Title: Untitled

Author: Saynt

She generally thought of Zabini in terms of the information she kept in a file in her head. His wasn’t a very thorough file; it consisted of tall, dark, Slytherin, intelligent, and kind of sexy. The first three facts came from simple observation. Fact one made it hard to miss fact two. Fact three was sort of a surprise due to fact four (she couldn’t quite help stereotyping Slytherins as idiots, what with Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy running about, though she knew it wasn’t true). Fact four was undeniable because Zabini had somehow made his way into her Advanced Potions and Arithmancy classes last term and had taken third and second respectively in those classes. She wasn’t quite certain where fact five had come from, but she accepted it because her brain had apparently come to that decision of its own accord and Hermione Granger wasn’t one for denying something that her brain had already accepted as true. She didn’t deny it, but she did a bang up job of ignoring it, preferring to think of him as competition and possible usurper of the top-student-in-Arithmancy position.

So she was understandably startled when, in the middle of a vacation in Florence, a tall, dark, intelligent Slytherin who happened to be kind of sexy draped himself across the chair adjacent from the one she occupied at a sidewalk bistro, gave her a smirk and said, “Welcome to Italy, now hurry and finish your food so we can get started.”

To which Hermione replied with an eloquent, “Huh?” And then remembered who she was and to whom she was speaking, and tried again, this time managing a rather confused sounding, “Zabini? Wha-” which she decided, after a pause, was an excellent beginning and almost managed to continue along those lines before Zabini interrupted.

“Please, Zabini is so,” he stopped here, as though searching for a word, and the smirk turned into a display of teeth that could possibly be called a smile, “impersonal. Call me Blaise, Hermione.”

Hermione was a bit taken aback that the Slytherin, by turns sarcastic, sulky, scary, or all of the above was smiling at her and had an unfamiliar moment where her brain just sort of stopped working. She looked away briefly, attempting to lasso her higher processes back into some semblance order. Accomplishing that, she turned back to the still grinning Zabini and couldn’t help but to think that furry little woodland creatures must see a similar sight before being snapped up into the drooling mouth of a large, toothsome predator. She then opened her own mouth again, intending to find out precisely what was going on, and again the attempt was foiled by Zabini’s seeming inability to shut his mouth when someone really wanted him to.

He seemed, she noted, to be staring at her pot of coffee. She was proven correct when he looked back up at her, giving another unsettling smile, and mock chided, “Where are your manners? Aren’t you going to offer me coffee?”. Which was, of course, the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, or actually, brought her completely back to her senses.

She looked at him, narrowed her eyes, snapped her previously agape mouth shut and tightened her lips. Had she been standing, her legs would have been slightly apart and she would have had her hands on her hips. “Zabini!” she hissed, “What do you want?!”

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