Silhouette

New ending to this chapter, as I was informed it was rather lame...
Oops.

Thanks to Amanda for all her hard work as beta. She puts up with a lot. Yay!

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Hermione sat bolt upright, her head reeling from the rush of blood, but she didn't care. Where was she? The bed beneath her was soft, inviting and, Hermione realized, completely unfamiliar. She was wearing a nightgown, but it didn't feel anything like her own clothing. It was long and loose, broad around the shoulders with a silk ribbon tie. Heavy curtains on the huge window hid the time from her, but she could tell from a crack between the thick cotton panels that it was still night. How long had she been here? Fingertips tingling and mind racing, she tried to remember what had happened. She recalled hearing her name, whispered in the dark, and candlelight through window panes.
A movement to her left caught her attention, and she reached for a wand that wasn't there. The shadows seemed to shift like a velvety black cloak over the figure as it came closer. She felt the heat of breath exhaled somewhere close. Panic began to rise in her. She didn’t like the idea of some stranger watching her in the darkened room.
Blond hair caught what little light there was in the room. "Draco?" Hermione tested. Gray eyes flashed, and she relaxed a little.
“I’m here,” he murmured, moving away again as he spoke. He was sitting in a chair that had been pulled up next to the bed, Hermione realized. Then again, for all she knew, that chair had always been there.
“Where the sodding hell is ‘here?’” she asked, glancing blindly around the room before resting her eyes again on Draco. Her expression was sharp, expectant, though she knew he couldn’t see her properly.
“Home. For me, at least. Snape said it was not the best idea to apparate you until you were conscious.”
“So I’m… at the manor, still?”
Draco sighed, fidgeting again, and though she could not see him, she felt him fighting against things he wanted to say. “Yes,” he said finally. “In a guest bedroom.”
She pushed her hair out of her eyes and rubbed her hands over her face. She felt straight locks slide smoothly through her fingers like strands of silk, nothing like her normal bushy curls. She registered the way her face felt, how soft her skin was, the shape of her nose, the fullness of her lips. She was Bianca. She remembered how.
“What happened? I fainted, didn’t I?” Hermione felt her cheeks burning.
“I think so,” Draco said. She felt him get up, and move away. Then the curtains opened, just a little, enough to splash the last remnants of moonlight onto the bed. The night was silver-tinted, blue-black like before the dawn. He was still in his dress robes. So it must still be the night of the party, or in the early morning after it, Hermione thought. “You were acting very strange after we danced, all “you-ness” aside, so I took you outside to get you some fresh air, get you away from everyone for a minute, then you just fell forward onto me and fainted.” He was pacing now.
Hermione raised her eyebrow. She thought that Draco might have oversimplified the situation a little, but didn’t say anything. Then it came to her. The kiss. She frowned. She was sure that she wasn’t so delicate that a kiss would cause her to faint, but maybe… “You kissed me.”
“Well, yeah, but I thought you could handle a kiss. I didn’t know I was so irresistible that you would faint because-”
“That can’t be why I collapsed,” Hermione said absently, chewing her lip, her mind racing for the answer. She felt as if solution was right on the edge of her mind, but she couldn’t make herself think it.
“Why not?” Draco stopped walking the little path back and forth in front of the window, indignant, though Hermione failed to notice.
“Because it wasn’t that magnificent. Really Draco, you should get over yourself,” said Hermione, preoccupied. She was so used to insulting him that it came automatically, but Draco didn’t have time to poise a proper pout on his face before Hermione was apologizing. “Oh hell, Draco, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking…” He didn’t look sated. “It was a great kiss, Draco, really.”
Then he was laughing at her. “Calm down, Bianca. I won’t hold it against you.”
Her thoughts rounded on her then, and the tiniest voice asked the simplest, most awful question. It filled her, booming into the farthest corners of her body until her hands shook with the echoes. It grew louder and louder until finally Hermione blurted out, “Why did you kiss me?” Draco looked nonplused. “I mean,” she said, babbling now and blushing again, “was it to keep up appearances or-”
“Bianca, now is not the time,” he said, sitting again, avoiding her eyes.
She calmed herself, struggling to keep all the words that were bursting to flood from her dammed up. Another, less girlish question came forward then.
“Why did I pass out, then, since we’ve established you had nothing to do with it?”
“We’re ruling out the kiss? Too bad,”
“Yes, well, aside from your bloody ego-”
“I believe I can answer this question, Draco,” hissed a voice. It came from a pitch black corner of the room, next to big lumps of shadow Hermione assumed were furniture. Out of the dim, Snape emerged, also still dressed in his robes from the night before, and just as sour-faced as ever, and Hermione shivered in spite of herself. Snape’s mere presence in a room seemed to make it colder. “Ms. Ciucur has finally asked a question worth answering,” he said, sneering. “I have asked it myself since I was summoned here from the ball. Draco told Nicoleta and I about your… condition, and we came at once. I kept Narcissa from calling St. Mungo’s. I told her I could heal you, and I have. For now.”
“‘For now’? Care to explain that?” Hermione retorted, eyes narrowed, new panic clutching at her. She pulled the sheets against her, feeling much like a dying hospital patient.
“No, actually. Not aloud, at least.” He caught her gaze and held it from across the room, then Hermione heard, not with her ears, but with her mind, “To speak it would give away too much. Better to tell you here, where it is safe. Legilimency is a useful tool, you know.”
“You sound like Lucius,” Hermione thought, willing Snape to hear her through the link in their minds.
“Maybe. But then, we are friends, aren’t we? As I was saying, I did all I could to help you, but I do not think it will be enough.”
“I fainted. I was just tired from dancing or something-”
“No, Ms. Granger. You know better. You know what has happened to you has nothing to do with the ball. Molly informed me that you were lightheaded at Headquarters even before training began. I believe you are smart enough to know the difference between what you claim to have felt last night and a real and serious illness.”
“So what’s bloody wrong with me, then?” Hermione’s eyebrows furrowed in exasperation, but she did not break eye contact. She heard Draco change his position in the chair, annoyed at being left out, but didn’t acknowledge him.
“Your mind is rejecting your new body, Ms .Granger. I can sense it, even in the short time I have been in this room. I should have noticed it before, that distress you couldn’t understand because it was within your own mind. Lucius must have felt it, too. He views it only as an unusually good blockade into your thoughts and memories, but that block is there for you, too, isn’t it?”
Hermione searched within herself, reviewing her memories, trying to find proof that this wasn’t true. But it was. She didn’t have a clear picture of herself before the charms changed her, and most of her memories had altered themselves to include the Bianca-body instead of Hermione. Details of her life flickered disconcertingly in and out of her awareness like the light of a dying candle, sputtering.
“You are dying because the bulk of your mind refuses to accept what we will call ‘Bianca,’ and yet Bianca is insinuating herself in small ways, ways that won’t be noticed until you can’t conceive of noticing them because they are such a part of you. It would be like noticing for the first time that your hair is brown, or your heart is beating. So now you are cutting yourself off from…” He seemed to struggle with the wording. All of this was so difficult to understand. “Your self.” In Hermione’s opinion, this did not simplify anything. “If the rest of you does not accept Bianca, your new self, then you will die.” That Hermione grasped. She would die if she didn’t allow Bianca, this new person within her that was her to take over. But she couldn’t ‘take over’ because she was already…her.
She broke eye contact with Snape, cutting him off from her thoughts, and Hermione felt the most stunning sense of anguish. Terror rippled through her like the shock waves of a tsunami. Everything that she defined as her, Hermione, would be gone. But it must still be there, she thought, because it was a part of her already. Like Bianca. Bianca the supremacist, the elegant pureblood flatterer, the vain, cunning young woman with no soul and very little heart. Could she do it?
Hermione tried to think, her head bowing as if in prayer, her eyes closed and fluttering like a seizure. She partitioned her mind, the part of her she thought of as Bianca, and tried to stamp it out. It fought back. She felt her toes curl, her bones bending violently within her body. The message was clear: I can hurt you; I can make you squirm.
Hermione convulsed in spite of herself; she gagged on the pain. Then she nodded, and the agony inside her went away. But Bianca had must have been in pain as well, Hermione reasoned, even if she didn’t show it. Hermione felt determination that was not her own- and yet was- swell within her in response to the thought. Bianca would fight. And win. They both knew Hermione would lose the battle either way. She could reject Bianca and die, or accept her and allow everything she knew to be shoved into the farthest reaches of her mind.
Calm swept over her. It was clear what she had to do.
She would welcome Bianca. She would live. She had to, or what good was she?
Hermione felt conversely like singing and throwing up. She supposed this was the happiness from ‘Bianca’ and the rage and confusion from ‘Hermione.’ She chose to ignore her nausea, pushing it away like an offensive plate of food, and instead embraced the bliss that was bubbling up from her stomach. It was euphoria, freedom as she had never known, yet it had always been there. It was the other side of the tall, insurmountable wall. She, Bianca, regained control of her glee almost at once, but the freedom stayed on, boiling like felix felicis. She raised her head to look at the two men she had almost forgotten were there. They were staring at her in amazement, dumbfounded. When she made eye contact with Snape he tried to see within her, but she brushed him aside easily. Her cool blue eyes found Draco, and didn’t leave him from a long moment. His hair was tickling the end of his handsome nose; his mouth was parted, as if he would speak.
She smiled. It was a delicate, slightly patronizing sort of smile, Bianca’s smile.
“Thank you, Snape,” she said sweetly, turning again to the tall, shadowy man across the room. “That was most informative.”
She gazed past him to the bedchamber at large. As she watched, dawn reached its fingers through the curtains, illuminating for the first time the full extent of the room. It was huge, with walls of dark paneled oak and hardwood floors. The hulking pieces of furniture matched the walls, and their curvy, carved drawers and big silver fixtures were shockingly ornate. The bedclothes were blood-red, deeper than the Gryffindor red to which the smallest part of her had been accustomed, and creamy white. She relaxed.
“Where is my wand, Draco?” she asked, reaching out a delicate hand and touching Draco’s folded arm.
“I-” he started.
“My wand?”
“Oh,” he procured it from an inside pocket and handed it over.
“Thank you,” she said imperiously.
“Ms. Ciucur, I think it would be best for you to stay in bed for the day, just to recuperate a bit-”
“I will do no such thing,” she snapped, whipping the covers from her lower body. She swung her toned legs over the side of the bed closest to Draco, her nightie bunching up around her thighs, and felt his eyes rake over bare skin. She stood up, soft fabric tickling the tops of her feet. “I think you should both leave now. I would like to change, please.” Snape stood frozen, infuriated at this disobedience, then turned his back on her and strode from the room.
Draco got to his feet, his body almost unbearably close to hers for just a moment. “See you,” he said rather lamely, breaking the tension, then followed Snape out.