Vellum Voices •Harry Potter X Blaise Zabini•

Serpentine Summer (p3)

"I saw the scar on his arm, Blaise. I know what that came from as much as you do."

Blaise turns to face his mother. Harry is asleep upstairs, exhausted from the Legilimency session today. He's exhausted by the sense that's slowly settling on him, too, Blaise knows, that Dumbledore must have known about the Horcrux and might have planned to have him kill himself.

But that's not what his mother wants to talk about now, so Blaise nods. "I know. There were rumors about what Slytherin's monster really was, in my second year. I see now that they were true."

"A basilisk. How did he survive a basilisk bite, Blaise?"

"I have no idea." Blaise sits down heavily on the bench that stands in the cool shade of the veranda and looks out at the sloping roofs below him. The sea gleams in the distance, and Blaise longs to be beside it, sitting on the beach and watching the waves run in. "I thought Harry was telling me most things."

"He does seem honest when we ask him to be." Mother sits down next to him, looking nearly as exhausted. Blaise gives her an anxious look, but she only smiles a little and shakes her head. "It's a migraine that will go away, dearest."

"But he keeps all these secrets he just never thinks to mention." Blaise swallows. "Mother, the Muggles he lived with abused him."

Mother only closes her eyes and nods. "I saw that much in his memories, Blaise. We kept him away from them this summer. You think that he will try to go back to them when he returns to Britain?"

"He can't."

Blaise makes the declaration, and he knows as he makes it that he's setting himself up for conflict with powerful enemies. Dumbledore and the people who follow Dumbledore want Harry to go back to that horrible place. Blaise doesn't know their reasons, but he knows he could listen to them and they wouldn't matter. Nothing matters next to the pain that Harry was forced to endure there.

And nothing matters next to the urgency of keeping Harry away from people who would do that to him—both the Muggles and the wizards who enabled the Muggles.

Mother is silent for a moment. Then she turns to face him and clasps his hand. Blaise looks down at their joined hands and remembers so well when there were only the two of them against the world, in his childhood, right after his father died and before Mother punished his murderers and inherited the wealth of the men she killed.

"I always said that I would support you and whoever you chose, Blaise. I mean that still. But we are going to have much more of a time with this than I thought when I believed you would fall in love with some sweet Italian boy and we might only face conflict based on the color of his skin."

Blaise smiles, looking down at his mother's fingers. She wears only a single ring, the mourning ring that she put on the night of his father's funeral. A spun braid of white gold and platinum, its stone is a ruby that Blaise knows symbolizes eternal love.

Someday, he is going to set a ring with a stone like that on Harry's finger. But his beloved is going to be alive.

"I know, Mother. I love you."

"And I you."

*

Harry takes a careful breath as he looks at the letter lying on the table in front of him. It came this morning, delivered by a tawny owl that Mrs. Zabini checked over carefully for spells before allowing the bird to drop off the message.

The writing on the outside of the envelope is Sirius's.

"Do you think he knew about the plan to get you to return to your relatives'?" Blaise asks casually from across the table.