Resolving

Nine

May 22, 2004

Seven months later, Blaise was acting as a chaperone on a Saturday for a trip to Hogsmeade. It was a nice spring morning, crisp and cool without being freezing, and the sun was shining. He'd been able to speak to Hermione in almost-friendly tone for the past month or so and his students were doing well. And he hadn't received any mysterious letters since the first.

He was walking towards The Three Broomsticks with Hermione, and she turned a faint rose color when he took her elbow to keep her from stepping into a puddle. It was strange to him, though he had to admit it was more because he felt more like he did before the war than ever.

"I don't see why you insist on being so harsh to your students," Hermione said, pulling him back from his nostalgic memories.

"Well, I'd hardly be Snape's protégée if I wasn't, would I?" he replied, perhaps a tad more sarcastic than he meant to be.

She rolled her eyes. "Blaise, be serious, please."

He sighed, somewhat dramatically. "Hermione, you and I have known each other for quite some time. In that time, have you ever noticed my stunningly good looks?" Hermione blinked at stared at him. He continued. "If I were nice to all my students, at some point, one of the female ones would get it in her head that I was especially nice to her and then she'd do something stupid. I don't really need letters from concerned and angry parents and neither do you. And, frankly, I remember working harder at the schoolwork tougher teachers assigned me because I wanted their approval much more."

Hermione looked as if she were considering a response to that when an inrush of air and slight bang caused them both to turn around. Zel was standing there and looked rather harried. "Blaise, it's time," she said. Without allowing him to respond, she grabbed his arm and Disapparated them back to where she'd come from - which, as he took a look around when they arrived, turned out to be St. Mungo's maternity ward.

He jerked his arm from her grip and promptly said to his elder sister, "Zel. What the hell is going on?"

Zel gave him a very irritated look. "I don't know if you remember, Blaise, but for the last nine months I've been looking over your favorite mistake in there. And now she's in labor. Time to go see your child into this world."

Blaise felt all the blood drain from his head. "Now? I mean, I'm not ready for this- I can't- What do I do in there?"

"Hold her hand and tell her to breathe," Zel snapped at her brother. "Now find a nurse, get some clean robes and get into the delivery chamber. Now's your part and you'd better face up to it."

He blinked at her for a second. Very rarely did you see this side of Zel, so like their late mother and eldest sister. Then he grabbed a pair of scrubs from a passing trolley and ducked into the men's restroom to change hurriedly into them. Once dressed, he slowly walked over to the delivery room door that Zel had indicated. Opening it, he saw Louise lying on the bed, breathing heavily.

He rushed over to her and as he did so, the MediWizard who was in the room came over to him. "I'm sorry, no visitors-"

Blaise cut him off, saying, "I'm her husband. The father."

The MediWizard paused and then nodded. "All right then. She's pretty much completely dilated and will be ready to star pushing soon. Just another few millimeters, really."

"So the baby - it'll be born soon?" Blaise asked the man.

The MediWizard smiled. "Yes, your baby will soon be here. If you'll excuse me, I need to conduct a few spells." He went to the end of the bed and pulled his wand out of his green robes and started to murmur spells under his breath.

As Blaise took up his station by Louise's hand, she looked frantically between him and the MediWizard. "Blaise, what the hell is he doing?" she asked, as a glow emanated from the wand to her stomach.

"Shh, it'll be alright. He's just conducting a few tests," Blaise soothed her.

Louise was calmed and squeezed his hand tightly as she went through another contraction. Shortly after it ended, the MediWizard announced it was time to push. She did so.

And then, something strange happened.

Blaise had never considered the possibility that his child would have powers like his. He knew that whatever child he produced would be a witch or wizard, but powers like his - well, it was a fluke for all of his siblings to have abilities like they did. He'd hoped that this child would be relatively normal - at least for the Wizarding world. However, it was becoming increasingly apparent that this would not happen.

The lights flickered. Then they went off. The MediWizard and nurses tried to cast light spells but - later on they would describe it as if their magic had just been sucked away from them - the light flew towards Louise's womb instead and then winked out. Louise, who had been silent as she pushed until now, started to scream. Her face grew pale. The hand that had previously been squeezing Blaise's started to tremble and weaken its grip.

Several seconds later, the baby slid out of Louise's birth canal, covered in blood and screaming. Several seconds later, Louise was dead.

~*~

Later on, the MediWizard and nurses who had been attending her would say it was the strangest thing - the most tragic thing - that they had ever seen. A young couple, just having their first child, a beautiful baby girl, and the second the child is born, the mother dies. Just like that. As if the life had been sucked out of her. That chilling phrase was echoed by a MediWitch who examined Louise post-mortem. She said that the life just seemed to have drained out of her. All the energy she'd had, stored inside her, gone.

And the baby who, on the Muggle prenatal sonograms, had appeared sickly and likely to be a very ill child was now a healthy child, full of life. Brimming over with it, you might say. She was born with a head full of bright copper hair and blue eyes just like her father's.

But the damnedest thing - the damnedest thing - about all of it, the MediWizard said, was how the father didn't even seem to care about the mother's death. He just sat and held his new daughter. When his wife was carted off to the morgue in a body bag, he barely looked up from his child, and even then his expression was of detached remorse.

~*~

Several hours later, Blaise was standing outside of the nursery looking at his daughter sleep in her little hospital basinet. He had a small smile on his face, and he felt as if he could fly. He felt someone come up beside him and looked over to see Zel. She smiled at him.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" Zel said.

"She's absolutely perfect," Blaise responded. The grin spread over his face.

"What are you going to name her?" Zel laughed as her niece woke and sneezed.

Blaise was silent for a while, and Zel almost thought he hadn't heard her when he said, "Eve."

"Eve?" Zel asked, slightly confused. "Why Eve?"

"I like the sound of it," he replied. "It's fitting."

"Hmm. What about her middle name?"

"Frances."

"Not after her mum? Louise?" Zel stared at her brother. Something was different about him. He'd come back from his travels not the man that she'd known before.

"No. Louise is gone. Not part of her heritage. I'll tell her of her mother, if she wants, but otherwise Louise won't be part of Eve's life." He turned to Zel. "When can I take her?"

Zel was a little disturbed by this side of her brother, but she pushed this out of her mind and strove forward. "The MediWizards say tomorrow, once the nurses teach you how to bottle feed. Of course, they say the examination of Louise's body will take a few days but-"

Blaise turned away from her as she mentioned Louise, decidedly uninterested. "I'm sure it will. Right now I'm far more interested in Eve and taking her back to Hogwarts." The only place she'll ever be safe, he thought to himself.

~*~

"It's been a long time since we've had a baby at Hogwarts," McGonagall said to Blaise Monday morning as he sat in her office, cradling Eve close to his chest.

"It's very kind of you to allow me to keep her here," Blaise said very guardedly.

"Kindness has nothing to do with it, Professor," McGonagall said briskly. "You've signed on to teach for the next three years and I intend to hold you to it."

Blaise grinned. "Well, I intend to stick around. Eve won't make much trouble, I'm sure. She's a very good-natured baby."

McGonagall smiled back for a second, before her face took on a somber expression. "I'm sorry to hear about her mother, dying like that."

To her surprise, Blaise just nodded and said, "Yes, it was very sad for her," and asked if that was all. She nodded and he left.

Very strange, indeed.

Blaise left the Headmistress's office slightly more cheerful than he was when he had entered. He still had his job. That had been weighing heavily on his mind for the past several months. As he carried the mound of swaddled antique family blankets that covered his daughter through the hallways, he found himself becoming more and more cheerful.

He thought that he couldn't possibly come off of this high until he remembered he had a class. How could he have forgotten? Though, he supposed, waking up at three in the morning and not being able to get to sleep and then having a seven o'clock meeting with the Headmistress tricked him into thinking the day was already halfway over. Point of fact, it was only just beginning.

Nevertheless, he had his eight thirty first years' Charms in less than five minutes. He ran through the hallways and made it there - barely - before his students and was able to conjure Eve's basinet before he heard his students outside the door.

It was going to be a long day.

By the time his first years' were out and the fifth years' trooped in, it was getting dangerously close to Eve's next feeding time. After all the students took their seats, he wrote down a section of reading for them to do and conjured a bottle of the formula he'd gotten from the hospital. It was freezing, so he cast a heating spell. It got a bit too hot, so he put it by the window for a few minutes.

She'd known - in the way babies do which is a mystery to adults - that her bottle was coming. But, since she started to wail loudly, causing his students to look up, shocked, he supposed she thought she'd been patient enough.

The girl he'd ridden on the Hogwarts Express with - Noya Basil, his memory supplied - raised her hand and said incredulously, "Professor, is that a baby?"

Blaise picked up Eve and gave her bottle as he answered. "Yes, this is my daughter, Eve."

The students started. Belatedly, he realized that the Gryffindors in his class had Transfiguration next-- with Hermione. He cringed mentally and said, "Well, you can either stare at me and get zeros on your upcoming test or study and get ninety."

The students immediately went back to their books as he looked down ruefully at his baby, who looked back up at him past her bottle and stared into his eyes with her own deep blue ones. She stopped sucking on the bottle and was quiet for a moment and then burped. He laughed quietly.

It was sad, he knew, what would become of her. Her destiny was a dark one and he regretted that he couldn't do anything to change it. But he had time enough with her and he wasn't going to spend it regretting anything. He would prepare her as best he could, so that when she met the storm of her fate, she could face it head on, instead of running away... like he had.