Title: Untitled

Author: Tinuviel Henneth

October 1997

She's standing at the top of the main staircase, some insanely heavy moldering book in her arms, surveying the students in the Entry Hall like so many of her subjects. Maybe they are. I don't know. She is the Head Girl, after all. Maybe she bribed them to do things for her. Maybe she did special things for them. Again, I don't know, although now I've got this image of her on her knees in front of Malfoy that I could have done without.

I'm down here in the middle of a cluster of my Housemates, trying to look interested in what Millicent is telling me while really focusing my attention on Granger up there at the staircase, where she'd just been joined by the bloody Boy Who Lived.

"Blaise?" says Millicent gently, a hand on my shoulder. "Blaise, come on. Dinner time." She speaks slowly, like I'm a House-elf, or something. Do I look like a House-elf? No. I'm far too pretty to be a stupid House-elf. My ears and nose are more relatively proportionate to the rest of my head, thank you. Even if the ears do stick out a tiny bit and I got my nose is my Greek maternal grandfather. He had a massive conker, though I like to think that mine is at least a little smaller.

I digress.

"What?" I say, raising my eyebrows at my friend. She's shaped roughly like a willow tree, all narrow in the hips and waist and then her shoulders-- her shoulders are broader than Hagrid's, I swear-- and she'd got this massive head and curly hair. It didn't used to be curly, I don't think. I don't remember.

She rolls her eyes and shares this look with some underclassman, Baddock, I believe. He's grinning his little head off, stupid, wretched Fourth Year. I can't even really make a snide joke about him, either, because he's her second cousin once removed... no... oh, whatever. He's her cousin and Millicent's the closest thing I've got to a best friend. So, I have to play nice because girls get all angry fast about nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if girls are really worth it.

Then I remember my great-uncle Ernest, who didn't like girls. He was the happiest bloke I'd ever met, I thought, until he killed himself (deliberate overdose of Dreamless Sleep, he left the memory in his Pensieve before he tapped out and died) when I was a Fifth Year. Our kind tends not to be very accepting of those who are different.

"Dinner time," Millicent says in a very final, scary voice and I allow myself to be dragged into the Great Hall without so much as a look back up at Granger and the Potter. As we go past the idiots at the Gryffindor table, they glance at me and snicker behind their hands, like they think I can't see it. Now, I'm not Malfoy, so I'm not used to the negative attention from that house to the degree he is, but I'm not an ickle Firstie, either. So, I'm not going to worry all that much about it. I figure, whatever those dolts have got to say about me, I don't care, because the point is they've discovered who I am at last. And it only took them seven years, well six, seeing as it's only October of my Seventh Year.

Millicent parks us at the Seventh Year end of the Slytherin table and bids her annoying little cousin goodbye. I'm stuck between Gregory and Malfoy again. Millicent sits across from me, Malfoy to her left and that simpering Daphne Greengrass to her right. Malfoy himself, sitting like the bloody Prince of Wales (as my tiring Muggle mother would say) at the head of the table, is telling a particularly disgusting story to Daphne and Greg about something his father once did to a Muggleborn witch during his time at Hogwarts. I hate Malfoy's stories. Mostly because I can't myself live up to them, having a Ravenclaw father and a Muggle mum. The other Slytherins don't know this for certain and I do not especially want them privy to it.

"Hey, Zabini," says Malfoy, interrupting his own story (miraculously, Greg and Daphne don't notice and I trade shuddering looks with Millicent because we've both been bumped by their feet as they race to play footsie and gaze adoringly into each other's eyes-- pardon me, have to gag here).

"Hmm?" I ask, fiddling with my silverware. I have this story about forks and knives but I'll leave it to another time. I try to stay as neutral as possible because Merlin knows what Malfoy might say. My father was in his father's year. I know these things because he knows these things.

Malfoy looks at Millicent for a moment but she's turned her head to talk to Tracey Davis on Greg's other side and doesn't seem to be listening to anything concerning me. I notice her jaw tense a little, and she's definitely turning red. Now, that's interesting. Wonder what Malfoy's got on Miss Prudence Bulstrode, there.

He's awfully quiet.

I glance at Malfoy to gauge the reason behind his lapse of silence. We're talking about a boy who wouldn't know quiet if it slapped his arse in an empty room. That actually happened to me once, but it turned out to be Peeves thinking I was somebody else and I got the Baron after him. Peeves hasn't accosted a student since, I don't think. It was mightily unsettling.

I really need to keep my thoughts on track here. This is becoming an issue.

Malfoy's sitting there with an odd look on that pointy face of his. I've never seen him with this sort of expression, and if he wasn't the Head Boy I might laugh. I know where my charm's are theorized, though, and I don't dare. He's prone to irritation lately (N.E.W.T.S? Lucius Malfoy? Potter? Merlin knows).

"I'm not going to make a disparaging remark today," he says finally, swallowing and looking oddly pale. Maybe it's got something to do with Greg and Daphne, but I bet it's more like the glare Millicent's sending his way. She's such an amazing multi-tasker, chatting Tracey up and glaring at Head Boy with such intensity. If she was prettier and wasn't my best friend, I'd have to snog her right here. As it is, she looks a bit like a hag, poor girl.

Only Millicent has the stones to glare at someone who isn't afraid to shave points off of his own house.

I'm not about to dwell on Malfoy being weird, since he's always just a little strange anyway. Has been since his father was arrested a few years ago, I think, but it's been especially intense since the start-of-term feast this year when he came in late, out of breath, with his hair mussed. Not a few of us suspected he'd been off snogging someone, in typical Malfoy fashion, but it didn't seem like any of the likely suspects were missing. I never asked him about it, again with not wanting my nuts in any vises. Figuratively, literally, whatnot.

"Has anyone gotten anywhere with that essay Flitwick assigned?" I attempt, trying to sound jovial and unconcerned. Unfortunately, I am not a Hufflepuff. That, and I'm absolute crap at placating anyone. Millicent looks at me warily and just a touch sadly, like she has to admit something she sincerely doesn't want to. Ugh, out with it, people so I can get on with my meal.

"Blaise, stop," she says. "Just stop."

later that day

I hate my life. I hate it. I hate that I have homework I don't understand and I hate that I'm sitting a table away from the girl of my dreams but my Slytherinness prevents me from asking her for help on said homework. That's a lot of hate, let me tell you.

She, Head Girl Granger, has got her nose buried in some new tome and her quill's racing back and forth across a flat piece of parchment of its own accord while she dictates various notes from the book. I need one of those quills. It'll cut my revising time in half at least. I write very slowly. "And you're staring at me because...?" she says, not looking up at me.

Now, I want to give her my best smoldering look and say, "Because you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen," but I doubt it would get me anything but negative points for Slytherin and possibly a Weasley-inflicted broken nose. I'm not much of a sex symbol, I suppose, so I just blink and say nothing.

December 1997

I'm not sure where that rumor started, I tell her.

I bet it was Malfoy displacing the attention, I say.

I swear I didn't mean to drag your precious Potter into this, I insist.

But I guess this isn't enough, is it, Granger? I ask.

She stares at me blankly, the brow furrowed a little. I sigh and turn the page of the Prophet to an article about the next Weird Sisters concert (speaking of which, they're playing the Hog's Head and I should secure some tickets).

The honest truth is that I don't know what I'm going to tell her. I've been sitting here practicing on the picture of her in today's paper for about ten minutes, and I'm not any closer to anything that might possibly make her not hate me.

More specifically, something that might convince her that I'm not a bloody Quafflepuncher. My robes are black and I do not fancy wizards, thank you. You've really got to think about all the possible double entendres derivative of a name like Quafflepunchers. People who hit big red balls while wearing pink? Please. It's too easy.

I am such an adolescent boy.

"Holed up in your dormitory when you could be outside pelting Gryffindor Firsties with enchanted snowballs, Blaise?" Millicent's standing in my doorway looking amused, and I don't even have to look to know it. I'm good. "You really must feel like an idiot for what you did to her precious Potter." If I've never mentioned it before, Millicent is a very wicked girl and she should go to Azkaban directly for it.

"Are you suggesting I should go against everything it means to be a Slytherin and apologize about outing poor Potter?" I ask, sounding perfectly scandalized, even though I know all too well that is exactly what I should do. I just want Millicent to confirm to me that I do want to do that. So kill me.

January 1998

"It's not that I'm angry with you..." she trails off guiltily. I know it and I don't even have to look up at her to confirm it. "Well, actually, I am angry with you. But that's not the point. The point is..."

I glance up at her over the top of my magazine and raise my eyebrows-- Perfectly waxed and sculpted eyebrows that made her want to scream every time I raise them at her. I think that perhaps they're the main reason everyone seems to think derogatory things about my sexuality. "The point is..." I say in a tone that's only slightly mocking.

"The point is that you're a resolute, incorrigible Slytherin, and you always will be," she snaps, flustered. One point to Blaise, thank you. "So, just because you sit there and look pretty and--"

"Hermione," I interrupt, "we're not here to discuss this randomness you're trying to inflict upon my perfectly ordered world. We're here to discuss how we're going to smooth things out between Potter and Malfoy. I cannot stand eating my meals with Malfoy in the state he's currently in, pissing about nothing and taking points off fellow Slytherins. It's not normal."

She actually looks like she could snog me right here. And, because I'm tempted to feel her forehead to see if she's feverish and that's the explanation for this barely verbal version of Hermione, I think I'll take a step back. Literally, figuratively, whatnot.

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