The Exception

He was not the sort of person who got unduly upset over things. At the age of seven, he had perfected the bored, arched eyebrow, the knowing smile. "Yes," he drawled to his reflection. "I'm sure that's exactly how it is." It was practice for later.

He needed it, later. It didn't do to show too much of what you felt.

His mother had taught him that. She was Spanish (the surname was his father's) and tall and porcelain smooth, unruffled, self-assured. Everyone's idea of what a film star should be. Flawless features, unshakeable smile. He only knew her by the way she allowed herself to thaw slightly in his presence. Never entirely--it was her persona, she could not let it go--but enough to let him know that she loved him. Since he was five and his father had had a mysterious accident with an enchanted well (rather dramatic, he thought, but then, his mother had always had a well-developed sense of pathos and climax), he had watched with his inherited impassivity the procession of lovers slip past him uninterestedly and rush into his mother's famed embrace. They showered her with praise, with gifts, sometimes with abuse. They longed to touch her curling lips and marble skin, make her theirs, only theirs. But she never belonged to them. They belonged to her, she set them down in her neat, careful Spanish in her book, the one his father had given her as an anniversary gift the year he was born, and consequently forgot about them. There were entries in there from before his father's death. He knew; he'd stolen the book periodically to see how many more had been added to the list.

It was important not to care, he understood. If you cared, they held power over you. He detested that idea.

There had been one man, by the name of Jeremiah Bones. His mother had forgotten not to care about him. She had thrown herself after the man, renounced all sense of propriety and screamed herself hoarse outside his flat, on his answering machine, in Howlers, after he had ended things with her.

He had been seven then, and watched the way her face slowly recovered from its twisted, ugly snarl and her voice lost the throaty abundance of Rs that meant that she was too angry to apply her carefully enunciated English. Her eyes lost their tender puffiness, but they never returned to quite their normal state afterwards. They were a bit cooler, a bit more gray, a bit more lost. He knew that being in so many bits could not be good for his mother, but she never said anything to give him the idea that she was not in complete control, and so he did not say anything.

From his mother, he knew there were two extremes to which he and his name could slide: blaze and blasé, pain and protection against ever being hurt.

He was extraordinarily disappointed in himself when he stumbled into the former.

His trysts at school generally tended to be brief and passionate, a quick hot culmination of an acknowledged attraction before his end faded into embers and he kissed his flavor of the week goodbye. Female or male, it didn't particularly matter. He had known from an early age that he had no real preference either way. There was nothing about the pleasant curves and soft edges of girls that precluded his equal appreciation of the abrupt corners and hard lines of boys. Either sex was more than willing to let him know his attentions were appreciated. He'd inherited more than impassivity from his mother; neither had his father been ugly. He carried what he had with the kind of bravado that made people's heads turn, played up his straight nose and dark brows and brooding allure that he worked daily to improve, and hid his slightly knobby elbows and too-feminine hands. He could have his way with half of Hogwarts; in fact, he nearly might have had it not been for her.

It was maddening, that was the word. She was not at all his type. He preferred adult composure, a mutual agreement not to make a big deal out of whatever the deal of the moment was. Sex was sex, a necessity, like breathing or barbed comments in the common room. He generally preferred Ravenclaws because of this; to be sure, he didn't dally in his own house more than he could help it.

She was immature, vindictive, spiteful. She was too forward, too brazen, unladylike. She wore her skirts too short.

He'd known her all his life, it wasn't like she was something new and entrancing. On the first day of school they'd sat in the same compartment on the Hogwarts express, and she'd scooped up a wayward toad they'd later discovered belonged to a bumbling, freckle-faced boy inexplicably Sorted into Gryffindor rather than Hufflepuff, and pointed her new wand at it, saying, "Aquarius." The toad had given an audible gulp and transformed for a moment into a wriggling, gasping goldfish. Back in toad form, it hopped away with all of its small leathery might, having disliked life as a goldfish with such a horrid girl.

He had laughed and asked her where she'd learned it, and she'd gone a bit pink and said, "My sister did it to...someone I knew once."

"Useful trick. Teach me. I'll practice on Longbuggery."

This elicited a wicked smile that he quite liked, and she'd put her Chocolate Frog cards in her pocket and stuck out her hand, sticky with chocolate. "I'm Pansy Parkinson, who're you?" she asked candidly.

"Blaise Zabini," he answered coolly, raising his overworked right eyebrow at her chocolate-smeared hand and declining to take it.

She wiped her hand on her robes, which were embarrassingly frilly and pink. They reeked of a mother's bad influence. "I like you," she told him, and at that his eleven-year-old composure slipped just a whit and he smiled.

Pansy had no shame, that was what was the matter with her. She was patently in love with Draco Malfoy, whom everyone knew was being eyed up by the Boy Who Lived. Zabini wouldn't have given a damn who Malfoy fucked except that it was tearing Pansy up. He watched as she hurled herself at Draco, just as his mother had hurled herself at Bones, with what some might consider success--but Zabini was smarter than that. He had a thing for Potter, and no matter how high up her thighs her skirts inched, he was never going to notice her.

Truth be told, he didn't understand the attraction. He and Draco had fooled around a few times in fifth year and it was nothing special; the kid had a Napoleon complex and absolutely no idea what to do with his tongue.

There was one perfect night when he thought he'd gotten it right. He'd spotted her alone in the common room, absently touching the world-class love bite on her neck and watching the firelight glint off an equally exquisite bracelet. He'd sat down next to her and said, "So who'd you suck off to earn that one, Pans?"

She'd started and given him a dirty look. In the light from the green flames her face was almost pretty--or--he revised--not pretty, as such, but put together well, the purebred lines of her face combining to make a countenance difficult to ignore. He liked the fact that she wasn't really pretty; it made him certain that there must be something more interesting about her than her bone structure, something his mother didn't have, when she had everything else.

"Your mother, that's who," she'd returned, oblivious to the direction of his thoughts. She had turned the bracelet around on her wrist and said thoughtfully, "It was a gift, Zabini, ever heard of those?"

"Oh yeah? From whom?" But he already knew the answer.

She knew he knew, and gave him a rueful smile.

"What's in it for me if I give you earrings to match, hm?" he asked, pressing his thigh to hers, watching her eyes glitter like the bracelet. They always hit on each other without really thinking about it; it was comforting to know somebody wanted you, even if they weren't ever going to have you. It wasn't joking on Zabini's side, at least.

"I thought I wasn't your type," she purred, shifting in the chair so he could see down her blouse.

"Everybody's my type," he told her. "Well--everyone who happens to be worthy of my golden loins, that is."

"Am I worthy?"

He caught his breath. "Not in the least. But I'll be willing to make an exception."

She gave him a predatory smile then, and closed her eyes, an invitation. In an moment he was draped across her, lost in the way she felt beneath him, kissing him. She slipped her hands into his robes and his mouth dislodged from hers from an instant and he gasped without meaning to.

"Pansy," he said, and thought she understood.

But the next day it was like nothing had ever happened, and the bracelet was back on her wrist, retrieved from where he'd stuffed it into the armchair's cushions, and Pansy was sitting on Draco's lap in the morning, laughingly feeding him toast and letting him lick the jam from her fingertips, eyes half-closed obscenely. He stalked from the Great Hall and when she asked him later what he was so pissed about he just shrugged and watched her walk back to Malfoy.

He didn't like the feeling of having been a fling. Not even a fling, anymore. A flung.

Blaise told his mother about it when he went home at Christmastime two weeks later, and she raised an eyebrow and said, "You got involved," a statement, not a question, an accusation, not an exoneration.

She was right. Blaise kept his feelings to himself and when Harry Potter came racing past him in the Slytherin side of the dungeons he pointed the way to Malfoy's rooms and took some unwarranted pleasure in the way Pansy didn't eat dinner that night.

He moved on to Nott, and made sure he was only a fling.