Author's Note: Thank you to PinkTribeChick, Lala5, Nynaeve80, DementedLeaf, and armygundamgirl for reading and reviewing the other three pieces in this series. You asked, you shall receive. :-) Thanks for being so encouraging.

The perspective in this story will alternate by chapter between Lupin and Hermione, so we'll get to see both points of view.

A third quick note: I am half-blind. There was an accident. Oops. Sometimes I make little typographical errors that I just can't catch. I do have someone read the stories over for me, but everyone misses the odd spelling mistake now and again, so they might be there. If you see one, please point it out tome so that I can correct it. I promise, I won't get upset, I'd really appreciate it. It's a terrible thing when you lose your credibility as a writer because you're physically incapable of properly catching your own "forms" and "froms." Thanks!

Enjoy!

Menolly

Disclaimer: Other than the obvious fact that I don't own Harry Potter, I also don't own the quote in the summary of this fic. I found that attributed to Elizabeth Taylor.

Chapter One: Fight or Flight

Hermione sipped absently at her butterbeer, while watching a very scrawny man trying to jostle people out of the way in order to get closer to Madam Rosmerta's counter. The sun had just begun to go down in the village of Hogsmeade, but activity in the Three Broomsticks didn't seem to fade with the light. At a nearby table, a collection of giggly witches were all looking at something in one of their shopping bags. Every time the witch with the bag opened it, all of them burst out into shrieks and gales of laughter that made Hermione wonder what exactly it was they had there. It was probably something from Zonko's, she decided, some one-use, instant love potion or something of that ilk.

Hermione, too, was laden with shopping bags, as she'd just left Honeydukes sweet shop, where she'd been shopping for her mother's birthday. No doubt, she thought with a grin, Mrs. Granger wouldn't ever have tasted any of the delectable sweet balls and concoctions that Honeydukes had to offer. She'd been careful to stay away from anything that was either shaped like, or acted like a mouse, toad, or cockroach, and had confined her attentions to the more innocent-looking sugar quills and chocolate balls. Mrs. Granger was very understanding of her daughter's totally unfathomable wizarding tastes, but Hermione had decided not to push her luck.

Another ear-splitting shriek erupted from the table next to hers, and Hermione shot an exasperated glance at the group of witches. They should, she thought, have just a little more decorum, as they looked no less than thirty years of age. They were acting like a group of schoolgirls.

A flash of light just outside the windows caught Hermione's attention, and she turned just in time to see a green jet explode, presumably, out of a wand, smacking a witch in the back of the head, and knocking her forward on to the ground, senseless. Hermione got to her feet, as did most of the other residents of the Three Broomsticks, all of whom were talking, yelling, pushing into one another to get either closer to the doors, or farther back into the depths of the inn. As the witches with the shopping bag pelted towards the door, Hermione realized that they hadn't been laughing. They'd been screaming in terror.

A wizard thudded hard on to the window, plastering himself up against it as he was hit from behind by a burst of magic. His frozen, terrified face slipped down the window pane, squished in a horrible mask of pain as he disappeared from sight. Hermione rushed towards the window, but couldn't see where he'd fallen. Was he dead? Stunned?

The doors to the Three Broomsticks burst open, and a man stumbled in, his wand thrust in front of him as if in challenge to all of the cowering people ranged along the back of Rosmerta's counter. Predictably, they all screamed. Hermione, however, did not scream, probably because she was too horrified to be capable of sound. She recognized the face under that hood all too well, from an all-too recent encounter.

She thought his name was Amycus. He was an older man, too old, one would have thought, to be useful as a death eater, and yet there was a hardness around his pudgy-eyed face that instilled very real terror in anyone who saw him. His grizzled hair and large, thick, disproportionate arms made him look more like a monster than a man, probably due to ill usage at the hands of the Dark Lord for any past slip-ups. Shining on his forearm was the unmistakable, leering skull of the Dark Mark, and he was pointing that branded wand-arm directly at Hermione.

For an aching moment, Hermione and Amycus stared at each other, motionless, uncertain. In the same instant, they both seemed to reach their decision. Amycus opened his mouth, and began to speak very quickly. "Avad-!" he began, but, before he had a chance to finish the incantation, Hermione had thrown a chair in between them, and fallen to her knees behind it, so that the spell bounced off of one of the chair's wooden legs, creating a searing black scar along it, but leaving Hermione unharmed.

She didn't have time to worry about the rest of the people in the inn, and she didn't have time to wonder about the presence of the Death Eaters in the middle of the crowded village. Hermione ran like she had never run before, out through the doors of the inn and aimlessly into the cobblestone streets, not paying any attention to where she was heading. She tried to force herself to think, to make sense of the situation, to make some sort of decision as to where she was going, but her mind was too paralyzed with the need to get away.

Vaguely, Hermione was aware as she ran of other people screaming, yelling, diving out of her way as she careened through them. She knew that Amycus must be at her heels, must be just behind her, his wand raised. She couldn't escape him, she realized with a jolt. There was nothing she could do. He would kill her, he would strike her down without so much as moving, the moment he managed to shoot off the Avada Kedavra curse . It was too late. She wasn't fast enough. She was going to die.

This realization stopped Hermione in her tracks, but, at the same time, it stopped her mind from spinning. So, she decided, this was it, then. She fumbled in her robes for her wand, but she knew that by the time she had it out and prepared to defend herself, he would already have had enough time to commit the murder. How long had she been running away from him, and why had she been so stupid? Shouldn't she have realized before she took off like a frightened squirrel, that the best defense was to face him, armed, and ready?

"Avada Ked-!" said Amycus, from behind her. Hermione held her breath.

"Stupefy," shouted a hoarse voice from somewhere to her left. Hermione spun around to see Amycus dropping his wand, stunned mid-sentence by the stupefication spell. She leveled her wand at him, a half expecting him to get up and charge at her a second time, but he didn't move.

"Expelliarmus," she said, and his wand flew out of his hand, hitting the ground with a crack. She bent down to pick up the wand.

"Leave it," insisted the voice that had come to her aid. "If we take his wand, he'll be able to track us as soon as he kills someone else and gets theirs. Come on."

Hermione turned, her heart flooding with hope as she recognized, for the second time that afternoon, a very familiar voice. Remus Lupin was standing over Amycus' fallen form, his robes just as beaten and patched as they'd always been, his hair streaked with the silver of aging, and of a worry that made him old before his time. Eyes flashing, he turned on her, reaching out to grab her painfully by the wrist. "Well, come on!" he insisted urgently.

Lupin's grip on Hermione's arm was painful as he hurried her forward through the streets of Hogsmeade. Once or twice she cried out as he twisted a bit too forcefully on her wrist, but he didn't relinquish his hold until they'd made their way around the back of the Hog's Head. Lying up against the side of the pub was a broom, just as tattered and ratty-looking as Lupin's robes. There was a brand name marked on one side of the broom, but it was so badly faded that Hermione couldn't for the life of her make out what it said.

Lupin swung one leg up over the broom, and settled himself on to it, sweeping his robes out from under him so that they didn't catch. Shooting Hermione a look, he waited, and she, realizing he expected her to join him, hastened over to him.

Hermione leapt astride the broom, bracing her knuckles against the hilt as she attempted to balance herself properly on to it. Lupin shook his head. "Put your arms around my waist," he instructed her, "or you'll fall right off." Hermione did so. As her fingers locked around the older man's slim waist, she was surprised to feel how slight his frame was, how disturbingly fragile he felt. Alarmed, she wondered what kind of work he'd been doing lately for the Order, and whether or not he'd even been eating properly, or sleeping sufficiently. She didn't want to see Lupin weakening. He'd always been a bit threadbare, but to imagine him as old, as frail…

Lupin kicked off from the ground, and the broom took off, soaring through the air over the mayhem in the streets, the roofs of the taverns and shops, and the houses that skirted the shopping portion of Hogsmeade village. Hermione stared down at the place where Amycus had lain, but she couldn't make out faces anymore, not at this height.

"We can't just leave," she started. "We can't just leave him there to wake up and start killing people. We're going back, aren't we?"

Lupin shook his head. "We're not going back," he told her. "That's not my job. Someone else will be here shortly to clean up the mess."

Even as he spoke, Hermione saw the crowd part around the place where she thought Amycus was. Groups of people were moving away from the spot, as if the spectacle was over. Someone, like Lupin had said, must have arrived to take care of him. Was it a member of the Order?

Taking her attention away from the scene of the crime, Hermione regarded Lupin again. She couldn't catch his eye, as he was looking fixedly ahead of him, focusing, apparently, on the trajectory of the broom. She had a thousand questions, and she spent a few minutes working out in her head which ones were the most important, and which she was most likely to get answered.

"How did you know?" she asked, after several moments of pensive silence between them. "How did you know that I was in trouble?"

Lupin shook his head. "I didn't," he said. "I got very lucky. We did worry that something like this might happen, that the Death Eaters might decide to come after you, Ron, and Ginny. Ron and Ginny are relatively safe at the Burrow, at the moment, however, and Harry can't be touched with the Dursleys. The first place I looked for you was at your mother's house, but she informed me that you'd gone to stay for the weekend at Hogsmeade, and that you wouldn't be home for a couple of days. I came to talk to you, thinking that you and I would work out some arrangement for your own protection. I did not think that I would find you at Amycus' mercy the moment I showed up. So, as I said, it really was luck."

"Well, luck or not," she murmured, "I think I owe you a lot of thanks, Professor. He almost had me. It was a very, very close thing." Hermione took a moment to reflect on exactly how close it had been, and her stomach dropped sickeningly as she remembered thinking that she was going to die, remembered deciding that it was all over. She'd been too cowardly even to turn and fight. Some DA witch she was. She felt stupid, childish.

"What I don't understand," she said, speaking around her thoughts to try and put her own self-disgust from her mind, "is why he was trying to kill me. Wouldn't I be a lot more use to…to Voldemort if I was alive, and able to give him information about Harry, and the Order?"

Lupin shrugged. "You're plenty of use to him dead, I'm sure. I can't imagine Harry standing by and taking our demise in good part. He'd go running off searching for Voldemort's lair without a moment's hesitation, hot for revenge, and that's all the Dark Lord requires."

"But," Hermione pressed him, "Ron is all right, and Ginny? Harry, too? No one's come after them, the way they came after me?"

Lupin chuckled darkly. "No," he replied, "no, for the moment, you're the lucky one who seems to have attracted Voldemort's attention, although I don't doubt that, now that he's failed with you, the rest of those of us who are close to Harry will be next. After all, that scheme worked once." Hermione heard the hardness in Lupin's voice, saw one of his hands clench down on the broom handle, as he thought about what had happened the last time Voldemort had decided to make Harry think that the people he loved were in danger. "We're doing the best we can to keep everyone safe from attacks," he added, after a pause. "The Order's somewhat dispersed at the moment, so that we're not all in the same place, making us more difficult to track down. Harry's staying with his aunt and uncle, and we tried to separate Ron, Ginny, and the rest of the Weasleys, but of course Molly wouldn't have that. She'd rather have the whole family together, of course, in the event of an incident."

Hermione didn't want to think about any sort of 'incident' occurring at Molly Weasley's house, where so many good people were currently living. She couldn't imagine anything happening to Ron and Ginny, but she quickly reassured herself as she remembered that all of the Weasleys were wizards, and could therefore defend themselves much better in numbers than she could by herself.

"You're not worried that they'll just hunt us down one by one and…pick us off?" she asked, swallowing against the tide of horror that those words brought about.

"Of course we are," insisted Lupin. "But we think that it's safer for everyone if it's more difficult to track us down individually. That way, the Death Eaters have to spread out over a much wider space to find us, and less of them can attack at once. There are a lot of benefits that way of thinking, and it's the best solution that we have, for the moment."

That seemed reasonable to Hermione. She took a look around as she and Lupin glided through the sky, which was rapidly darkening as early evening took hold of the surrounding village. She had never particularly liked broomsticks, perhaps one reason why she'd never taken to quidditch like her friends. Glancing down, she remembered exactly how terrified she was of heights, and tightened her grip around Lupin's waist, reminding herself firmly that he was no doubt an expert flyer, and would not let her fall. What an awful fall that would be, too, with nothing but rooftops, pavement and stone beneath her to break both her fall and her.

Lupin reached back and placed a reassuring hand on her arm, before returning both hands to the broom. "Don't worry," he said, "we're almost there. I'll let you off soon enough."

"Where are we going?" asked Hermione. "Grimmauld Place?" But no, she decided, even as she said it. If Lupin was trying to keep everyone apart, they wouldn't be going to the headquarters of the Order, where no doubt other members were currently staying.

"Actually," he murmured, "we're going to my home."

Hermione blinked at him. It hadn't occurred to her that he had one, and she felt silly about it. Of course he had a home. Where else could he have been living, all of those years before Dumbledore had called him to join the second Order? "It's been a couple of years since I've spent any time there," he continued, "so it wouldn't honestly be the first place that anyone would look for me. There's a good deal of spellwork on the place as well, since I've never been particularly keen on being easy to find. There are plenty of people, totally unrelated the cause of the Death Eaters, who'd like to torch the house of a known werewolf."

"Idiots," muttered Hermione, grimacing. "We need unity, and faith in times like these, not prejudices and ignorant hate crimes. Some people never will understand what's best for them, I suppose."

"No," said Lupin, "probably not." But Hermione thought she detected a slight change in his tone, and less of an edge to his voice as they soared on through the night sky.