lomonaaeren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lomonaaeren) wrote2025-07-02 11:07 am
lomonaaeren) wrote2025-07-02 11:07 am
Entry tags:
[Songs of Summer]: Wellspring, Harry/Blaise, R, 1/4
Title: Wellspring
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Blaise, past Harry/Ginny
Content Notes: Angst, drama, EWE, violence, curses, Master of Death Harry Potter
Rating: R
Summary: Blaise encounters a devastated Harry Potter in a pub in Knockturn Alley and discovers that Potter, unexpectedly, sheds the raw magic Blaise needs to navigate his hereditary curse. He arranges for them to help each other.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Summer” fics that I’m posting between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have three or four parts.
Wellspring
Blaise settled into the chair at the Wolf’s Corpse and sighed. A mug of dark ale was sitting in front of him, and when he got thirsty enough, he would drink it. The attraction of this pub was its dim corners and its reputation for silence, not its drinks.
Blaise let his head thunk against the wall and his eyes close. He had had a very long journey, this time, running around in circles throughout Britain, trying to track down the elusive traces of someone with strong enough magic to let him feed on it and not die. The trace had leaped about as if the person was Apparating wildly, and then faded entirely. Blaise had to wonder now if he’d imagined the whole thing.
Maybe I should go back to Italy.
He swallowed some of the ale and grimaced as the actual taste hit his throat. He could have gone back, that was true, but he preferred not to. Mother would be a bad influence on him, and he didn’t want to watch her with her latest husband, who would inevitably succumb and die when she finished feeding on his magic.
Blaise liked Britain. He liked the distance between him and his mother, and the feeling of control he had over his life. He liked his job as a scholar working for the Department of Research at the Ministry, even if the person who had set it up had been Hermione Granger. He enjoyed being able to see his school friends whenever he wanted.
But starving was something he didn’t enjoy.
He stared down at his own hand, which was a sturdy, solid, dark-skinned hand if you were looking at it from far enough away. He tilted his head to the side and squinted with his left eye and—
Yes. There was a bit of translucence to it. If things got bad enough, he would have to go to St. Mungo’s and pick someone who radiated wild magic as part of their curse damage and feed on them. That could be enough to kill them, some of the worse-off ones. Of course, perhaps it was a mercy.
That sounds like my mother.
Blaise drank more of the awful ale, and wished for the impossible—for someone who radiated that kind of wild magic but was strong enough to stay alive, for someone who would stay with him without needing to be enchanted by the kind of witchery his mother used. Someone who would love him and always be there.
The radiant flicker he’d chased across the country had felt like that kind of impossible dream. But it probably wasn’t, Blaise consoled himself. It was probably someone who was testing some kind of invention or spell, and it just felt like what he wanted to his starved senses.
And then the person who radiated it walked through the door of the Wolf’s Corpse.
Blaise’s head snapped up, and his ale went flying. It soaked someone at a table behind him, but there was little more than a mumbled complaint. That was the kind of atmosphere here.
Meanwhile, Blaise stared with monstrous hope at the cloaked figure who was speaking to the barkeep. Little enough to see, except for a fairly tall figure and a deep voice that might indicate a man. Blaise swallowed as the soft waves of wild magic beating from the man bathed him, and—
He stole another glance at his hands. They had lost every hint of translucence, already firming up simply from being in the same room with this miracle.
This had to be the person he’d been searching for. Maybe not just now, but his whole life.
Blaise waited until the man sat down at a table about halfway across the room. He didn’t move after that, just half-crouched with his hooded head bent low over his mug. He was utterly still, not even rocking in the chair the way Blaise had thought someone so filled with wild magic might.
Blaise stood up and made his way over. The man didn’t appear to notice him until Blaise stood right beside his chair, and then he started and looked up. Blaise saw the shadow of a nose and mouth in the hood, enough to tell him the man was white and probably fully human.
“May I join you?” Blaise asked quietly.
His tone was vibrating with the subtle harmonies that the curse granted him, tones of persuasion and notes of meaning that made his prey—his companion—more likely to agree. For long, silent moments, while the man stared at him and didn’t move, Blaise wondered if it would fail for the first time.
Then the man moved his hand in a restless way and said, “Fine, but I’m not good company.”
That the man might have tried to protect Blaise from himself made Blaise smile as he sat down. “My name is Blaise Zabini,” he said, and the man moved again. It was a little start, but it felt like recognition, if the way the pulses of wild magic bent towards Blaise were any indication. Blaise tilted his head. “Did you attend Hogwarts?”
“Yeah.”
No more motion or words than that, and Blaise waited a few minutes, then sighed. “Will you not tell me who you are?”
The man seemed to debate it. Then he said, “You might tell other people.”
Blaise assumed he meant that he would tell them that the man was radiating wild magic, and leaned forwards with the kindest smile he could. “No, I promise. I have my own reasons for wanting to keep your identity to myself.”
For so many reasons, he thought as he ran his eyes over the man’s cloaked form. He radiated wild magic, but he sounded sane, at least sane enough to worry over someone else finding out what was wrong with him and to go unnoticed in a fairly Dark corner of Britain’s wizarding world. He hadn’t lashed out at Blaise, and he had enough of a long-term memory to recognize his name. Those were qualities rare in the victims that Blaise’s curse forced him to prefer.
The man sighed, and for a moment, his hands moved as restlessly back and forth on the table as if he was the one who was starving. Then he reached up and abruptly pulled the hood of the cloak off his face.
Blaise sagged back in his chair, staring. He had hoped for male and not too ugly, if only to suit his own tastes, but he would have taken someone who looked like Goyle. He hadn’t expected the fierce green stare and the lightning bolt scar of someone he knew all too well.
“Potter,” he croaked.
“Keep your voice down.” For a moment, Potter’s eyes darted back and forth as if he thought someone had actually stalked him to the Wolf’s Corpse, and then he nodded and looked back at Blaise. “What’s your reason for wanting to keep it secret? Not wanting to be mobbed, or do you want to write a newspaper story, too?”
“Never that,” Blaise said, and swallowed. Potter just watched him, while the wild magic eddied back and forth around them. “What happened to your magic?”
In his past experience, asking this question was useless because those with chaotic magic didn’t realize it, but Potter gave a hollow laugh. “I suppose someone who practices Dark Arts is the most likely to notice.” He glanced away while Blaise waited, not minding the aspersion on his character. It was just truth.
Potter finally looked back at him, and Blaise had the sense that he was more carefully choosing his words than he ever had. “I made…some of my friends and my girlfriend were sick with a disease that the Healers told me couldn’t be cured.” He stared at the ale, drank some of it, grimaced, and put the mug back down. “I decided that I could cure them if I made a large enough magical sacrifice.”
Blaise blinked. That kind of knowledge wasn’t common anymore, not even in the darker areas of Rome where some of the Arts had flourished for centuries. “And you sacrificed your control over your magic to do it?”
“No.” Potter’s lips stretched in a rictus that Blaise half-suspected him of making up to try and cause Blaise to run. But when Potter leaned forwards, his voice was sober enough. “I sacrificed my heart.”
Blaise’s eyes went to Potter’s chest before he could stop them. Potter pulled back the robe, revealing an ordinary shirt and, as far as Blaise could tell, an ordinary chest. Potter lifted the shirt, and Blaise nodded. The skin there was unbroken, without the gaping, forever-bleeding hole Blaise knew could well have existed.
“And it didn’t work?” Blaise asked quietly.
“It worked,” Potter said, and closed his eyes. “But not the way I thought. The way I meant it. I thought the sacrifice would either rip my heart from my chest and turn it into a cure for them, or take my ability to feel away. Instead, it cured them, but it took away their feeling towards me. The heart of me.”
Blaise arched his eyebrows. “Who did you make the bargain with, Potter?” There weren’t that many old powers out there who would have twisted the bargain to achieve that result. Most would have happily taken Potter’s heart and killed him, rejoicing in the grief of the survivors.
Potter gave a half-smothered laugh. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this much.”
Blaise studied him and made an educated guess. “Because you’ve been carrying the weight around for months, at least. And for some reason, you can’t tell the people whom you made this bargain to cure.”
“I told you, they lost all their feeling towards me.” Potter turned around the mug of ale and frowned at it as if it was giving him bad news. “My girlfriend is as indifferent to me as if we broke up years ago. My friends look blank when someone asks about me and then just say that they wish me well, but we’ve parted ways. That’s—it. My whole life, the people I cared about the most, gone up in flames.”
Blaise shook his head. “Which power did you make the bargain with? It’s important.”
“You can help me reverse it?” Potter stared at him with eyes shot with hope.
“No,” Blaise said gently. He had never heard of a bargain like this being reversed, except to be replaced with something even worse. “But I’d still like to know.” He reached out and put his hand on Potter’s wrist before the man could make some other kind of objection. “If nothing else, maybe I could help you cope with the aftereffects.”
Potter blinked. “Death.”
“You want death?”
“No. Death is the power I made the bargain with.”
Blaise felt a long, slow chill move through him, even as he made sure to keep his hand in place on Potter’s wrist. Old rumors he hadn’t paid attention to because some people would say anything in the aftermath of a war filled his ears like the pulsation of Potter’s magic.
“The Master of Death,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Potter said, and closed his eyes. Blaise had never seen suffering carved so plainly in a human face, and he’d the opportunity, because of his curse, to see plenty of them. “Only it turns out that Death really doesn’t like being mastered.”
“Ah.” Blaise pressed a little harder with his hand. “And how did it affect your magic?”
Potter shrugged wearily. “Before I made the sacrifice, I was devoting a lot of my magic to taking care of Ginny and Ron and Hermione.” He seemed to think Blaise would know who those people were, and Blaise didn’t correct him. He remembered them from Hogwarts. “That was how I detected the disease that was going to kill them even though no Healer would believe me about it existing. After the sacrifice, when I woke—and I really wasn’t expecting to wake—my magic had been torn away from them, and it’s like it’s been seeking something else out to latch onto. Except I don’t know what.”
Blaise thought he did. He shivered, and Potter gave him a compassionate look, probably thinking it was fear. It was about as far from fear as it was possible to be, but Blaise was doing his best to keep that to himself, because he didn’t want to scare Potter off or make him think Blaise was profiting from his loss.
Even though, if Blaise rolled his Gobstones right, that was what he could do.
“And my wand won’t work,” Potter added.
Blaise blinked at him, brought out of deep thoughts about how Potter’s power would taste. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I have two wands. Not because I want to, because that’s another part of the stupid curse that won’t leave me alone.” Potter’s voice hissed with loathing, and Blaise wondered for a moment if he was going to speak Parseltongue, but instead, he twisted his wrist. A wand made of elder wood appeared from a holster on the side of his hand. “My original one, and this bastard. Ever since I woke up, my original wand won’t work, even though it’s served me faithfully for years, even after I collected this one. This one’s taken over.”
“The Elder Wand,” Blaise said, and glanced from the wand to Potter. “May I touch?”
Potter’s eyes widened, and Blaise was about to apologize for the faux pas when Potter shook his head. “It’s not a bad question. It’s just that no one’s ever asked before.” He thought about it, then shoved the wand towards Blaise. “If you want.”
Blaise reached out and let his fingers glance over the elder wood. He received a sharp spark, both confirmation of his presence and the wand pushing him away. He smiled. “It’s wonderful to touch something so old, with such a legacy, but it’s also telling me very clearly that it only has one master.”
“Yeah. I’m a lucky bastard.” Potter shoved the wand into his pocket and then drained the dark ale with one pull. He didn’t even grimace the way someone with a healthy sense of taste would have.
“And the sacrifice affected other people besides your friends?” Blaise asked quietly.
Potter snorted. “Yeah. I can only interact normally with people who just want to sell me something, like the barkeep there.” He tilted his head at the proprietor of the Wolf’s Corpse and leaned back to stare up at the ceiling. “By the time I got back to my job, they’d moved my office into a little corner and told me I could like it or stop being an Auror. They just—don’t care about me anymore. Ron and Hermione look at me with pity when I try to bring it up with them. Ginny’s already moved on and is dating someone else.”
He closed his eyes and held still. Blaise wanted to ask, even though he didn’t care about Potter’s friends that much. But each piece of information gained made it likelier that he’d be able to hang on to Potter. “What about the rest of the Weasleys?”
Potter shrugged. “They’re vaguely welcoming, but they treat me like someone who used to be Ron’s friend in childhood and then drifted away from him. None of them remember that I was dating Ginny.”
Blaise whistled softly. “And so your magic has the triple burden of not being grounded, answering to the Elder Wand, and being deepened by grief.”
“Yeah.” Potter stared at his fingers as they roamed over the table. Blaise put his hand over them, and Potter shot him an unreadable look, but didn’t try to move them. “And I don’t know what to do about it. I think I’m going to explode soon, but I can’t take back the sacrifice. I can’t let people I love die.”
His voice cracked on the last words, and Blaise picked up his hand and kissed the back of his knuckles. Potter went silent at once, staring at him with eyes so large that Blaise had to smile.
“I think,” Blaise said slowly, “that I might be able to do something to help.”
*
“So, this…thing you can do to help. Is it part of what made me spill everything to you like my guts were overflowing?”
Potter was defensive again by the time they had made their way to Blaise’s flat, of course, his arms folded and his body vibrating with tension. Blaise didn’t mind that, not when it stirred his magic so deliciously, but he knew that he would probably have to calm Potter down before they got anywhere.
He turned around, leaning his back against the door and letting Potter look around Blaise’s flat. Blaise had actually purchased two that were right next to each other and knocked the walls between them out, so that his space was larger than most others he’d been in. He’d filled the walls with paintings and the space with chairs, cushions, and a large dining room table. Draco teased him about the seascapes, saying that they showed his homesickness, but Blaise liked to sit on the chairs and watch the waves slowly roll up to the frame of the painting. It had relaxed his mind enough to give him some interesting breakthroughs in his research.
“Yes, probably,” Blaise said. “My curse is a bit different from my mother’s, though. She can make people with wild magic trust her just by smiling at them. I have to work at it.”
“So—you admit it?”
Potter was watching him with narrowed eyes. Blaise shrugged and sat down on the couch under the seascape. “We can help each other, Potter. I want to be honest.”
“You weren’t being honest when you made me vomit words all over you.”
“Look at it this way. In the end, it’s a way of giving you back some of your heart.”
“You can make my friends accept me?”
Blaise shook his head with true regret. He had admired and sometimes envied Potter and Weasley and Granger’s friendship in Hogwarts. He would have done that gladly in exchange for Potter staying with him. “No, I’m sorry. What I can do is give you a grounding for your magic so that you can hopefully develop other relationships and get past your grief.”
“How will you do that?”
“By feeding on your magic.”
Potter jolted, although interestingly, he didn’t turn towards the door or draw his wand. Instead, his wild magic swirled out around him again. Blaise sighed at the feeling of it.
“You’ll give me back my heart by turning me into a Squib.”
Blaise rolled his eyes. “Nothing so plebian, Potter. You’ll retain your magic. But it will be calmed down.”
“And the price of this?”
“Well, feeding on your magic keeps me alive. So you can consider that I’m saving your life as you want it, and you’re saving mine.”
Potter continued to study him with hooded eyes for long moments, his fingers rapping on his knee. Then he said, “I think you’d better tell me a bit more about this curse.”
Blaise kept his expression pleasant with an effort. Of course Potter would want to know, and of course Blaise would want to tell someone who might actually be powerful enough to handle his feeding with no ill effects. But a lifetime of secrecy was hard to overcome.
Only when he saw Potter start to stand did he snap out of it. Blaise shook his head and blurted, “Someone cursed one of my ancestors long ago.”
“How long ago?” Potter settled slowly back into his grey chair, eyes intent.
“Centuries. Of course my ancestor killed him for it, but the damage was done. We have to feed on wild magic that people radiate around them. Unfortunately, our feeding mostly kills our victims, and our victims mostly don’t even notice that they radiate chaotic magic. My mother—seduces men like that, and eventually her feeding kills them.”
“You don’t want to kill me.”
“No.” Blaise leaned a little forwards, feeling as if he were skiing down a rough hill that ended in rocks at the bottom. He knew he was being reckless, and his mother would chide him for being reckless, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Potter had been honest with him and Blaise thought he might have something different for once in his life. “I want someone who will stay with me despite my curse. Love me despite my curse. You might be the one.”
Potter’s eyes opened as round as two moons. Blaise had never seen him like this before. If he had at school, he might have been interested then.
But then, Potter’s magic hadn’t been chaotic enough to attract Blaise’s attention or soothe Blaise’s curse.
“You don’t really know me,” Potter whispered.
“Through the circumstances of my curse, knowing someone has never been something I can count on to help me.” Blaise shrugged and smiled a little. “You don’t know me, either. You don’t know that I could soothe your magic or give you back your heart. But you want to believe it. And I want to believe in you.”
The rocks at the bottom of the slope seemed to be growing closer as Potter sat staring at him with dazed eyes. And then he abruptly nodded and stood up.
“Potter?” Blaise warily followed.
“Nothing else has worked,” Potter said quietly, in a voice as intense as a shout. “Let’s try this.” He held his hands out. “Show me what you can do.”
Blaise slowly extended his hands, watching his own arms shake. His fingers closed around Potter’s, and Potter gave a little shudder like a horse when a fly landed on its skin. Blaise instinctively moved closer.
“Shhh,” he whispered. His voice probably sounded a bit drunk, he thought, noticing the suspicious look Potter gave him. But Blaise was caught up in this, swept up in it, his balance wavering a little as he absorbed enough magic to keep him going for a month from one simple touch. “Let me drink from you.”
Potter muttered something that sounded like it included the word “vampire,” but he also turned and shifted a little closer to Blaise, bowing his head so that his chin was just a centimeter or so above Blaise’s shoulder.
Blaise took a deep breath and opened his magic.
Potter’s power paused for an instant, as though it didn’t know what to make of the touch of Blaise’s magic against it. And then it dived into him.
Blaise wavered in place, holding onto Potter’s arms. The magic was burrowing into him, flooding him, burning him. It felt like being drowned in an avalanche of food, of fire. Blaise opened his magic further.
And further.
He knew almost as soon as he did that he wouldn’t survive this if he tried to eat all of it. So he hovered and fed as delicately as he could, letting his own power draw him back to his body when he would have crumbled beneath the chaos of Potter’s magic. And when he had fed and sated himself, he opened his eyes.
Potter was staring at him with a slightly opened mouth and quiet air around him. Of course, just because Blaise couldn’t feel the chaos didn’t mean it wasn’t still there for Potter.
“Are you all right?”
*
Harry had never felt anything like that, and he didn’t know that he cared to feel anything like it again. It really did resemble descriptions he’d read of being drained by a vampire, having fangs fastened in his throat and his blood drawn out.
Only this had been his magic.
But when he reached out to calm the chaos the way he’d got used to doing every few seconds, it was quiet. He reached down and down, and only found a spark at the bottom of what had been a completely full and shifting aura around him, continually moving and continually tearing at him and wards and his holly wand and every bit of magic he felt around him. Harry took a deep breath.
“Potter?”
Harry stared at Zabini. The man was looking back at him, concern on his face—or as much concern as could be pasted over an obvious expression of dreamy ecstasy. Harry reached up slowly, with one hand shaking, and traced a finger down Zabini’s face.
Zabini raised his eyebrows.
“It’s quiet,” Harry whispered.
“The magic?”
“And the grief.” Harry had to close his eyes, because he wasn’t sure he could continue speaking if he kept looking at Zabini. “I felt—it was like existing in the center of a storm. And now it’s number. Quieter.”
It wasn’t gone, no more than the chaos in his magic was. But Zabini had soothed it in the way that meditation and Occlumency and charms and the spells of all the Healers willing to cast on Harry hadn’t.
Harry shuddered, and collapsed.
“Potter!”
Harry heard the speaker. He might have tried to muster up some words, to reassure them that he was all right.
But he was falling, further and further into the center of a dense black maelstrom, and he had to settle for hoping that they could feel his breath and his heartbeat and would take him to St. Mungo’s if they really had to.
Harry, himself, closed his eyes and settled into the first real sleep he’d had since he’d woken to find that his friends didn’t know him.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Blaise, past Harry/Ginny
Content Notes: Angst, drama, EWE, violence, curses, Master of Death Harry Potter
Rating: R
Summary: Blaise encounters a devastated Harry Potter in a pub in Knockturn Alley and discovers that Potter, unexpectedly, sheds the raw magic Blaise needs to navigate his hereditary curse. He arranges for them to help each other.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “Songs of the Summer” fics that I’m posting between the summer solstice and the first of August. It should have three or four parts.
Wellspring
Blaise settled into the chair at the Wolf’s Corpse and sighed. A mug of dark ale was sitting in front of him, and when he got thirsty enough, he would drink it. The attraction of this pub was its dim corners and its reputation for silence, not its drinks.
Blaise let his head thunk against the wall and his eyes close. He had had a very long journey, this time, running around in circles throughout Britain, trying to track down the elusive traces of someone with strong enough magic to let him feed on it and not die. The trace had leaped about as if the person was Apparating wildly, and then faded entirely. Blaise had to wonder now if he’d imagined the whole thing.
Maybe I should go back to Italy.
He swallowed some of the ale and grimaced as the actual taste hit his throat. He could have gone back, that was true, but he preferred not to. Mother would be a bad influence on him, and he didn’t want to watch her with her latest husband, who would inevitably succumb and die when she finished feeding on his magic.
Blaise liked Britain. He liked the distance between him and his mother, and the feeling of control he had over his life. He liked his job as a scholar working for the Department of Research at the Ministry, even if the person who had set it up had been Hermione Granger. He enjoyed being able to see his school friends whenever he wanted.
But starving was something he didn’t enjoy.
He stared down at his own hand, which was a sturdy, solid, dark-skinned hand if you were looking at it from far enough away. He tilted his head to the side and squinted with his left eye and—
Yes. There was a bit of translucence to it. If things got bad enough, he would have to go to St. Mungo’s and pick someone who radiated wild magic as part of their curse damage and feed on them. That could be enough to kill them, some of the worse-off ones. Of course, perhaps it was a mercy.
That sounds like my mother.
Blaise drank more of the awful ale, and wished for the impossible—for someone who radiated that kind of wild magic but was strong enough to stay alive, for someone who would stay with him without needing to be enchanted by the kind of witchery his mother used. Someone who would love him and always be there.
The radiant flicker he’d chased across the country had felt like that kind of impossible dream. But it probably wasn’t, Blaise consoled himself. It was probably someone who was testing some kind of invention or spell, and it just felt like what he wanted to his starved senses.
And then the person who radiated it walked through the door of the Wolf’s Corpse.
Blaise’s head snapped up, and his ale went flying. It soaked someone at a table behind him, but there was little more than a mumbled complaint. That was the kind of atmosphere here.
Meanwhile, Blaise stared with monstrous hope at the cloaked figure who was speaking to the barkeep. Little enough to see, except for a fairly tall figure and a deep voice that might indicate a man. Blaise swallowed as the soft waves of wild magic beating from the man bathed him, and—
He stole another glance at his hands. They had lost every hint of translucence, already firming up simply from being in the same room with this miracle.
This had to be the person he’d been searching for. Maybe not just now, but his whole life.
Blaise waited until the man sat down at a table about halfway across the room. He didn’t move after that, just half-crouched with his hooded head bent low over his mug. He was utterly still, not even rocking in the chair the way Blaise had thought someone so filled with wild magic might.
Blaise stood up and made his way over. The man didn’t appear to notice him until Blaise stood right beside his chair, and then he started and looked up. Blaise saw the shadow of a nose and mouth in the hood, enough to tell him the man was white and probably fully human.
“May I join you?” Blaise asked quietly.
His tone was vibrating with the subtle harmonies that the curse granted him, tones of persuasion and notes of meaning that made his prey—his companion—more likely to agree. For long, silent moments, while the man stared at him and didn’t move, Blaise wondered if it would fail for the first time.
Then the man moved his hand in a restless way and said, “Fine, but I’m not good company.”
That the man might have tried to protect Blaise from himself made Blaise smile as he sat down. “My name is Blaise Zabini,” he said, and the man moved again. It was a little start, but it felt like recognition, if the way the pulses of wild magic bent towards Blaise were any indication. Blaise tilted his head. “Did you attend Hogwarts?”
“Yeah.”
No more motion or words than that, and Blaise waited a few minutes, then sighed. “Will you not tell me who you are?”
The man seemed to debate it. Then he said, “You might tell other people.”
Blaise assumed he meant that he would tell them that the man was radiating wild magic, and leaned forwards with the kindest smile he could. “No, I promise. I have my own reasons for wanting to keep your identity to myself.”
For so many reasons, he thought as he ran his eyes over the man’s cloaked form. He radiated wild magic, but he sounded sane, at least sane enough to worry over someone else finding out what was wrong with him and to go unnoticed in a fairly Dark corner of Britain’s wizarding world. He hadn’t lashed out at Blaise, and he had enough of a long-term memory to recognize his name. Those were qualities rare in the victims that Blaise’s curse forced him to prefer.
The man sighed, and for a moment, his hands moved as restlessly back and forth on the table as if he was the one who was starving. Then he reached up and abruptly pulled the hood of the cloak off his face.
Blaise sagged back in his chair, staring. He had hoped for male and not too ugly, if only to suit his own tastes, but he would have taken someone who looked like Goyle. He hadn’t expected the fierce green stare and the lightning bolt scar of someone he knew all too well.
“Potter,” he croaked.
“Keep your voice down.” For a moment, Potter’s eyes darted back and forth as if he thought someone had actually stalked him to the Wolf’s Corpse, and then he nodded and looked back at Blaise. “What’s your reason for wanting to keep it secret? Not wanting to be mobbed, or do you want to write a newspaper story, too?”
“Never that,” Blaise said, and swallowed. Potter just watched him, while the wild magic eddied back and forth around them. “What happened to your magic?”
In his past experience, asking this question was useless because those with chaotic magic didn’t realize it, but Potter gave a hollow laugh. “I suppose someone who practices Dark Arts is the most likely to notice.” He glanced away while Blaise waited, not minding the aspersion on his character. It was just truth.
Potter finally looked back at him, and Blaise had the sense that he was more carefully choosing his words than he ever had. “I made…some of my friends and my girlfriend were sick with a disease that the Healers told me couldn’t be cured.” He stared at the ale, drank some of it, grimaced, and put the mug back down. “I decided that I could cure them if I made a large enough magical sacrifice.”
Blaise blinked. That kind of knowledge wasn’t common anymore, not even in the darker areas of Rome where some of the Arts had flourished for centuries. “And you sacrificed your control over your magic to do it?”
“No.” Potter’s lips stretched in a rictus that Blaise half-suspected him of making up to try and cause Blaise to run. But when Potter leaned forwards, his voice was sober enough. “I sacrificed my heart.”
Blaise’s eyes went to Potter’s chest before he could stop them. Potter pulled back the robe, revealing an ordinary shirt and, as far as Blaise could tell, an ordinary chest. Potter lifted the shirt, and Blaise nodded. The skin there was unbroken, without the gaping, forever-bleeding hole Blaise knew could well have existed.
“And it didn’t work?” Blaise asked quietly.
“It worked,” Potter said, and closed his eyes. “But not the way I thought. The way I meant it. I thought the sacrifice would either rip my heart from my chest and turn it into a cure for them, or take my ability to feel away. Instead, it cured them, but it took away their feeling towards me. The heart of me.”
Blaise arched his eyebrows. “Who did you make the bargain with, Potter?” There weren’t that many old powers out there who would have twisted the bargain to achieve that result. Most would have happily taken Potter’s heart and killed him, rejoicing in the grief of the survivors.
Potter gave a half-smothered laugh. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this much.”
Blaise studied him and made an educated guess. “Because you’ve been carrying the weight around for months, at least. And for some reason, you can’t tell the people whom you made this bargain to cure.”
“I told you, they lost all their feeling towards me.” Potter turned around the mug of ale and frowned at it as if it was giving him bad news. “My girlfriend is as indifferent to me as if we broke up years ago. My friends look blank when someone asks about me and then just say that they wish me well, but we’ve parted ways. That’s—it. My whole life, the people I cared about the most, gone up in flames.”
Blaise shook his head. “Which power did you make the bargain with? It’s important.”
“You can help me reverse it?” Potter stared at him with eyes shot with hope.
“No,” Blaise said gently. He had never heard of a bargain like this being reversed, except to be replaced with something even worse. “But I’d still like to know.” He reached out and put his hand on Potter’s wrist before the man could make some other kind of objection. “If nothing else, maybe I could help you cope with the aftereffects.”
Potter blinked. “Death.”
“You want death?”
“No. Death is the power I made the bargain with.”
Blaise felt a long, slow chill move through him, even as he made sure to keep his hand in place on Potter’s wrist. Old rumors he hadn’t paid attention to because some people would say anything in the aftermath of a war filled his ears like the pulsation of Potter’s magic.
“The Master of Death,” he whispered.
“Yeah,” Potter said, and closed his eyes. Blaise had never seen suffering carved so plainly in a human face, and he’d the opportunity, because of his curse, to see plenty of them. “Only it turns out that Death really doesn’t like being mastered.”
“Ah.” Blaise pressed a little harder with his hand. “And how did it affect your magic?”
Potter shrugged wearily. “Before I made the sacrifice, I was devoting a lot of my magic to taking care of Ginny and Ron and Hermione.” He seemed to think Blaise would know who those people were, and Blaise didn’t correct him. He remembered them from Hogwarts. “That was how I detected the disease that was going to kill them even though no Healer would believe me about it existing. After the sacrifice, when I woke—and I really wasn’t expecting to wake—my magic had been torn away from them, and it’s like it’s been seeking something else out to latch onto. Except I don’t know what.”
Blaise thought he did. He shivered, and Potter gave him a compassionate look, probably thinking it was fear. It was about as far from fear as it was possible to be, but Blaise was doing his best to keep that to himself, because he didn’t want to scare Potter off or make him think Blaise was profiting from his loss.
Even though, if Blaise rolled his Gobstones right, that was what he could do.
“And my wand won’t work,” Potter added.
Blaise blinked at him, brought out of deep thoughts about how Potter’s power would taste. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I have two wands. Not because I want to, because that’s another part of the stupid curse that won’t leave me alone.” Potter’s voice hissed with loathing, and Blaise wondered for a moment if he was going to speak Parseltongue, but instead, he twisted his wrist. A wand made of elder wood appeared from a holster on the side of his hand. “My original one, and this bastard. Ever since I woke up, my original wand won’t work, even though it’s served me faithfully for years, even after I collected this one. This one’s taken over.”
“The Elder Wand,” Blaise said, and glanced from the wand to Potter. “May I touch?”
Potter’s eyes widened, and Blaise was about to apologize for the faux pas when Potter shook his head. “It’s not a bad question. It’s just that no one’s ever asked before.” He thought about it, then shoved the wand towards Blaise. “If you want.”
Blaise reached out and let his fingers glance over the elder wood. He received a sharp spark, both confirmation of his presence and the wand pushing him away. He smiled. “It’s wonderful to touch something so old, with such a legacy, but it’s also telling me very clearly that it only has one master.”
“Yeah. I’m a lucky bastard.” Potter shoved the wand into his pocket and then drained the dark ale with one pull. He didn’t even grimace the way someone with a healthy sense of taste would have.
“And the sacrifice affected other people besides your friends?” Blaise asked quietly.
Potter snorted. “Yeah. I can only interact normally with people who just want to sell me something, like the barkeep there.” He tilted his head at the proprietor of the Wolf’s Corpse and leaned back to stare up at the ceiling. “By the time I got back to my job, they’d moved my office into a little corner and told me I could like it or stop being an Auror. They just—don’t care about me anymore. Ron and Hermione look at me with pity when I try to bring it up with them. Ginny’s already moved on and is dating someone else.”
He closed his eyes and held still. Blaise wanted to ask, even though he didn’t care about Potter’s friends that much. But each piece of information gained made it likelier that he’d be able to hang on to Potter. “What about the rest of the Weasleys?”
Potter shrugged. “They’re vaguely welcoming, but they treat me like someone who used to be Ron’s friend in childhood and then drifted away from him. None of them remember that I was dating Ginny.”
Blaise whistled softly. “And so your magic has the triple burden of not being grounded, answering to the Elder Wand, and being deepened by grief.”
“Yeah.” Potter stared at his fingers as they roamed over the table. Blaise put his hand over them, and Potter shot him an unreadable look, but didn’t try to move them. “And I don’t know what to do about it. I think I’m going to explode soon, but I can’t take back the sacrifice. I can’t let people I love die.”
His voice cracked on the last words, and Blaise picked up his hand and kissed the back of his knuckles. Potter went silent at once, staring at him with eyes so large that Blaise had to smile.
“I think,” Blaise said slowly, “that I might be able to do something to help.”
*
“So, this…thing you can do to help. Is it part of what made me spill everything to you like my guts were overflowing?”
Potter was defensive again by the time they had made their way to Blaise’s flat, of course, his arms folded and his body vibrating with tension. Blaise didn’t mind that, not when it stirred his magic so deliciously, but he knew that he would probably have to calm Potter down before they got anywhere.
He turned around, leaning his back against the door and letting Potter look around Blaise’s flat. Blaise had actually purchased two that were right next to each other and knocked the walls between them out, so that his space was larger than most others he’d been in. He’d filled the walls with paintings and the space with chairs, cushions, and a large dining room table. Draco teased him about the seascapes, saying that they showed his homesickness, but Blaise liked to sit on the chairs and watch the waves slowly roll up to the frame of the painting. It had relaxed his mind enough to give him some interesting breakthroughs in his research.
“Yes, probably,” Blaise said. “My curse is a bit different from my mother’s, though. She can make people with wild magic trust her just by smiling at them. I have to work at it.”
“So—you admit it?”
Potter was watching him with narrowed eyes. Blaise shrugged and sat down on the couch under the seascape. “We can help each other, Potter. I want to be honest.”
“You weren’t being honest when you made me vomit words all over you.”
“Look at it this way. In the end, it’s a way of giving you back some of your heart.”
“You can make my friends accept me?”
Blaise shook his head with true regret. He had admired and sometimes envied Potter and Weasley and Granger’s friendship in Hogwarts. He would have done that gladly in exchange for Potter staying with him. “No, I’m sorry. What I can do is give you a grounding for your magic so that you can hopefully develop other relationships and get past your grief.”
“How will you do that?”
“By feeding on your magic.”
Potter jolted, although interestingly, he didn’t turn towards the door or draw his wand. Instead, his wild magic swirled out around him again. Blaise sighed at the feeling of it.
“You’ll give me back my heart by turning me into a Squib.”
Blaise rolled his eyes. “Nothing so plebian, Potter. You’ll retain your magic. But it will be calmed down.”
“And the price of this?”
“Well, feeding on your magic keeps me alive. So you can consider that I’m saving your life as you want it, and you’re saving mine.”
Potter continued to study him with hooded eyes for long moments, his fingers rapping on his knee. Then he said, “I think you’d better tell me a bit more about this curse.”
Blaise kept his expression pleasant with an effort. Of course Potter would want to know, and of course Blaise would want to tell someone who might actually be powerful enough to handle his feeding with no ill effects. But a lifetime of secrecy was hard to overcome.
Only when he saw Potter start to stand did he snap out of it. Blaise shook his head and blurted, “Someone cursed one of my ancestors long ago.”
“How long ago?” Potter settled slowly back into his grey chair, eyes intent.
“Centuries. Of course my ancestor killed him for it, but the damage was done. We have to feed on wild magic that people radiate around them. Unfortunately, our feeding mostly kills our victims, and our victims mostly don’t even notice that they radiate chaotic magic. My mother—seduces men like that, and eventually her feeding kills them.”
“You don’t want to kill me.”
“No.” Blaise leaned a little forwards, feeling as if he were skiing down a rough hill that ended in rocks at the bottom. He knew he was being reckless, and his mother would chide him for being reckless, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Potter had been honest with him and Blaise thought he might have something different for once in his life. “I want someone who will stay with me despite my curse. Love me despite my curse. You might be the one.”
Potter’s eyes opened as round as two moons. Blaise had never seen him like this before. If he had at school, he might have been interested then.
But then, Potter’s magic hadn’t been chaotic enough to attract Blaise’s attention or soothe Blaise’s curse.
“You don’t really know me,” Potter whispered.
“Through the circumstances of my curse, knowing someone has never been something I can count on to help me.” Blaise shrugged and smiled a little. “You don’t know me, either. You don’t know that I could soothe your magic or give you back your heart. But you want to believe it. And I want to believe in you.”
The rocks at the bottom of the slope seemed to be growing closer as Potter sat staring at him with dazed eyes. And then he abruptly nodded and stood up.
“Potter?” Blaise warily followed.
“Nothing else has worked,” Potter said quietly, in a voice as intense as a shout. “Let’s try this.” He held his hands out. “Show me what you can do.”
Blaise slowly extended his hands, watching his own arms shake. His fingers closed around Potter’s, and Potter gave a little shudder like a horse when a fly landed on its skin. Blaise instinctively moved closer.
“Shhh,” he whispered. His voice probably sounded a bit drunk, he thought, noticing the suspicious look Potter gave him. But Blaise was caught up in this, swept up in it, his balance wavering a little as he absorbed enough magic to keep him going for a month from one simple touch. “Let me drink from you.”
Potter muttered something that sounded like it included the word “vampire,” but he also turned and shifted a little closer to Blaise, bowing his head so that his chin was just a centimeter or so above Blaise’s shoulder.
Blaise took a deep breath and opened his magic.
Potter’s power paused for an instant, as though it didn’t know what to make of the touch of Blaise’s magic against it. And then it dived into him.
Blaise wavered in place, holding onto Potter’s arms. The magic was burrowing into him, flooding him, burning him. It felt like being drowned in an avalanche of food, of fire. Blaise opened his magic further.
And further.
He knew almost as soon as he did that he wouldn’t survive this if he tried to eat all of it. So he hovered and fed as delicately as he could, letting his own power draw him back to his body when he would have crumbled beneath the chaos of Potter’s magic. And when he had fed and sated himself, he opened his eyes.
Potter was staring at him with a slightly opened mouth and quiet air around him. Of course, just because Blaise couldn’t feel the chaos didn’t mean it wasn’t still there for Potter.
“Are you all right?”
*
Harry had never felt anything like that, and he didn’t know that he cared to feel anything like it again. It really did resemble descriptions he’d read of being drained by a vampire, having fangs fastened in his throat and his blood drawn out.
Only this had been his magic.
But when he reached out to calm the chaos the way he’d got used to doing every few seconds, it was quiet. He reached down and down, and only found a spark at the bottom of what had been a completely full and shifting aura around him, continually moving and continually tearing at him and wards and his holly wand and every bit of magic he felt around him. Harry took a deep breath.
“Potter?”
Harry stared at Zabini. The man was looking back at him, concern on his face—or as much concern as could be pasted over an obvious expression of dreamy ecstasy. Harry reached up slowly, with one hand shaking, and traced a finger down Zabini’s face.
Zabini raised his eyebrows.
“It’s quiet,” Harry whispered.
“The magic?”
“And the grief.” Harry had to close his eyes, because he wasn’t sure he could continue speaking if he kept looking at Zabini. “I felt—it was like existing in the center of a storm. And now it’s number. Quieter.”
It wasn’t gone, no more than the chaos in his magic was. But Zabini had soothed it in the way that meditation and Occlumency and charms and the spells of all the Healers willing to cast on Harry hadn’t.
Harry shuddered, and collapsed.
“Potter!”
Harry heard the speaker. He might have tried to muster up some words, to reassure them that he was all right.
But he was falling, further and further into the center of a dense black maelstrom, and he had to settle for hoping that they could feel his breath and his heartbeat and would take him to St. Mungo’s if they really had to.
Harry, himself, closed his eyes and settled into the first real sleep he’d had since he’d woken to find that his friends didn’t know him.