Thunder and Lightning

Hermione is helping Mrs. Weasley clean out another room when she sees Sirius again. Half of her face hidden by a tea towel, doxycide in hand, she feels his presence suffuse the room with heat a second before she hears his voice. She conspicuously averts her eyes from his graceful figure and pretends to look at the buzzing drapes interestedly. She can hear him direct his attention to Mrs. Weasley and begin to speak to her in low tones.

"Hermione, I-" she remembers his voice then, low and edged with fire; she remembers her logic pulling her body away from him and out of the room. She looks up and stares at him, and can't help but think of his hand seizing her wrist, his face coated with rain, his tongue in her mouth.

She puts down the bottle of doxycide and moves silently around Fred, and then George, so she is standing directly next to Sirius, and though he pretends not to notice, there is a new strain in his words, and his nerves are bunching in an attempt at self-restraint.

He bends over to examine the writing desk and his voice shakes when he speaks more to Mrs. Weasley, vocal chords tripping over words he's said a thousand times, words like pretty and boggart and worse.

Hermione's eyes ghost over the stripe of skin that shows when his back archs lower, the skin between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his pants. He can feel her eyes like a tangible thing on him, like a hand or a mouth touching him.

Molly's agreeing with him politely as he stands up, and when she bends to look through the key-hole of the desk as he did, he shifts his weight onto his right foot so his arm is touching Hermione's left arm just so. Hermione pauses and wants to scream at the contact, but knows she cannot say anything with Mrs. Weasley so close, with the room full of people.

She picks something dusty up from the nearby shelf with her right hand, pretending to examine it, pretending nothing is happening, pretending her brain isn't filled with thoughts of beauty and danger. She keeps moving, because she knows if she stops she'll be pulled under by the idea that he's so close to her, she'll have no choice but to grab him right there. She puts the thing back down and looks at her fingers, examining them as if Sirius were nowhere near her, as if her heart weren't beating double time. The gaps on her fingers, those swirls of fingerprints, are filled with black dirt.

She can hear Mrs. Weasley still talking, eyes steady on the desk, clueless of what is happening right beside her. To Hermione, Mrs. Weasley's voice is quiet, and it's getting more and more quiet as the touch of Sirius' arm becomes more evident and present to her. She inhales quickly and moves her eyes to the left, to him, and in her peripheral vision his face is a mask of composure.

Sirius' hand moves minutely from his side to press against the side of her left leg, and when it travels inward to grip the inside of her thigh, she has no choice but to cease movement. She can concentrate on nothing but him touching her, on the shake and rumble of thunder beneath his skin, on the memories of his hands on her hips, on her ribs. She's still looking at the dust on her hands and feels the heat of his skin through her pants. She thinks about melting down his body with her fingertips, the blood inside of her so hot as to turn his skin to liquid blackness. She imagines his melted body then slipping into her fingerprints, taking away any trace of Hermione and just leaving this thing, this hybrid of Hermione and Sirius, this product of lust.

His hand is moving higher and she loses all train of thought as his wrist rests on the inside edge of her hipbone and his fingers on the crotch of her pants. He curls his hand inward and she lets out the most minute of gasps, but to her it sounds as loud as thunder, and she remembers that Mrs. Weasley is standing so close to them.

The doorbell chimes loudly downstairs and Sirius hurries to quiet his screaming mother. He looks back at Hermione, half of her face covered, her eyes dark and intense.

***
"I can't open it," Ginny says, fingers tugging on the seam of a heavy silver locket. Hermione doesn't say anything at first, looking at her own reflection in the glass cabinets, eyes darting ever so often to see Sirius' reflection. Their faces are the same but shrouded in a dusty haze, as if they were standing behind a dirty gauze curtain.

She looks intently at Sirius' reflection, waiting for his eyes to turn and burn her with his stare. But he never looks, he seems oblivious to her now, and she frowns and turns to Ginny, "What?"

She looks down at the silver oval lying in Ginny's palm, the face engraved with a huge gothic B.

"It's beautiful, don't you think?" Ginny's speaking but it seems so far away, and for a moment Hermione doesn't answer, eyes trained heavily upon the locket.

"Hermione?"

"Oh," Hermione shakes herself and feels as though her brain is surrounded by cotton. "Sorry. Yes. Beautiful."

Ginny shrugs and puts it down, opening another cabinet and moving her attention towards something else. Hermione looks around and everyone is busy with something. Her eyes remain on Sirius' reflection for a long time, his animated face, and she can hear no thunder beneath his voice when he laughs and speaks to Harry.

She doesn't know why she's been so stupid, and her logic takes over her entire body. Everything wrong about Sirius and Hermione rushes through her brain, and she resolves to focus on other things, on school, on her friends.

Even so, she palms the locket before she leaves the room, eyes darting on the glass cabinets at everyone's relfections. No one notices, and when they move to another room her hand lays heavily upon the silver in her pocket.

***

Ginny falls asleep on the couch, and Hermione slips quickly into the room they share as if she were a robber. She has the room to herself, and the lock clicks loudly when she turns it.

She opens the windows because the room is stiflingly hot, and even when she peels her clothes off and lays bare in bed, her body is covered with a shimmer of sweat.

She can hear, first faintly, then distinctly, Sirius talking to Remus in another room on the floor. While she tells herself that it's all infatuation and that it never could work with Sirius, she leans over the bed and reaches for her pants, discarded on the floor. She dips her hand into the front pocket and pulls out the locket.

She looks at it and it feels susbtantial in her hand, making everything with Sirius real, more than a dream. She smooths her fingers down the letter, all the while her logic is speaking to her.

You're too young, her logic says as she turns the locket over and touches the smooth surface.

What would everyone say? it says louder, as she slips her fingernail into the gap on the side and pulls.

You're probably nothing to him, now her logic is positively screaming at her, and the seam and tiny hinge are refusing to give, the locket remaining closed.

You're not in love with him, it turns to a whisper as she puts the chain over her head and lets the locket lay beneath her throat.

She presses her hand between her legs, attention trained on the beautiful silver being the only thing lying on her skin, but when she comes, she cries frustrated tears.

***
Sirius is drinking tea alone in the kitchen when Hermione walks in, hair bound haphazardly, pajamas rumpled. She says nothing, she doesn't even look at him. He stares at her back as she pours some hot water from the kettle into a cup for herself.

He can see the curve of her spine under her thin shirt, and his eyes travel upwards to rest on her neck. He blinks. There is an angry red burn on the back of her neck. He gets up and stands behind her, and her hands still.

"What happened to your neck?" He asks, his breath hot and present against her hair.

She pulls her shirt tighter around herself and says, "Nothing."

Sirius looks closer at the burn and sees a tiny design, it's a chain. He grasps her shoulders and turns her around harshly, pulling the neck of her shirt down to see the chain continue down between her collarbones and meet in a large oval.

Inside the oval, there's a B, burned deep and red into her skin.

"It won't come off," she says quietly, remembering her frantic usage of every healing charm she knows, remembering the burn clinging fast to her skin. "I'm sorry, I didn't-"

He cuts her off, "Everything in this house can sense blood, Hermione."

"Dirty blood," she breathes, and feels ashamed for having stolen the locket, ashamed for being so foolish.

"Why did you take it?" he asks, a thousand memories of that thing lying against his chest as a child, and the last, of throwing it on the floor in frustrated rage, of running away from it and his family.

"It reminded me of you," she says, "when you...when I...when we're together, I feel like I'm dreaming it, like it isn't real...I mean, how could it be real?" She laughs at herself, looking down.

He doesn't know how she can be so self-deprecating all of the time, doesn't know how she could see herself as anything but beautiful. He cups her face in his hands and runs his thumb lightly down her cheek.

"Hermione," he says, and she looks up at him, "It's real."

He kisses her.