Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter
Summary: In the span of a single heartbeat a romance was born, savoured, and devoured – a love story, of a kind.
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There was a time when he had plans: delicate constructs, more strategy and sugar-spun silk than anything with solid roots. He built roofs and towers high up in the air, but forgot how to plan for foundations. But still, what happened between then and now isn't very important. All that matters is this: he used to have plan, and now he doesn't.
What he has now are dreams, half-cocked ideas stuffed away in the dusty corners of his mind, taking up what little space there is. He stores them away because he doesn't need them; he knows what his life will be like.
His mother is a beautiful woman, perhaps even the most beautiful one this side of the world. Her hair is dark and glistening, her eyes bright, her hands soft. She is lovely in the way poisonous mushrooms are lovely, their round little faces sullenly turned away from the light of the moon.
His mother is a thief and a killer, and widow seven times over, and she loves him fiercely. He remembers being nine and dying from fever, and he remembers the palms of her hands as she cupped his face and promised him: he will live, and he will thrive. She kept her promise. He lived, and he lives still.
But what his mother, the black widow that she is, cannot ensure is his happiness. He meanders through life much like a shadow, doing this and that and nothing much at all. He goes to school, studies, learns, watches. He lives the life she gifted him because she wants him alive. Her heart would shatter into million tiny little shards if her was gone from this world. He won't put her through that – he remembers her desperate howl when, during that fateful fever, his breathing slowed and almost stopped.
So he tucks his dreams away, because his dreams are violent, angry things, that would much rather tear and claw and bite than amble along nicely. And that wouldn't do at all, because he has to make his mother glad, and he has to keep his promise to her – live, love, learn. He lives for her, he loves her, and he learns from her. Everything, everything for her.
But sometimes it isn't enough. Sometimes the aching hunger gnawing at his thoughts grows too big and too rabid to be contained. Sometimes his fingers gain a life of their own and they start tracing circles where there should be lines instead. Sometimes he throws caution to the wind and does what he pleases despite whatever heartache it will bring his mother. Sometimes he acts selfishly.
This is one of those moments. There is a wildness about him now, a kind of forceful tugging pulling the world towards him, to gravitate around him, and he wants. It isn't anything physical that he longs for – in fact, he can't even imagine what he might need right now. It's more of an emotional want, some obscure need for something.
He remembers his fifth stepfather. He was a handsome man, very clever and kind. He knew all too well what his wife would do to him one day. But because he loved her, because he wanted her to be happy, he'd allowed her to murder him. At the time, Blaise had considered him a fool. But his mother had simply smiled a smile, small and soft and sad and so infinitely tired. She'd said that death was simple. It was life and emotions that were the hard part.
He hadn't believed her. But now, with this beast clawing at his lungs, shredding the papery tissue… Maybe his mother was right when she said that death is easy. He cannot imagine living with this sort of pain every day, the way his fifth stepfather did.
With a light step he exits the common room. The hallways are cool and blessedly dark, soothing some of the roiling fire scorching the hollow of his arteries. But even the amniotic darkness can't contain him for long, and the desire to stretch his legs and run is overwhelming. Well… Surely no one will see him…
The flex of muscles, the acidic burn in his things and the almost audible cracking of his toes are a greater sedative than he could have hoped for. Within minutes the incessant pulse under his skin had all but worn off, the only remnant a thin itching more reminiscent of a buzzing fly than anything truly distracting.
The Black Lake is perfectly still, like a sheet of glass polished to shine blindingly, reflecting the pearly grey sky streaked with clouds. The silence is comforting. He grew up in silence, his mother, no matter how much he adored her, a fleeting mirage at best. His mother didn't raise him. Nobody raised him. A library full of history books raised him. His two dozen owls raised him. The gardens of Zabini Villa raised him. He raised himself.
But then, a movement. A flutter, somewhere nearby, somewhere close…
There!
He twists, adrenaline igniting his bones with the rush and simple joy of motion, and as he rolls on the balls of his feet, prepared to defend, he sees – well.
She is sitting under the tree on the other side of the Lake, bowed over a scroll of something or other, frizzy hair shadowing her face and glimmering like copper in the pale sunlight, a halo delicately framing her frown. He stills, watching like a cat readying itself to pounce, as she runs one hand through the thick mane, the movement hurried and frustrated.
Blaise is by nature a quiet, reserved sort of person. He has trained himself to be unobtrusive. But even though this is how it's always been – him unnoticed, the world unaware of his existence – now, it bothers him. It's an itch right in the middle of his soul, a scabbed over scratch that amplifies the pulse of blood the way bruises do, and he hates, in that moment. He hates so deeply, so thoroughly, this way in which she can ignore his presence, utterly overlook him, as if he was as important as the breeze dancing over the water.
What right has she, to not see him, to not notice him? Is he truly so unimportant? No, surely not. It must be something about her, not him. He wonders how to make her realise his presence. Should he make some noise, some movement? Should he do something?
He imagines walking around the Lake to turn up at her side, and in his mind's eye he sees himself tower over her slumped figure. He will be taller than her even if she stood up, but with her sitting the difference is even more marked. It makes something in him sing with joy: the rancid pleasure of being bigger than someone else almost too sweet to bear. She will look up at him, maybe gasp slightly in surprise. Those doe eyes will widen, glossed over, and her mouth will form a perfect little circle.
And then what? Is he truly the kind of person who takes glee in other's fear and pain? No, he refuses to be like that. His mother taught him better than that. Perhaps he will offer to help her with her notes, or book, whichever one it is. Of course, he isn't a stupid Hufflepuff, so he can't exactly help her for nothing. A trade, then. He makes her a trade; she is the most brilliant witch of their generation, so he can easily find some way for her to repay him.
She lifts her head, and frown. Asks: why should I agree to that? And he answers – well, he says something clever, something sneaky and twisted and migraine-inducing. And then he charms her utterly, makes her head spin with his words; he was always complimented on his silver tongue. It had been his third stepfather who first told him that, with his mind and his tongue, he could conquer nations. Blaise had always remembered that, had always carried that claim close to his heart. She doesn't stand a chance against his silver tongue.
And then… He will help her, certainly, and he will wait for a perfect chance to call in the favour she owes him. The war, he knows, left many of the darker families with little dignity. Their collective pride has taken quite the beating, and money means nothing if no one will accept it. So perhaps he will ask her to raise him up in the public's eyes, to parade around with him for a bit and convince the sheep that he isn't, after all, that bad. He has his good sides.
But she is clever, he learns it in time. Her mind is as sharp as his is, maybe even sharper. She just doesn't like showing it that much – Gryffindor has never been a haven for the bookish. She gleams his intentions so easily, she's understood his motivation ever since that first time he approached her by the Lake – she knows, and she doesn't care.
In this she reminds him of his fifth stepfather, that poor fool who thought that love would soften the Black Widow, that care and affection can crack his mother's cold, black heart and make her love him back. But he paid for it with his head, his throat swollen and blue from the tiny little phial of poison his beloved wife fed him once who got bored with him. She is equally insane. Or is maybe Blaise the insane one, for humouring her?
Watching her with that book, hair shining like beaten copper in the setting sun, he imagines it all. He could love her, he thinks, if he tried to. He could go mad for her, become a drunkard who feasts on her gentle expression. He could be as insane as she is, as insane as his fifth stepfather was.
His mother explained love for him once, when he was six years old and still far too young to understand what she was talking about. Love, she said, is like the sky. It calls forth storms and lightning, and it rips apart anything in its way. It teaches you exactly why hurricanes are named after people. It is rain, heavy and metallic, washing everything away – all the pain, all the anger, all the sorrow. It's the canopy of clouds, drifting free and untethered, coming and going but always there in the end when you need them. But most of all, love, like the sky, is eternally present. Love doesn't disappear. It merely changes form.
He hadn't understood this as a child. But now, at sixteen, halfway between boy and man, more elegant than any other student present but still a tad gangly and loose, he can. He sees the illumination as clearly as he sees her, and maybe they're the same thing.
He could love this stranger, bowed low over her book. He could love her as easily as breathing. He would marry her, adore her, shower her in diamonds. Anything she wanted would be hers. But…
Blaise is his mother's son, through and through. He is the Widow's legacy down to his bones, her fingerprints recorded in his marrow, her influence steady and unchanging. He is his mother's son; she is there in his atoms. Could he truly ever he happy, with this copper-haired bookworm, forever in one home, forever joined?
No, he thinks sadly. He would never be happy like that. Blaise is his mother's son, her flesh and blood and soul. If ever he could love, he would love at a distance, the way she did, and every keeper holding him chained would become someone to be resented. He would hate this girl, this wondrous stranger, if he ever loved her. Love and hate are the same thing, because love never goes away. It merely changes shape.
He wonders: how would he end her? Would he take a leaf out of his mother's book and slip her a drop of vampire blood? A fever, he would later be able to say. A sickness it was that took her from him, and he would be right. Who could ever prove that he had killed her? But no, it seems cruel, dirty somehow, to poison her.
Should he, then, kill her with the very magic she admires so? A cutting hex to the neck, and it would all be over. The whole world would know that he was the one to murder her. He likes that idea: every man, woman, and child, aware of his hand in her death. They would be a masterpiece, him and her, because he would, perhaps, slit his own throat after he was done with her. Together in death as they were in life.
In the end, he will do neither. He will remain as he is, standing by the side, his presence ignored, unseen. She will never know just what destiny she escaped so narrowly.
They have fate, but no destiny, him and this perfect stranger. He was meant to see her like this, to fall in love with her in such a time-stealing way, but she was never mean to do the same. She is a bird, free of him and his perversions. She will remain unscathed, unmolested by his disturbed tendencies.
With a slow, sly grin spreading over his lips, he retreats, footsteps quiet and sure. Perhaps he loved her, but he hated her also, and love never goes away. He will leave, and she will stay, and they will never exchange a single unkind word, because Blaise used to have plans, and he doesn't have them anymore. He doesn't intend to build any more castles in the air.
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Unedited; un-beta'd.