Legal Disclaimer: I own my stuff, but not the original source material. That belongs to whoever. Also, the opinions and interpretations I use here may not reflect the same in said whoever that owns the source material. Look, I'm just a poor college librarian. Suing me isn't going to get you anything but tears.

Warning: This work may be offensive to some readers. Feel free to back out if that's you.

Author's Note: I have a very low opinion of the Dursleys because of everything that it is implied in canon that they did to Harry. A hesitant goodbye and a "you aren't a waste of space" is not enough to get me to think they're even remotely close to decent people. If you do not think that they were abusive in canon, then this fic is not for you. Also, it should be noted that I reject apocrypha habitually, including the terrible name given there for Luna's mother. I changed it to something less bad naming magic. That's who Dione is, for those who aren't familiar with the headcanons that I reuse constantly.

Submitting Info:
Stacked with: Hogwarts (Term 11); MC4A
Individual Challenges: More than England; Hufflepuff MC; Ravenclaw MC; Slytherin MC; Sett to Destroy; Lion's Moon & Shadow Bribery (Y); Seeds; Shipmas; Tissue Warning; Interesting Times; Golden Times; Old Shoes; Themes & Things A [Love] (Y); Themes & Things B [Protection] (Y); Feeling So Logical [Responsible]; Lovely Triangle; Ethnic & Present; Rian-Russo Inversion (Y); Flags & Ribbons; Short Jog; Two Cakes! (Y); Yellow Ribbon; Yellow Ribbon Redux (Y)
House: Hufflepuff
Assignment No.: Term 11 – Assignment 02
Subject (Task No.): Agricultural Studies (Task#1: Write about someone feeling unwanted.)
Other Hogwarts Challenges: Romance Awareness [09] (Bodyswap with Soulmate) (Jealousy); Insane Prompt Challenge [680] (No Characters in their Canon Houses); 365 [32] (Moon); Galleon Club (Different Houses AU)
Space Address (Prompt): Summer Bingo [3E] (Moon)
Representation(s): Blaise Zabini/Luna Lovegood/Harry Potter; Autistic Genii
Bonus Challenges: Abandoned Ship; Second Verse (Ladylike; Persistence Still; Found Family; Nontraditional; Unwanted Advice; Three's Company; For the Vine); Chorus (Pear-Shaped; Wabi Sabi; Bee Haven; Machismo; Peddling Pots; Mouth of Babes; Tomorrow's Shade; Unicorn; Wind Beneath)
Tertiary Bonus Challenges: T3 (Thimble); SN (Rail; Ameliorate); LiCK (Poppy); FR (n/a); O3 (Orator; Olivine); HoSE (Schooner; Obscure)
Word Count: 1714

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Found Wanting
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Blaise stared at the ceiling of his bedroom as he counted down the minutes until he would switch body with his soulmate. Well, one of them, and honestly, the one that he had always worried about the most. The problem with having two would always be that his Switching Days were split. Instead of having two hours a year where he had a chance to switch into his soulmate's body and potentially learn their identity, Blaise only had one hour for each soulmate, a year apart. Each new moon after the Solstices, he would have an hour in his soulmate's body, while they would have an hour in his.

Every winter, he found himself in Luna's body. Her parents had never been normal but watching Xenophilius lose himself in madness after Dione's death was hard enough in just an hour a year. Even after getting to know Luna once they had both started Hogwarts, Blaise didn't know how she could stand watching it from essentially the front row. He could see how it had made her kind as well as insightful. Nothing enraged him more than how others treated her, throwing any overtures of friendship back in her face with mockery. Even worse was those who treated her as if she was less than what she truly was just because they didn't understand her.

Yet for all of that, it was summers that were harder. Even after all the years of trading places with his other soulmate, Blaise still didn't know who it was. The reason for that made him want to set the world aflame if he thought about it for too long. The boy who was his soulmate was always locked up somewhere. When they had been younger, it had been a cupboard with an angled ceiling that indicated it was under some stairs. Starting the summer after his first year at Hogwarts, it had been a bedroom filled with broken toys. There had been scribbled bits of spells and even runework, but no indication of the boy's identity or even Hogwarts house.

Blaise had only ever met his family once, and they hadn't used the boy's name once during the interaction. Blaise hadn't dared inform the Muggles (and it was clear that they were Muggles, even in that brief interaction) of who he was after Luna's attempt had ended violently. No one could predict what would happen if a soulmate died during a switch, but they had come close to discovering it during that summer visit.

If Blaise was honest, it had probably been that incident that had cemented Luna's loyalty to their unidentified soulmate to the point that the Sorting Hat had sent her straight to Hufflepuff instead of Ravenclaw with him. For all that they didn't know who he was, his influence on both them could easily be seen in their Houses. Luna had been headed towards Ravenclaw until her loyalty outgrew even her prodigious intellect due to almost dying in their soulmate's stead. Likewise, Blaise had been silently trotting towards Slytherin until his thirst for knowledge had overcome his ambition to be free of the reputation given his mother.

He couldn't help but wonder if they had influenced their third in kind, despite his complete silence on the matter. Both Blaise and Luna had left numerous notes for him, hoping that he would contact them in return. Neither had ever received a response of any sort. It was starting to look very much as if their third did not want to be found. Even their parents had failed to gain any meaningful information during the Switchings, the few times that they could confirm that they had been spoken with him. That was something that they could only do in retrospect as he always pretended to be which he had switched into and had as much skill as any chameleon in doing so.

Both Blaise and Luna had been excited to realize that for the first time, the new moon after the Summer solstice would be falling during the school year. It would have been their chance to finally discover at least their soulmate's House, if not interact with his Housemates and discover his identity. Then they could work on convincing him to join their relationship during the days between the Switching. Maybe they would even be able to finally do something about the Muggles he lived with.

That hope had died when Luna had returned to her body after her Switching. Blaise had just spent the last several hours cuddling her on the couch in the abandoned classroom they had claimed as their own. They had been waiting for the random hour when one of them would Switch, determined that the other would get a chance to talk to their soulmate. Luna had jerked in Blaise's arms as she came back and had begun to cry as she described the lengths that their soulmate had gone to in order to prevent them from discovering any of the clues they had been expecting. The sting of rejection had been strong as Blaise had processed that he had just spent an entire hour with his unknown soulmate, and he hadn't bothered to let him know at all.

Blaise sighed as he focused on the oddly shaped splotch on one of the stones in the ceiling. Maybe they should accept that their third didn't want to be with them. Maybe they should accept that while they were happy to be united, that they just weren't what their third wanted out of life. Yet something made Blaise hesitate about that interpretation, and he knew exactly what it was.

It was the Muggles that their soulmate lived with, who hadn't hesitated to react with violence to Luna's presence in their soulmate's body, who hadn't addressed their soulmate with anything other than freak or boy when Blaise had met them. Despite the nagging sense of being unwanted, Blaise couldn't help but think that there might be more to it than that. He couldn't help but remember how since the disastrous attempt from Luna to make contact, there had been protective magic separating their soulmate from any potential threats, sunk into the wood of that dark cupboard with crudely phrased runes that had been carefully carved. After Blaise's first year at Hogwarts, the phrasing of the ones on the doorframe of that bedroom had been even better.

Whoever their third was, he was clearly intelligent and driven. Rune magic was not the easiest magic to wield successfully, even if it was one of the few types of magic that had lingered in the non-magical world after the Statute of Secrecy had been passed. Even if he didn't want Blaise and Luna as soulmates, he was loyal enough to be protective of them. There was also not doubt in Blaise's mind that his soulmate could only have survived his childhood by being filled with courage.

Blaise stumbled a bit as he settled suddenly into the body of the soulmate he had been just been analyzing. Going from laying down to being in motion was always a confusing part of the Switching. On the plus side, it appeared that his soulmate had come out of wherever he had locked himself away during Luna's turn. A quick scan of the body he was now in showed that he was not wearing a school uniform, even if he was clearly still at Hogwarts. Given the hour, he had probably been headed toward his dorm.

It would be wrong to use this time to trap his soulmate somewhere to be interrogated. That would make Blaise no better than those despicable Muggles with their cupboard. Spotting a nearby classroom, he ducked in quickly. It wasn't like he could finish the trip to his soulmate's dorm, after all. Once secluded though, Blaise hesitated again, torn between letting his soulmate keep his anonymity and doing anything he could to never see Luna cry like she had earlier.

In the end, the choice was difficult.

After a couple of pats, Blaise found his soulmate's wand tucked into a crudely made pocket on the inside of the long-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Blaise looked at the nearly foot-long wand, recognizing it from somewhere that he couldn't immediately place. The wood was barely into the pale range—an apple or a holly, if Blaise wasn't too far off. It was a rather plain wand, with the only true identifier being a burned symbol in the pommel of the handle. Blaise didn't know of any students who had the sign of the Questers on their wand, but wands were personal enough that he didn't expect to.

The wand still worked well enough for Blaise to make the blackboard reflective.

He was not expecting to see Harry Potter looking back at him. There had been a lot of rumors circulating the past four years about the famous wizard. After the Boy-Who-Lived had shocked everyone by being a Hatstall that had finally been sorted into Slytherin, there had been whispers of other things. Some contributed Quirrel's disappearance to him. Others placed the blame for the petrifications of second year on him, especially after the Weasley girl had nearly died. The whole mess with Lupin being a werewolf and Black being revealed as never receiving a trial had also been rumored to have involved him in some way beyond being Black's godson. Then this year, Potter had been chosen as an unexpected fourth champion in the Tri-Wizard Tournament.

Jealousy burned through Blaise as he recalled that Daphne Greengrass, the Ice Queen of Slytherin, had been Potter's date to the Yule Ball as well as the person considered by the judges to be who Potter would miss the most. He tried to remember that Delacour's hostage had been her little sister, but Diggory and Krum had both had their soulmates chosen. It hurt more than it probably should. Maybe all the efforts to hide his identity really had been because Potter didn't want them, didn't want to be with the people chosen for him by Magic.

Maybe it was time to accept that.

Blaise closed his eyes and focused on trying to breathe through the pain of that idea.

Being unwanted felt like someone had slipped a dagger between his ribs.