Unexpected by JAWorley
Summary: Some unexpected changes are taking place in Harry's body, which are sure to make for an interesting 6th year. He will have to rely on Ron, a mysterious man, and a snarky Potion's master to get him through the year.
Categories: Healer Snape, Teacher Snape > Trusted Mentor Snape, Teacher Snape > Professor Snape, Parental Snape > Guardian Snape, Snape Equal Status to Harry > Comrades Snape and Harry Main Characters: .Snape and Harry (required), Dumbledore, Ginny, Hagrid, Hermione, McGonagall, Original Character, Other, Petunia, Pomfrey, Remus, Ron
Snape Flavour: Snape is Angry, Canon Snape, Snape Comforts, Snape is Mean, Overly-protective Snape, Snape is Secretive, Snape is Stern
Genres: Action/Adventure, Angst, Drama, Fantasy, General, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery, Supernatural
Media Type: None
Tags: Alternate Universe, Creature!fic, Hospitalization, Incognito!Harry, Injured!Harry, Physical Impairment, Runaway, Spying on Harry! Snape, Werewolf!Harry, Werewolf!Snape, Werewolves
Takes Place: 6th summer, 6th Year
Warnings: Abusive Dursleys, Neglect, Profanity, Violence
Prompts: Harry is a werewolf
Challenges: Harry is a werewolf
Series: None
Chapters: 9 Completed: No Word count: 29112 Read: 42007 Published: 28 Dec 2011 Updated: 08 Apr 2018
Struggle by JAWorley
Author's Notes:
The boys try to figure out how to keep Harry (and Ron) safe.
“Harry?  Harry, wake up!”  Ron stared in the darkness at his friend as he stood in front of the closed dorm bedroom door with blank, vacant eyes, and kept trying to walk through it.

When Harry didn’t wake up at Ron’s whispers, Ron looked around him and was glad to find that the other boy’s all had their hangings shut.  Ron crept forward and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder, leaping back when Harry startled awake and jumped.  His eyes flashed yellow for a moment, making Ron pull back another step, and then they turned back to green in the darkness.

“What?  What’s going on?”

“You.  You were trying to get through the wards to get out.  And your eyes...”

"Yeah?"

"Yellow."

"Great."

Harry ran his hand through his hair.  This was the second night in a row he’d dreamt of someone calling to him.  He couldn’t remember anything else, only that it was a deep male voice, and that it seemed so gentle yet commanding, that he wanted to follow it more than anything.

“Harry.”

“What?”

Ron pointed down to his hand.  “Your wand.”

Harry looked down now too and was startled to find that he was holding his wand.  “Do you… do you think I was going to let the wards down?”

“I don’t know.”

They stared at each other in the half moonlit room for long moments, before Ron told Harry to get back into bed and put several more wards around the room.  The other boys could get out, but Harry would not be able to.

“Maybe we should tell Hermione,” Ron whispered as he got back into his bed.

“No,” Harry said.  “We’ll have to figure things out on our own until Ethan comes back.”

“Ethan… great,” Ron muttered, before rolling over so that his back was to Harry.

Harry sighed and then lay down on his back, staring at the hangings over the bed.  At least Snape hadn’t caught him this time.  He didn’t want to scrub cauldrons for two days in a row.

* * *

“Here,” Ron said, setting a stack of books down heavily in front of Harry at a desk in the very back of the library.

“We’d better not check them out,” Harry said, fearing that madam Pince would catch on if she saw the titles they were reading.

“Well we’ll have to hurry then.  We’ve only got one hour a day where Hermione is in Arithmancy.”

“Here.”  Harry shoved the top book towards Ron and then pulled the next one off the stack.  He would rather be outside right now, soaking up the autumn sun during his free period, but he feared what would happen that night if he didn’t figure out how to stop the Alpha from calling him out of bed in his sleep each night.  He was also positive that while the hunter didn’t know his identity, that the Alpha did, seeing as how he was the one that had turned him.  No, not knowing who the Alpha was, Harry didn’t want to venture outside.

“There’s nothing here,” Ron said at the end of their hour as he closed the heavy tomb.  “Nothing we didn’t already know.”

“Same here,” Harry said, closing his book.  As they rose to put the books away Harry kept a cautious eye on other students to be sure no one was watching them.  Just as they got back to their table, Hermione came out from behind a bookshelf.

“There you are.  What are you doing up here?”

“Homework,” Harry said automatically.  He’d already rehearsed his answer to her.  “I want to get a leg up in defense this year.”

“Well you should,” she said, but then reluctantly added, “but you’re already top of the class in defense.”

He shrugged.  “I’ve got a price on my head, remember?”  This answer seemed to satisfy her and she didn’t ask them anymore about it as they headed towards Potions.

Harry was not pleased to find that in Potions Snape seemed to be keeping an extra close eye on him.  Every time he looked up from chopping his ingredients or stirring his potion, the man was in a new place in the room but still staring at him.

“He’s keeping an eye on you,” Ron said quietly after nudging Harry.

“Well he thinks I’m up to something.”

“Maybe we should be up to something to throw him off,” Ron whispered seriously.

Harry gave him a serious look and then a small nod.  Maybe.  If they let the man catch them at something and ‘foil’ their plan then maybe he’d leave them alone.  It might be worth the detention they would get, and Harry was glad Ron seemed to be willing to pay the price as well.

Hermione and Ginny gave them strange looks that night at dinner as Harry and Ron moved down to the other end of the table to discuss what kind of false trouble they could get into but they ignored it as they leaned in far over the table so they could talk more quietly and still hear each other over the noise of other students at dinner.

“He caught me out after bed without a shirt on, and he caught us talking in the hall that day.  What can we do with that?”

Ron frowned and thought hard.  “We really need Fred and George’s brains for this.  Wish they were still around.”

“We could write to them,” Harry suggested, “but they’d be too interested in our reasons.”

“Nah,” Ron said, sitting back.  “They live by a rule breaker’s code of conduct.”

Harry crossed his arms and shook his head.  “Rule breaker’s code of conduct.  What if Snape intercepted our owl?”  He leaned in again and in a mocking tone recited a fake letter, “Dear Fred and George.  We’re up to something.  We need help in throwing Snape off the trail.  Give us some rules to break.”

“Ok ok, well what about a prank then?  We can just take it right out of Fred and George’s book.  Next best thing right?”

“I’m listening.”

Ron lowered his voice.  “Let’s say we just do something to the Slytherins.  Something Snape would be interested in learning.  We’ll let Draco overhear our evil plan or something.  You know he’ll go right back to Snape with it.”

“I’m no good at pranks though.  I wouldn’t know what we would plot to do against their whole house.”

They thought in silence for a few moments and then Ron looked up.  “We’ll just do something annoying then.  Fred and George used to stick people to their chairs.  We could look up a spell to make the Slytherins stick to whatever they touch.”

Harry laughed out loud.  “Can you imagine?  The boys would all be stuck in the loo!”  

Ron laughed too.  “Ok, let’s do it then.”

“Actually plan it or just let Draco overhear?”

“Let’s just plan it,” Ron said.  “I want to do it. They put us through enough already.”

“We’ll definitely get detention if we do it.  Remember what’s coming up next week…”

Ron’s smile faded a little.  He knew.  The full moon was almost upon them again and he and Harry had been discussing different ways to keep Harry away from people and out of sight.  They’d already decided that with the hunter on the loose, and the alpha, that the shrieking shack and anywhere else out on the grounds wasn’t an option.  It would have to be someplace in the castle, somewhere where no one would hear him howling or open up a door and get… mauled.

“After dinner,” Ron said.  “Well just act suspicious then and let Draco overhear.”

Harry nodded.  “Fine.”

As planned they left shortly before they thought Draco would be finishing up and stood just outside the doors to the Great Hall.  When they saw him rise from the table they started whispering about their ‘plan to pay back the Slytherins with a sticking charm’.  Out of the corner of his eye Harry saw Draco slow as they spoke just loud enough for him to hear, and then they stopped when they saw him hurry off towards the Dungeons, surely to tell Snape.

They didn’t leave the Entrance Hall though, they waited for Snape to come catch them plotting, and within five minutes he had appeared in the doorway to the dungeons with Draco looking smug standing behind him in the shadows.

“Potter- Weasley,” he said with a sneer and a definite curl of the lip.

“Sir?” Ron asked with a falsely innocent tone.  He even put his hands behind his back to make it look like he was trying hard to hide his intentions.

“It has come to my attention that you are planning some sort of foolish revenge on Slytherin house.”

“Revenge sir?” Harry piped up.  “For what?”

“Do not play coy with me Potter.  Mr. Malfoy overheard the two of you talking about permanent sticking charms.”  Nice touch Draco Harry thought to himself.  They’d never said anything about permanent but Draco had certainly done his job of getting Snape back into the Entrance Hall.

“I don’t know any sticking charms,” Harry said, and then mustered an angry look and said hotly, “he’s lying!  He’s just trying to get us into trouble!  You can’t prove anything!”

“I know you’ve been up to something Potter, and now I know what.  Detention for both of you.  Tonight."  He looked irritated then and said with a sneer, "Go find Mr. Filch and tell him you are to each serve an hour.  I don't have time to waste babysitting dunderheads like you."

He turned on his heel and stalked off and Draco crossed his arms, still looking smug as he followed his head of house.

Harry sighed and Ron said, "Had to be done.  At least it's only an hour."

"Too bad it's only an hour," Harry said.

"Too bad?  You hit your head or something?"

"If I'm awake all night doing detention, maybe I won't get called out."

They started up the stairs to find Filch.  "That's- possibly genious," Ron admitted.  "You could sleep in the day between or go to bed really early."

"My only worry is that he'll figure it out and call me out in the middle of the day.  Can you imagine me sleep walking down a corridor full of students?"

"And the yellow, you know," Ron said as a group of Ravenclaws passed by.  "What's that all about?"

"I don't know," Harry said.  "I haven't really looked at myself in the mirror, but Ethan, his are yellow when he's..." he paused, uncertain who could be just around the corner listening.  "We have to find a way to talk about this."

"Snitch and Playing Quidditch," Ron said, and Harry smiled and gave a nod understanding that the Snitch was golden like his apparently yellow eyes.

"Ethan gets the Snitch when he's playing Quidditch.  I must do it too."

"But you weren't playing last night."

They looked in four closets before they finally found Filch patrolling the library corridor with Mrs. Norris and he set them to work in a boys bathroom.  Finally alone again, they warded the bathroom against eavesdroppers and started to talk again.

"My face didn't change last night did it?"

"No."

"Maybe it's because of the Alpha calling me out.  He's obviously accessing some part of the beast side of me to get me out of the castle.  But I don't know about that," Harry said, changing his mind.  "There was one time where Ethan got really mad at me after we left the Burrow and his eyes were yellow for a minute.  I thought it was just because of the full moon later that night though."

"Some help he is," Ron said.  "He could have at least clued you in to some of this."

"We spent most of the time traveling with him trying to make me mad so I would freak out and change.  He was trying to teach me how to control the change so when I get mad here I don't do it in front of everybody."

"You told me.  But it doesn't sound like he's a good teacher.  You said you didn't have it down by the time you got back."

"No, I don't.  I'm just trying to not get mad at anyone."

Hermione tsked at them that evening when they got back to the common room.  "You know they'll send an owl to your mum," she told Ron.  "It's only been a week since school started."

Ron lifted up his hand and moved his fingers back and forth like they were talking.  "Yeah yeah," he grumbled, and followed Harry up stairs to the boys dormitory.

"What are we going to do all night?"

"What do you mean we?" asked Harry.

"Well if you've got to stay up, we might as well do something productive.  Let's sneak back to the library tonight and read and see what we can find."

"If we get caught with those books-"

"Then I'll say I'm researching for ways to help Professor Lupin or something.  I don't know."

"That hunter... I'm sure Snape alerted Dumbledore to what he said about chasing two were's onto school grounds.  If we get caught they'll think it's the two of us."

Ron grinned.  "Then I can go around snapping at all the people I don't like in the hallway between classes and scare the snot out of the Slytherins.  Come full moon they'll find they were wrong about me."

"And me?"

"What if I sneak out with the cloak and bring back a few of the books in my bag and we can sit up reading them."

Harry thought it over.  "You're too willing to get into trouble for me."

"What are best mates for?"

Harry agreed, and dug out his cloak for Ron, knowing he would do the same if the tables were turned and it was Ron who were a werewolf.  Ron snuck out through the common room at five minutes to curfew and returned almost forty minutes later with four heavy books and Harry's cloak.  Some of the other boys had gone into the dorm to study or start getting ready for bed, so Harry and Ron headed downstairs to a nook in a corner of the common room often used by older students because it was walled in on three sides.  It was the perfect place to study.

"Can I join you?" Hermione asked, comming up to them a few minutes after they sat down.  She was wearing her pajamas and had a notebook and her Runes book.

"Go ahead," Harry said, not wanting to draw suspicion.  They each had a book and the other two were still in Ron's bag under the table.

"What are you studying?" she asked.

Ron held up his book, a book about magical creatures and Harry did the same.

"Someone said Voldemort was gathering vampires into his ranks, and we know he already has werewolves and giants," Harry told her.  "I want to be sure I know how to fight each and every one of them when the time comes.  And besides, I wanted to know more about that hunter that came onto the grounds the other day."

"I looked the hunters up already," Hermione said.  "They sound aweful.  Can you imagine one of them hunting Professor Lupin if he were here?"

Harry shook his head but the answer was yes.  Yes, he could imagine what it would be like for Remus to be hunted, becuase he'd been followed by the hunter all summer, shot at, and filled with fear and adrenaline more often than he cared to admit.

Hermione left them studying to go to bed around midnight when the common room had finally cleared out, leaving Harry and Ron alone.

"Anything?" Ron asked.

"You become an Alpha by killing another Alpha, usually the leader of the pack they belong to."

"Aren't you supposed to find and kill the Alpha to get rid of the lycanthropy?  Does that mean you'll become an alpha?"

"I don't know," Harry said.  "That's what worries me.  I don't want to be even more of a werewolf."  He flipped back through the pages he'd read and stopped at a picture of a grotesque face.  "Look.  This is what my kind looks like as an Alpha when transformed."

"Yech."

"Yeah.  No thanks."

"I didn't find anything about the Alpha or the eyes.  This book mostly has information on Russian were's.  You know how Snape used to brew a potion for Remus?"

"Yeah."

"It only works for that kind of were.  Sorry," he finished lamely.

"For what?  You think I'd demean myself and accept help from Snape once a month?  You know he never let Remus live that down, how he had to brew a complicated, expensive potion all month long and how he was the only one to do it so he had to be burdened to do it for Lupin all year long..."

"If I was better at Potions I would come up with a potion for you."

"Thanks."

Ron fell asleep on the couch half an hour later, and Harry passed out next to him soon after.  He found himself immediately in a dream where he was outside in the Quidditch Pitch, ripping someone to shreds and enjoying the taste of flesh.  When he sat up, finally finished, he looked down in horror to find a shock of orange hair.  He had eaten Ron's instestines and left the grass a bloody mess under the three quarter moon.  Appalled he stood up and stumbled backwards.  He fell and when he hit the ground, he woke with a start.

Harry was confused when he found cold damp grass under his hands.  Was he still dreaming?  It didn't feel like he was dreaming.  He looked around wildly for the Alpha or the hunter or Ethan or anybody, but there was no one.  He looked to where Ron had been in his dream, heart thumping loudly in his chest, and found nothing there.  Harry turned and wretched, barfing on the grass.  No- no no no.  This can't be happening!  How did I get out here?  I was in bed with the dorm warded... no, I was next to Ron on the couch and we didn't ward the common room because we were going to stay up all night.

Getting to his feet, stumbling, and getting to his feet again, Harry ran as fast as his legs would carry him back out of the Quidditch Pitch and across the damp lawn.  He sprinted up countless sets of stairs and burst into the common room, where Ron was still in the corner sleeping.  He wasn't covered in blood and seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

Harry almost knocked a chair over in his haste to get to his best friend, and Ron startled awake at the noise.

"Harry?"

"He got me outside Ron!" Harry panted, still feeling panicky and completely out of control.  "I was in the pitch.  I was dreaming I'd eaten you... you were dead.  And then I woke up and I was really outside in the Pitch!"

Ron looked him up and down.  "You've got blood on you."

"What?"  Harry looked down at his chest, confused.  "I didn't get anyone, I swear!  There was no one out there."

"No, it's you.  You're hurt."  Ron pointed and Harry realized that his shirt was ripped. He lifted it up and found three angry, deep red scratches on his chest.

"Did you- did you do that to yourself?"

"I don't know... maybe?  Maybe I was trying to wake myself up."

Ron reached forward and spread his fingers apart to see if he could trace the scratches.  "No, these are too wide.  It had to be someone with a bigger hand... claw..."

They both stared at the scratches for long moments and finally Harry sat down, putting his head in one hand.  "What am I going to do?  It's only a matter of time until I really do get someone, or someone gets me."

"Come on.  Let's go up to the dorm.  I'll put tripple wards on it and you put yours on it."

"It's not safe for you up there," Harry said.  "I think the dream was a message.  The Alpha knows you're helping me, and he's telling me that he could have me rip you to shreds at any time."

"Then I'll ward my bed against you.  Come on.  It's not going to do either of us any good to stay down here the rest of the night."

Harry followed him upstairs and they put their wards up.  Ron also warded his bed and the beds of the other boys against Harry.

"You don't have to be my keeper you know," Harry said as they both lay in their separate beds in the darkness staring at the ceiling.

"No, but I am your friend."
To be continued...
End Notes:
Thoughts? I'm sure there are spelling and grammar errors. I haven't edited it yet.


This story archived at http://www.potionsandsnitches.org/fanfiction/viewstory.php?sid=2728