When Zabini, Blaise was called to the Sorting Hat on his first day at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, his knees did not shake and his hands did not tremble. The darkness of the fabric over his face was cool, welcoming.

"Well well, what have we here? You don't even know, do you? Confused little boy."

The spectators saw the small figure straighten in the chair, his fingers splayed over his lap. From the sliver of his face still visible, they could see his mouth harden into a thin line; a grimace, not usually to be seen on the face of one so young. So innocent.

"I am not a little boy!"

There was the quiet echo of laughter, and Blaise was unsure whether the sound came from within his head or without. He raised his eyebrows under the unheeding cloth.

"I'm not. I'll be twelve next month, that's hardly little anything, is it?" Then, an afterthought, "And you better not even think about putting me in Gryffindor, I'd never live it down. I suggest Ravenclaw."

There was another rumble of laughter, which sounded rather like leaves rustling in the wind, or being crunched carelessly underfoot.

"I don't see Ravenclaw for you, though you've certainly the intelligence for it. You're a chameleon, willing to mould yourself to the most beneficial purpose in order to get what you want; you're a reptile, young Zabini. Destined for the house of reptiles."

The Hat's voice rose out over the Great Hall, shouting 'Slytherin!' to it's tired audience, and Blaise slipped from the seat without expression. His new House-mates hissed in greeting and, after a moment, a slow grin split his face and he hissed back.

Envy

"A toast!"

The sound of expensive suits rubbing as several rich men get to their feet. The sound of glasses clinking together in crystal celebration and plummy voices echoing the shout of 'laevus insibilo' in badly-pronounced latin. The sound of a boy, snorting in derision, and the soft clamp of a hand over his mouth.

"Shut up, Zabini!"

Seated on a smaller table to the side of the adult diners, Blaise laughed behind the pale hand, his shoulders shaking in black silk, and he licked Draco's palm where it rested over his lips. The yelp produced caused several of the men at the high table to glare in their direction, and Blaise inclined his head under their attention, his voice even.

"Can I help you, gentlemen?"

Lucius Malfoy was not a patient man; he wasn't a tyrant, and he did love his son in his own way. He wanted Draco to be a powerful man under the reign of the Dark Lord; fear brought about respect, and respect was a stronger emotion than love for the Malfoys. But, much to his chagrin, his son's posturing was forever in the shade of that damn Zabini boy.

Blaise Zabini was thirteen years old, tall and gangly with his teenage limbs, his hair falling messily over his face as if a veil. He had always dressed like a child, hastily mismatching buttons and leaving his Muggle-style shoes untied but recently he had become more polished, leading Narcissa to mention over the breakfast table to Draco that his friend was 'such a well-dressed boy'. Yet looking at him now, he was anything but a boy; his pale green eyes did not waver as they met Lucius's own, and the self-confident tilt to his chin was fitting a Malfoy heir.

Smothering a small, inappropriate, smirk, Lucius nodded at the man before him. "It is nothing. Let us continue." The murmuring voices resumed among the seated men.

Draco had a faintly shocked look on his boyish face, but Blaise didn't look surprised. He never did.

Avarice

In Blaise Zabini's third year Harry Potter was hunted by an escaped convict - the man who murdered his parents, Draco made a pillock of himself, and a werewolf taught Defence Against the Dark Arts. This last fact didn't matter until after, when Draco slammed Blaise against the dungeon walls in a temper, hard enough to rattle something within his skull.

"You keep staring at that scruffy teacher! What are you on, Zabini?"

(Long fingers tipped with bitten-off nails, clean and half-mooned, but not at all feminine. Strong, strong enough to wrap around a throat and break, strong enough to push into untouched skin and leave white-flush-pink prints.)

Smoothing his hair back - he's growing it long - Blaise shrugged, shoulders slinking under tailored seams.

"I don't know what you mean; there's so many 'scruffy teachers' here, it's hard to keep track. Binns, I can understand his situation, but did you see Trelawney yesterday-"

"Shut up!"

Blaise shut up, his lips white with anger as they creased in his face, close to curling into a sneer; when he blinked, hate made his eyelids almost transparent. Draco would have regretted the outburst, if he knew how.

"Just. Shut up. I've seen you watching that Lupin all year - don't you know what he is? My father says-"

(Eyes, amber and gold, liquid and solid. Feral, in a way that only Man could ever be. The edge of violence and something altogether primal in his smile, the bite of flat teeth more penetrating than fangs.)

"Your father says quite a lot of shite."

And there's frantic fingers yanking his hair by the roots, inexperienced lips on his own in a clash of expensive teeth and heavy breathing and. Blaise pulls away. Laughs.

"Grow up, Draco."

Lust

Sometimes, things are too easy.

A smile behind Snape's back in Potions, aimed at that pretty Gryffindor girl with the glamour-straightened hair, will have her following you into an empty classroom. Her hands are gentle as they grasp at your biceps, her lips inviting as you plunder them and tease with nips of teeth. Her skin is soft, expanses of sun-darkened flesh paling beneath your careful exploration, and when she begs it is in a voice like birdsong.

You forget her name by November.

Then, in the library, you shoulder past a skinny Ravenclaw and he drops his books. His smile - fleeting and nervous - melts into a genuine grin when your hand brushes over his to the tune of a Arithmancy textbook.

It is not the first time you've been to the Astronomy Tower but you know it's his and you pretend, for a little while, that that sort of thing matters. His body is all edges and planes, and you calculate the angle of his hips with your tongue. Blaise plus Ravenclaw bracket books divided by latin bracket equals?

His name stays on your lips until March, when the air is crisp and there's no longer a need for an extra body in your bed to keep you warm.

From March to May your hand is a scrawl of hastily-biroed names and Houses in a vague effort to remember who you're supposed to be fucking this week. As the summer term draws to a close you miss an appointment with a Hufflepuff boy, a fifth year Slytherin, and a Ravenclaw girl with long black hair, because you're bored with that, now.

Stepping onto the Hogwarts Express you catch a flash of blond in the corner of your eye and follow the light, curious. In the corner of the carriage is Draco Malfoy, reclining lazily with his feet propped on the chair opposite. He sneers at you but his eyes are wide, and you smile.

Sloth

Draco knows that Blaise is watching him. The other boy makes no secret of it, curled in the corner of the Slytherin common room with some Muggle book ('Gormenghast'), and never turning the pages. He has one long leg stretched out, the other keeping his balance as he tips back on the chair and just. Watches. He chews on his bottom lip sometimes, and the skin there is red and glistening. When he looks up their eyes meet and there is a question there ('Would you?') and it's answer ('Yes.') but they stopped speaking to each other a year ago.

In their dormitory - Malfoy counts the days 'til sixth year, when he's guaranteed his own room - he feels eyes on him, as if their green held venom and could poison if only... If only they stung, like hate should.

He knows hate, like a coat it shrugs easily around his shoulders, but Blaise doesn't hate. Blaise barely has emotions at all.

It isn't love, either.

Not that they would recognise it, if it were.

Blaise has been watching Draco move through Hogwarts for months, since they returned in September and he found that their timetables matched almost lesson for lesson (he'd taken Muggle Studies, Draco Ancient Runes). School robes did nothing to hide that pale column of throat or his inner-wrists, where delicate veins mapped out heritage and destiny like some obscure form of fortune-telling. He would've taken Divination if there had been a chance to read Draco's palm, tickle it with hot whispers in the darkness of the dungeon dorms.

At the end of the school year Malfoy's eagle owl stumbles over breakfast, it's legs weighed down with a yellowed scroll bearing the familiar crest of two intertwined serpents. Lucius's seal. Draco leaves the Great Hall without a word and isn't seen for the rest of the day. Only Blaise, from his seat to the left of Draco, noticed the white hands trembling.

Gluttony

There are no new Slytherins to be Sorted that September - the Hat directs one lone girl to the table but quickly corrects itself. 'It's the moths, you know.' Dumbledore's speech is refreshingly, alarmingly, direct. There are new rules.

You do not leave your House after nine pm.

The Astronomy Tower is off-limits, as are all towers with open roofs.

There will be no duelling, on threat of expulsion.

When a professor says 'jump' you not only say 'how high' but also 'and what can I get you on the way down, sir?'

Non-compliance with these rules and you will be expelled, and left in Hogsmeade to find your own way home.

There were no upper-year Slytherins, and a notable number of missing Ravenclaws. Hogwarts was free of rats for the first time in a century - Blaise often heard them scuttling around the dungeons at night, neon-pink or twin-tailed, but no longer. The ship was sinking.

Draco had returned. His hair was out of place, his face flushed, and he had flown to the school on his broom, but he had returned. When he entered the Great Hall during the too-brief Sorting, every face had turned to him and only two hadn't immediately turned away - Blaise, and that Potter boy. Snape had been announced missing, presumed dead, along with the welcome.

Shifting sideways on the bench with a handful of bread and roast chicken, and remaining dignified, isn't the easiest of things to do, but Blaise managed. Draco offered no greeting, but his hand brushed Blaise's denimed thigh as he sat down, and didn't move until they stood to leave.

He didn't get his own room, and his clothes had suffered in the hasty transference from being a heir to being disowned, but there were only Blaise and Draco left in their dorm. So it didn't much matter, really.

Wrath

There were no Malfoys or Zabinis anymore, just two bodies twined around each other and holding as if there was no war or death or anything but this tangle of limbs and lips. This was magic. This was life, this was all that mattered and, maybe, just maybe, this was death, a little. For flavour.

This was pale skin on pale skin, long fingers twisting into longer hair, dirt under dirtier fingernails, and tugging hard just to feel it. Just to hear the cry and smell the fetid breath, breathing into each other's gasping mouths, and taking, always taking. They gave up giving a long time ago.

A letter comes, eventually, attached to a bird the colour of blood. The vibrant colour and garish squawks hurts their eyes and ears and they ignore the letter attached to one spindly leg, its serpent seal ugly and leaden.

Sometime later one of them stands and finds that the world has moved on without them. Winter has been consumed by spring, skeletal trees spotted with tentative green buds, and there are no men rattling the wards. Outside the door are bodies in advanced stages of decay, the sticky feel of Dark magic like tar in the back of their throat.