"Sirius? You okay?"
"Oh yeah." His words were now very run-together, and he was swaying slightly on the spot. "Just… stood up too fast. I'd better go… go…."
What Sirius had better go do was lost on Hermione, because, at that instant, Sirius crumpled into a dead faint.
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All was black and aching, even as Sirius opened his eyes, tentatively, letting the sparse light bleed into his vision. He felt blind, except that he could see where something was close to him, or farther away, and a few inches of grainy wood of what he could only assume to be part of the bed he was in.
It was silent, except for the far-off sound of somebody walking around and cupboards being opened and closed. He winced. He would have liked to have been blissfully unaware of what he been disclosed to him shortly before fainting, but he knew it all, the pain was there to prove it, in his body and in his heart. He felt like he had been dead for seven years, all of a sudden, so hurt and staggering. He felt like a corpse.
His vision cleared enough for him to be able to tell that he was not in his house. He looked around this room he found himself in; it was far too clean to be in Grimmauld Place. The walls were impeccably white, the floor mold-free and completely devoid of any stray objects lying strewn across it, except for a set of robes and some other clothes that must have been his own, but even these were folded neatly at the side of the bed.
Sirius looked under the covers, and blushed to see that he was wearing only his boxer shorts. Had Hermione undressed him this much? He laughed as he pictured her doing it, impassive and a little annoyed, but altogether radiating every sign possible of being highly bored. He wondered briefly if the girl had ever been turned on in her life by something that was not made of ink and parchment.
He rolled out of bed, mussing the nicely tucked-in blankets, and groped on all fours for his clothes. A note came to his hand instead, and in Hermione's steady penmanship, he saw written 'These are filthy; try the ones in the drawers'.
Sirius sighed and staggered to his feet, then walked like a zombie over to the bureau and yanked open the drawers, rifling through them.
It was obvious that these clothes had once belonged to Hermione's father, for not only were they Muggle, but also very business-like. They looked like something Moony would wear, Sirius thought with a laugh. He considered just putting on his old robes, but they did have a certain malodorous air about them, so he backed away and begrudgingly tugged on the old Muggle clothes.
Glancing at himself in the mirror, he thought he looked like a prick. Sighing and running his fingers restlessly through his hair, he trudged from the room out into the hallway.
This had to be Hermione's flat, he thought. The entire house radiated a kind of cleanliness Sirius found in all unimaginable. He gaped at it as he walked down the hall, took a stab in the dark at a junction of two further halls, and found himself in the kitchen, where Hermione was sitting at a pristine white table and sipping a cup of something that was emitting soft amounts of steam.
She looked up at him, and grimaced at his expression. "What's the matter with it? Too Muggle for you?"
He almost laughed. "Nah. It's too clean."
At this, Hermione did laugh. "I just did a bit of straightening up before you got up. The den's still a wreck, though."
It belied everything Sirius had once held as true to imagine Hermione trashing a room, so he shook that out of his head. "Any chance of breakfast?" He asked, giving her his award winning grin. She seemed unaffected, and gave a shrug.
"Afraid I don't really eat breakfast, but there might be some stale cereal in the pantry."
Sirius followed the direction of her point and looked inside the pantry. The only cereal he saw had an expiration date of shortly after his own death, so he left it alone and turned back to Hermione, standing across the table from her.
"Did you sleep well?" She asked, not looking away from the newspaper she was reading.
Sirius gave a half-laugh. "Well as possible. This is… your flat?" He asked unnecessarily. Hermione looked at him and gave a curt nod. "Hmm… nice place. From the window it looked like we were basically in the middle of nowhere."
"Basically, yes." Hermione said coldly, turning a page of her newspaper with an indifference that made Sirius frown.
"What happened after I fainted?"
Hermione looked up finally, and gave a bit of a smile. "I found I was strong enough to drag you to the fireplace and Floo us both out of there. I took you to the guest bedroom and undressed you." Sirius was triumphant to see a small flush rise in Hermione's pale cheeks as she said this. "And the rest is history."
"Don't you have to go to work or something?" Sirius asked, finding the teapot and suddenly getting a hankering for tea. He began opening cupboards in search of a teacup.
"Today? Oh no." Hermione said, actually smiling. "I planned it so that the day after I did my, er, stunt I wouldn't be at work. I didn't want to face that inquiry, in case something went wrong, or have anybody guess why I was so weak if anything happened to me. I get a week-long holiday starting today."
"A bit of overkill, don't you think?"
"It wouldn't have been, had there been nobody to take care of me." Hermione said, and suddenly there was a silence that stretched what felt like a thousand days, Sirius whirling around to look Hermione in the eyes. She avoided his gaze, but finally looked up and gave a half-genuine smile.
"Thank you for helping me."
There was a further silence, before Sirius said, "You're welcome."
Another few billion years passed in two seconds, before Sirius said, quite a bit quieter, "Thank you. For saving me."
Hermione instantly smiled, but it was a thin, humorless smile. "You're welcome."
Sirius felt another age pass by, the tension filling the room, before Hermione said softly, wry smile gone, "The teacups are in the cabinet in the corner."
"Thank you." Sirius said, and walked off to fetch one. They were all dreadfully dull white porcelain, but for one, with a floral design on it. Just to be the regular Sirius, he picked the different one, which had been buried in the back. He poured himself some tea and tipped about half the sugar container in, stirring it around with a small spoon.
Hermione saw Sirius's choice of cup and sugar quantities and gave a flicker of a smile, and another one when Sirius downed the entire cup of tea in one long drag. She sipped hers, watching Sirius's delayed reaction to the temperature of the tea, and as he yelped and ran to the sink, allowing the cool tap water to flow over his scalded tongue.
He pulled away, giving Hermione a mock-glare. "Not funny." He said, but with his hurt tongue, it came out sounding a bit like he said, "Noth thunny." This just caused Hermione to laugh even harder. He laughed along with her, hoping it would encourage her; he had a feeling she had not laughed in quite some time.
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Hermione stopped laughing to see Sirius gazing solemnly at her from above the rim of his coffee cup. She instantly flushed red and looked away, filling the sink with soapy water and swirling her cup around in it. She heard Sirius walk over, and then saw his arm reach out from behind her, putting his own cup into the sudsy water.
"Do you know what happened earlier? Why did I collapse?" Sirius asked, but Hermione really was not listening. It occurred to her that Sirius was standing much too close, she could feel his breath in all the wrong places, but for some reason there was a rightness permeating the situation, and Hermione almost lost herself to the feeling. She swallowed it all, not even allowing herself to reconsider what she had just been thinking. A ticking, every-analytical part in the back annals of her mind, however, pointed out the painfully obvious—how very scintillated she was at the feel of his body so close to hers. She slowly turned, and then their chests were pressed together. Her eyes stayed momentarily on where they touched, but Sirius was not backing away, and Hermione was incapable of doing so. She trailed her gaze up to his.
"Er…" she tried to recall his question, and it suddenly came back to her, although allowing enough of a pause to cause Hermione's face to flush deeply again under Sirius's quizzical glance, "just the effects of the arch, mixed with… s-surprise, from what I'd told you."
"I figured as much." Somehow, Sirius took a step closer, and Hermione was positively crushed by him—she somehow found this invigorating instead of harmful. The smell of him washed over her, and somewhere underneath that un-bathed air was a slight hint of cinnamon. "I mean, it isn't every day that a man finds out he's been dead for seven years."
"Indeed not." Hermione found Sirius's gaze disconcerting, and she looked away. Sirius must have noticed Hermione starting to look a little uncomfortable, because he backed away, apologizing in undertones. Hermione took advantage of this to slightly bow her head to him and rush of to the living room, breathing heavily for some reason or another.
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A/N: Again,thanks so much for the reviews. pulls out Spanish/English dictionary I don't mean to be so terribly mean all the time. Tonight won't be such an awful cliffhanger, I swear.