A/N: Written for the Houses Competition. All the love to CP, Holly, and 2D for the betas, but an especially huge thanks to Alixx for going over this a million times and helping me an insane amount.
House: Ravenclaw
Category: Themed
Prompt: Blaise Zabini
Words: 2184
"It's better for us, I swear." Draco paces back and forth, running a hand through his silvery hair. "I've seen it myself, the power he can give us-" He breaks off, face unsure and eyes wide, childlike. Blaise thinks he's just trying to convince himself.
Astoria, ever the heroine, stands up and turns to face him. Her jaw is set, stance strong, but Blaise can see the way her hands are trembling. "Draco, there are Death Eaters in the school. And my family-" She glances at Daphne, and Blaise feels a familiar pang of worry shoot through his chest. "We've spent so long avoiding them, and now they're coming to Hogwarts?"
"It'll be fine," Draco mutters back, although he still sounds to Blaise like a little boy, parroting back a line his father's told him. "It will. If you follow the Dark Lord, nothing will happen. My father said-"
"I don't care what your father said! I-" Astoria's voice cracks slightly, but Blaise can still see the fire in her eyes. "I don't want to follow the bloody Dark Lord. It's school, Draco. We're kids, we're meant to be worrying about our fucking homework, not Voldemort." Draco flinches at the name. "And I won't let you drag me into this. I'm done!"
Something unspoken passes between the two of them, the tension in the air so thick that it's suffocating. Pansy glances from one to the other, confusion written all over her face. Draco opens his mouth as if to say something once more, but Astoria just turns and walks into the fifth-year girls' dorm, head held high. Draco sits down in an emerald green armchair by the fireplace, staring stonily into the flames. People start to disperse, the meeting over. Just as Blaise stands up to leave, Daphne brushes past, whispers into his ear, and they exchange small smiles with each other. Smiles that only they can understand….
The setting sun bathes the grounds in an unearthly golden glow as Blaise sprints across the lawns that stretch out in front of the castle. It is his favourite time of day, this, when everything seems to come alive, turn from the ordinary greens and browns to something else. Soon, he comes to their spot, a large oak further away from the castle than anyone else would be bothered to go. He collapses there, breathless and waiting.
"'lo, Blaise," she says, and he jumps, not having heard her sit down beside him. Daphne's eyes are sparkling with her own quiet type of mischief, and he knows she did it just to scare him.
"Stop sneaking up on me, you know I hate it," Blaise replies, but he's fighting back a laugh. Daphne shoves him playfully in return, and he pushes back, until they are full-on wrestling, rolling over and over in the grass. Eventually, she's on top of him, pinning down his arms, hair falling in a golden curtain around them. Her eyes are an ever-shifting shade of green and Blaise feels his breath hitch in his throat.
It has been different, ever since last summer, when things between them started feeling unlike friendship, like something more. Then the holidays had started and Blaise was shipped off to Italy, before they ever had had a chance to figure out what 'more' was. He opens his mouth to speak, to say anything, but before he can Daphne collapses onto the grass next to him.
"Blaise," Daphne says breathlessly, staring up at the gold-streaked sky. "What are we going to do?"
"We'll be fine," Blaise replies, although he doesn't think he's ever been this unsure. "Nothing has to change if we don't want it to."
"I hope so." She curls up next to him, smelling of vanilla and sandalwood perfume. Blaise thinks that maybe things won't turn out so awful in the end. At least, it feels that way when he's with Daphne.
They stay there, lying together on the grass, until the sun sets and the night turns into a sea of pitch velvet, and a line of hooded figures marches up to the castle. Blaise and Daphne sneak back inside just as a luminescent green skull over the turrets of Hogwarts splits open the black of the night sky.
The next few months fly by quickly, in a blur of lessons taught in dimly lit classrooms and hushed conversations in dark Common Rooms. At first, the Gryffindors try to stand up to the new personnel, crusading through the halls and talking of bravery, and strength, and power in the face of adversity. A few first years are called to the Carrows' office for detention and the bright Gryffindor flame is snuffed out.
Blaise doesn't agree with their methods, never has and never will. He knows too well what power does to the people who have it, and he will never be that way. His mother, marrying husband after husband, each one richer than the last, and each one dying in a more inexplicable manner. Each time she weeps and wears black, as a grieving widow should, but they are crocodile tears. Blaise can always see the glint in her eyes as she moves onto her next victim, the desperate greed as she chases down her next millionaire. He knows what she really needs, and it is not a vault full of gold or a villa in Tuscany. It is what comes with the galleons that she truly craves. Power. Ensnaring anyone who gets so much as a taste, power traps them until they are nothing more than an empty, dead-eyed shell of their former self.
Now, as Christmas draws ever closer, Blaise can sense that very same craving for power taking root in most of his friends' hearts. He would be lying if he said it didn't scare him.
Daphne is his only solace in the castle, a beacon of light and hope in his increasingly bleak life. She is warm and brave and stands up to the Carrow siblings in a way that makes Blaise's heart stop, and only partly because he fears for her life when she does. They hate her because of it, each time she shields a trembling first year with fire in her eyes brings with it even more punishment, a fresh round of Cruciatus curses. Every night they can manage it, they go down to their tree, and Blaise talks to her about everything except the fresh bruises that cover her body, the new scars that crisscross her skin each day. It helps to escape, to live in a world where they are just Daphne and Blaise: young, naive, and not so hardened by things no one should have to see. And yet, each day Daphne is more closed off than the last, her smile never quite reaching her eyes. He can barely recognise her as the girl who sat down next to him at the Slytherin table on their first day, the girl he had known for six years. That was a girl with boundless optimism and a fiery spirit that could never be extinguished. Blaise wishes more than anything that he could see that Daphne again.
That is what drives Blaise to do what he does. As much as he is scared of power, and all of the temptations it holds, of turning into his mother, that is not what frightens him the most. His greatest fear is losing the Daphne that he loves to a world that he hates, and she is already slipping away before his eyes.
If she gets hurt because he is too afraid to step up and do what he needs to do, because he is powerless, Blaise will never be able to forgive himself. So, when Draco comes to him for what seems like the hundredth time since the Death Eaters came to Hogwarts, he actually listens.
The candles that illuminate the far corner of the library where they are meeting are pale and flickering, casting dancing shadows across Draco's ashen face. "Blaise, you've got to choose a side now," Draco mutters, his voice hushed and urgent. "The Dark Lord, he must know where it is your loyalties lie."
Draco is thin and gaunt, deep purple shadows beneath his exhausted eyes, and Blaise winces at the sight of his former best friend. Despite everything, he doesn't know if the price that Draco pays, that he might have to pay, is worth it. "Draco, it's-"
"Think about it," Draco cuts him off insistently. "What the Dark Lord can give you, the power that he can offer you. You'd do well, Blaise, you'd have a chance to have something more."
Blaise wavers, considering it now more than ever before. He's sure that he can resist the pull of being in control, that he can wait out the year, and then he and Daphne can disappear. All he has to do is join Draco, play puppet for the Dark Lord for a little while, perhaps patrol the corridors at night and look out for people that the Carrow siblings deem undesirable. Blaise sighs, and prays that Daphne will understand. "I'll do it, Draco."
Naturally, she doesn't.
"Blaise, how could you?" Daphne's face is pale with shock, fists clenched so tightly her knuckles are white. They are sitting by their tree, Blaise finally having gathered up enough courage to tell her what he's agreed to do. "Please, please, tell me you're joking."
"Daphne, you've got to know I'm joining them for you." Blaise tries to hold Daphne's hands in his, but she just bats them away roughly, angry tears forming at the corners of her eyes. "Please, Daph, I love you, I-"
"If you did you would never have done this," she spits, her eyes flickering to the black tattoo just visible beneath Blaise's rolled up shirt sleeve. Disgust crosses her face and she recoils away from him. "It's like I don't even know who you are."
Hurt and regret slam into Blaise like a freight train, knocking all the air out of his lungs. "I haven't done anything yet and I won't, it's just until we can get out of here. Together, Daph."
Daphne laughs incredulously. "That's what Draco said. And Pansy, and Millicent and even Theo, Blaise. And now look where they are. Torturing fucking first years."
"I would never-"
"Stop," Daphne says, and the finality in her voice is almost too much. "Don't ever speak to me again." With that, she turns and sprints back up towards the castle. Blaise feels like he's suffocating, each breath without Daphne more difficult than the last.
So, Blaise does all he can to forget about her. He loses himself in what he has to do, accepting each order with a nod and a fake smile. He morphs into just another faceless Death Eater, soulless and obedient. At first, Blaise feels nothing, staying numb to it all. He suppresses any emotion that threatens to bubble up to the surface with every blood traitor he is sent to discipline, each time he enforces a punishment for the Carrows. But Blaise still can't stop the ache in his gut that comes when he brushes shoulders with Daphne in the halls or when she glares at him from across the Common Room.
It is only after Easter, another lonely holiday spent at school, that Bellatrix Lestrange calls him up to her office. Blaise can barely remember the conversation, only staring into her dark eyes and listening to her rant and rave about victory and control, dominance and the importance of ruling with an iron fist. Watching her, driven mad by her lust for power, makes Blaise feel sick to his stomach. If he continues the way he's going, he knows that soon he will lose his apathy and begin craving the same power that Bellatrix obsesses over. If it's the last thing he does, he will escape the vicious cycle that he fears he might be getting trapped in.
After Bellatrix has finished her speech, he says a stiff 'thank you' and rushes down to the dungeons. Daphne is not in the Common Room and Pansy says she hasn't seen her for an hour, but that she spends a lot of time by a tree on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Blaise's heart races at that, a flutter that he hasn't felt in too long a time in his stomach.
When he arrives at their spot, Daphne is lying exactly where they used to lie together, eyes closed and hair fanned out around her. The sun is just barely touching the edge of the horizon and the sky is streaked with red and pink, the world bathed in a golden haze. Suddenly, after months of power struggles and not feeling anything at all, Blaise thinks that he might have a chance to be happy.
"Daphne," he calls breathlessly and she glances up at him, her gaze softer than he's seen in months. "I'm done, I'm so sorry. I love you, Daphne." Daphne smiles brilliantly at him, and all of his shattered pieces feel like they might be mending.