XXXVIII. Love
True love didn't exist. He had seen lust and debauchery and the most turgid affairs imaginable, but love? It was a concept he couldn't get his head around. True love was people sacrificing themselves, pouring their hearts out to one another, disappearing into a haze of emotion that he couldn't begin to understand. Things like that didn't happen in real life.
Except then it did. Parvati had screamed at him, telling him not to be an idiot, that soon the war would pass and everything would be right in the world.
"I will fight for you," she had said. "I will die for you. I will sacrifice everything I have for you. What else can I give but my entire being?"
The problem was that Blaise didn't want that. Even though they were in the middle of the war, she wasn't the only one he had to turn to. He had Terry. He had Lisa. He even had Theodore, though his friend certainly wouldn't have seen things in that way. Blaise didn't want all of Parvati, didn't want to be stuck with her forever once the war was over.
She had left him a few months later, professing that she was still in love with him, just tired of all the fighting, all the fear. He knew that he was still in love with her and he hated it. In the world Blaise knew, sacrificing yourself for another was simple stupidity. That was why, he decided, all those hideous notions of 'true love' had to be a Gyrffindor concept.
He told her straight out that he didn't want that, didn't want love, didn't want her. He couldn't even bring himself to cry when she was killed in the final battle mere months later; he was only glad to have escaped from the girl's obsession, which she had convinced herself was love. He wasn't going to make himself cry when he hadn't even lost anything.