I don't own Harry Potter. Unless you count the actual books. I own a few copies of those.
A/N: This is set in an Alternate Universe. If you're not into that, it goes w/o saying that this probably isn't your thing. But anywho, to those who do give it a gander - thank you kindly!
A/N again: Basically, I decided "Hey, what if the HP characters were thrown into the film Red Riding Hood. And I had a double shot of espresso. Here we are. If that didn't scare you away, then, once more thank you for reading! Tis always appreciated!

Why she'd run into the forest, she had no idea.

Not for nothing, but it was the normal order of business for the village of Horthwarg and its people to shut down upon hearing the sound of a wolf howling in the woods during the season where the moon in the night sky would wax full. But Hermione Granger, daughter of the local apothecary, had not heard merely a howl, but a scream as well. Having all happened as she was standing near the edge of the woods, while picking the last of the berries that evening to take back home for the medicinal material stock, she could hardly bring herself to simply run for cover in her home after hearing a cry for help from within the trees, and so she'd done just that, abandoning the berries to investigate what had happened within the depths of the trees.

Heroics aside, she couldn't help but feel a strong desire to turn and run in the other direction now, as she pushed by and through any number of crowded trees, scraping leg and arm on branches in the darkness of the night, when not nearly tripping over large tree roots.

"Stupid. I'm stupid for doing this. What am I doing here?" she said to herself in a breathless voice, hearing another scream, followed by a second how. "Stupid."

Feeling quite winded by the time she reached the source of the noise, the girl with a fair complexion stopped dead in her tracks upon laying eyes on the sight that met them. A girl she knew fairly well - though not well enough to neccesarily call a friend - was lying on the forest floor. A wolf had pounced atop her, and was actively mauling her. It was a bloody, gory mess - even in the only moon lit darkness, one could easily tell it - and Hermione used a mix of overwhelming willpower and adrenaline both to snap herself from the shock that came with the sight of it all.

"Get off her!" she shouted, quickly reaching down to the ground to pick up a rather large rock as she did so.

The wolf, startled by her shout, turned from its current victim, staring back at Hermione now instead, looking ready to pounce her. Quickly hurling the rock forward, striking the animal once on the head, she took the seconds that the action bought her to reach down for two more rocks, before moving in a bit closer, and then hurling them both in quick succession toward the animal. Striking it in just the right area from a closer range, it was soon down for the count. Whether actually dead or merely unconscious, Hermione couldn't be sure, but she felt that it whatever it was happened to be enough to satisfy her sense for need of personal safety.

"Lavender, are you going to be alright?" she asked in a shaky voice, before clearing her throat as she hurriedly made her way to the attacked girl's side.

Kneeling next to her, she placed a hand against the girl's bosom, which was only rising and falling in a very shallow way; she felt a strong enough heartbeat, but the rest of the blonde-haired girl looked much worse for the wear. "Come on," Hermione said to her, slowly standing as she put a hand at the girl's side, grasping onto her arm with her other hand. "Let's get you to my house. My father probably has polstices enough to help you."

"I don't know if I can get up, Hermione," the girl murmured, her voice slurring slightly as she widened her eyes; she seemed to be caught within a state of shock her own self.

"Oh, yes you do. And you can. And you will," Hermione answered her, tugging at her arm until the girl did indeed begin to move to get to her feet. "I know it won't be easy, but who knows when this wolf might wake up and attack again? That'd be the end of us both, Lavender."

Slowly and shakily making it to a standing position, the buxom girl swayed slightly on her feet, before gaining a more steady composure. Allowing Hermione to help guide her forward with her hands on her arm and side, respectively, Lavender paused a few steps away to look back at the wolf that had attacked her. Staring blankly for a millisecond, she then gave a quiet gasp, before shaking her head from side to side, slowly. "But where did it go...?"

"What?" Hermione said, rather blankly, before turning to look for her own self. The wolf was gone.

She hadn't heard it get up or walk away or howl, or any other such thing it would be likely to do, yet it was gone - completely disappeared from where she'd left it. "Let's just hurry back to the village, Lavender..."

"I'm trying," the girl said, indeed doing her best to walk in a faster pace as Hermione continued to help guide her and keep her steady. "Do you really think your father can help me?"

"He can mix up a potion for anything."

"Even werewolf attacks...?" Lavender asked uncertainly, her breathing growing a bit more labored.

"Werewolf attacks? Don't be silly. That was just a regular old wolf. It was a dangerous, regular old wolf, but all the same-"

"By the face of the waxing moon - in the light it doth shine - the wolf that is man will stagger and swoon - transfixed by the light and heart filled with evil divine," Lavender recited, recollecting a poem that she'd first learned as a much younger girl.

"The wolf that is man - right. There is no such thing. Don't worry. Not for nothing, but you're bad off enough as it is without making up pointless things to worry yourself with at the moment. Please try to relax - it will help," Hermione said to her, in a matter-of-fact way, shaking her head.

"Have you ever seen one? A werewolf, that is?"

When Hermione remained silent, apparently too convinced there was no such thing to even answer the question, Lavender went on to say, "Well there you go. You personally wouldn't know if what had me down on the ground was a werewolf or not. If you haven't ever seen one, you wouldn't know."

Shaking her head further still, Hermione kept quiet, deciding to simply continue to help the girl on back to the village. As far as she was concerned, if Lavender wasn't willing to drop this silly talk, then the pair of teenagers really had nothing to talk about at all. Werewolves - of all the crazy talk in the world.

"Tomorrow when we have time, do you think we should practice brewing our potions before our next lesson?" Sat upon a large stone outside of the home he shared with his friend and his friend's family, a sixteen year old with dark hair and green eyes glanced over uncertainly in the direction of who he was asking the question to. He wasn't particularly fond of doing lessons outside of actual lesson time itself, but their last potion brewing lesson with the apothecary's apprentice had been troubling at best, and wanted to hear his friend's input on the manner.

"Is there any real point in practicing it without Hermione here to tell us what we're doing wrong? I'm pretty sure she has something planned with my sister tomorrow. She probably wouldn't be available to help us." Standing with his back leant against a side of the aforementioned home, a taller, gangly sixteen year old with a freckled complexion and ginger hair gave a sigh upon answering what he'd been asked. "Honestly, Harry – do you think we could get past the first few steps without her help?"

"Probably not," the now perturbed-looking young man said as he scratched at the stubble on his chin, before shaking his head and moving to stand up, stretching as he did so. "But if we did practice more often, then we might not be so lost all the time, you know, Ron."

"Eh, she'll lecture us both enough later on," the redhead answered lazily.

Looking vaguely puzzled, Harry raised an eyebrow, saying to his friend, "Maybe I'm imagining things, but I'd have sworn you were starting to really take a liking to her after all this time."

Glancing away, Ron answered, "Just because I dislike her lectures doesn't mean I dislike her. Besides, did you see what happened last week, when the bottle of whiskey was knocked over and started a fire near the haystack while we brewed polstices? When I put it out, she practically had stars in her eyes looking back to me, like I was a hero or something."

"You're something, alright," Harry said.

"Oh whatever - I know what I saw, and it was admiration. She really likes me."

"If you're so certain, let her know then," Harry answered simply, before smirking in an amused fashion as he watched his friend go a bit red in the ears.

"Why don't you go telling her things like that, and in class no less," Ron said, a sour look on his face. He'd then begun to say something else when an outcry coming from the edges of the nearby woods caught his and Harry's attention at once.

"Who's out at this time of night?" the ginger said immediately, before heading onward for the forest edge with Harry.

The light of the moon providing guidance, they soon found the source of the sound. Startled, they watched as their friend struggled to exit from the last of the trees, bearing some of the weight of another village girl as she approached them.

"Can you help me?" she asked, gasping for a breath as both of the young men came to her aid; Ron, reaching the girls first, took Lavender from Hermione completely, lifting her up in his arms to carry her the rest of the way on into the village, while Harry was left to place a hand at Hermione's shoulder, while he asked her several questions, wanting to gather what had led to this occurrence.

"Why were you and Lavender in the woods at night?" was his first question, and when Hermione didn't answer right away, he moved on to, "It was a really dangerous thing to do. You do realize that, don't you?" And finally, shaking his head as he walked with her back toward the houses, following quickly after Ron and Lavender, he asked her, "Are you out of your mind?"

Finally deciding to answer, the brown-eyed young woman took a deep breath to calm herself down, and then answered, "I heard her scream – I went to see what was wrong. Of course I know it was dangerous, Harry. And, lastly, yes, I probably am."

"Oh really? You probably are, you say?"

"Yes," Hermione said simply, giving a curt nod as she did so. "After all, once I hit the wolf with enough rocks to take it down – and once I had gotten poor Lavender to her feet, as well – well, I looked back and the wolf was gone. I've been deduced to imagining things, Harry."

Both feeling and looking alarmed, Harry stopped in his tracks, grabbing hold of Hermione's wrist as he did so. "You do realize the werewolf comes out during the waxing of the moon, don't you?"

Gently removing her wrist from his grasp, Hermione replied, "Maybe I'm not the only one out of their mind. Now enough of this – we need to help Lavender. We have to wake my father. We should probably go and wake Apprentice Snape, as well."

"Are you quite sure your father isn't good enough to help Lavender on his own?"

Ron asked this question of Hermione in a whisper as he huddled with both her and Harry on the opposite side of the one-room cabin that the apothecary and his daughter lived in.

On a bed by the biggest window lay the shivering, bloodied body of Lavender. The apothecary was moving like clockwork, mixing polstices to aid her in any way possible. After applying ointments to afflicted areas, he would then proceed to bandage them up, before moving on to more afflictions. All in all, he'd been working to keep her alive for the past forty minutes straight, not pausing to take so much as a half-moment's breather. Upon first entering into the cabin and laying the injured girl down upon the table, Ron had quickly done as instructed to do so by the apothecary, and had gone to alert Lavender's family about what had happened to her. While he'd told them that she'd been attacked, he left out much of the details. Who needed a panicked family coming to disturb the apothecary as he worked, after all?

Afterward, when Ron had returned with Lavender's parents, only to be told to escort them right back to their cabin after they caught a glimpse of their daughter and went into a hysterical panic, the apothecary had sent his own daughter to fetch his apprentice to help, as well.

As it was now, Hermione had returned, and she and her two friends were awaiting his appearance at any moment, to aid with the help being given to Lavender. "I know he's hard on us when we do lessons with him," Hermione was saying to Ron and Harry. "I understand that he isn't pleasant. But he's a superb apothecary, even if only an apprentice at the moment."

"Yeah, well, calling Snape unpleasant is practically a compliment, for one thing," Ron set in at once. "For another thing, he is too old to be anyone's apprentice. Yet he's so skilled, as you'd have us all know. Do you know, I heard a rumor, and I reckon it must be true, all these things considered."

"Oh, now isn't the time for rumors!" Hermione scolded him, but Ron was undeterred.

"The way I hear it, he was into all sorts of black arts and dark magic in the village he came from. He finally got so dark with it all, that they decided he needed to leave! How's that for "unpleasant"? An eviction from an entire town – something's not right with Snape, don't you agree?"

"Makes sense," Harry said, earning himself one nasty look from Hermione. "Well, sorry, Hermione," he then said. "But it is a bit too weird for someone to know so much about magic and alchemy like he does, without - as he'd have you think - ever having dabbled very much in it before."

Sighing, Hermione frowned as she looked on to watch her father still at work. She felt really bad for Lavender, and she was busy hoping against all hope that all her father's efforts for the poor girl wouldn't be a waste when the door opened, allowing a man with chin-length, raven black hair to enter into the home.

Looking over first to the table, to see the state the patient was in, he then darted his dark eyes over to the direction of the three friends, who were still huddled in the corner. "It would figure," he said, speaking in a quiet, yet surly and elongated drawl of a voice. "That my understudies would be standing around, completely useless – if not, perhaps, oblivious, to the situation going on around them."

"My father asked us not to interfere," Hermione said simply, but the apprentice didn't acknowledge her explanation. No, he simply rid himself of his cloak and approached the table, ready to help the apothecary with the situation at hand. The three friends, indeed not knowing what else to do, remained put where they were, all wanting nothing more at the moment than for all these efforts to work, so that their fellow villager might be saved.