heart-shaped boy
Blaise Zabini doesn't have a father, everyone knows this.
What they don't know, though, is that this doesn't simply refer to the fact that his mother gets a new husband every year or so, giving her son a new step-father by the same occasion.
What they choose to forget is that his mother just showed up with a baby boy one day. She laughs, whenever someone asks how she hid her pregnancy, and winks whenever someone mentions glamour spells as a possible answer, and lets others believe what they will.
The truth is this:
Blaise Zabini appears on her doorstep, carried down from the heavens and wrapped in a small white blanket made of an unearthly material. There is a dove, on that blanket, and it shines like gold – like the hair of the woman who wasn't human that the Lady Zabini spent the last summer with, the one who smelled like Amortentia and called herself Aphrodite.
(in the end, it took a goddess to satisfy the Lady Zabini, the one the magical world call a Black Widow)
.x.
Blaise is a pretty, pretty child, with a dark skin that always shines with health. His laughter rings like crystal bells and when he speaks, people can't help but listen.
When he is five, he falls off the tree he had been climbing in their garden. Asry, their House Elf, is beside herself as she rushes to the young master's side. She had been keeping an eye on him, of course, as per her orders, but he had seemed alright and something had distracted them both, a low growl that came from outside the property but had echoed deep in their bones.
The young master is fine though. He sits up, rubs his head with a wince and then smiles, a powerful thing already even if he's missing two teeth.
"Look!" He exclaims, showing her his hands.
Asry looks.
The Young Master's hands are glowing gold still, though the shine is already receding. It takes with it the small wounds that littered his palms though, only leaving behind mostly dry blood, some grass and a few bits of rock.
"Young Master can heals!" Asry cries out. "That is being powerful magic!"
"That's so cool!" The Young Master cheers beside her, and then Asry has to dissuade him to find ways to try to trigger his powers again.
In the end, the Elf goes to his mother, because the Lady is the only one who's orders supersede the Young Master's.
Asry never knows what the Lady tells her son, but it works because he stops trying to make himself heal again.
.x.
Blaise doesn't find out about the monsters until he is nine.
(years later, when he gets to the Camp, he'll find that he was actually lucky)
Of course, he knew something was there years before that. He hears them at night, awful, dreadful things skirting the edge of their wards. Which was why his mother never let him leave the property unless she took him with her to visit other wizards or witches who lived in homes as well protected as theirs.
But Blaise is nine, the weather is nice and he's pretending to be one of the magical knights of old, hunting creatures for glory and power on his faithful steed (the broom his mother bought him last Christmas).
He doesn't notice it when he leaves the boundaries of the wards, only notices how much colder it gets suddenly, until he's forced to come down else his fingers freeze around the broom's shaft.
The monster is down there, waiting for him, its mouth full of sharp teeth and with a breath that sends out frost into the air. It has a thick, leathery-like skin with winged-shapes protuberances sticking out of its back, and its eyes look mean.
'I will kill you and devour your bones, little demi-god,' it says, and its voice somehow rattles Blaise's bones.
It lunges then, a powerful and vicious move that Blaise only narrowly escapes by twisting away in a roll that nearly makes him fall off his broom.
He survives, somehow. He's so scared he can't even scream and his heart beats so fast it almost feels like it's trying to get out of his chest, but his mind has never been so clear or more focused. His magic flares out to protect him and the monster crumbles into dust, only leaving behind a teeth that glitters like diamond dust.
It's so sharp Blaise almost cuts his hand open on it picking it up, but in the end he wraps it in a bit of his shirt before heading back home.
The sky is clear again and the weather is warm, and he only mentions his adventure to his mother because she notices the unusual grin on his face and the way his cheeks are flushed.
The next morning, a white dove delivers a silver bracelet with a handful of charms already attached.
One of them is a perfume bottle and it smells horrible – his mother tells him that it'll hide him from the monsters for a short while if he sprays it on himself, or confuse their senses if he sprays it on them.
There's also a tiny spear that grows as tall as he is when he pulls on it, and a few flowers that as far as Blaise can tell don't do anything but look pretty.
Blaise loves it, and he never takes it off once he puts it on.
.x.
When he turns eleven, Blaise goes to Hogwarts like any other magical child. The castle, his mother tells him, is protected in much the same way as their home and he'll be safe there. Still, if he doesn't like it, she adds, you can always come back here.
He spends the school year at Hogwarts and in the summer his mother sends him to the Camp, and in the end he isn't sure which of those places is the most dangerous.
Hogwarts has Potter and all the trouble he drags after him, but the Camp sends them on mission to kill monsters sometimes, and even training can lead to wounds if they're not careful.
He likes his siblings though – it is nice to have people to talk to who don't stare goofily at him whenever he smiles, and who understand what it's like to want to look their best. It's even nicer to be able to practice the gifts his godly blood gives him instead of just the magical ones, and every summer Blaise is sad to go.
Not too much though – he knows he'll be back the next year after all.
.x.
It is difficult, sometimes, to be part of two worlds. It is even harder, he finds, when those two worlds are at war, though thankfully not with each other.
Blaise wonders what he would have chosen – which side he would have chosen – had he not been a demi-god, had he not seen too many monsters of all shapes and sizes not to realize just what exactly the Dark Lord was.
He hopes he would still have made the right choice, but he isn't sure.
And in the end, he's not sure it even matters. The choice of a son of Aphrodite is hardly going to change much in the grand scheme of things, isn't it?
(still, Blaise likes to think he wouldn't have followed a madman, that he'd have helped fight him still)
(it's a nice hope)