Oh, my, Readers, I swear I was not reneging on my promise to update frequently. No, the big news is...I moved! I'm in a new home now, so I had to wait for the cable company to come and hook up my TV, phone lines, and-you guessed it-internet access. So literally the first thing I did upon getting home to find I had a fully functional network connection was to update, becauser you guys have been sooo patient. Then for some reason wasn't letting me edit any of my stories. Bummer. After forwarding countless error messages to support, my patience was rewarded.
No more rambling, I swear. On with the chapter! We know very little about Blaise Zabini, other than the fact that he is a Slytherin in Harry's year who "turned out to have a famously beautiful witch for a mother (from what Harry could make out, she had been married several times, each of her husbands dying mysteriously and leaving her mounds of gold)." (Half-Blood Prince, American paperback edition, pg. 145). I decided to take that juicy little hint and run with it. Enjoy!
The Artful Dodger
The bedroom was dim, lit only by a few rays of early-evening sunlight fighting their way through the long, lace curtains before the ruby-red sunset claimed the day for its own at last. The air hung thick with the permeating scent of costly imported perfume, the fragile glass atomizer still perched atop the dressing table, which was littered with cosmetics: hair potions, lipsticks, rouge. Nearby, a warbrobe door stood ajar, some of the luxurious robes inside hanging crooked on their hangers, where their owner had abandoned them in her frantic search for the perfect one. From the shadowy recess of the doorway, a haughty-looking boy slunk noiselessly across the Persian carpet. No one saw him enter.
The boy moved with an almost animal grace, deftly checking over his shoulder as he traversed the room. His eyes rested briefly on the crisp bedcovers, which looked as though they hadn't been slept on in days. This wasn't the purpose of his visit, though; he was on a mission that, over time, had achieved a nearly ritual aspect in his eyes.
He scoured the polished surface of the mahogany dressing table with a practiced eye and, the corner of his mouth twitching into the faintest suggestion of a sardonic grin, he reached out and snatched a flat, velvet-covered box that had been given pride of place on the cluttered table. Peeking inside to verify its contents, the boy snapped it shut almost immediately. Grimly satisfied that his target had been procured so easily, the thief stole across the antique carpet once more and disappeared.
Blaise slipped stealthily out of his mother's boudoir with the jewelry box concealed expertly up his sleeve. Another gift from another lover who would no doubt be all smiles and false cheeriness to Blaise while his mother was watching, then cast clearly irritated looks in his direction when she went off to find her handbag. As though Blaise would get in the way of his planned conquest! That had never stopped any of them before.
It was Wednesday night, a rather unusual night for rendezvous, at least as far as most people were concerned. Isabella Zabini, however, was not 'most people'. And so, regardless of what Blaise may have wanted to the contrary, the halls filled with the overbearing, sickly scent of her perfume as she kissed her son absentmindedly on the forehead, murmuring, "Now you be a good boy, Blaise, and Mother will bring you something special…" as she applied lipstick in a shade most mothers of ten-year-old boys wouldn't consider wearing out in daylight.
She wouldn't be home that night, Blaise knew almost for certain. His mother's suitors were anything but creative. First the theatre, or maybe the opera…then the restaurant, usually French or Italian, with drippy candles and gypsy violins…then the hotel, the champagne, the strawberries, and a lonely dawn in that big house with no one to turn to for company.
When he was small, Blaise would sit up all night in bed, until his eyelids drooped with tiredness, long after one of the house elves had brought him a glass of milk and dimmed the lights, hoping to soothe him to sleep. He would sit there, breathing deeply the night air and listening attentively to the sounds of the crickets and sometimes—sometimes—he'd be rewarded with the faint pop! announcing his mother's sudden reappearance at home. But more often than not, the first rays of morning sun preceded Isabella's return. Blaise had since learned not to wait up.
He never knew for sure what drew his mother to this life, what she gained in the long run. All he could see her getting out of it all was a little attention and some costly trinkets. For, given for mercenary purposes, they were really little more than trinkets.
They brought her jewels, perfumes, art; once or twice Blaise had even been disgusted upon sorting through the tissue in a long, flat package to reveal scandalous-looking knickers and bras. These tokens filled Blaise with bitterness, a bitterness that could only be diminished by the adrenaline rush of secretly pinching the ill-given treasures from his mother's room.
She'll never notice, he thought. They never stay, anyway.
Well, here he was wrong, and he scolded himself inwardly for forgetting those that had stayed. They would sweep in as though they owned the place, with all the swagger of a king, to eventually slip a sparkling diamond on Isabella's finger, a shiny new broomstick into her scowling son's arms and their own ostentatious robes into Blaise's father's old wardrobe. Unsurprisingly, they never lasted long, either. Most mysteriously, Madam Zabini had outlived several wealthy husbands and considerably more wealthy lovers, and still the only constants in her life remained her wealth, her beauty, and her continually dissatisfied little boy.
Slinking through the shadowy house with the dexterity of a cat, Blaise made off for his refuge. His secret place, where none of them could waste his time. They were all a waste of time. Like a goldfish in a bowl, their time here would be so brief, so meaningless, that there was no sense in getting attached.
"And where are you off to?" came a jovial voice from a door to the right. Blaise's frown deepened. He'd been spotted…spotted, but not caught. To be spotted was nothing; he'd dodged worse scrapes than this. That one time his mother had caught him with those pearls from that blustering duke…Blaise still sometimes questioned whether she'd really believed him when he'd claimed they reminded him of her, his mother, when she was away and he was feeling lonely. The way he'd allowed his eyes to well up with false tears—some of his best work, by far. The hallmark of a true master.
He edged into the doorway a fraction of an inch, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at his mother's latest paramour. "To my room," he replied in a flat voice that firmly implied a disinclination to respond further—a time-tested, foolproof method Blaise had devised for dodging unwanted inquiries with skill and flair. The man nodded blandly. What a prat…clueless!
And without a backward glance, he continued down the dimly-lit hall and snapped his bedroom door shut behind him. Wedging himself into an imperceptible corner of the linen cupboard, behind a basket of unwashed laundry, he pulled out an old wooden box he'd purloined from the silver cupboard, embossed with his late father's coat of arms. The lid creaked open, revealing a veritable hidden treasure—flawless pearls, glittering jewels, the gleam of gold and silver and platinum. Each and every piece a gift from another suitor, each and every one so artfully stolen by Blaise without so much as a whispered indication of his guilt in the matter.
"Well," his mother would always say after engaging the house elves in a frantic search of her bedroom, the bathroom, the sitting room..."Well, perhaps it's Fate. I suppose we simply weren't meant to be." And like that, it was over and done, forgotten...and before long, she'd be enfolded in an entirely different set of arms and the whole thing would begin again.
He never bothered to look at the items after stealing them, nor did it ever occur to him to try and fence them for some extra pocket money or even just to get them out of his house. Even the thrill of the theft mattered little in the long run. All that mattered was that, in the absence of the gaudy finery, each and every one of his mother's liaisons flickered, burned out and died, leaving just the two of them, alone in the world…the way Blaise liked it best, and—as far as he was concerned—the way it was meant to be.
She might be theirs for a little while, he thought to himself, steeled with ten-year-old stubbornness and conviction, but she's mine forever. And no one can steal her away.
Well, what did you think? I do hope you enjoyed it, and I assure you that now that I'm settling in to my new home, updates will be much more regular, or at least more frequent. Cheers!
On va se 'oir,
Delilah