Three-quarter Time

Three-quarter Time

The pounding on the door was unnaturally loud, echoing in the absence of the hum and buzz of electricity she'd always taken for granted. The power outage made everything more eerie, stark and cold. She shivered, tugging the afghan more firmly about her as she shuffled towards the front of her flat, crunching absently into her last praline.

"Who is it?" she called through the thin wooden door, leaning slightly on the frame and trying to squint through the peephole. It was useless though, as the hall was nearly pitch-black.

"Er... Blaise Zabini. From next door?"

Hermione rolled her eyes, flipped the bolt and cracked the door open with a curt, "What do you want?"

They didn't get on well. That is to say, Hermione didn't get on that well with Blaise. She wasn't at all sure what he thought of her, and she didn't much care. He'd just moved in a few weeks prior, but had already left a bad impression on her, having the annoying habit of watching the telly full blast in the small hours of the morning. The back of it was quite obviously pushed up against her bedroom wall.

Blaise, blue-black hair a mess of curls falling over his forehead, grinned winningly at her and placed the flat of his hand on her door, pushing it inwards. "Listen, do you mind if I hang out a bit here? Flue's blocked on my hearth. All it does is smoke and it's damn near freezing over there now." He rubbed his hands together briskly to emphasize his words, light eyes hopeful on her face.

With a sigh, Hermione let go of the doorknob and stepped back, gesturing for him to come inside. Her own fire was glowing hotly, but the old building had been cold-quiet for nearly seven hours already, the artic temperature snaking steadily through the cracks and seams of the walls and windowpanes. Annoying neighbor or no, she wasn't going to let him freeze to death.

It wasn't quite dark yet, but candles flickered around the room as Blaise lowered his too lean frame onto the sofa, catching up the blanket draped across the back of it and snuggling in with a sigh. "You're an angel, Granger."

Hermione arched a brow.

"Oliver said you were an angel, but I had my doubts." In truth, Blaise had thought her a bit of a prude; the disapproval that haunted her amber eyes when they'd met on occasion reminded him too much of his mother, 'The Queen Bitch.' Of course, Oliver had also called Hermione a genius with astronomically high stress-levels, so Blaise had taken her overt crankiness in stride, offering her smiles and pleasant greetings despite her glowers in return. He'd even started finding the fact that his cheery demeanor seemed to deepen her frowns more amusing than anything else. "Until now, of course," he amended with a grin.

"Oliver?" she asked, puzzled.

Blaise nodded and closed his eyes, reveling in the solid twenty degree warmer temperature of the flat.

"How do you know him?" Hermione moved to the hearth and dropped down on her knees. She took up the poker and jabbed absently at the crackling wood before hefting on another log.

"You can't play uni football and not know Oliver Wood."

Hermione snorted a laugh, then clapped her hand over her mouth, feeling a stain of embarrassment rise to her face, but Blaise just smiled blindly, eyes still shut.

He had a nice smile, Hermione thought, if a bit wide. In fact, he was rather pleasant looking on the whole, his olive-toned complexion setting off his blue eyes and the bump on the bridge of his nose balancing the somewhat girlish curl of his lashes. Handsome, really, in an unconventional way.

Hermione self-consciously tightened her grip on the blanket and hoped her hair didn't look too hideous in the firelight.

Settling into a marginally comfortable silence, Hermione worried her bottom lip with her teeth and stared into the hearth, wondering what exactly Oliver had told Blaise. As a notorious loud-mouth, the Scottish footballer lived to rile her up, using every fodder from her admittedly crap hair down to her terminally unstylish footwear to tease her, insisting that the bloom anger brought to her cheeks and the snapping fire in her eyes were her topmost assets – he was merely making her shine, and helping her to present her best face to the world. She'd never imagined he thought her an angel.

A crash jerked her from her revelry and Blaise sat up abruptly on the sofa, blanket pooling in his lap.

"Shit. Fuck. Owww... Sorry!" a voice carried down the hall. "Christ! Sorry, sorry..."

Blaise cocked his head at her quizzically. "What...?"

And then Seamus came stumbling into view, clad in boxer shorts and a ratty t-shirt, a half-grown beard shading his chin and his index finger stuck in his mouth. Seamus bloody Finnigan. "Sowwy," he repeated around his finger, hazel eyes sheepish.

"For what?" Hermione asked, resignation in her tone.

His digit slipped out of his mouth and he shrugged. "The, ah... red," he gestured vaguely with his hands, "thingy, with the green..." His shoulders slumped. "Sorry."

She shook her head. Seamus had to be the worst flatmate in the history of flatmates. When he wasn't breaking something or bleeding all over her sofa - she glared at the sluggish cut he had pressed up against a cushion - he was uncouth and blunt and, most often, horribly ripe.

"Seamus, this is our neighbor--"

"Blaise Zabini," Seamus cut in happily. "You play with Oliver. Christ, it's cold in here. What the hell happened to the heat and..." he eyed the flickering candles about the room speculatively, "did I interrupt something?"

Seamus was, for the most part, nocturnal.

"Power's been out all day," Blaise supplied.

"Oh! So no..." He waggled his eyebrows.

Oh. God. Hermione was never so glad the room was twilight dim. "No," she groaned, sinking further into the folds of her blanket.

Seamus nodded. "Good."

Blaise's lips quirked. "Why good?" He shot Hermione an amused glance. She wasn't all that bad, really. Kind of sweet when she wasn't scowling at him, all curled up in her afghan, pert nose just visible.

Please, Hermione thought desperately, not the pacing.

"Your pacing's all off," Seamus said, settling down on the floor next to Hermione and grabbing the ends of her blanket. "Shove over, love. Let me in. Bloody freezing in here."

"Fire's warm," Hermione mumbled, but let Seamus wriggle inside her cocoon.

The sandy-haired Irishman had studied dance and musical theory all last term to impress a leggy blonde named Daphne, and when the relationship went to shit, as they always did with Seamus, he'd come up with some asinine explanation as to why: Pacing.

"Pacing?" Blaise questioned, confused, and, surprisingly, somewhat rankled at the man for monopolizing Hermione's... covers. He frowned at the odd, possessive thought and shook his head. Maybe the cold was going to his brain.

"I've seen you play, mate," Seamus said. "You fucking lope out there."

Blaise gazed at him blankly.

"You're a good player, Zabini, but you haven't got half as much drive as Oliver has in just his pinky toe. You waltz. Fucking three-quarter time." Seamus grinned, his goofy Irish face practically split in half.

"You..." Blaise clicked his mouth shut and shifted his gaze to Hermione. "Do you have any clue what he's prattling about?"

Hermione grimaced. "Unfortunately, yes."

"Now, Hermione here," Seamus went on, nodding towards her. "She's wound tight as a spring. She's got a damn metronome in her head and a stick up her arse. Sorry, love, you do," he added, patting her arm dismissively at her indignant protest. "She might as well be step-dancing. You two don't jive."

"Don't... jive," Blaise echoed incredulously, sending Hermione a look that said 'can you believe this git?'

Seamus leant forward and grabbed his pack of fags off the low, scuffed coffee table. "You're like clear opposites, and while opposites might attract," he emphasized, "their relationships are doomed to fail."

Hermione felt as if a rock had settled in her stomach. How the hell had they even gotten on this subject? Blaise was their neighbor; she didn't have any designs on him at all. At best, the dark-haired, unfailingly cheerful man irritated her to no end. The last thing she needed was for him to think she was harboring some sort of attraction for him. Which she wasn't, despite having noticed his rather fine arse.

Blaise narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. "I'm not sure that theory holds water."

"'Course it does," Seamus mumbled around an unlit cigarette. He'd quit the week before, and found it surprisingly easy to refrain from lighting up so long as one of the slim sticks was at his lips. Of course, he'd only started smoking in September, and only because Daphne had declared it 'fucking sexy on an Irishman.' And then she'd ripped his heart out and fed it to a bloke from Sidney with arm muscles bigger than Seamus' head. Nasty sight if you asked him. "Take Oliver and Percy. Both definite foxtrots. Solid, driven four-four rhythm."

"But they broke up last week," Blaise pointed out blithely.

"Oh." Seamus blinked. "Well, no matter. It doesn't always work out, you know, even if they," he linked his fingers together, "mesh rhythmically."

"Well then, doesn't it stand to reason," Blaise argued, "that it doesn't always have to not work out when they don't mesh... rhythmically?"

"Er..." Seamus scratched the back of his head, clearly lost. "Come again?"

"Exceptions, Seamus. If a four-four doesn't necessarily match a four-four, then why can't a three-four match a," he glanced at Hermione, "two-four, or whatever the hell Granger is?"

Oh. Good. Lord. Hermione burrowed deeper into her blankets. She was going to beat Seamus later for bringing up this whole conversation. Beat him.

"Well," Seamus hedged, "it isn't all about pacing, is it? But the basis has to be there. The rhythm. Your lifestyles have to click."

"Okay," Blaise conceded, nodding. "Okay, let's say you're right. Um..." he flicked his gaze about the room, "d'you have a piece of paper? Pen?"

"Hang on." Seamus scrambled to his feet and disappeared into the kitchen, and Hermione offered Blaise a wan smile.

"Sorry," she said lamely. Lord, was she sorry.

He winked at her. "Passes the time, doesn't it?"

"What the fuck is this?" Seamus called out, stepping into the archway, brow wrinkled as he stared down at a little doll in his hands.

"A gift from Dean," Hermione explained. "He stopped by earlier but you'd just passed out."

He held it up to his nose and sniffed. "It's an onion."

"Looks voodoo-ish to me," Blaise said, peering over the top of the sofa.

"A voodoo..." Seamus trailed off, smile widening with delight. "Bloody brilliant! Fuck, I should just see Dean, shouldn't I? Best bloody friend I'll ever have. A fucking voodoo Daphne!" he crowed, eyes just slightly teary, and then he unceremoniously bit into the doll's head. "Eh," he grimaced, chewing slowly. "Strong." Somewhere in the world, he fancied he could hear the twat screaming.

Blaise turned to Hermione. "And Dean is...?"

"My new boyfriend," Seamus declared grandly, slapping a pad of paper and pen down on the coffee table.

"Seamus," Hermione pointed out patiently, "Dean isn't gay."

"Well, neither am I, so it should work out swimmingly." He grinned. "Just so long as we don't have to shag each other."

"Which makes him your..."

"Best mate since primary," Seamus supplied. "Up and coming London artist and voodoo master... priest...thingy." He waved a hand towards the paper. "Now what are we doing here?"

The den had grown rapidly dim in the impending night, and Blaise pulled two candles closer to the paper, sending Seamus a cheeky grin. "Disproving your asinine pacing theory," he replied.

"Hey," Seamus exclaimed indignantly, worming back into Hermione's blankets. "S'not."

"It is," Hermione murmured, sending Blaise a conspiratorial glance. The flames from the fire lashed violently in the drafty den, throwing flickering golden light over the room's occupants. Blaise's eyes were cast in shadows, but he radiated good humor, and Hermione couldn't delude herself into thinking that the heat on her skin was merely from her close proximity to the hearth. Damn it. She did find him attractive.

He shoved his fringe back off his forehead and arched a brow at Hermione. "Favorite color?"

"Blue," she answered, wondering what exactly he was doing.

He nodded and jotted that down, then said, "Mine's green. Favorite time of day?"

Hermione bit her lower lip and stared down at the carpet. "Morning," she finally said. "Just after breakfast, lingering over a second cup of coffee, when the sun is low and bright, and the day really hasn't officially started yet."

She heard a harsh exhaled breath and glanced up to see Blaise watching her, his head bent at an angle that let the fire catch his irises, making them burn almost cat-yellow. He shook his head minutely, then shot a smug look towards Seamus.

"This girl knows how to relax," he said, "you just aren't observant enough to see it."

"That isn't relaxing," Seamus protested. "That's her plotting out her day and how best to use up every speck of time."

"Anything that involves lingering over coffee is a time of deep meditative rest." Blaise looked to Hermione for confirmation and the girl nodded. "Coffee time is sacred."

"What about you?" Hermione asked softly.

He shrugged. "Morning's as good as any. I'm a bit of an insomniac." He cocked his head at Seamus. "Bet you didn't see that one. I may waltz, but it's almost always non-stop."

"I noticed," Hermione offered.

"You did?"

"Your telly keeps me up some nights." Most nights, she amended in her head. She was feeling gracious, though, and managed to keep the ire out of her tone.

Blaise's mouth dropped open. Oh, no wonder... "Christ, I'm sorry, Granger," he said gruffly. "Why didn't you say something?"

"Off topic," Seamus sing-songed.

Hermione gave him an incredulous look. "How is this off topic?"

"Er, well," the Irishman stuck his lower lip out in an exaggerated pout, "I wasn't involved." He sat up straighter. "I'll ask the next question. Zabini, what are you studying?"

"A bit of everything. I'm taking a field class in Anthropology this term though, and it's fascinating."

Hermione leaned forward. "With Hillbank?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding enthusiastically. "Did you take that? Isn't she beyond amazing? I never thought I'd go for this hands-on stuff, you know. I'm more of a dry research sort of student, but..."

"I almost dropped my medical studies for it," Hermione confessed. "She just makes you want to be..."

"Exactly!" Blaise agreed. "The pictures she paints with just her words and weathered hands, some sand and clay and splintered bones... I think I really want to live that, you know?"

"Off topic," Seamus cut in, mouth pursed.

Blaise and Hermione looked at him silently.

"Er..." He offered a sheepish grin. "Maybe I'll just..." Unwrapping Hermione's blanket from his shoulders, he got to his feet and started towards the hall. Stopping in the doorway, he crossed his arms over his chest, shoving his cold hands under his armpits, and said, "I'm still right about the pacing." He'd just been wrong about Hermione. Three-quarter time. She had that down pat. And Blaise, well... he admitted Blaise had fancy footwork when motivated. No, the pacing theory merely had to be amended a bit, to allow for bridges, choruses and rests. Seamus could smell a thesis in the frigid apartment air.