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As Blaise followed Hannah out from the shadows of Malfoy Manor, he had the unshakeable sense that the world had shifted irrevocably beneath his feet.
He should have been less surprised by that than he was. Hadn’t he been passing information to Bridge for almost six months now? Not that he ever had much to say, and he’d known that when he’d sworn Rosier’s promise—whatever Rosier thought, Blaise and his mother weren’t particularly prominent in the SOW Party. Blaise was friends with Pansy and Draco, yes; his mother often helped plan SOW Party events, yes. Neither of them were privy to the kind of political information that he suspected that Rosier wanted.
And yet.
And yet it had been a party that was attacked, so maybe the information that Blaise agreed to give was relevant.
And yet Lord Riddle had been attacked in the home of one of his greatest allies, Lord Malfoy, with none of them the warier.
And yet it had been Hannah Abbott who’d gone in there and gotten him out.
He didn’t know anything yet, he reminded himself, the chill of the night air seeping through his thick fur. This was Lord Riddle they were talking about—Lord Riddle, one of the most powerful wizards in the world, and even if these unknown terrorists had gotten past the wards, he was still surrounded by his most powerful people. Lord Malfoy would put up a fight, so many others would, and they’d come out the successor. Perhaps he’d only return home in the morning, to his mother who would be too tired but still too willing to tell him the tale of heroic victory, and to scold him for running.
But there was a part of him that just didn’t believe it. Once he would have—six months ago, before the attack on the Unity Ball, before Bridge—he wouldn’t haven’t questioned Lord Riddle’s victory. Now, he did.
“Come on,” the young man, Christian, said roughly, shifting back into his human form from the runtish wolf he’d been and offering his arms. “Side-Along to the Warren.”
“L-let’s go,” Hannah replied, motioning for Blaise to take Christian’s other hand. “As quick as poss--possible, please.”
Christian turned on the spot and Disapparated.
The Warren, Blaise realized when he opened his eyes, was at least half underground. He could make out a series of low hills, most of which had wooden buildings seemingly growing out of them. A warm, yellow light shone out of the windows, some of them covered by curtains that turned into jewel-coloured squares in the night. He could smell people, many people, in the tiny pockets of housing around them.
“Welcome to the Warren,” Hannah said, reaching over to take his hand. She gave a quick squeeze, and the smile on her face was relaxed, genuine, and relieved. “My home.”
Once, Blaise would have just smiled and said, of course, not having any idea what Hannah meant. He would have assumed that Hannah meant her home for now, the place she’d grown up, a place she obviously would have feelings for but that she would leave when they married. He’d assumed much about her then—that she wasn’t very smart, that she was meek and submissive like most Hufflepuffs, that she was only too grateful to have him for a soulmate. How couldn’t she be grateful? He was Blaise Zabini, he was a Slytherin, he had good connections and money and, bluntly speaking, if Hannah Abbott was not his mate, he would never have taken a second look at her.
He'd never realized until six months ago that, if he were not her soulmate, Hannah Abbott wouldn’t have taken a second look at him either.
Hannah Abbott was pants at Defence Against the Dark Arts. She struggled with Transfigurations. She stuttered, and she found it hard to express her opinions on the spot. She didn’t engage in the sort of witty repartees of which he and his friends were fond. She couldn’t—she just wasn’t that quick-thinking or witty enough. But her speech impediment and failure to make quick judgements hid that fact that her opinions, once she came to them, were carefully considered, nuanced, and thorough. She was also very good at Herbology, and quite good at Charms, and while she’d never said anything, considering the sheer amount of time she spent baking, she was probably as good as any master pâtissier in Diagon Alley.
Hannah Abbott was also steady, and that meant when she said the Warren was her home, she meant that it was always be her home. This was the place she belonged—this was the place that, given all choices, she would live out her life and that she would die to defend. This was not a home in the way that Blaise considered homes, as temporary places he happened to live in when his mother had married someone new, and that he would no doubt leave within the next couple years—this was Hannah’s home, in some deep and visceral way that Blaise did not think he would ever understand.
“Right,” Blaise murmured with a nod, looking around. It seemed inadequate, but it was less condescending than of course. He’d been trying to be less condescending to her, these past few months, knowing full well that while he wrote letters to Rosier with SOW Party gossip from the comfort of his dorm room, Hannah had been sneaking out of school to meet with her other contacts.
Inside, it was cluttered. A mess of shoes and boots were piled by the door that Hannah had taken him through, the small shoe rack clearly inadequate for the job, and the coat rack in the corner was covered so thickly that it looked like nothing so much as a mushroom growing out of the floor.
Hannah kicked off her boots, leaving them in the pile, and Christian did the same. Blaise, with some hesitation, took his shoes off and lined them up in the neatest corner he could find.
They stood out. They were formal shoes, not like most of the casual boots that were tossed in the corner, but also they were clearly made of finer material.
“We have to go report to Dad,” Hannah said, iron resolve in her voice. “I hope everyone else got back okay...”
“If they didn’t do anything stupid.” Christian snorted, shooting Hannah a look.
Hannah didn’t respond, leading the way into the Warren.
It was a labyrinth. The ceilings were low, and the lights were barely adequate. The corridors were narrow, barely enough for two people to cross, and there were many offshoots into different rooms—rooms that Blaise could hear had people sleeping, reading, living. This was a complex where many people, many families lived together, not the sort of house that Blaise was used to. This was no Malfoy Manor, no mansion of elegance where only one family lived, but a whole village living within one very large, interconnected series of mansions.
He didn’t know if he liked it, the feeling of all these strangers pressing up against him, living so closely to him.
“Jules, Mark.” Hannah stopped short in the hallway, blocking Blaise and Hannah from getting in. “You’re back already?”
Christian poked Hannah on the backside, prompting her to let the two of them into the room. Blaise resisted the urge to snap at him for touching her, turning his attention around the room. This one was a dining room, it looked like, one where Armand Abbott, Hannah’s father, was waiting.
“We watched the force hit the Ministry of Magic,” A woman, who had to be Jules, answered with a shake of her head. “Separated into different squads and went in. We didn’t stay to watch—didn’t think there was much to gain for it. We didn’t see people coming out, either, but…”
“Not a lot of people at the Ministry at this hour—if they got in…” The other man, Mark, trailed off and he gave a twitchy sort of shrug. “All they have to do is take out the night watchman and the Auror offices, and I didn’t hear any alarms go off. We did wait thirty minutes, but no Aurors went in or came out either.”
“We don’t know,” Jules replied. “And we weren’t going in to find out. You? And who’s the…” She gestured at Blaise.
“Voldemort’s forces are attacking Malfoy Manor,” Hannah said, looking around at the group. “And this is Blaise—Blaise Zabini. He’s my—my mate.”
She said the words slowly, biting them off carefully. She’d never mentioned being mated before to these people, Blaise realized, and if she hadn’t mentioned it to her father—
Well, she likely hadn’t mentioned it very much at all. Not even in shifter circles, where being mated was not an uncommon occurrence.
“Zabini, is it?” Hannah’s father looked at him, coolly assessing—which was kinder than most of the other looks around the table. “I knew your father. He was a good man, once.”
“They often are.” Blaise looked down, picking his words carefully. He didn’t know these people. He didn’t think he liked them. But at the same time—
He didn’t know what else he was supposed to do. Both for Hannah, and because of that still present, still unshakeable sense that the world really had shifted beneath his feet. Where was he supposed to go tonight, if he couldn’t stay here?
Not Malfoy Manor. Not home.
“My mother,” he replied eventually, “is a very… attractive but difficult woman.”
“She is greedy, and the world is not enough.” Armando Abbott’s voice was even cooler. “Are you greedy, Blaise Zabini?”
Blaise glared at him. “I am not my mother, Mr. Abbott,” he said, his words clipped. Blaise loved his mother, in the way he thought all children did, but he had been on the roulette with too many stepfathers for too long not to know exactly what his mother cared about. Blaise had never ranked higher than more riches, with her, never higher than her latest beau du jour, and well did he know how that felt. “I enjoy a good life, I admit. I enjoy material things. But I am not my mother, and I would certainly not throw away my mate as she does so often to the men she marries. I would value her above all else.”
“I see,” Mr. Abbott said, before pushing his glasses back up on his nose. “I will consider that with the evidence of your own behaviour, once I have seen more of you. Hannah, Christian—go on with the attack.”
“There—there isn’t much to say,” Hannah replied, breathing out slowly. “Christian and I got there, and we were scout—scouting when I saw that Voldemort’s forces had crossed the outer ward limits. That was when I knew there was something wrong. There was a party or something like that inside Malfoy Manor.”
“It was ostensibly to celebrate their Heirs returning from school,” Blaise added. “I understand that Voldemort may have had some other plans, but I—my mother and I did not know them. My mother needs no excuse to plan an event.”
“I knew Blaise was inside, so I went inside with the wards down and convinced him to come out with me. When we were leaving, we heard fighting behind us, but—but since I’d already risked everything by going in to get Blaise, we got out of there as fast as we could.”
“So, you don’t know how it ended.”
“No.”
“I see.” Mr. Abbott nodded, his nose twitching. “The world is changing tonight.”
No one answered him. They all felt it, Blaise guessed. The world was changing tonight, changing in ways they didn’t yet understand and that they couldn’t understand.
“You had better send Rosier a message,” Mr. Abbott said finally, getting up from his chair. “And in the meantime, Mr. Zabini, for tonight you have our hospitality. I will arrange a room for you, for it seems that there may be no safe place for you to return. We’ll look at the world again in the morning.”
One night turned into several nights—which then turned into weeks.
Hannah had appeared in the tiny guestroom they’d given him for the night in the morning, a stack of clothing in hand. He’d taken one look at her, and she’d shaken her head grimly. He hadn’t understood, then. Some part of him still hoped he was wrong, still hoped that that sense of the world shifting beneath his feet had been wrong and that they’d all been wrong, and he’d wake up in the world he’d known.
But he hadn’t.
So, he’d taken the clothing, which was not as fine nor as stylish as his own, but they were clean and well cared for and fit.
The world had changed. Lord Riddle was dead, Voldemort—once a terrorist, now a proclaimed liberator of the people, though Blaise didn’t know who he thought he was liberating—in charge, Pansy Parkinson at his side. Lady Parkinson, Lady Rosier, Lady Malfoy and Draco had all escaped that night, but he didn’t know much more. Lady Parkinson and Lady Malfoy had left, while Lady Rosier turned out to be someone else entirely.
Draco Malfoy was being held at Rosier Place, not an enemy exactly but also not a friend. Lines had been drawn, lines between them and us, the enemies and the allies, and Draco Malfoy was neither clearly an enemy nor clearly an ally.
Where did that leave Blaise?
He’d asked after his mother. The most that anyone could tell him that she had lived the night, but that she was being held with the remainder of the prisoners by Voldemort. And without his mother—well, his mother had held the Zabini fortune in her Gringotts vault, not that many dared go into Gringotts now to withdraw their Galleons, so Blaise was effectively penniless. He had escaped, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, no one was looking for him—but he was not the person he was, either.
Before the coup, Blaise hadn’t been a Bridge supporter, not the way that Millie had been. He’d seen some reasons why people might be supportive, but he’d been closer to neutral than sympathetic himself. Now, it was clear to him that sides had to be picked.
Hannah had picked a side, and she and the shifters had leapt with their feet months ago—Blaise with them, not entirely willingly. Millie had been with them, though she likely hadn’t known it. Pansy, now, had picked a side, though it was the other side and she’d picked it in a night of blood and fury. Draco was under house arrest, precisely because, as far as Blaise could tell, he hadn’t picked a side—or he hadn’t picked the right one.
And Harry Potter, formerly Rigel Black, was back—her own side picked with nary a thought.
“D’you want to come with me, try to convince the other noble families against Voldemort?” she asked, stopping him as he accompanied Hannah to one of her meetings at Rosier Place. “Theo—he wasn’t there that night—”
Blaise had snorted. “If you think Theo will join—”
Harry had looked away. “We should try anyway, Blaise.”
He’d looked at Hannah, who’d shrugged. She didn’t need him.
She never had, a fact that he knew well after weeks at the Warren. She loved him—she had no choice but to love him—but she didn’t need him. She had a whole Warren full of aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbours who loved her, and he had almost been hurt to realize that he wasn’t even the first of people whom Hannah would seek out for, well, anything at all.
She was close with Jules, and her cousin Kathleen, and so many people that Blaise wasn’t even sure of them all yet. With her spare time, she normally could be found where one of them were, helping to look after the younger kids, playing board games, or just talking and laughing over a plate of cookies. She was often also in the kitchens, either cooking for the large number people who lived in the Warren, or baking treats. And while Blaise didn’t think he would be of assistance there, he also didn’t know how to insert himself into the clear circle of friends and family she already had.
Even if she was going out on Alliance business—conducting surveillance, primarily—she didn’t choose him to come along with her. He wasn’t trained at surveillance, she’d explained to him patiently, and he also didn’t have a shifter form that worked well with surveillance work. Her preferred team was Jules, Mark and Christian for espionage, leaving Blaise… exactly nowhere at all.
And so, Blaise had agreed. For weeks, he went out with Harry to the oldest families in Britain, trying to drum up support for any resistance, only to realize he wasn’t very good at that either. He wasn’t noble, and Harry was a known halfblood—perhaps he should have known that, in their class-conscious and striated world, Voldemort and his power would always be more attractive than a common shifter whose family money was at best inaccessible and at worst turned over to Voldemort, and a halfblood.
“Of course, come in,” Sir Henry Nott said with a smile that immediately had Blaise’s slightly-less-than-proverbial hackles rise. “My son Theo speaks very highly of you both.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Harry said, with a small dip of her head, though Blaise could tell that she had her own reservations. Something was wrong, here—Theo might have spoken highly of Blaise, but not of Harry, and they both knew it.
Still, they were here to talk. They were here to talk, and to convince the Notts—not the main noble house, but Theo’s branch—that falling behind Voldemort would be a bad idea and that they ought to join the resistance. And that meant going inside and giving talk a chance.
Sir Nott led them through the halls of Theo’s home, leaving them in a room towards the back of the mansion. “I will go arrange for a tray of tea. Please, take your ease.”
“Thank you,” Harry replied with a nod, making to sit down on a nearby sofa, one that Blaise suspected would be cleaned thoroughly they had left, if not tossed straight into the nearest fire. Blaise stayed standing, looking warily around the room.
It wasn’t the proper etiquette to put guests in a back-mansion sitting room. Rooms at the back of a house were meant as family spaces, this one likely someone’s reading room. There was only an armchair and a long sofa, and a desk in a corner with a book on it. There were no windows, a fact that only made the hairs on Blaise’s neck stand up higher. He didn’t like this. There were no windows, and the only way out was the door.
“This isn’t right,” Blaise whispered, striding towards the door. “Something is wrong. They’re doing something. We should get out of here.”
“We can’t assume that,” Harry replied, though Blaise could see her checking her wand in the duelling holster, and then a small array of vials at her waist. “This can’t be their primary sitting room, but—”
“Smoke,” Blaise snapped, his nostrils flaring as he smelled the scent of Floo powder—Floo powder, a fire. “Someone’s here. We have to go.”
Harry hesitated for a half-second, just long enough for Blaise to catch a different voice, merry and bright, before she stood up and drew her wand. “Go.”
Blaise wrenched the door open and walked out, taking quick steps. On one hand, he knew Theo’s house well, having been here often enough—on the other, that meant he knew that the mansion was a mess of narrow corridors, and they had too many of them in any direction to travel.
He guessed. He’d been here before, and Harry hadn’t, so he went to the back—towards the back exit, the ones used by the house-elves and the family that went to the back grounds. He didn’t think they’d look in this direction first, and those doors were closer. It was better to be out in the open, where they could run.
The hallways pressed in on them.
Blaise hurried, the corridors slipping out from under his feet as he moved as quietly as he could. He couldn’t do much about the portraits, who were hurrying out of their frames, to the masters of the house, but hopefully—if they moved fast enough—they’d be gone before the portraits were able to raise the alarm.
Just one right turn, and they’d be at a landing. At the bottom of the stairs, there would be the back doors.
“There!”
Blaise heard the shout before he saw anyone, but he didn’t need to see anyone to shift. The spell flew over his head, and without his colour vision, he couldn’t identify it—but he could hear Harry behind him, retaliating. Unfortunately for them both, there was a servants’ door opposite them, and someone was coming out of it.
He didn’t think. The landing was too small for any real combat, and he and Harry needed to get out. He leapt for the person, sinking his teeth into a shoulder as he missed the throat, and he ripped. He felt the crunch of cartilage, the crack of the bones, the snapping of sinews—and then he was gone, spitting the flesh out in a chunk as Harry got off another Stupefy, and they took the stairs in two massive jumps and crashed out into the back garden.
Harry was doing something with a potion, pouring it out in an arc in front of the doors, but it took less than a second. And then they were off and running, until Harry grabbed the back of his neck and twisted them both into Apparation.
His mouth tasted of blood.
At the Warren, Blaise made his way to the kitchen. His mouth was disgusting—the copper taste of blood was still there, even after Harry had given him two glasses of water and breath mint potion. He was confident he didn’t smell of blood, not even to himself, but he still tasted it under the peppermint in his mouth. Worse yet, he could feel the bones cracking in his jaw, the stretch and fight of the sinews, the soft wetness of the flesh.
He needed something else. A Butterbeer, at least—a Firewhiskey would be better. Just enough to rid his mouth of the sensation, and let him relax a little.
He didn’t find any Firewhiskey, or Butterbeer. He didn’t even find any wine, but there was the cooking sherry, and after a thought that this was indeed a very bad idea, he uncorked it and took a swig.
It was disgusting.
It also wasn’t very strong, but the fact that it was disgusting helped. It was disgusting, and so was Blaise’s mouth, and cooking sherry was actually more disgusting and he would take his wins where he could get them.
“Hey.” Christian sat down beside him at the kitchen table. “Rough day?”
Blaise shrugged, taking another swig from the bottle. “Went to one of the branch houses for the Notts today. They tried to ambush us. I bit someone.”
“Gross.” Christian grimaced, flipping him a striped, red-and-white package from his pocket. “Here. Fisherman’s Friends, cherry flavoured, sets your mouth on fire and tastes like the worst Muggle cough syrup you can imagine. Better for you than the cooking wine. I never thought those visits had any chance of success, so you know. No loss there. Hannah will just be glad you’re back safe.”
Blaise snorted, taking the package and letting Christian confiscate the wine, which was very bad indeed. “Will she?”
“You’re her mate. Of course, she will.”
“Right.” Blaise let the word trail off. “Her soulmate. She doesn’t have a choice in it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“We’re mated.” Blaise rolled his eyes. “It’s rather the definition of being mated—”
“You don’t have a choice in the starry-eyed love feelings, I get it.” Christian shook his head. “But aren’t you forgetting all the choices that you and Hannah do have? Hannah has to love you, but she doesn’t need to like you. She doesn’t need to feel grateful and happy that you escaped unharmed. And you, you have to love her—but think of all the choices you did make.”
“That I…?”
“You stayed here.” Christian’s expression was serious. “You didn’t need to—you could have left, gone anywhere in the world, and you stayed here.”
“All of our money is in Gringotts—”
“I’m not an idiot, Zabini. I know you have properties and money elsewhere in the world too.” Christian snorted. “You could have left. Asked to be taken out with the refugees to France, or Italy—asked to be connected to your father’s family, even. Speaker Armand is in contact with them. They’d have taken you in, barely a shifter as you are.”
“Barely a…” Blaise swallowed, because Christian wasn’t wrong. He was a shifter, in the sense that he could shift, but he’d had very little contact with the shifter community growing up. In the middle of the Warren, the heart of the Shifter Alliance, that fact was even clearer.
Hannah belonged in this community, the importance of which he couldn’t have understood until he was here. She was a living and breathing node of it, while Blaise was a stranger. Blaise was only now getting a handle on shifter culture, with its strong focus on family and community, which were totally alien to Blaise.
Everyone in the Alliance took care of each other. Everyone paid a third of their annual income into the Alliance Community Fund, which paid for the upkeep of the Warren, kept a central food pantry stocked for needy alliance members, and made sure that every shifter child had the opportunity to go to Hogwarts or to school abroad. About a third of the alliance lived in the Warren itself normally, or so Hannah said, but nearly every member had moved in with their families during the war. Safety came in numbers, and the Warren was better warded and protected than their individual houses.
And so, they’d all come home—to the home of their hearts, if not where they normally lived, and they’d settled into the labyrinth of bedrooms and living rooms and brought the Warren alive.
“So, why are you here, Zabini?” Christian nudged him with shoulder. “You don’t have to be here. I’m not even sure you like being here.”
It took Blaise a little while to reply.
“Because Hannah is here,” he said finally, looking at Christian. “And because I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know my father, or his family. I’ve—My mother and I, we spent my entire life moving, and I didn’t have the same stepfather for more than two Christmases in a row. At the time, it was fine, but now… I look around and I realize that I don’t have anywhere to go.”
It was after Wales that Blaise came to a decision.
Wales was bad. Weeks after coming home, Blaise wasn’t able to shake the images from his head. Ottery St. Catchpole had been destroyed. Families were murdered, and for nothing more than happening to live on the wrong side of a border that, for generations, hadn’t even been there. The people who had lived there hadn’t been part of the resistance. They’d probably been purebloods. None of that had mattered.
Hannah had cried about it. Some to Blaise, because he’d been there, but also with her friends in the Warren. She’d bled out the pain of the memories, sharing the burden, and meanwhile—
Blaise hadn’t. It was only a few months into the war, but the world had shifted underneath his feet. The world was different, and so was he—and more than that, he didn’t want to be the person that he was.
He didn’t want to be Blaise Zabini, proud Slytherin from a wealthy family with a good pedigree. Money and pedigree meant nothing and could be taken away in a flash. He wanted something more than that, something real.
People who’d mourn him when he died—not like his mother, who would have put on a good show and who he hoped would feel more about his death than she had for his father and his last six stepfathers. Not even like his friends from Hogwarts, who would care but… not in the same way that the shifters he lived among had mourned their losses.
The shifters he lived with now had taken their losses at the Unity Ball as if it was one of them. One of their own, and they had turned it to action. They’d turned against the people they blamed, and they were trying to make a better world.
He wanted that. He wanted to be missed if he was gone, and when he died, he wanted his death to mean something. He wanted to be part of something greater than himself. He wanted to belong somewhere, or to someone, and to have a somewhere and someone to come home to.
He didn’t want to feel like a stranger anymore.
“Hannah,” he asked, catching her in the kitchen as she worked on a batch of brownies. She’d been indulging in her hobby a little more often lately, saying that in times of war, they all needed things to bring them joy.
“Hm?” she asked, looking up from the mixing bowl. There was a smudge of batter across one cheek.
“What—” Blaise let out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “What would I need to do to join the Alliance?”
Hannah blinked once, and then again. “Blaise—you don’t—”
“But I want to.” Blaise looked away. “I know—I haven’t been very respectful of you, or of your dedication to the Alliance before. I didn’t understand what the Alliance meant. But now… it’s different now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want a place I can call home.” Blaise swallowed, looking into Hannah’s concerned blue eyes. “A place with you in it, but also a place that I, and you, and any kids we might have can come home.”
Hannah looked at Blaise very seriously, and then she smiled. “I’ll talk to Dad about putting your candidature forward. I’m—I’m really happy you’re thinking about this, Blaise. Especially because it isn’t only for me.”