Hermione lounged about on her couch, barefoot and draped in a blanket. The forecast was calling for snow any day now, and Hermione was not one to second-guess the weather, especially when it was so very cold outside.
"Shut your eyes," came Sirius's call from the kitchen, "and open up your mouth."
Hermione sighed and shut her eyes. She heard footsteps, and said impatiently, "You're not going to slip a spider in there, are you?"
Sirius just laughed a deep, throaty laugh. Hermione shivered, and pulled the blanket a little tighter around her. Sirius spoke again, now so close that she could feel his breath on her face.
"Of course not. Now open up."
Hermione grinned, but did open her mouth.
The taste of the spaghetti was remarkable; the sauce, which Sirius had insisted on making from scratch, was just the right consistency or solid and liquid. The actually let out a moan of surprise, and heard Sirius's chuckle. She swallowed before opening her eyes.
The sight that greeted her caused her to clutch her hand at her heart, laughing. Sirius stood before her in her only apron, which was blue with floral print, holding the fork out like a mother who had just fed her baby by telling it that the airplane was going into the port.
Sirius beamed. "I thought you'd like it." He modeled a bit, putting his hand to his hip and swinging his arm around. "Great taste you've got."
"My… mum gave it… to me." Hermione said between gasping shudders of laughter. She was now clutching at her heaving sides.
Sirius sat down next to her and just stared for a few moments, Hermione still laughing uproariously, before saying, "You know, that spaghetti could come out of your nose if you keep this up."
Hermione laughed more at this, but calmed down. She looked over at him, seriously, and blinked her eyes slowly once, smile still evident on her face.
"Thanks, Sirius. I haven't laughed like that in a long time."
He grinned back. "No problem."
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Two hours later, it was far past Hermione's bed time, but she hardly noticed at all. Sirius was keeping her well entertained by telling stories of the Marauders at Hogwarts. They had each eaten copious amounts of spaghetti, and were mildly drunk with the night, collapsing into fits of giggles every now and then.
Soon, however, the drunken feelings turned to melancholy ones, as Hermione told in detail the stories of Dumbledore's death, Sirius's own, and then a little about the circumstances of Ron's. She simultaneously felt that Sirius, having taken Ron's place in the spell, did not deserve to know, and that he alone would truly understand the death of a friend so close, and then… years of utter torment, alone and afraid. She knew her situation was much less severe than Sirius's had been; she wondered how he had kept grip on his sanity whatever.
He noted her silence with a raised eyebrow, and said quietly, "What about Wormtail? Whatever happened to him?"
Hermione slowly chewed her mouthful of spaghetti, then swallowed it down. "Disappeared. Nobody really knows. We think he may have died, but we're keeping our eyes open until then."
"How about the Malfoys?"
"Draco's still alive, but his parents…." She shook her head, smiling a humorless half-smile.
Sirius frowned a little bit.
"I can only imagine how Draco feels." Sirius said. "I never even remotely wanted my parents to live. Harry never had time to."
"I always did." Hermione said quietly, wiping a sweaty palm on her pants legs. She noticed again how cold the room was, and was suddenly glad of Sirius's warmth at her side. He was like a beacon in the dark, and she barely stopped herself from leaning farther into him.
"You've had a well-rounded life, haven't you?"
Hermione laughed a little at Sirius's choice of words.
"I wouldn't say that." She said darkly.
"Why not?"
"I see a well-rounded person's life as a circle." Hermione said, looking at Sirius. He looked curious, and nodded for her to continue. "Well, you know… it has to be perfectly balanced, right? The right amount of love, the right amount of hate; balance between beauty and ugliness, skill and ineptitude. So, if you're nice and balanced, you're a circle… the same all around, right?" Sirius nodded again. "Through all this, I really envision my life as… like a scalene triangle, really. It'll never be really balanced until somebody rubs at the corners 'till they make a circle. I have too much hate over-countering my love, it's clouding out everything else. I hold obsession high over passion. I hold the past over the present or the future. Do you… do you understand at all?"
Sirius was looking at her with shining eyes, very solemn and sober-looking. He nodded slowly. "I don't think I've ever understood anything more than that."
She gave him a smile, which, in turn, caused him to smile back at her. They held this glance for a few moments, both hearts pounding wildly behind their chests. They were on the same page, and it had built some sort of bond between them, something that nobody else could take from them.
Don't tell. The words crossed the back of Hermione's mind, fluttering like a butterfly across the pages of her memory. A strong urge to know once and for all whether Sirius tasked like cinnamon as she expected clenched her heart, and she saw his eyes drop to half-mast as he tilted his head slightly to the right, leaning in towards her a millimeter… a centimeter….
A clatter arose in the kitchen, and Hermione jumped to her feet, rushing off to find out what it was. Sirius, dejected, dropped his head to stare at his hands uselessly clutching his empty sauce-stained plate.
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Hermione returned to the room, but the mood was gone. Smiling a little, she walked back to the couch and sat down next to Sirius, a little farther away than she had been before. Everything seemed so awkward, yet she still felt that closeness between the two of them, buried somewhere deep inside her.
Sirius looked at her, both eyebrows raised in polite question.
"Crookshanks. Going after a mouse." Hermione explained.
Sirius just nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
"Well…" Hermione said lamely, "er… good night, I suppose, it's a little late."
"G-good night." Sirius said. Hermione shot him a look for his stutter, but he blindly pulled her into a hug.
The embrace pressed both of their madly driving hearts together, and Sirius did not miss that their pulses were at the same rate. He buried his face into her hair; she had bared her heart to him that night, and he wanted to seal it back up before anything else could hurt it. He also wanted to go back in time and maybe give Crookshanks a toy mouse to play with for the night, to stop certain things from occurring—or not occurring, as it were—but he knew that would be impossible without meddling with time.
Harry's best mate. His mind reminded warningly when Sirius noticed with interest the things Hermione's proximity was doing to his now-tingly skin, but the warning was a halfhearted one. He felt her gasp at their melding heartbeats.
He pulled away, and then swept down to press his lips firmly to her cheek, holding a second longer than necessary before retreating again. "Good night." He said, now with certainty.
As she watched him walk away to his room, one hand hesitantly floated up to the now-burning spot he had left on her cheek, the other to where her heart beat insanely beneath her breast. She had not imagined, then, what had just happened… nor what had almost happened.
Don't tell, the voice said again in her mind, and a dreadfully familiar tune struck Hermione's ears. It took her a few moments to realize that Sirius was humming it.
Just as he had in the dream.
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"Don't tell."
Sirius straightened up, smiling, and walked away.
Was he joking? Hermione would have to be insane to tell anyone about this. Her first real kiss… and he was so much older than she, although not nearly as mature as she was. She fell against the wall from weakness, but Sirius walked away, humming as if nothing earth-shattering had just happened.
She felt a string attach her heart to his, and knew that string would always be there.
Her fingers drew across her slightly swollen lips; the fingers of her other hand touched tentatively the spot on her blouse above her heart. Their hearts, so close together, had beaten at such a mis-rhythm then, almost like tribal drums. Her pulse, so fast… his, so slow and natural. She knew he had felt her excitement seeping through her skin to his….
Hermione sat up with a start. She could not believe she was dreaming the same thing as she had the night before; she felt with a little smile the all-too-familiar taste of cinnamon flooding her mouth, but, with a gulp, realized that was just a phantom of the dream, or memory, or whatever it was. She would have loved to see for real.
Harry's godfather. Her mind whispered at her, semi-desperately. She allowed a melancholy smile to drift over her features, and wondered for a moment why she even cared. She would hold out for Ron for as long as she had to. The spell had messed up and given her the wrong person—she had to wait until she was strong enough to remedy that.
End of story.
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A/N: Again, thank you for the lovely reviews!