Let me begin by explaining that the title comes from William Blake’s poem, “Tyger, Tyger.” You should look it up if you’re not familiar with it. It references another famous Blake poem, “The Lamb,” which is the opposite in tone and subject. I picked out this line from the beginning to serve as my title because it hints at the dynamic between Remus and Hermione: the Tyger and the Lamb.

Lastly, I want to say that this story is for Professor R.J. Lupin, who taught me everything I needed to know about defense, except how not to die (you live on in the hearts of those who knew you). And for David Thewlis (you’re still charming, despite your weak chin, prominent nose, and that infernal moustache).

(coeptus)

The house had not changed.

It had not changed aside from several suspiciously absent wall hangings and what seemed to be an unfinished exercise in carpentry lying bare-planked in the small backyard of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. All things—except one—had remained the same for Remus Lupin. It was still a house of shadows, of secrets kept by draperies, and of memories he would rather have forgotten.

He felt a little more at home in Grimmauld Place these days than he had in a long time, since years before when he was a student spending summer nights here with his best friends. Although James was still dead, he lingered in the house—in his son Harry. Sirius had recently joined James, but something of his dark eyes and wild hair remained in every grim tapestry, every gothic fixture, every crisp linen. Nothing had physically changed within the house, but the continued presence of Lupin’s childhood companions had become more apparent than ever.

The people living here were different, of course. Deaths and chaos in the Wizarding society these last several years had taken a visible toll on the house’s occupants. Some—like Harry—had grown quiet and their eyes were full of dangerous revenge. A few—like Ginny and even Molly—had developed tremendous fortitude in the face of societal turmoil. Molly had begun to shout less at her brood and apply her passion more in the kitchen, which never failed to turn out a hearty meal.

Ginny had taken up the role of house diplomat. At times there seemed to be no fewer than three of her whisking from this room to that, from one dispute to the next. A considerable amount of her effort seemed focused on mending Lupin’s blunders in his own love life. Many arguments were settled by a passing comment of hers or an innocuous suggestion that Lupin go for a walk on such a fine day, just to discover Hermione had somehow gotten the same idea.

Lupin was sure the only thing preventing Harry from avenging both his godfather and Dumbledore was Ginny’s tact at keeping peace. Harry was a very lucky man, if the way Ginny clung to his arm at every meal was any indication. Lupin would smile whenever he watched them from his own place at the table. Then he would cover Hermione’s knee with his hand, and she would touch his wrist.

She had changed, too, but unlike the others. Hermione had always been a sweet girl, but she was gentler, kinder and more compassionate now than ever. When she had been his student at Hogwarts, she might have formed an intervention group on his behalf: perhaps the Society for the Protection of Every Werewolf. Now she had actually tended the wounds of his profession herself. She had stayed up one night disinfecting cuts and mending fractured bones that his fellow werewolves had dealt him. She had cared for him and—he later found out—grown to love him.

And therein lay the only change that mattered to Lupin. Hermione’s heart was one of the largest he’d ever known, and against every law of the natural world, he’d found a place inside of it where he belonged.

He thought it only natural that she would someday share her bed with him. The first night she did so was under circumstances he had not anticipated.

He woke late one night to a soft cry outside his bedroom door. He was curious to discover Hermione’s bandy-legged cat sitting in the hall at such an indecent hour. The cat blinked up at Lupin, gave an acknowledging little lick at its whiskered lip, and then frisked away down the hall and up the stairs.

Lupin followed on impulse, thinking to usher the cat back to the room of its mistress. Instead, he found Hermione’s room empty. One of Crookshanks’ discontented mewls at his ankle prompted him to continue his search, which led him to a sliver of light shining through the crack under a door farther down the hallway. It was the third-floor bathroom.

As Lupin approached the closed door, he heard a muffled sniffing sound that cut off in a startled little gasp when he knocked.

“Hermione?” He whispered through the door.

There was silence for a moment; finally the lock clicked and the handle turned. Lupin first noticed that Hermione had been crying. Then he realized how naked she was, standing there in her scandalously insubstantial white camisole and plain, pink panties.

Perhaps his eyes had wandered; she trembled and her expression became anxious.

Lupin wondered why she should seem frightened of him. Then he recalled another bathroom and an abandoned wand. He remembered a large, bald-headed barman with dead eyes, and the voice of a Death Eater who had confessed to roving intentions with his prisoner.

Crookshanks meowed reproachfully at Lupin’s heels.

He held out his palms to show Hermione that he meant no harm. She stumbled into his chest and he held her close while she shook with silent tremors of relief.

“Come on, darling,” he murmured into her hair. “You need rest. It’s all right,” he added when—as he shut off the light behind them and began leading her back toward her room—Hermione stiffened in his arms. Crookshanks joined them presently.

Lupin climbed onto her bed first, lying outside the sheets and leaving plenty of room for her. Hermione followed, slipping beneath the comforter and plastering herself as close as she could be against his frame. She nuzzled his throat so that her cool breath tickled his skin.

“It’s all right, you’re safe,” he repeated until she fell asleep. He lay awake for a while, smelling her hair and memorizing the softness of her bare arm that rested atop the sheets with him.

He would not learn the softness of the rest of her body for several more weeks. On the second evening he would take her to bed, Hermione leaned in toward him after dinner and whispered in his ear.

“Wait up tonight.”

Lupin had been waiting too many weeks for a distinct combination of such words. He asked no questions and dutifully did as he’d been told, staying awake almost an hour after the others had gone to bed. He lay atop the comforter and listened to the sounds of the house settling down until finally his door opened and Hermione entered, wearing her pajamas.

He rose to meet her. “Everything okay?” he asked, not because he worried that anything might be wrong, but simply to maintain normalcy and not jump to conclusions.

Hermione didn’t say a word. She fit herself into his arms and began kissing him feverishly.

“Are you sure?” he asked, breathless between tastes of her skin, her lips, her mouth. She nodded into his shoulder and he felt himself weaken at the knees for her touch at last. “Okay,” he said, catching her lips again.

They started with his clothes. She pulled greedily at his shirt and trousers. He let her trace his many scars and bring her small, delicate fingers across his chest, down his abdomen. Despite his racing pulse, he was slow to slip her shirt up over her head, to hook his thumbs in the waistband of her pajama pants, brushing her hips with his fingertips as he slid the pants off along with her panties.

She looked just the way he thought she would beneath her cotton pajamas. She was small of stature and narrow in the shoulders. The arch of her back was graceful, her arse smooth under his palm. Her stomach was flat, the crest of her hip bones protruded beneath the skin, and her lower abdomen swelled gently with undeveloped muscle. Her crotch was thatched with dark, dark brown—nearly black—curls, and her supple thighs brushed together at the tapering of the small triangle of light between her legs.

He felt, as he took in every feature of her young body, as though he’d been wandering for a very long time in a foreign land and had finally come home. There was something so familiar and comforting about the shape of her, as though he’d dreamed of it many years before but hadn’t remembered until now.

Hermione was perfect.

She was also biting her lip under his inspection.

It wasn’t the adorable, thoughtful gesture she’d used when he challenged her in class with a difficult question. This was more like the expression she wore whenever she heard about some new victim of the Death Eaters over dinner. The tension of her brow suggested unease.

“Hermione,” he said, failing to stifle the chuckle he felt tickling his chest. He kissed her mouth and held her firmly against his front. “God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered into her hair. He held the back of her head and her arse and felt his erection harden against her belly. Hermione rose up on her toes—causing him to grunt at the friction—and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

He led her with kisses and caresses to the bed, where he lowered her just as he’d imagined doing a hundred times before. Her bare body spread beneath him, small and soft, but he kept his weight on his knees for the moment. He kissed her jaw, her throat, her collarbone, while the hand that was not holding up his weight roamed. He explored her small and perfect breasts, the curves of her hips and the warm, damp shadows between her legs. Her hips bucked when his fingers grazed her clitoris. He took his time there, and her hands upon his back responded to the pressure. Soon the sweet, fleshy scent of her sex saturated the air that plunged down his throat and filled his lungs.

Lupin couldn’t wait any longer.

He kissed her as he dropped his weight between her smooth thighs. He wanted to be gentle as possible for this, but found control difficult to maintain. He held his breath and slowly pushed himself forward with his toes, filling her to the hilt. She was an exquisitely tight fit.

She squirmed beneath him—not much, but just enough to let him know she was uncomfortable. He shifted. She flinched. And suddenly he understood she was a virgin. She bled a little that first time he penetrated her, and he felt bad about that, trying to remember whether anything similar had happened back at school when the girls in his class reached an experimental age.

“Hermione,” he gasped, freezing with his weight on his hands again. “God, I’m sorry, Hermione. I didn’t know; you didn’t tell me you were—”

“Shut up,” she said, her voice low, purring, dangerous: the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, but her expression was serene and unhurried. Only a tension around her mouth suggested her impatience.

Lupin hesitated. Hermione’s dark eyes assured him. And in the end he could not resist her slick warmth or the tightness of her fleshy cavern. It was like being sheathed in every bit of kindness she had for him in her heart, every gentle word, every smile, every laugh. Her muscles flexed around him, and he groaned, already blind and deaf to the world that existed outside of her. Hermione sighed and sunk her heels into his calves as he began to move.

A strange thing happened in Lupin’s mind as he made love to her. With each thrust deep inside her, he felt fulfilled, complete. Each time he withdrew, he was empty. With every movement, he remembered vividly and clearly that Hermione Granger had chosen him, and the knowledge made him hunger to know more of her, to be deeper inside of her, to fill her as utterly as her love filled him. It made him thrust harder and withdraw faster and effect the softest of moans from her throat.

Soon he had pulled his mouth off of hers and found that he’d put his weight on his palms and his thighs again. Their eyes locked. He drank in her expression as he pushed forward with his toes. Her fingers dug into his back, his shoulder. Her thighs clamped his hips. Her gorgeous, calm, color-flushed face blurred in his vision, but he kept the memory fixed, even when he felt a pull at his navel and squeezed his eyes shut. Her face remained fixed in his mind as he neared the edge and the pressure built toward a fine point of blinding, white light.

He hadn’t noticed her hand leave his shoulder, but he felt it then as she gently, lightly touched the side of his face. He gasped and his eyes snapped open, scattering the tears he hadn’t known had gathered on his lashes, while all at once the pressure spilled over the edge and released—and he released, too, deep within her.

It had only taken a few minutes.

Much to his embarrassment, it was over quickly that first time. He had not been inside a woman—at least while he was sober—in so long that he found he was overly sensitive to Hermione’s touch. He had also been craving her for many months, and it compounded his sensitivity. He cherished the precious moments he was with her that first time, from penetration to climax.

Then, with his face burning partly in shame and partly from exertion, he collapsed on top of her. He apologized between shallow breaths for the lack of stamina and promised her that the next time would be better. She laughed—a small, silvery, tinkling sound like bells—and assured him she had enjoyed it. He held her neck and kissed her mouth as his fingers strayed to the cleft between her thighs. She clutched his wrist and forearm tightly while he finished her.

It would take them several tries before Hermione learned to be comfortable with the arrangement and before Lupin learned to delay his own pleasure long enough for her to achieve orgasm. She learned to move carefully, more deliberately, with him. She began to lead, to suggest with her body language that they try something new. Lupin found himself coerced into such positions as he had not explored in many years. He was rejuvenated by her eagerness and persuaded by the suggestions of her body, which bore such subtlety and graciousness that he caught himself believing he had been the one to think of trying these things.

Hermione was earnest in her lovemaking, as though she considered being with him a solemn endeavor, but she never once hinted at aggression. Her gentleness and passion made Lupin feel truly desirable for the first time since his school days.

He would never be accustomed to just how quietly she reached her climax. No matter how often he reminded himself, he never felt prepared for her silence, or for the powerful, soundless explosion of tension throughout her frame. She would never make a sound—not a moan, not a gasp—until, with only the softest sigh, she would turn her face aside, hide her ever unhurried expression in her pillow and offer him a sculpted jaw and neck to kiss with the pulse fluttering under the skin. Then the arch of her back would relax and Hermione would collapse onto the sheets.

It startled Lupin every time. And every time the jolt of electricity he felt at the shock would destroy his last vestige of control and would make him cum harder than he had in twenty years.

Her silence kept him on a short leash. She could drive him mad through her composure, the way she calmly traced the scars on his back as though she didn’t care how hard he was fucking her at the moment. It was her call to him and, like an obedient pup, he came every time. Lupin was very aware of what she was doing, but he could not bring himself to be put off by it. Obedience was his gift to her, his only feeble reciprocation for the profound honor of being the only man Hermione Granger had chosen to love, body and soul.

“Professor Lupin,” she breathed against his throat one night, lapsing adorably as she did in times like these when the night was late and she was spent from the last of her tremors.

“Mmm?”

“Love me?”

He chuckled. “You have no idea,” he said, brushing his lips against her brow. The girl nuzzled his throat and sighed.

It was true, Lupin thought as he wound his arms tighter around her and settled in for sleep, Grimmauld Place had not changed at all. The house had never been—and would never be—a place of real happiness. It would remain a place of shadows and painful memories.

But now and then on a night like tonight, Remus Lupin would rediscover joy with the woman he loved.

(fin)