, dragged some part of him back. The sheer effort on her face. Hermione, frightened and refusing to let fear decide what happened next.
He clung to that as long as he could.
"If I..." He swallowed hard. Words felt thick now. Slippery. "If I do something..."
"You won't."
"You don't know that."
"No," she said, and her voice came out low and fierce. "I do not. So I am going to make sure you don't."
A broken laugh escaped him then, because it was such a Hermione answer, so maddeningly direct, so impossible to argue with, that for one second he wanted to laugh and cry both.
Then the next wave hit and whatever language he had left shattered.
He dropped to the floor, body jerking. His vision fractured into brightness and shadow. The room no longer held together properly. It came in pieces. Hermione's shoes. The broken lamp. The smell of blood. The door. The window. The pounding in his chest. The pounding in her chest. Her voice saying his name again and again.
He did not know when the sound of his own breathing changed.
He only knew that suddenly it filled the room. Wet. Rough. Too deep.
He lifted his head.
Hermione's face had gone nearly white.
She had seen werewolves before, or at least the remains they left behind in books and reports and the distant horror of stories. Harry saw all of that pass through her in one flash and then disappear, shoved aside by will.
What looked back at her was not a proper transformation. Not complete. Not clean. It was worse. Human and not. His face still his, but dragged wrong at the edges by something savage and confused. His eyes too bright. His mouth half-curled over teeth that did not look quite right anymore. His fingers spread against the floorboards like claws trying to remember themselves.
Hermione swallowed hard.
"Harry," she said.
The name meant something.
He knew it meant something.
He could not, for one horrible second, remember why.
Then her scent, her voice, the sight of her fixed eyes, all pulled one thin thread straight in his head.
Hermione.
He knew Hermione.
"You know me," she said, and there was fierce hope in the words now, as if she could build a bridge out of grammar and stubbornness alone. "You know me. Say it."
He tried.
The shape of the name caught in a mouth that no longer wanted to form human words.
"Her... mi..."
"Yes." Hermione dropped carefully to one knee again, slower this time, every movement deliberate. "Good. Good. Stay there. Stay with me."
Harry made a low, miserable sound. Everything hurt. The air hurt. His skin hurt. The room was too full. He wanted to run. He wanted to tear through the wall and the grounds and the world until there was no one near enough to look at him. He wanted to stop existing for a little while, just until this shape passed.
"Hurts," he managed.
Hermione's face changed at once. Not pity. Never exactly pity with her. Something rawer. Something that came from loving someone and being unable to fix the thing hurting them by force.
"I know," she said.
He shook his head.
No, she did not know. She knew everything and she did not know this.
"Make... stop."
"I'm trying."
He slammed the side of his head against the wall once, not on purpose, simply because movement and pain and panic had become the same thing. Hermione gasped and moved before she could stop herself, catching his face in both hands.
For one terrifying instant Harry felt the violent impulse to turn into her touch, to bite, to strike, to do something unspeakable just because instinct and fear had fused together into something monstrous.
He froze in horror.
Hermione froze too.
Their faces were inches apart.
Harry saw the exact moment she understood what almost happened.
He waited for her to let go.
She did not.
Her hands trembled against his face, but she kept them there.
"Listen to me," she said, voice unsteady and fierce. "Listen very carefully. You are not gone. Do you hear me?"
He stared at her.
"You are not gone," she repeated. "Something has happened to you. Something ugly and dark and cruel, and I am not saying it is small or simple because it is not, but it is not you. You are still Harry."
His eyes burned.
"Hermione," he whispered. The word came out broken and wrong, but it was there.
"I'm here."
"I don't..."
"I know."
"What is happening to me?"
She shut her eyes for the space of one breath, and he knew, even through the chaos in his mind, that she was deciding how much truth to say.
When she opened them again, she looked more frightened than before, but also more certain.
"I think," she said slowly, "something happened to you in the battle. I think it tangled itself into your magic and into your body both. I think that is why your spells are failing. I think that is why this is not... normal."
The word hung there uselessly. Nothing about this was normal. Nothing about him had ever been normal, and for the first time in his life he found himself longing for the ordinary sort of misery he had once despised.
"Werewolf," he said, or tried to say.
The word came out in pieces.
Hermione did not deny it.
Harry looked away from her and felt something inside himself collapse.
All the fighting. All the death. All the luck and sacrifice and impossible survival. He had reached the end and won, and somehow there had still been enough left in the world to mark him one more time. One more scar. One more thing that would make people step back when he entered a room.
He had thought he knew what it meant to be feared.
This was different.
This would not make him a symbol. This would make him a caution.
A problem.
A creature.
His chest tightened until he could hardly draw breath.
Hermione must have seen it, because her grip on him steadied.
"Do not do that," she said.
He looked back at her blankly.
"Do not decide what everyone will say. Do not decide what this means. Not now. Not before we know anything. And do not you dare decide that you are monstrous because something monstrous happened to you."
He stared at her.
It was such a ridiculous Hermione sentence. So exact. So furious. So stubbornly moral that it almost cracked through the despair by sheer force of familiarity.
A tear slid out of the corner of his eye and into his hair.
He had not even realized he was crying.
Hermione saw it. Her mouth tightened, but she said nothing.
Good. If she had sounded sorry for him, he thought he might have broken completely.
Instead she kept her tone practical.
"We keep this quiet for now," she said. "No one else needs to know until we understand what we are dealing with."
Harry's gaze flicked toward the ruined room.
The broken mirror. The split bedframe. The gouges in the floorboards where his fingers had dug in. The lamp in pieces. Blood on the wood. Vomit by the washstand. Enough evidence for anyone with eyes.
He gave a weak, humorless huff.
"Bit late for subtle."
"We can still do damage control."
"Is that what this is called?"
"It is what I'm calling it," Hermione said. "Because if I call it something else, I might start screaming."
Despite everything, a tiny, cracked laugh escaped him.
Hermione let out one breath that almost looked like relief.
The worst of the change began to ease after that.
Slowly. Imperfectly. Like a storm withdrawing in ugly steps rather than grace. The painful tension in his muscles loosened by degrees. The sharp wrongness in his hearing dimmed to something merely unbearable instead of impossible. His face, whatever had been happening to it, began to settle back toward itself. Human. More or less. Enough.
Harry sagged where he sat.
He felt emptied out.
Not better. Never that. Just wrung dry.
Hermione finally let go of his face and sat back on her heels. Only then did he notice that she was trembling.
He stared at her.
"You're shaking."
She looked down at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. "Yes," she said after a moment. "Well observed."
"Are you hurt?"
A strange look crossed her face, something halfway between affection and exasperation.
"I've just watched you nearly turn into something out of a banned text, been thrown into a wardrobe, and am currently sitting in a room that looks as though a poltergeist had a breakdown in it, and you are asking if I'm hurt."
Harry shut his eyes briefly.
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize for asking."
"No. For..." He looked at the room again. At himself. "For all of it."
Hermione followed his gaze.
For the first time since entering, she let the full sight of the damage register. The floorboards ripped and scored. The broken furniture. The cracked mirror running with a single long jagged line that split Harry's reflection from top to bottom. His hand was still streaked with blood. His shirt was damp with sweat. His face hollowed by pain and fear and humiliation.
Harry saw the moment she understood that even if no one else ever knew, he would remember this morning for the rest of his life.
Her voice softened.
"We're not at the part where you apologize yet."
He almost smiled. Almost.
Then voices sounded outside the door.
Both of them froze.
Not loud. Just close enough. Two people in the corridor, talking low.
"...heard something break..."
"...door's locked, why is it locked...?"
Harry's whole body went rigid again.
Hermione was on her feet in an instant, wand up.
"No," Harry said, too fast.
She looked back at him.
His face must have shown everything then. Panic. Shame. The raw, desperate terror of being seen like this. Not dead and heroic. Not alive and victorious. Broken. Changed. Uncertain. A thing not yet named aloud.
"Hermione," he said, and his voice was hoarse enough to hurt, "don't tell them."
She held his gaze for one long second.
"Not yet," she said.
It was not a promise that this could stay hidden forever. Both of them knew that. It was only a promise about the next five minutes. Sometimes that was all a promise could honestly be.
Harry swallowed and nodded once.
Hermione turned to the door, drawing herself up, already building the lie she would tell.
Harry stayed where he was on the ruined floor, breathing through the fading pain, staring at the broken room around him and knowing with cold certainty that whatever life had been waiting for him after the war had just been torn apart before it had even begun.
Outside, someone knocked.
Hermione laid her hand on the handle.
And Harry, who had faced death more times than he could count, discovered that he had never in his life been more afraid of what came after the door opened.